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

Knifey

I stick Muse’s new album on.

David (from behind me): This is perfect music for sneaking up on people with a knife.

I look up.

David with a breadknife

Matthew @ 11:32, July 31, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (2)

Joke

While at Ashburnham I gave a presentation on my trip to Japan. Near the end, someone asked the question “What things do you miss about Japan, or Japanese culture?” The first part of my reply was:

The whole concept of taking off your shoes before you enter the house. It’s great, especially if you’re inexperienced with chopsticks. The floor in the houses are so clean, if you drop something on the floor you can just pick it up and eat it without worry!

For those inexperienced at detecting my jokes, I was joking. Unfortunately, I think my audience weren’t expecting a joke and took me completely seriously.

The word, I feel, is “nuts”.

Matthew @ 09:50, July 31, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ashburnham 2006

As I didn’t mention before, let me mention that, like last year I have spent the last week at Ashburnham Place on a St Helen’s-organised summer school. I’ve made some of my best friends there over the past few years, so it’s always a fantastic week and helped me cope with coming home from Japan a bit better. (If I hadn’t had Ashburnham to look forward to I would have been far more unhappy coming home from Japan.)

The week at Ashburnham with St Helen’s people always sets me up for a year of irritation with my own church. The teaching at the summer school is always excellent, never boring, and only a problem due to the lack of sleep the teenage listeners usually get. This year (despite three or four nights with five hours sleep or less) I was always awake, due to my rediscovery of the afternoon nap.

I was helping with the three year olds in the mornings as I am now too old for the teenage group. This is an interesting experience, as the group had a greatly varying grasp of the English language and were often hard to understand for the unexperienced. They also have an attention span similar to a reasonably intelligent goldfish. Cute, though.

Leader: And now we’re going to say a thank you prayer about people. Who should we say thank you to God for?

Girl 1: Mummy!

Leader: Yes, we should say thank you for our parents, shouldn’t we? Who else?

Boy 1: Kate!

Leader: Yes, we should say thank you for our brothers and sisters too!

Boy 2: Charlie!

Leader: Yes, we should say thank you for friends as well. Let’s pray, shall we? (Checks to see all the kids are concentrating.) Are we all listening? Good.

Girl 2: Thank you God for boys!

They start earlier and earlier.

The teaching in the evening was on Matthew 8:1-9:13, which were incredibly familiar passages to everyone, so it really showed that there are some good preachers and some excellent preachers when everyone felt challenged and that they’d learnt something, even with such familiar texts.

The final night involved a couple of walks around the lake with a sheet in tow (it gets cold at night and I forgot to bring trousers/long-sleeved t-shirt), a viewing of Napoleon Dynamite, a rendition of Tom Lehrer’s Irish Ballad to a sleeping Welshman and an exploration for a Classical ruin that ended in failure.

During the week we managed to have conversations ranging from creation to the end times via “being filled with the Spirit” and literary deconstuctionism. I didn’t manage to see quite as much of certain friends as I would have liked, but on the whole it was good and I had some good conversations. The week gave me a lot to think about, and once that’s all been thought about some more I may well write about it here.

So yeah – another good year at Ashburnham, but I expected nothing less. Now I’ve got a whole load of other camps I’m helping on, this time with no one I know other than the camp leader. By a strange co-incidence, the camp I go to on Saturday is run by the guy who gave the talks on Matthew this past week. (His son was in my group of three-year-olds – I wonder if he’ll recognise me.)

…and into the third paragraph in which I try to end this rambling entry. For some reason the last sentence of the previous two didn’t quite seem enough like an ending. Like this one’s any better.

Matthew @ 20:49, July 30, 2006 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (2)

Three am entries

You know the way that when you’ve been working on something for some time – be it essay, song, painting, poem, novella, dissertation or blog entry – you have no way of actually telling if it’s any good? What I mean is, you’ve revised it so much that what you’ve written is somehow a part of you, and you have no discernment available separate from the personality that wrote it. I’m not explaining myself well. Anyway, I think often with creative endeavours fresh eyes are needed in order to see whether something actually makes sense/is amusing/works.

These problems are compounded at three in the morning, when your natural resources of energy ran out hours ago and your intellect is running on that mix of adrenaline and caffeine that takes the worst attributes of each constituent stimulant and morphs any conversation into a series of non-sequiturs and incoherent statements. Luckily, these conversations seem to make complete sense to anyone else in a similar state of stimulant-enhanced stupor. Unluckily, these conversations, when written up and posted for the world to see online, can in one swift stroke remove any self-respect the author may or may not have gained up until that point.

It is with this in mind that I turn to yesterday’s entry “Dreaming”, and I hope to elucidate my reasons for writing and posting it. My reasons for writing it are reasonably clear, I hope. Under the influence of said stimulant cocktail, I decided (along with similarly stupified associates) to write a blog entry about something which seemed highly amusing to us – namely, a friend who was still asleep, even after having had practically any object within reach balanced, lodged or attached on, in, and to various parts of his sleeping form.

