Free ice-cream
There must be someone somewhere who finds thinking up relevent entry titles as hard as I do.
Yesterday, after a day’s not-quite-managing-to-revise-because-I-left-my-notes-at-home, I stopped in at church to say hi to some of my friends from the local girls’ school. Xanna organises a small group for them, and I’ve semi got to know a few of them from being around on Wednesdays in the past.
Due to exams most of them were late, so I had a chat to one of the group I hadn’t met before while waiting for the others to arrive. In the process, I was invited to join their group for the day.
Now, I don’t know how much you know about Christian small groups, or what I mean when I say “small group”. What I mean is a group of people who meet together regularly to study the Bible together, pray, and generally encourage and offer advice to each other. Often they’re single-sex groups, just because there are some things you can’t talk about in mixed groups. So for this all-girl group to invite me to join them for their session was slightly different. “Oh it’s okay,” Xanna assured me, “none of them are undergoing personal crises so it’ll be fine”, but I refused to join until the whole group had given a unanimous decision to accept me for the week.
Xanna led a study of Psalm 8, which included a discussion of our role as stewards for the world – in other words, that as humans we are responsible to look after the world. This led onto discussion about George Bush’s recent comments on climate change and aid for Africa, and a general mooting of frustration (“it’s all very well us doing the small things we can, but if people like him don’t do the big things we might as well not bother”). There are of course things that individuals can do, and it was fantastic to see a group of friends that all wanted to live environmentally- and world-friendly lives. Two of them were even planning to instigate a recycling system in their school (“we’ll hopefully put a paper bin in every classroom and collect them up each week to recycle”), and others were raising money to go to a “Friends of Bono” Africa appeal.
It really encouraged me, and made me realise how much I don’t do that I could. A letter in the Independent this morning also did the same thing – one guy was saying to readers “you have no right to complain about America not meeting the 0.7% GDP on aid target if you’re not meeting it yourself”. It’s a good point. As a Christian I believe I should be tithing at least ten percent of my income to charity or church – some of that going towards a political pressure group trying to bring democracy to autocracies in Africa would be a good place for some of it, perhaps.
It’s people like these girls who I’ll really miss next year. I’ll see Xanna still (I know I won’t lose touch with her, and anyway she’s taking a gap year like me), but the others I only see as they’re Xanna’s small group. There’s many groups of people who I see regularly whom I’ll miss and probably lose contact with.
Oh, the title. We started the small group with a social time involving ice cream, in large quantities. The whole afternoon was one delightful surprise after another.
Currently listening to X&Y – Coldplay
Matthew @ 17:50, June 9, 2005 to Diary | Comments (15)
Comments:
Sheepie
mmm pie
i mean ice cream
Comment added at 18:22, June 9, 2005
Sparticus
More importantly (than your brothers comment, not than your actually entry, that was good), how do you pronounce Xanna? Anna? Zanna? Exanna? Does she have a really mundane surname too?
Comment added at 08:57, June 10, 2005
Matthew
Zanna, and it’s not a mundane surname really – she’s the only person I know with it (other than her family of course).
Comment added at 09:46, June 10, 2005
Rory
Okay, this is completely irrelevant, but what happened to my freakin’ subdomain? It seems to have disappeared on the 22nd May… And never returned! I have it all backed up on my HDD, but otherwise, it’s all gone… Any idea why, oh Matthew? I know you’re not really affiliated with shatteredvision.co.uk any more, but still, could you lend a hand in the investigation?
Comment added at 20:08, June 10, 2005
Matthew
How so precise about when it disappeared?
*checks FTP server*
Hmm, there’s a file in the public_html directory called “rory” with some very weird attributes, including the date of the 22nd May.
What happened to it? For once being serious, I think it was the web server gremlins. I haven’t the first idea what else could have caused it… I’d delete your subdomain and that file, then recreate it and reupload the files.
Comment added at 20:50, June 10, 2005
Rory
Yeah, that’s what I was going to do, but I wanted to determine the cause of the disturbance first. I say 22nd May as that’s when I stopped getting hits on my site (well, non-404 hits).
I was gonna convert my site to XHTML, but it’s a lot of work – I have to actually learn it first.
