Category: Uncategorized

Just seen a great quote. Do you have trouble with stress? Do you worry about things overly? Read on…

Stress has been pinpointed as a major cause of illness. To avoid overload and burnout, keep stress out of your life. Give it to others instead. Learn the “Gaslight” treatment, the “Are you talking to me?” technique, and the “Do you feel okay? You look pale.” approach. Start with negotiation and implication. Advance to manipulation and humiliation. Above all, relax and have a nice day.

Your stress management lesson today comes free of charge courtesy of Bob the Monkfish and the letter ص (which is apparently the Arabic letter sad. No, it won’t display right on your screen. Do I care? No.)

Ah, just noticed, Fedora Core 5 has been released. According to the release notes, there have been a few changes since Fedora Core 4. Looks pretty cool, although I’m not going to be rushing to upgrade anytime soon! (it always take a few months for third party packages to catch up with a new release like that).

One thing I’ve been meaning to do is get my old system up and running so I can use it as backup. I can backup my main machine on there, once it’s all safely backed up I can experiment with a few different distributions! But yeah, Fedora 5 looks good, I’ll let you know as and when I’ve tried it 🙂

I realised the other day that I’ve managed to book myself out every evening this week. Here’s a summary of my evenings:

Monday – go round to Matthew’s to do a poster for the mission week coming up at Fordham.
Tuesday – go round to Philippa’s for dinner, prepare for this evening
Wednesday – do ‘Christianity Explored’ course with a couple of friends from church
Thursday – go to home group (I’m leading it this week)
Friday – do some babysitting for some friends from our home group.

Ah well, c’est la vie! None of it is too strenuous so I’m happy. Tomorrow morning I’m taking my car in to be fixed… apparently it has to have the manifold replaced. The car’s been fealing quite ‘heavy’ the last couple of days, i.e. seems to rev quite a lot for not that much acceleration, so hopefully this will improve matters.

All for now!

So… what have I been up to this weekend? Not a whole lot really! On Friday night, I went round to some friends of ours from church for a games evening. It was a very enjoyable time – we played a couple of good games including one called “Metro” (a German game I think) which I want to try and get hold of!

On Saturday, I went into town with Phil in the morning and because it was sunny, we bought ourselves some lunch from Subway and had it in castle park! Although it was a bit windy, it was just so nice to be sitting out in the sun after the rather poor weather we’ve had recently. I managed to buy myself a new shirt and tie, which means that I have now pretty much everything I need to wear at the wedding in June. The only thing I need now is cufflinks (I don’t think they’ll be too hard to find!).

Yesterday, we went to Church in the morning. I was involved in a Mother’s Day sketch with a “This is Your Life” theme – the life of Mary, the mother of Jesus! I played the part of John the apostle. I rather enjoyed it! I was also called in at the last minute to play for “Sunday @ 7”, so Philippa and I both played yesterday evening. In the afternoon I prepared for the home group study I’m doing this week (on the question “Hasn’t science disproved Christianity?”).

And… that was my day! Think that’s just about it for the time being. All for now!

Joe has posted up on his blog about being obsessed with badgers: he seems to find that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that the more people thing he’s obsessed with badgers, the more he convinces himself he is obsessed with badgers, the more he talks about them… and so on.

I suggest that to combat this obsession he grows a beard, dons tweed hat and coat, gains a west country accent and an incurable cough.

That’s right, folks, joe should become Bob Fleming of “Badger Watch” fame (c.f.: the Fast Show). The shame of being like Bob Fleming should cure anyone’s badger obsession for ever… apart from maybe Bob Fleming, that is.

I’ve done a new mix! It’s breaks (as per usual), bit more on the funky side this time though!

TRACKLIST

01. Specimen A – Blow Ya Head
02. Drummatic Twins – Pumped Up Funk
03. Shifty – Turn it Up
04. Deep Impact – Out of Control
05. Smithmonger – Straight out of Burnie
06. Offkey – Red Alert
07. Autobots – This World
08. Phrenetic – Flatline
09. Unknown – Wind it Up
10. Cut & Run – Pink
11. D-Ranged – Hell Hats

DOWNLOAD

MP3, approx 50 MB (right click, save target as)

I’m fed up with political parties. The reason? Well, a couple really. They seem to spend all their time playing “tit for tat”, rather than wanting what is actually best for the country. Just look at the last election campaign. I don’t think that’s really the best way to decide what is best for the country!