My reasons for posting it are rather more complex, but centre around the fact that the brain isn’t in much a better state after three hours sleep and a sudden injection of sugar. I can’t quite remember yesterday evening fully, but I definitely remember reading through what we’d written and deciding it was definitely worth posting.

In conclusion, in the same way my entry “Interest” was basically an excuse for the possible decline in content that had possibly been caused by an increase in the frequency of entries being posted, this entry is an attempt to excuse the possible mistake caused by yesterday’s entry “Dreaming”. The problem is, as I wrote it (albeit while under the influence of mind-altering drugs – yes, I know that sounds illegal, but it’s definitely accurate) I cannot tell. Hopefully though, if you do think of “Dreaming” as insane and pointless, hopefully this entry makes up for it. Or something.

Matthew @ 12:17, July 30, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (0)

Unexpected

When returning from Japan, one problem I didn’t expect was beds that were too short for me, or indeed showers I could not stand upright in. Still, this week away was almost like a continuation – a slower reintroduction into British life, one thing at a time. (The pillows, however, were incredibly soft. Lying in bed with a slightly hard mattress, my feet off the edge of the bed, a bump on my head and a typically British pillow beneath it, in a reasonably humid heat with no duvet necessary – well, it was the soft pillow that made me the most uncomfortable.)

Currently listening to The Decemberists – From My Own True Love (Lost At Sea)

Matthew @ 11:04, July 30, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dreaming

(This entry is based on actual events.)

Imagine the scene. You’re staying up late chatting to friends, and doze off in your chair with your feet up. The next thing you know, you’re lying in a boat surrounded by mints with a straw hat on your head and cooking tongs sellotaped to your left hand. For some reason, your first conscious thought as you emerge from the misty realms of sleep is a question regarding the location of a compatriot.

Where’s Glynn?

You sit up, and the mints balanced on your face, torso and legs fall to the bottom of the boat. The water lurches around the keel as you realise where exactly you are. You are in the middle of a lake, the waters of which are absolutely calm but murky with a sort of murky coloured murkiness. The shore is not far off, but there aren’t any oars in the boat. The sun is just rising, and was probably what woke you.

Your next conscious thought is with regards to your location, because you were quite happy sitting in your chair, and this new aquatic naval boatish environment is slightly less comfortable. Quite unsettling, in fact.

Again, you wonder what has become of Glynn. The last time you saw him you were talking about football. There was a slight disagreement with him about who scored in a particular game. The memory is hazy.

You suddenly notice the cooking tongs in your hand. Somehow this strikes you as amusing, and you start to chuckle. It is then that you notice that there are mints stuck between your toes. As you automatically reach out to remove them, a spoon falls off your shoulder.

You’re now awake enough to realise the surreality of the situation. You begin to seriously worry about your friends. You start paddling towards the shore. An occasional mint dislodges itself and makes a rattling noise in the boat. You reach the shore, and discover a leprechaun waiting for you. It starts throwing mints at you, and you suddenly wake up.

(Entry inspired by Daniel; writing assisted by Caroline. These events almost happened to Daniel, but the amusing thing was, having woken up, the dream he’d had was incredibly similar to the plan hatched during his slumber. This entry was written at three in the morning – apologies for any lack of internal consistency.)

Matthew @ 19:40, July 29, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (2)

Irritating things of the day

Matthew @ 17:55, July 21, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (0)

The last apple juice

We drank the last drop of Itayanagi apple juice today.

I will never be able to drink normal supermarket apple juice again…

Matthew @ 17:38, July 20, 2006 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (0)

The ninth miscellany

People are still finding this site by Googling for “disowning parents”, which worries me as I’ve never written about this. Like I’ve said before – not a good idea. There was also the question “what do octopus eat?”, to which my answer would “it’s octopi, not octopus” where it not for the fact that Wikipedia tells me otherwise. Amazingly, “she’s got a chicken to ride” was featured. Finally, we have the (fragmented) question “Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson dating?” and the answer “Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson are dating” featured with one hit each. (Note: I’ve no idea if this is true, but if it is, you really shouldn’t care.)

In Japan-related news, there’s nothing like living with 8Mb/sec broadband for almost three months to make a 1Mb/sec connection seem unbearably slow. Also, it’s the Japanese for “excuse me” (sumimasen) that I’ve been saying automatically.

Muse’s “disco space rock” on their new album is really good, and Keane have really improved as well. The Death Cab album’s as good as I remembered, and Thom Yorke’s album is good, but not quite Radiohead.

I’ve just discovered Delicious Library which is a rather over-the-top but fun way of keeping track of who I’ve leant DVDs and books to. I’ve just started filling it out, so currently it’s a bit sparse.

