Monthly Archives: March 2006

Church

‘Exploring the Bible as Scripture’

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Bible Society Lecture

So after having missed last weeks lent lecture though spending the evening sorting out a major failure with the Church e-mail and internet connection, this week I was able to enjoy Revd Dr David Spriggs from the Bible Society speaking on the subject of ‘Exploring the Bible as Scripture’.

This wasn’t a lecture on the history of how the Bible was brought together – indeed when someone asked in the question and answer session if he could describe how the Old Testament came together, he started the answer by saying that it would take a three year degree course to give a proper answer! The key theme of the lecture was that it is not possible to properly explore the contents of the Bible, without viewing it through it’s religious context. Indeed, you miss fundamental points about the book if you view it purely as a piece of literature. One of the key questions he put was whether the Bible would even exist today if it weren’t for the living Christian community who have used it over the centuries.

He gave some very good analogies to describe the Bible, my favourite being to think of it like a Cathedral. Like a cathedral it has been evolving over a long period of time, with successive generations making changes, adding bits on and so on. Also like a cathedral bits of it don’t fit together – successive generations haven’t tried to make new bits fit in neatly with the old. However, also like a cathedral you have to appreciate the whole, and also appreciate the way that whole has been used, and is used today in order to fully understand it’s meaning.

There was also audience participation. He gave us an exercise where he got us all to tell our favourite Bible story to the people sat next to us. As he pointed out, different people tell the same story in different ways, highlighting different aspects. Indeed he pointed out that many of our versions of the stories had significantly more in them than in the original texts – the Christmas stories being a prime example where our versions have been coloured by Christmas card scenes and the words of carols, rather that what is in the actual text. He also highlighted some of the differences between accounts of the same events in the texts themselves, for example if you read the account of the Last Supper in Luke Chapter 22 Jesus takes the cup first, then the bread, and then the cup again – which differs from the other accounts, and certainly comes as a surprise to many people. He also specifically mentioned that later changes to the stories were as a result of the Christian communities that used the texts – hence why it is important to consider the Bible as the scripture of a living Christian community rather than as a static document.

After all of that, he also said that it is also still important to consider the Bible using the tools of literary analysis. As an example he mentioned the 23rd Psalm, which is very well known, but what is almost never commented on in religious commentaries is the way that in verse four, it changes how it refers to the Lord. In verses 1, 2 and 3, the Lord is ‘he’, whist in 4 and 5 – where the tone goes more dark, it is the much more personal ‘you’.

It was definitely an interesting lecture, and certainly gave us some questions to consider. Next week we’re looking forward to hearing Revd Professor Ian James, Diocesan Environment Advisor talking about ‘Christianity, Christians and the Environment’.

General

Heating Update

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I commented on the end of my post about the heating yesterday that it appeared to have sorted itself out. This proved to be the case, as the system came on as normal this morning, so when the heating engineer turned up, there appeared to be no problem at all.

Beth said that thankfully he didn’t disbelieve her when she described the problem, nor did she get the heating engineer equivalent of ‘is it plugged in’. Of course he did say that with everything working it is very difficult to work out what went wrong last night. However, he checked the system over, and the only apparent fault was that the boiler took a long time to light – you could hear it sparking three or four times before the burner actually ignited.

He sorted that problem out, so it now ignites immediately, and we were left to keep an eye on it, and to call them back if there are any more problems. As it was a call out under the emergency cover, and there was a fault, it didn’t cost us anything either. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that the failure last night was due to the sparking problem.

Computers/Technology

Great Support from MZTools

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I’m a great fan of MZTools. On paper the features it offers don’t really seem spectacular, offering templates and assistants for commonly used constructs and tasks, an improved find and replace and so on. However, whilst on their own, each seems a fairly trivial addition or change, together they make a big difference.

I had the freeware VB6 and VBA version installed at SSE pretty well since I arrived, but until recently I hadn’t really looked at the newer .Net versions, not thinking I really needed them.

