Monthly Archives: February 2008

Church

Lent Lectures

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Once again this year St James is running a series of open lectures during Lent. As before the evenings are free, and open to anybody who wants to attend, and will take place on Wednesday evenings in the Parish Centre starting at 8pm, with coffee served from 7:45pm.

The selection of speakers and topics is as varied as ever.

First up on 13th February is Berdine van den Toren who works for the Church Mission Society, who along with her family spent over eight years living in the Central African Republic as an educationalist helping the church to cope with the AIDS pandemic.

She is followed on 20th February by the new Bishop of Oxford, Rt Rev John Pritchard, who is speaking on the subject of developing your prayer life.

On 27th February we hear from Dr Lawrence Turner, a lecturer in the Old Testament at Newbold College in Binfield. He has written a book called Back to the Present: Encountering Genesis in the 21st Century, and will base his lecture around the topics in the book.

The lecture on 5th March is entitled “Underneath the Skin of South Africaâ€?, and will be given by Brynn Bayman, a member of our congregation, and a South African himself, who is currently teaching at Wellington College. Through the lecture he is hoping to give us a better understanding of life, and the problems of his native country, to help us better understand life for the members of our twin Church, St Matthew’s in Kimberley.

The final lecture on 12th March is again being given by a member of our congregation. Captain Abi Brown is an officer in the British Army who was married in St James a couple of years ago, and has recently returned from a six-month tour of duty in Iraq. In her lecture she is going to talk about what life was like for her and her colleagues, and also how she as a Christian deals with what she saw out there.

As you can see, a pretty varied selection of topics and speakers. As before I’m aiming to attend all the lectures, so hopefully I’ll post reports and pictures as the weeks go by.

Pictures

Pictures

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Roman Ruins

Following on from my hard drive troubles at the weekend I’ve uploaded a whole batch of scanned pictures I managed to salvage from the drive, all of which probably come under the category of archive material!

There are several group shots, including a picture of the class of ’91 from my school, most of my Computer Science course from 1994, the employee group shot from Flagg Ranch where I worked during summer 1993 and a shot of the development team at my first job. I’m a lot easier to spot in some of the pictures than others, but I am in all four.

There are also a couple of scans of cuttings relating to the Geocaching video I posted a couple of months back.

The biggest set is a whole load of pictures from our wedding back in 2001 – not the official shots but a mixed bag of pictures from the table cameras, and various other snapshots people took. You can also see the house Beth lived in when she first moved to the UK.

Alongside all of those are a kind of ‘best of’ selection of some of the pictures I took on my trips to Morocco, and to Syria and Jordan. This one of Petra will probably be familiar to anybody who has come to our house as an enlargement of it hangs in our hallway. The picture above is one from my Morocco trip, and is my being experimental with shooting pictures of the Roman ruins.

Apple/Mac, Computers/Technology

Salvage Work

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I’ve had an interesting evening… A few days ago I realised that the original scans of a couple of old pictures were only on the hard drive of my old PC – no problem I thought, I’ll just hook the old box up to the network at the weekend and copy the files off…

Not as simple as I first thought, as the old PC steadfastly refused to boot. Out came the screwdrivers, and I then tried to get the two hard drives from inside the PC to read using either my current PC, or the Mac using an external hard drive box – the smaller drive, containing only applications read fine, but the data drive kept coming up with errors – apparently well and truly dead.

I tried a couple of the apps I’ve used before for recovering data from dead memory cards, but that didn’t produce anything, so eventually I tried a demo copy of Data Rescue II which successfully produced a list of tens of thousands of files on the drive. Unfortunately for me what it totally failed to find was any sort of directory structure, so for pictures I had a directory full of over 5000 jpeg files with default sequentially numbered names. Since the demo copy of the software only allows you to pull off one file, that was a bit of a problem – so out came the credit card to get a full license key.

The recovery process took a couple of hours, so I now have a folder on the Mac filled with everything the software managed to retrieve – the pictures I wanted are there, along with all sorts of other pictures I’d forgotten I even had. There are also hundreds of old word documents, PDF files, and even my old e-mail files, all of which will have to be sorted. There are quite a few corrupt files, but from a hard drive that seemed totally dead to both Windows and MacOS X, that’s a pretty big turnaround.

Anyway, if anyone else has a hard drive die on them, I do now have a copy of a bit of software that will pull off most of the data… 🙂

Movies & TV, Music

Boys Don’t Sing – Or Do They?

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unplaced_the_choir.jpg

Last night was the first part of the second series of The Choir – subtitled “Boys Don’t Singâ€?. The format was slightly different from the first series last year in that rather than coming in purely to lead the choir, this time Gareth Malone was actually joining the staff of the school. The school itself was somewhat different, being one of the largest single sex comprehensive schools in the country, The Lancaster School in Leicester.

The exact details of how he came to be invited to The Lancaster School are not explained – although he is met on arrival by the head of Music at the school, and the commentary does say that she has been trying and failing to get a choir off the ground before. What is interesting is to note that it wasn’t always like that in the school. A long standing member of staff shows Gareth some old pictures of various school choirs – and highlights that assemblies at the school used to include singing, but that was stopped sometime in the mid-eighties when the school grew and the music staff (who played the piano for the singing) became form tutors. That comment did actually get me thinking, and realising that when I was at school, and we sang a hymn in the lower school assembly we had a music teacher play – so perhaps Rickmansworth also didn’t allocate a form to the music teachers.

There were definitely some amusing moments, in particular the point where the music teacher shows Gareth some of the stuff that happens musically in the school – just watch his expression during some of those sequences. He also challenges the head of year nine and ten, very definitely an alpha male within the school community, prior to telling the whole staff that in order to achieve the goal of forming a choir, it needs backing from the teachers. Thinking again about my school, we always had a number of staff, including the headmaster in the choir, and indeed a number of them would participate in the school productions too.

Although he looked mightily nervous at times, Gareth did seem to fairly swiftly work out a plan of action, starting with the GCSE music class, and moving on from there. As before he seems very determined, and driven by the belief that being able to sing is an opportunity that all young people should have. Certainly a belief I share. As with the programme last year there were people who liked singing but were keeping it quiet, but who seemed to find the increased acceptability of singing in the school as an opportunity to come out of their shells somewhat. Equally there were other students who despite being talented, proved to be troublesome, and a source of headaches for Gareth.

Perhaps the biggest counterpoint to the testosterone fuelled attitude that seemed to be being portrayed, that singing was for girls, and that boys did sports, was towards the end of the programme, where Gareth took the step of launching the choir. The trailer only showed the very beginning of that sequence – Gareth sitting in an empty hall. What it didn’t show was that 170 students, about a tenth of the whole school population, turned up to sign up for the choir. Boys don’t sing? Maybe that’s the impression – but about ten percent of the population of that school do, or at least want to learn.

If you missed the programme, it can be found for the next few days on the BBC iPlayer.

Current Affairs

Skewed Perceptions

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Hat tip to Ian for a nice little piece here about the perceptions of Youth Crime against the reality – which dovetails in nicely with a discussion that Beth was having with one of her media classes about how influential the media can be. Without exception they believed that crime in the UK was rising – it isn’t – recorded crime fell by 9% in the most recent statistics, although the media majored on the elements of crime that rose. Certainly in our local statistics that were published this week everything was down – less burglary, less car crime, and the dispersal order in Winnersh has halved the number of incidents there – but whereas the Winnersh story was the top headline many times over the past couple of years, the positive news was buried away in a bigger article.