The other thing is, they seem to discourage open and frank discussion. If a member of a party doesn’t agree with something the party does (and comment about it openly) then they’re at risk of being fired from the party (or something like that). Witness the octogenerian man who was thrown out of the labour party conference 😉

No, I think that the modern world has moved into a situation where political parties themselves are less relevant than they used to be. What I mean is, in the past people would align themselves with the particular ideology of a political party. If you agreed with Convervative ideals, you’d vote for the tory party. Likewise with labour, etc. Everyone know where they stood. But these days the lines are distinctly blurred. It’s not so easy to separate out those ideals. In fact, it’s almost downright impossible. I might like a combination of policies from labour, from the tory party, and from the lib dems.

So, my suggestion would be – split the parties up into various departments, and let the voters vote for those particular departments / people they agree with, rather than an entire party. That way, rather than playing tit for tat about ideologies they might start working together (for a change) for the good of the country!

Yes, OK, so you people who know about politics are going to say that would be the end of civilisation as we know it. I don’t think I’d miss it, to be honest :p

Well, I’m back on the net 🙂 And, that’s the perfect lead into writing what I’ve been up to!

Here’s a brief recap of last week:

Saturday – went down to Philippa’s
Sunday – met up with Foz, went to see the place the wedding reception’s going to be (as Foz is DJing and providing the equipment)
Monday – did some more wedding preparation, like meeting up with the rector of the church we’re getting married in
Tuesday – Went to find the place we’re going to the weekend after the wedding – the village was lovely!
Wednesday – Met up with Phil P in London for lunch, went to an Essex graduate reunion in the evening (see if you can spot me on the photos page!).
Thursday – didn’t do much
Friday – got my car serviced in the morning, went to see “The Importance of Being Earnest” at the Mercury Theatre with a couple of friends from church in the evening (it was fantastic!)

Saturday and Sunday again, didn’t do much – just the usual (boring) stuff! Yesterday evening, we went to Alex’s and watched Peter Kay Live at the Bolton Albert Hall. Oh, we also went for a walk and took some photos (earlier in the day) – I’ll upload them and post them up here! The good ones, anyway.

And… that’s all from me!

Why oh why has no-one written a proper library computer system yet? When I say “library computer systems”, I mean the things they install down at the library so that people can access the internet. The current setup on the computer that I’m using (no internet at home at the moment unfortunately – Paul’s taken his router home, so I’ll have to try and pick mine up tomorrow) is Windows XP, with a kind of “shell” installed on it.

Unfortunately, this shell looks like it was written in Visual Basic — it’s rubbish. When you want to book an internet PC, it tells you that to exit that part of the application, you have to press Alt+F4 (for those of you who don’t know, in Windows that is the shortcut for exiting the current application). When you’ve logged on to use the internet, it comes up with the default “libraries” Internet Explorer thing (which doesn’t have an address bar at the top), so you have to actually click on “Hotmail” (or another link on the page) to bring up a new Internet Explorer window — which opens outside the application, and … grrr!

They could make all this so much better by using Linux (no, seriously), Mozilla Firefox, and a transparent proxy. A properly secure operating system, a decent browser, and a secure internet connection (so they could log what you were doing and not let you do anything subversive). To be honest you could probably do the same thing on Windows, you can make it fairly secure if you want — but most libraries don’t.

Anyway, I’ll stop rambling now…

Just a quick note to let you know that I’ll be away for a few days. I’m actually writing this post from London – I’m staying with Phil and her parents! We’ve got a few wedding things to sort out. I’ll be back home on Thursday… I might not be able to update then, though, because Paul is moving out and taking his router with him 🙁

I do have an ADSL modem / router, but unfortunately it’s at my parents’ house in Ipswich, so before I get back on the internet I’ll have to go back home.

So, just to let you know why I won’t be posting much for the next few days!