Monthly Archives: October 2006

Cars

Replacement Stick

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Replaced Gear Stick

So before dawn this morning I was up and off to Ridgeway VW to have them replace the entire gear stick due to the broken bit of trim on the top. On the phone the service agent had said that the job would take about an hour, but it was best to leave an hour and a half just in case they had problems, or were busy. They had slots at 7am or 8am – not surprisingly with it being a Saturday I opted for the slightly later 8am slot!

When I arrived, there was one person already sat in the waiting area, and another car just being taken in, but aside from that it was pretty quiet. The car was moved by a technician almost immediately, so I sat down with a drink and some reading material ready for my wait.

However, barely had I finished browsing the brochure for the new Eos, and just started on an extreme level Sudoku puzzle on Sudoku Rules Extreme (usually takes me between 20 and 50 minutes to do) than the same technician was coming in to give me back my keys having done the job. When I mentioned that I had been told an hour for the job, he said that they usually leave an hour in case they have problems, but the actual job should only involve unclipping the trim and swapping over the stick. In total it took about twenty minutes to do. The only visible indication that anything has been done is that the new gear stick has a black plastic collar under the ball on the top, rather than the silvery chrome collar the old one had – not anything you’d notice unless you were looking, and certainly not anything that would affect the operation. The only reason I paid any attention to it was because they explicitly asked for the old broken top, and with the speed of the changeover compared to the estimate I was wondering whether they’d patched up the old one!

Church, Movies & TV

Bad Vicar in Croxley Green

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I actually posted a link to this clip on the end of my posting last night, however I’ve embedded it in because when I was watching it, the Church building looked decidedly familiar, and so it should as I’ve been in the place a good many times during my school years!

The church in question is All Saints, Croxley Green, which sits across the road from the school I attended, and is where – aside from one year when the local vicar and our headmaster fell out – the annual school carol service was held.

As to where I came across the clip, you can blame a Parish Priest who is tempted to show it to his PCC as part of an away day.

Church

Christian News Stories

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A few Christian News Stories from the pages of Ekklesia to get you thinking…

The first that caught my eye was this one about a controversial new Bible from the Western Bible Foundation that cuts out all the passages that are difficult for Western Society to handle relating to economic justice, possessions and money.

Says the chairman of the foundation, Mr De Rijke:

“Jesus was very inspiring for our inner health, but we don’t need to take his naïve remarks about money seriously. He didn’t study economics, obviously.â€?

“What if all Christians stopped being anxious, for example, and started expecting everything from God? Or gave their possessions to the poor, for that matter. Our economy would be lost. The truth is quite the contrary: a strong economy and a healthy work ethic is a gift from God.�

However all is not as it seems, for Dutch speakers at least – ‘De Rijke’ means ‘the rich’ in Dutch. The book is making a serious point, but not the point that it seems. Mr De Rijke doesn’t really exist, and the book is actually published by a network of Christian Students and young adults called Time to Turn, and is making a point about the parts of the Bible often ignored:

“Many Christians accept the Western lifestyle, including the degradation of creation and the injustice of our trade, and they only take the easy parts of the gospel. But it isn’t until we publish this gospel with holes, that they get confused!â€?

They are soon to follow up the Western Bible with a set of bible studies looking at what was left out, thereby examining the issues that western Christians have so much difficulty with. Unfortunately the book is currently only published in Dutch – I’m sure an English version would be popular.

Secondly, today there was also news that the UK Christian Handbook from Christian Research are being selective about who they include. After previously offering the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (LGCM) valuable advertising space, the offer has suddenly been withdrawn, with the editor of the handbook citing purely ‘commercial concerns’, although of course those commercial concerns are that they believe that certain elements of the UK Christian community would not buy the handbook if it had such an advert. Having said that it is sad that yet again, one particular branch of UK Christianity is, in this case succeeding in dictating what the rest of us read, watch or listen too.

That leads neatly on to a third story that caught my attention, the recent vote by the student Guild at Exeter University to rename their Christian Union back to being the Christian Union, after they had earlier been forced to change it to the ‘Evangelical Christian Union’.

To some extent at it’s core this is not a new problem, and precisely the reason that I avoided the Reading University Christian Union, that they are very narrow in their Christianity – indeed you only need look at the doctrinal basis for both Exeter and Reading. Like many of the other Christian Unions at universities they are part of the national Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship, which provides the doctrinal basis, and only people who sign up to that basis can be members. In the case of Reading, as in other universities there were other Christian groups that operated separately from the Christian Union, that covered the broad range of Christian denominations and groupings.

