Audience of One is the weblog of Matthew Weston, a UK student, Christian, technophile and musician.

Morning

Time: 7.45am. Scene: a large room with three mattresses on the floor. Two have sleeping figures on them. The door opens and a figure enters.

Martin: Good morning, guys!

John + Matthew: Mm.

Martin: Well, my wife’s had to go take someone somewhere, so plans are all changing for this morning. Matthew, you’re on washing up in the fellowship room – there’s a meeting in there at nine. John, you’re going to the dump with Micah to drop off all the stuff we picked up last night. The church floor also needs cleaning. Once that’s all done you’ll be able to meet Kevin at the university for ten thirty, right? David’s about to go into Aomori with me – should have left earlier but luckily I’ve not got as much to do as I thought. That all okay?

John and Matthew: Mm.

Martin: Great! See you later! (door closes)

Matthew: When people ask me what I learnt in Japan, I’m going to say “Well, the morning has far more hours than I thought were possible”.

John: Mm.

Matthew @ 01:50, June 27, 2006 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (3)

Numbers (Conference)

(Someone brought a wireless router to the conference centre, which the staff kindly let us install on their office broadband connection. I shouldn’t really use it though – I do have a sermon to write after all.)

Matthew @ 08:08, June 21, 2006 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (1)

Desktops

Today I remembered a program I’d heard about before I got my Mac, that I’d wanted to try out but couldn’t. It was a program that created a close to realtime image of the earth from space on your desktop, updating clouds, lights in the night etc. every half hour or so from the internet. It’s called EarthDesk, and it’s a fantastic program. I downloaded it today – there’s a Windows version available now so most of you could do the same – and it works brilliantly (albeit with large text over the picture telling you to buy it). I’m not using it for one reason – it takes up about a hundred megabytes of RAM. If I had a few gigabytes to spare, maybe…

I also tried out BackLight, which again is pretty darn excellent – it allows you to use a screensaver as your desktop. Apple have a brilliant slow-moving abstract screensaver that’s perfect, as it barely changes but changes enough to make it interesting. So I used that for a bit – only to discover that Exposé breaks it, and the real desktop (BackLight only overlays something on top of the current desktop) appears again. That, and it creating a menu item next to the Bluetooth and Airport status items (which I never like it when applications do) made it not such a good choice.

So what about Desktop Earth? Pretty good, actually. This website allows you to choose the time, date, and where to centre the camera, and renders custom desktops of the earth from space for you. I’ve got one currently which I will use in the future that is an amazingly detailed picture, perfect for a desktop.

In the end, though, I had to go with an old favourite:

My current desktop

I don’t know why I always return to this picture. I edited a picture I found on deviantART years ago and have used it on every operating system since Windows. I will have other things on my desktop for months at a time, but I don’t think there’s been a year since I found it that I haven’t had this one for a couple of months. (I want to take a photo of my own one day that I’ll feel the same way about.)

Matthew @ 14:14, June 17, 2006 to Geek | Permalink | Comments (9)

Another entry

And in a vain attempt to make June 2006 top June 2005 in the rankings, I bring you yet another blog post!

Erm.

Anyone know any good jokes? I don’t even mind if I’ve heard them before…

Seriously though, I have sad, sad news. I will be going to Tokyo tomorrow evening, and as a result will not have internet access until Friday. (Yes, I know Tokyo is the most technologically advanced city in the world with 100Mb/s broadband for peanuts. No, it doesn’t make any sense that they don’t have internet at the conference centre we’re going to. I know. I feel it deeply, or something.) So this may well be my last entry for a while! That is, unless anything terribly amusing or interesting happens in the next twenty-four hours.

Matthew @ 10:48, June 17, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (7)

Sagacious advice for programmers

When trying to get a particular function to work in your latest program, don’t ever assume that the class you wrote over a year ago is bug-free, especially not if you never actually tested the class until recently.

Matthew @ 09:36, June 17, 2006 to Advice | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sagacious advice, particularly for tall people

When entering a Japanese building you haven’t been to, remember that Japanese people are, on the whole, shorter than you.

Matthew @ 07:10, June 17, 2006 to Advice | Permalink | Comments (0)

English night extra

One of the questions of the quiz I didn’t mention yesterday, I now reproduce below. Your best suggestions for possible answers shall be added to the list!

Which of the following is a correct line from a Beatles’ song?
We all live in a mutant tangerine
We all live in an iguana’s spleen
We’re all made out of polyethylene
We all live like we’re in a movie scene
We live life out of glossy magazines
We all stare at what’s on the TV screen – suggested by Sheepie
We all want to assassinate the queen – suggested by Sheepie
We all tripped (let’s pretend it was a dream) – suggested by Sheepie
etc. etc.

And for bonus points, have a guess as to the questions for which the answers are:

  1. Five days
  2. Elizabeth Windsor
  3. Chicken

Current most amusing suggestions (regardless of accuracy):

3. “What does roast beef taste like?”

