Monthly Archives: April 2006

Church, Pictures

Youth Group Manage the Impossible

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Youth Group Asleep in the Pews

I just thought I’d share this picture of some of the youth group taken at the dawn service this morning – just for those people who have tried to sit comfortably on the pews in our Church. Here we have ten young people apparently doing the impossible, and falling asleep in the pews. It is worth noting that they were sound enough asleep by the end of the service that it took quite a bit of prompting to get them up for the breakfast over in the parish centre.

What was also quite funny was the response of some of our ex-youth group members, back for Easter, who turned up to the dawn service and commented that they never fell asleep in the dawn service. Although it’s true that there wasn’t this sort of mass sleeping session, we certainly have had a number of them fall asleep at various points. Usually you tended to find them asleep under chairs and tables after the breakfast when we were trying to clear up, however we have had several who have dropped off during the service before.

It is worth saying that in comparison to previous years we had a pretty young crowd for the vigil, with almost half of them never having done the vigil before, as such I suspect that as with the previous youth group members they’ll start to learn to pace themselves a bit better. Plus of course since we had a relatively late dawn this year, there will be other years when the vigil will be a bit shorter.

Perhaps one of the more amusing episodes, was actually at the dawn service when the entire congregation actually managed to arrive at the Church before Rev Richard. He’d been telling everybody that he’d arrive about 5:30am, however when by 5:45am nobody had actually seen him, Richard Owen first tried phoning him, and then actually drove down to the rectory to bang on his door. Having said that, Rev Richard did manage a pretty quick turnaround, and we only started about five minutes late anyway!

As usual, Beth and myself came home pretty well worn out. Beth is really the person who pulls the whole thing together, coming up with activities, and making sure everything goes to schedule, so when we get back home about 8am, we tend to then sleep through until early afternoon – much to the bemusement of the cat. Having said that, things might be better next year. Since she has now started working on her portfolio for the Diocese, Beth has decided that she needs to rearrange her commitments at the Church, and since we’ve done Youth Group for rather a long time, we’ve decided that it’s time to take a break. So next year we may well take the opportunity to actually attend some of the regular Easter services – something we’ve not seen for five or six years!

Movies & TV

New Earth – New Doctor

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So tonight we had the first regular outing for David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor, in New Earth.

As an episode I thought it was okay, but not fantastic. There were some nice bits, but to some extent the plot didn’t overly seem to hang together. After having built up the whole concept of the sisters essentially breeding humans to act as cures – a parallel to arguments over creating embryo’s for genetic research – I though the whole resolution was really just too easy, with the Doctor apparently managing to cure all the bred humans rather easily.

Having said that, there were good elements. As before there was a good dose of humour, using the old body swap plot device to give Billie Piper especially a chance to play a different personality. Also David Tennant seems to be getting in to the role, with a good chance to show a variety of emotion in this episode.

Interestingly, this was the first time watching the new series that I thought ‘I’ve seen that before’ in terms of locations. It happened in two senses, firstly, when they went into the back corridors of the hospital, it looked rather like the location used for the final scenes of Rose back in series one. However, in one of the chase scenes, it did strike me that they recognisably went down the same gantry and staircase, a bit reminiscent of the ‘these corridors all look the same’ joke in the Comic Relief Special a few years back.

On the basis of the series last year, I tended to not be overly impressed with the episodes written by Russell T Davies, and this episode seems to continue that pattern. Certainly I’m looking forward to some better episodes later in the series.

Calendar/Contact Syncing

More Calendar Stuff

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Calendar Sync

So after a couple of weeks working with the current arrangement for keeping all my calendars in sync, how is it working? There are still occasional synchronisation goofs, particularly the problem with timezones when all-day appointments come through from Entourage onto the Exchange server that I mentioned in my previous posting. There are also periodic problems with contacts, usually getting duplicated. The other odd problem is that periodically the PDA and ActiveSync seem to suffer from amnesia, announces that this device has not been synced before, and do a new sync. That in turn generates a stack of duplicate appointments that then get deleted. As the current set-up is somewhat on the complicated side, I thought I’d put together a diagram of where my calendar currently goes in order to get it everywhere I need, which you can see here. You can click on the image to see a bigger version.

Whilst on the subject of calendars, and my previous grumble about how difficult it was to synchronise them, I recently came across a great blog by Scot Mace, called Calendar Swamp, which focuses on the entire subject area of electronic calendars and their interoperation. His apt analogy is that the world of computer calendars is like a swamp, and alongside that when a new bit of software, or possible solution comes along, he awards points for how well, or otherwise it succeeds in draining the swamp. If you like me are mired in the same swamp trying to keep everything in sync, it is certainly a site to keep an eye on.

Of course, one much anticipated addition to the arena is Google Calendar, with speculation going back more than a year, much of it expecting Google to really shake things up. As of this week, Google Calendar finally arrived, even being reported by the BBC.