Comment added at 14:59, June 14, 2005
Matthew
Oh, come on, it’s just writing it in valid XML (sort of). Easy enough. The tricky part’s learning CSS.
Comment added at 18:19, June 14, 2005
Rory
But I don’t know X(HT)ML… I only know HTML, and the very basics at that.
People like me shouldn’t be allowed to have websites…
That said, at least I don’t use Frontpage (shudder) or, heaven forbid, Word (shudder) to make my sites… My pages are all born and bred in Notepad. Or a text editing program on my Palm.
Comment added at 13:24, June 15, 2005
Matthew
I assumed your <geek> tshirt meant you knew – ah well.
One piece of advice before you start on your quest: if you are ever tempted to use <b>, <i>, <u> or <font>, break down, cry a bit, repent and return to your CSS.
Comment added at 13:38, June 15, 2005
Matthew
Oh, and <div> tags rock, but try not to use too many. And avoid tables for layout, as that is almost as great an evil as Tesco Value jeans are.
Comment added at 13:40, June 15, 2005
Rory
Not as bad as frames. I never used tables in the old days, I used monospaced fonts and a lot of spaces… I have much to learn, as those tags you forbade are my mainstay…
I’m so oldschool, I still use Windows 95. At least, I would, if my other motherboard was operational.
Comment added at 02:19, June 19, 2005
Matthew
Come on, install Linux! Your inner geek is calling. Hey, I could even send you an official Ubuntu installation disk (and LiveCD) as I just got sent ten from the Ubuntu US office a couple of days ago.
Honestly, learning to code using proper semantics is very logical. All you do is you use tags that add meaning – so you use <h1> tags for the main page header, <h2> for the next level of sub-heading, <p> for each paragraph, <code> for any code examples, <ul> and <li> for lists etc.
Then you add rules in the CSS for particular tags, so:
h1 { font-family: Helvetica, Tahoma, sans-serif; color: white; border-bottom: 1px solid #ffffff; }
defines things for the <h1> tag.
The only bit that gets tricky is using <div>s and positioning, but that’s because IE sucks. Still, it comes down to writing things that add meaning. So, for example, the main section of my blog is in a <div> with the id “main”, each entry is in a <div> with the class “entry”, the menu has the id “menu” etc.
Comment added at 12:47, June 19, 2005
Rory
I was intending on using Linux on my Duron machine that’s been festering in my room for a while – I recently ordered a motherboard on eBay for it, so I can get to fixing it. I was gonna have dual-boot Windows 95OSR2 and Linux, not sure what distro, maybe Debian, maybe Gentoo… Send me Ubuntu! You have my address, yeah? The only problem is, one of my HDDs has disappeared during my absense…
So how do you do tables in XHTML? And headers and footers?
Comment added at 02:22, June 22, 2005
Matthew
Email me your address as I think I’ve lost it.
*double-checks*
Yeah, I’ve lost it. Email me and I’ll send you Ubuntu. Personally I prefer Gentoo (having tried out Ubuntu myself) but it has to be said Ubuntu is easier to install. It is “Linux for human beings” after all, as opposed to Gentoo’s “Linux for uber-geeks”. Ubuntu is, as far as I can tell, a really good version of Debian.
If you have broadband go for Gentoo, as you learn sooo much. But try out Ubuntu first, definitely.
As for tables, you do them in the exact same way except you don’t use them for layout, you use them for tables of data. And nothing else. That is, after all, what they were designed for.
Headers and footers involve a <div> tag, probably with an id of “header” or “footer”. Then you use CSS to style it. Just check out the #header stuff in the CSS file. I’ve done it a slightly strange way I think, but I’m at the library and can’t remember exactly how I did it (my header contains two images, one which links to the home page) and the computer refuses to let me open CSS files.
Comment added at 13:31, June 22, 2005
Rory
Oops, I misread your advice. I thought you meant avoid tables all the time… I missed the “for layout” part… I never use them for layout, fret not.
Okay… I will email my address to you… If I remember which one of your email addresses you use these days… Crazy kids and your super-technology…
Comment added at 15:23, June 22, 2005
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