Matthew @ 13:40, June 16, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (5)

English night

The church ran an English night this evening (where “English” mean either “English-speaking” or “British”). We had tomato soup, cottage pie, and roast vegetables, followed by trifle, banoffee pie and carrot cake – this was our traditional British meal. We also played “re-construct Blackpool Tower in five minutes” with modelling clay and straws. The best part of the evening though was the quiz. I’ll finish with a few of John and David’s questions (note the distancing myself from any involvement):

What is the first line of the British national anthem?
a) God save our gracious queen
b) God save the bodacious queen
c) God watches Camberwick Green
d) The Wombles of Wimbledon are wombling free
On which side of the road do people drive in Britain?
a) The right side
b) The left side
c) Both
d) Whichever the horse decides
What is the most popular dish in Britain?
a) Roast beef
b) Sushi
c) Indian curry
d) Natto
Who is the captain of England’s football team?
a) Johnny Wilkinson
b) Brooklyn Beckham
c) David Beckham
d) Phil Mitchell
What is this?
a) A Scottish hunter
b) A traditional musical instrument
c) The King of Scotland
d) A man squeezing a small animal

Answers on a postcard to “Matthew Weston, Aomori, Japan” – you never know, it might actually get through.

Matthew @ 13:45, June 15, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (9)

Today

Well, today I’m supposed to be working on a DVD to display at the upcoming East Japan conference we’re all attending. Problem is, it takes ages to download footage (which occupied the morning) and now my computer (one of the fastest laptops on the market today for this kind of stuff) is going to take a couple of hours to “letterbox” it all so it’s the right proportions.

So anyway. Um. Stephen Hawking is writing a kids’ book, I am now struggling with not playing my new Tetris clone all the time, and you should all read Ephesians 2:1-10 and tell me what to say in my sermon on it in three weeks time. (I think it’s three weeks. Far too close whenever it is.)

Having a built-in webcam is reasonably disconcerting sometimes. iMovie has this weird design flaw that means while it’s letterboxing it turns on the iSight webcam above my screen, so that whenever I switch to iMovie I see my face.

In other news, I have finished teaching myself hiragana, the first Japanese syllabary, so I can now read Japanese books written for five-year-olds (though I only understand one word in fifty). Next on the agenda: katakana, so I can graduate to books for seven-year-olds; and then kanji (of which there are three thousand in common use).

Currently letterboxing clip 44 of… oh, wait, iMovie doesn’t tell you. (Sort it out, Apple!) I think it’s about two hundred clips in total – three hours of footage.

Waiting for iMovie

Matthew @ 05:24, June 15, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (6)

To do in Japan

Matthew @ 08:09, June 13, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (24)

Octopus

Finally. And it’s not half as chewy as I’ve been told. In fact, it’s just like squid, only with suckers.

We should eat more octopus in the UK. Or indeed squid – I’m not fussed either way. The suckers do look cool though.

With the exception of my octopus break I’ve been working pretty much since nine this morning. It’s now half five – still another four hours working time before bed if I allow half an hour for supper…

</new me>

Seriously, work is good. I expect to snap out of it at some point, though hopefully not soon as I have an entire bilingual PHP content management system to write by next Friday, and I need this enthusiasm. Speaking of which, back to work!

Matthew @ 09:20, June 10, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (9)

250th entry!

For my 250th entry, I thought I would celebrate. There are many things that I would like to celebrate as today has been a Good Day. The first few points are geeky, but don’t despair – there are non-geeky ones in the second half.

Firstly, Six Apart have released a new beta version of Movable Type, the software I use for this blog. Version 3.3 looks like it’s going to be great fun to play around with when I have a spare moment. Support for tags (sidetrack – will we look at sites which use tags a few years from now and muse “so 2006” to ourselves?) among other things, such as easier ways to manage pretty permalinks than my hacked-together .htaccess file. (As ever, if you didn’t understand that sentence then you’re normal.)

Secondly, the website I’m designing for the church I’m working for is progressing far quicker than I’d predicted yesterday. Yesterday morning I wrote a timetable for the next two weeks of coding. I had finished up until Saturday by mid-afternoon, and have even started on next week’s work. (I should probably correct my timetable.) Linked to this is the apparent lack of hacking needed for Internet Explorer – currently there’s only one design bug I can find and it looks reasonably straightforward (though I may find myself using conditional comments for the first time).

Thirdly, my attempts to learn Ruby have proved fruitful – after a couple of evenings of playing with it, I have learnt enough to write my first TextMate command.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
text = STDIN.read
commentbegin = /^<!--/i
commentend = /-->$/i
if(commentbegin.match(text) && commentend.match(text))
    print text.gsub("<!--","").gsub("-->","")
elsif(commentbegin.match(text))
    print("#{text}-->")
elsif(commentend.match(text))
    print("<!--#{text}")
else
    print("<!--#{text}-->")
end

Given an input of the selected text or, if no text selected, the current line, this command adds HTML comments to HTML code, allowing you to quickly comment the text at the press of a few keys (Ctrl+Cmd+C for me). Not only that – if it detects the code is already commented, it removes the comments instead. So with one keyboard shortcut, you can comment and uncomment the selected text or current line. I’ve also written a version for CSS, and can easily write one for any language (including Ruby, PHP, Perl or Python, the four I occasionally work with). Before that though, I think I’m going to simplify it so instead of writing out the comments each time I can just add them as a variable, and only have to change them in one place when writing it for a different language. (Currently the variables are regexp only, so I’ll have a play to see what I need to do.)

