Monthly Archives: January 2005

Church

Jesus – Meek and Mild? I like this better…

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I was just flicking through the Church of England website, as I’d never really looked at it before, and found a link to a site called rejesus, which is an explaoration of Christianity and why we believe what we do. It’s been set up as a site for ‘beginners’, I think, but just on a quick glance it seems to have some great stuff. I found this image there – sums up what Jesus was as opposed to the wishy-washy image that many people have of him. It was created as an advertisement to get people to come to church at Easter. Thanks Churches Advertising Network!

You also have to look at Chocolate Theology – Fabulous!

MobLog

How was Black Monday for you?

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Since according to a tutor at Cardiff University, January 24th is the most depressing day of the year. The winter weather, coupled with Christmas high wearing off, and the bills coming in, without the prospect of an impending holiday, all combine to the general down feeling. As a number of people have mentioned it to me today, I thought I’d look at whether Black Monday really was so Black!

Firstly, the weather wasn’t particularly lousy. Although it was cold, it was bright for a lot of the day. The snowfall didn’t appear, aside from a couple of quick sleet showers, and the temperature is still above freezing even now. Actually, weather-wise I did have a first. When I got to the car this morning, there was a single perfect snowflake sat on the edge of the roof, where I could clearly see the hexagonal structure. Whilst I’d seen pictures of snowflakes in books, I’ve never seen an example like that for myself, especially not sat on it’s own.

Anyway, work was much the same as usual, although at lunchtime, the topic of conversation was Black Monday, which then got on to living in Australia. Two of the people on my team have worked down under, both loved it, but for various reasons came back to the UK, but if circumstances were right would like to go back.

Outside work, one potential source of blackness was the car. The Golf has what is described as a long life service pattern. Basically the car decides when it needs a service based on various factors, and sticks up a service indicator at some point between 9,000 and 20,000 miles. I’ve done just over 8,000 and got a service required in 1,400 miles yesterday. I phoned the garage, who are able to take it in on Saturday to check it out, but she said that it shouldn’t require a service until much nearer 20,000, and that they’d check out the computer for a problem, rather than just do a service. Fingers crossed, all of that will come under the warranty if it is a fault. Having said that, thus far the Golf has done 8000 miles without having gone in for anything – by this point both the Focus, and the Fiesta I had before that had been in with engine problems (which on the Focus have never been properly resolved).

Also tonight, I had the first of two PCC (Church council) meetings this week. This was the regular meeting tonight, which went fairly well, and unlike some I didn’t leave feeling generally frustrated that we got bogged down.

So, was it a black day? From my point of view it was pretty much a normal day, with ups and downs. However, if you’ve seen the news from Twyford, and when you realise that Peter Bohn, the man involved has worked as caretaker at the school where Beth works for 27 years, you’ll see that Beth’s day was somewhat different. As with anything like this, the usual school day changes dramatically the school tried to come to terms with what had happened.

So I guess, like most things, whether Black Monday was the worst day of the year, is really just subjective. Certainly, I doubt life can be summed up in the equation proposed by the tutor in Cardiff!

General

Amazing What You Can Do With Photoshop

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I got the following picture through the e-mail this morning, which seemed quite interesting:

RAND 1954 Computer

It looks like a clipping from an old paper, complete with caption, describing the picture as an example of a prototype of the home computer of 2004, produced by scientists of the RAND corporation. However all is not as it seems, the picture doesn’t look quite right, I’m not sure whether it is the slightly odd looking TV screen on the wall, or the fact that the paper on the teletype doesn’t appear to be correctly aligned underneath. But anyway, it got me suspicious, so I looked up RAND Computer 1954 on Google, and came across this article.

The article describes how the picture is actually an entry in a web site picture modification competition, and shows the original picture of an exhibit at the Smithsonian, and linking to the site with the competition.

So although it was another one of the many hoax e-mails that circulate, this one was actually pretty well done, and a good example of what you can do with something like Photoshop given the time.

General, Movies & TV

The War of the Worlds

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Over the past couple of days, I have been listening to the musical version of The War of the Worlds.

The War of the Worlds

As you may know, the album follows the basic plot of the book, with Richard Burton reading in key passages, and playing the narrator. However, listening to the CD, it reminded me that in the upcoming film, Speilberg has transferred the story from 19th century England to 21st century America, so I started to wonder quite how much of the original story would survive.

It seems I am not alone. The new issue of SFX makes a couple of comments in an article about the trailer (which can be seen here). Points they highlight are the tagline, “They’re Already Here” – as they say, that wasn’t in the book. They also they jokingly subtitle the article “Has anybody confirmed the other world is Mars yet?”…

So, this has led me to suggest a little game to play before seeing the film, guessing quite what will and won’t survive from the book to the film. Points will be awarded for every plot point succesfully spotted to be missing. Special bonus points will be awarded if you spot any plot holes caused by leaving something out, or leaving it in, but putting it in a 21st century context. Incidentally, there aren’t any prizes, it’s purely an opportunity to predict how much the story will be sliced and diced in the name of pleasing the cinema going public.

Having said that, it is not the only movie on the way. Take a look at Pendragon Pictures and their slightly lower budget attempt to make a film true to the original book. Also there is the proposed movie version of the Jeff Wayne album I’ve been listening to, which has been postponed until 2007.

Anyway, if you want a place to start, you can remind yourslef of the original story with the text of the original novel, available as a free ebook from PlanetPDF.

Books, Computers/Technology, General

Apple Storytime

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David forwarded on to me a link to a story about the creation of the Graphing Calculator, shipped as part of the standard build of pre-MacOS X, PowerPC versions of the Macintosh. (The application is still available, now being sold separately by Pacific Tech themselves.) The story is well worth reading, especially if you work in the IT/Software Development industry, the question being not only would you be happy to work on your current project for six months for free, but also would you be able to get away with it wherever you work?

The story also highlights a lot of the attitudes of the people working at Apple in the way many of them knew what was going on and actively helped. It also reminded me of some of the stories about the early development of the Mac at the Fokelore site. This is a project to produce a platform for collective storytelling, that is using the story of the Mac as a prototype. Stories come from a number of people involved with the Mac during that era. Many of the stories from the site have also been brought together into a new book called Revolution In The Valley.

Revolution In The Valley