What has happened at Exeter, as has happened previously in Birmingham and Hull, is that the student body as a whole has objected to the narrow view of Christianity as espoused by the Christian Union holding a monopoly of the term Christian. Following a complaint made to the student guild in May, the student guild forced them to change their name to the ‘Evangelical Christian Union’ to reflect their actual position. They have now, unsuccessfully tried to revert to the original name, but have been beaten by a vote amongst the students. The report on the Exeter web site quotes the leader of the campaign to retain the ‘Evangelical Christian Union’ name:

“The referendum result is a significant victory for democracy and human rights, and a hammerblow against religious bigotry and intolerance. For years, this society has deceptively marketed itself as the �Christian Union“ while systematically silencing and discriminating against Christians who are not evangelical.�

“Today, this cynical ruse has finally come to an end. The result of the referendum and the GSA motion passed yesterday represent the first two steps towards a future in which every Exeter student will have their beliefs accepted and welcomed. We sincerely hope that all religious societies –including the ECU – will be willing to work together to achieve this goal.�

Both the LGCM/Christian Handbook story, and Exeter story have a lot in common with my favourite Christian pressure group Christian Voice as they represent one group of Christians trying to portray their particular brand of Christianity as representing all Christians. What is pleasing is that at a University level at least, there are increasing indications that the term Christian is being reclaimed from the fundamentalists – unfortunately in the wider world they are still doing things like dictating the contents of the UK Christian Handbook, and still periodically appearing on TV and radio claiming to represent the whole of Christianity.

Anyway, if all this Christian Fundamentalism is getting you down, a couple of links to make you smile – how about Christian Voice: The Opera, or this quite terrifying new vicar from Mitchell and Webb? 🙂

Apple/Mac, Computers/Technology, Programming

Another Switcher

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It’s starting to look like Microsoft might have a problem on their hands. Catching up with Mike Roberts blog it looks like he too is switching platforms. He’s yet another techie I’ve found who thinks that Microsoft have lost the plot with Vista.

I have heard Mike speak at conferences, and he is probably most well known for being behind CruiseControl a tool that provides automated continuous build functionality, and that I used in my previous job. However don’t think that he’s stopping .NET development – not at all, he’s doing it under Parallels on the Mac!

Movies & TV, Politics

Fly Tipping by J R Hartley

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Every so often I catch an edition of Rogue Traders, a BBC consumer show that uses secret filming to trap unscrupulous tradesmen. In the past it has been everything from solar panel salesmen to gardeners, and is usually a catalogue of dodgy selling techniques, and shoddy workmanship.

Tonight, the subject of the programme was fly tipping, a recurring problem all over the country, and something that our local councils have to spend large amounts of our money to deal with. One of the underlying reasons for people fly tipping is that to dump any commercial waste at a suitable site in the UK, commercial companies dumping waste are charged a landfill tax – essentially they have to pay to dispose of the rubbish – therefore it’s a lot easier to dump it for free somewhere out of sight and pocket the cash, which of course is why it’s such a problem.

Watching the programme I was expecting to see things like the example they showed of a skip hire firm burning waste in an area of outstanding natural beauty, but the other firm featured was quite impressive in the audacity of where they chose to dump the waste. It is worth mentioning as well that this other example had also recognised the presenter of the programme in his disguise and still illegally dumped the rubbish – the programme even had pictures of him doing it!

The programme had hidden a selection of tracking devices in the rubbish they asked to be cleared in order to track it’s movements after it had been removed. In this case the firm was operating in Barnet, but rather than dump the rubbish out in some rural spot, they instead dumped the rubbish in somebody else’s drive elsewhere in the local area. There didn’t seem to be any particular plan, the driver just seemed to have driven around until he found a likely looking spot, tipped out the contents of his truck and driven off. I was just open mouthed at it, especially when, even having been suspicious that he was on the programme, he did it again. The other amusing irony of the whole programme is that the secret filming also included the driver discussing with his mate how he was faking a back injury to claim incapacity benefit too.

The irony of all of this illegal dumping is that residents have already paid for disposal of a lot of household waste as part of their council tax. Unfortunately the exact service offered is up to each local council and varies across the country. For example our local council will collect everything from your old fridge-freezer to builders rubble. They used to collect limited items for free, but they now levy a charge. Other councils are more limited in what they will take. The real issue for householders now though is that in an effort to crack down on fly tipping some councils are going after people who hire disreputable firms, alongside the firms themselves. Take a look at this announcement from Swale Borough Council:

The Government have given local authorities more powers to continue their war on waste. Householders who use unlicensed waste carriers to remove their waste can now be prosecuted and fined up to £5,000, whether they do it knowingly or unknowingly.

Commercial fly tippers rely on householders and businesses not asking questions or checking registration details and therefore a duty of care is being placed on householders to take all reasonable steps to ensure that their waste is disposed of legitimately. Fly tippers can make huge sums of money by dumping waste, often in multiple lorry loads.

Essentially the onus is being passed back to the person responsible for the waste to ensure that the person they hire to dispose of it, disposes of it properly. Whilst the fly tipper may be long gone, the authorities will now come back to the source of the rubbish whether they knew it was going to be fly tipped or not. So if you have a lot of rubbish to get rid of it’s up to you to ensure that you get a reputable firm or risk a £5000 fine if they dump the rubbish illegally.

fly-tip east lond 2 originally uploaded by rUd?.