Learning Ruby was worthwhile even if I only use it to write TextMate commands. That’s useful enough for me. TextMate is brilliant as it is, but being able to write new commands for it so easily is fantastic.

Fourth on my list of reasons why today is a Good Day is my progress with hiragana, the primary Japanese syllabary. I received a couple of books on hiragana through the post which I’ve started looking at, and I can now recognise and draw the first ten characters: あいうえおかきくけこ. Yes, I know typing them is cheating. Tonight’s lesson: さしすせそ – very easy as I know two of them already. Tomorrow morning is たちつてと – this time I know three of them. I’ll be finished in no time…. (There’s fourty-six basic ones then another fifty-something compound ones. Oh, and katakana, which has different symbols for every single hiragana – so that’s another hundred-odd. I won’t even start on the thousands of kanji, though I know three already: 一二 and 三.)

Fifth on my list: a good night’s sleep last night, waking up early but refreshed, and no hayfever to speak of all day. I’m now pleasantly sleepy and ready for bed after working for most of the day. May tomorrow be as productive and enjoyable.

Sixth and last thing: I’m reading two brilliant books. The first is Can we believe Genesis today? by Ernest Lucas, a professor at Bristol Baptist College and Oxford chemistry graduate. He has written a book exploring the philosophical, scientific, historical and literary issues to do with the beginnings of time and the book of Genesis, and has done it superbly. I bought this book after Denis Alexander’s talk, and it has clarified some of the issues that Dr Alexander mentioned briefly, repeated a lot of what was best in the talk, and gone further in many areas beyond biology. The most interesting thing worth mentioning so far is the difference between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism. The former is what orthodox science is based on – that is, science is based on what can be observed and tested in nature. The latter goes one step further and says that nature is the only reality there is, as it is the only reality we can observe and test. This is philosophically a false link. Without a higher reality than that which we can observe and test, there is no philosophical grounds for human rationality and therefore for any scientific understanding whatsoever. That is a simplified explanation of what the book says in a much better but longer way.

The second book I’m reading I’ve only just started in preparation for my first ever sermon: God’s Way of Reconciliation: An Exposition of Ephesians 2 by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones – the greatest preacher of the twentieth century. Before Doctor Who there was Doctor Lloyd-Jones, and the Doctor was the cornerstone of the evangelical church in Britain for many years, much like John Stott is today. He’s dedicated four chapters to the first three verses, and a cursory glance suggests them all to be fascinating. Roll on website completion so I can get properly started on this.

Matthew @ 13:11, June 8, 2006 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (3)

The sixth miscellany

Continuing my tradition, I bring you search terms that have thrown up this site in the past month. All the old favourites (such as pineapples, Emma Watson and proportional representation) are present, with some interesting new entries:

With regards to the middle one, let me give this verse to anyone searching for Biblical advice with regards to disowning parents.

On the theme of site statistics, I have discovered through careful analysis (read “a quick calculation”) that the Top 5 category incites the most discussion (with 10.4 comments to each post), whereas the Advice category incites the least (2.5 comments a post). Obviously my advice is good enough that it isn’t contradicted by many people, but not good enough that people find the need to reply with a loud “Amen!” Science/Nature topics also scored highly, as did Politics. Maybe I should write about these more – between all three of the top comment-inducing categories, I have written 22 entries (out of a total of 249).

In music I bring you news of two new songs, one rather more well produced than the other, but both free: Two Margarines by John Shuttleworth, and a new song by Switchfoot that you can download by signing up for their newsletter. (The Switchfoot song is excellent.)

Finally, I bring you news of Leonardo Da Vinci’s last invention.

Matthew @ 09:30, June 6, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (2)

This week's new experiences

Currently listening to Thom Yorke – Harrowdown Hill

Matthew @ 01:54, June 4, 2006 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (3)

Curse of the small insects

Using a Mac really makes you look at the world differently. For the past half hour I’ve been trying to work round a rendering bug in a Gecko browser.

Currently listening to Muse – Cave

Matthew @ 03:04, June 2, 2006 to Geek | Permalink | Comments (8)

End of a tradition

Last night was the first time in almost five years that I’d bought something in a McDonald’s. I am ashamed, but it’s where we were all going, it was late, and I was starving. So I bought a salad. (Apparently they’re just as unhealthy as the burgers. Certainly tasted that way.)

Supper

Currently listening to Thom Yorke – Cymbal Rush

Matthew @ 15:49, June 1, 2006 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (0)