I have to say that as a Mac user, aside from the close integration with GMail, and natural language parser (which they are not the first to do – see this comparison of 30 Boxes and Spongecell), the rest of the calendaring was a bit old hat, even down to the look. The similarity to iCal, that ships as part of MacOS X in both operation and functionality is very noticeable – but then they do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! Having said that, the fact that this is essentially a web based version of iCal, even down to sharing the same industry standard file formats is good, as it does provide a well known ready made location to publish shared calendars. Also with Google and a number of other online calendar providers pushing the format, Mozilla basing their calendar on the same format, and even some limited iCal support in Outlook it might make interoperability a bit less of a pain – we live in hope!

As to whether I’m going to be changing from my current solution, I think not. I’ve had a play around with both 30 Boxes, and Google Calendar (see here for a good comparison) but since both are pushing on with online editing features, and I’m looking primarily for a synchronisation solution, they’re not really what I neeed. Having said that both might be good for publishing schedules for Youth Group, Choir, and other groups like that.

Doctor Who

Only A Day to Go

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So with only a day to go before the new series of Doctor Who kicks off the BBC are whetting the appetite further with a special set of preview clips running continuously on BBCi, accessible through the red button on a digital remote.

Interestingly there appear to be no clips from the first episode, New Earth, due to be shown tomorrow, perhaps because it has got a lot of the attention up to now. Instead it goes through the next few episodes in order giving us a taste of what is to come in later weeks.

Firstly we have ‘the werewolf episode’, called Tooth and Claw, and featuring the Doctor and Rose meeting Queen Victoria. There also seems to be a good deal of running about escaping from the aforementioned werewolf.

The next block of clips is one that I suspect a lot of fans are either looking forward to, or dreading. Called School Reunion it features the return of Sarah Jane Smith and K-9, and also Anthony Stewart Head, who from the clips is relishing playing a bad guy. The clips also reveal that the monsters look rather like the Malevilus, monsters who appeared in early Doctor Who Monthly comic strips. One amusing clip we get to see in the preview is Rose and Sarah Jane trying to out do each other with the monsters they have met.

Following on from this we have clips from The Girl in the Fireplace which is set in 18th Century France, but with elaborately painted androids stalking the girl of the title.

The final block of clips is from another episode that is much anticipated, the return of the Cybermen in Rise of the Cybermen. Here we get a series of clips including marching Cybermen, and lots of atmospheric shots through plastic sheeting. There is also the added dimension that this is set on a parallel Earth, complete with doubles of some of the regular characters.

All in all it certainly seems to be shaping up to be a good season to come.

General, Movies & TV

First Impressions of Sky+

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Sky+ Box with Anti-Vibration Measures

Yesterday, after a good deal of pontificating, we finally had Sky+ installed, having only ordered it on Sunday afternoon. We also took the multi-room option, where they relocate your existing box to another room, and give you an additional card programmed with the same channels as your subscription – mainly because if you took the multi-room option the Sky+ box was subsidised down to £89, and they didn’t charge the £60 installation fee, working out at half the price.

In terms of the installation, the Sky+ and multi-room option is quite involved, as in addition to the obvious new cable needed for the new room, the existing cable from the dish to the box needs to be replaced as the Sky+ box uses twin tuners so needs two connections to the dish. As a result the installer had to take out the current cable that runs from the dish at the front of the house, through the garage and round to the back wall of the house where the TV is located, and replace this with a new dual core cable, and then put in a new cable into our bedroom where we have the other TV in the house.

The cable into our room proved to be the more complicated though. When the installer arrived, his initial suggestion was just to take the cable in the back wall of the house into our bedroom – and run it through the back of the fitted wardrobe to the alcove with the TV. He then looked into the wardrobe and changed his mind… This then threw up a different problem, as although the wall behind the TV in our room is theoretically an outside wall, the garage is alongside – specifically, the roof line runs diagonally across the wall. Working out exactly where the roof line sits is pretty difficult, but I was fairly certain by following the line from the window sill in the bathroom along, that putting the cable through at just above baseboard level, and close to the wardrobe in the bedroom would come out under the roof-line in the garage. When I left for work, the installer was just debating whether there was any other way to do it, although in the end he did drill out from the bedroom – although apparently it comes out pretty high up the wall in the garage (I haven’t been up into the rafters of the garage to take a look though.

So first impressions. Firstly we have a much better picture upstairs now, and also the right local news bulletins. Because of the location of the house, the only transmitter we can clearly pick up is Crystal Palace, so we get London local news, with the box upstairs, we now get a good picture, plus the local news for the South. With the Sky+ we gave it a good workout on our first go as we were out at Church all evening. It recorded Eastenders, and Grand Designs for us, and I was even able to watch back Eastenders whilst it was still recording Grand Designs. As it is all integrated, there wasn’t the risk of messing up the recording either as there is with a standalone video recorder.

In fact the main criticism we have of the box currently is nothing to do with the operation, but with the noise. It uses a hard drive for recording, which will make some noise, however on top of that the top cover of the box vibrates. As all of this is sitting on a hard floor it was really noticeable. My solution was just to stick a box on top, but as you can see from the picture above, Beth has gone for an altogether more visually appealing solution…