Anyway, recently I decided to give an evaluation of the .Net version a go, and, as with any good evaluation, found that I missed the features when the evaluation expired, so I decided to put my money down, and purchase a copy for myself.

I went for the VS2005 licence – although I primarily still work with VS2003, as Carlos Quintero, the developer kindly throws in a free copy of the 2003 version too. The 2003 version installed fine, however I hit a bit of a problem with the 2005. Part way through the install it came up with a pretty odd looking error message.

I e-mailed a copy of the message off to Carlos, who asked what platform I was using. I replied telling him that I had VS2005 installed onto an XP64 partition – and Carlos confirmed that he wasn’t able to support XP64, as he is still developing using a 32-bit system. He kindly offered me a refund, however since I could use it on a 32-bit install, and he said he was going to support 64-bit in the future I said no.

I wasn’t expecting to hear anything else for a while, at least until a 64-bit native version turned up, however this afternoon I got another e-mail from Carlos double checking my setup, followed by a zip file containing a replacement for one of the files in the installation. He asked me to replace the file, and run a single command at a DOS prompt, and hey presto, MZTools fired up fine under VS2005.

When you consider what lousy support you can get from some of the big names in the industry, it is great when you come across someone like Carlos with a great little product, and a fantastic level of support to back it up.

MobLog

Crazy Heating

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We’ve been having weird problems with our heating lately. Back on Sunday, we came home to a decidedly chilly feeling house, and adjusting the thermostat the ‘click’ was down at about 17’C, and yet the boiler was resolutely staying off. Turning the thermostat didn’t seem to do any good, the system just sat there. As a last ditch attempt, I turned everything off, turned it back on, and the boiler fired up first time.

Everything was OK yesterday, but then today when I got home from work, Beth was huddled under a blanket on the sofa, and the house was again cold. The same symptoms again, with the ‘click’ being at about 12’C. I tried repeating what I had done on Sunday, but nothing happened. So it was recourse to the emergency boiler cover that we got a couple of years ago.

Having said that, it proved to be not quite so simple. The cover is one of those things that gets paid regularly by direct debit, and until you need it – which we haven’t, to be honest you don’t really look at. When I got the paperwork out, I realised that the company with whom we had originally taken out the cover, wasn’t the company that had most recently written to us. A quick dig around on the internet found that the company had been sold twice over the past couple of years.

I gave the current company a call, who could find no record of us, so I then went back to the original cover certificate, and dialled the original number, which thankfully routed through to a real person, at the same company I’d just spoken to.

I got a really helpful girl on the phone, who tried every possible combination of post code, reference number, bank account details, but couldn’t find anything. As an aside to this, during the phone conversation, the boiler fired up – very strange. In the end she passed me over to their claims department, who found me pretty quickly on their system – it seems that as with any merger, the company ends up with multiple systems, but thankfully it allowed us to put in a call.

Following the surprise start up of the boiler whilst I was on the phone, I had another fiddle with the controls, and it seemed that the boiler had fired up to heat the hot water, but not due to the heating – so maybe it’s just a fault with the heating thermostat.

Anyway, the heating specialist phoned us back within the hour, and arranged to come over tomorrow morning to take a look.

What is interesting just now is that the time-clock had shut off the heating system as usual a few minutes ago, so I just pushed the one hour run button for both hot water and heating, and the boiler fired up absolutely normally – more than that, the radiators are all heating up, and the temperature in the house has almost reached 20’C. Hopefully this is not going to be one of these difficult to locate problems, but with the intermittent nature of the fault I fear it might be…

Computers/Technology, Movies & TV, Writing

How to Get Fired from Apple

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The Unofficial Apple Weblog linked to this great video taken from an internal Apple talent show.

The full story is told in the captions, and included are some of the other entries, many of which are pretty dreadful. The guys routine is a really funny ode to a Canadian Fed-Ex lady, but one that ultimately resulted in the VP who was organising the talent show sacking the poet for unprofessional conduct…

The sequence is well worth watching, although for a family audience you should be aware that there is a naughty word included in the captions. You can also take a look at the poet’s website for more of his work.