Delicious Library

The thing I found interesting when I first ran it was the list of “borrowers” that it imported from my address book. It imported family only (using my surname), but, even though there is no distinction in the address book between male and female, it assigned a female icon to my mum and aunt, and a male icon to my dad. (My brother gets his custom icon.) Very clever.

Anyway, enough for now. I’ve managed to write an entry for each day this month so far, but from Saturday I won’t have internet access for a week. Six more entries in two days? I doubt it. (That would equal my record.)

Currently listening to Muse – City of Delusion

Matthew @ 13:48, July 20, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (7)

Dirty

Suddenly I feel so unclean.

XP on a Mac

Currently listening to Death Cab for Cutie – 405

Matthew @ 10:23, July 19, 2006 to Geek | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thoughts from the aeroplane

It first really dawned on me that my Japan experience had changed me when I automatically went for the chopsticks for the meal on the flight.

Actually, scratch that. It first dawned on me that my Japan experience had changed me when I realised, near the end of the flight, that I had used chopsticks for both meals without noticing or thinking about it.

Actually, scratch all that completely. I knew my Japan experience had changed me long before that. I mean, 私はイギリス人です, 神様は愛です and all that. (Bet half those kanji are wrong though.) But learning a language doesn’t really count as changing. The change will be noticeable if I, without thinking:

Then of course there’s the less noticeable changes. When I first started this blog the idea was it would be a record, in some small part, of my Christian life. That concept hasn’t exactly failed (after all, I did say “some small part”) but it’s not exactly been that much of a feature. So here goes.

When I came to Japan I had a vague idea that planting churches was a good idea. Now I’ve lived with a professional church planter for two and a half months, I return convinced of the fact, and I’m having to prepare myself for the inevitable frustration of the Anglican dislike for church planting. (A brief explanation of church planting: starting a new church, potentially with members of your current church, in a new location in order to reach out to that location.) I mean, surely it should be obvious that along with being an evangelist, the apostle Paul was a church planter? Why do you think (in human reasons) he wrote so many letters to different churches?

When I came to Japan I thought I was pretty good at trusting God in my work. After all, I would reason, if it hadn’t been for his help I would have messed up my exams and not got into the university I wanted. I got a B in music where I needed an A, and the normally strict admissions office let me in anyway. (I later got the paper remarked and got an A – turns out loads of people were heavily under-marked on one exam. It was almost as if God was saying “look, you’re a talented musician (of course, I made you that way), but so you know that it’s me you need to rely on, I got you into university even without the grades”.) The year previously, after having never written a proper practice essay for English, I got a B rather than the F I’d expected before the exam went so well. (Note to younger Christian readers: this is not an excuse not to work. “Oh, I trust in God that I’ll do well in my exams so I won’t do any revision!” Not a clever idea. I feel that exam was definitely the exception to the rule. As was Geography the year before. No idea why I needed an A in GCSE Geography or a B in AS level English, but I’m sure God has his reasons.)

Anyway, I realised that in some spheres I did seem to trust him, but in others I completely forgot he was there. Take the church website I’ve been designing and programming. Countless times I would struggle for days, even weeks, trying to get one little thing to work; countless times I’d completely forget about God. Then when about to give up, I’d suddenly think: “hang on, I can pray about this”. With one exception, my prayers were answered within an hour, and the problem would be solved. (The one exception, however, resulted in a couple of days in which I learnt a load of other things, so I’m okay with that.)

I wrote this on my feedback form:

I’ve learnt that geeky and technical problems aren’t somehow separated from spiritual assistance, and that prayer and programming are essential companions when working on a church website to a tight deadline.

For some reason, possibly because programming and theology seem completely unrelated disciplines, I had kind of subconsciously been thinking that God didn’t know anything about UTF-8 encoding or Internet Explorer rendering bugs. If you’d asked me, I’d have said “yes, of course he knows” but that wasn’t how I thought while working. And of course, prayer always came as a last resort. As the interviewer said in my debrief, it’s hard to learn to pray first sometimes, though you’d think it would be obvious given the results.

I’ve also learnt not to feel confident about my public speaking ability. I gave what I think was a really good first sermon (things to work on of course, but it was my first), and followed it up the next week with a pretty rambling and incoherent testimony. The sermon had gone so well I’d almost forgotten that I should probably proof-read and practise my testimony. This is tied to the last point – I’d been praying about my sermon for weeks, whereas I hadn’t prayed at all about giving my testimony. Again, you’d think it would be an obvious thing to do.

There’s many other things I’ve learnt, but I think those are the major ones from the actual Japan experience. There’s also lots of things I’ve learnt from books I’ve read and from talks I’ve listened to, but they’re (perhaps) for another entry.

(Everything prior to this sentence I wrote on the aeroplane, but it’s only now I’ve had a chance to post it.)

Matthew @ 09:51, July 19, 2006 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (4)

From Narita

Well, I’m currently in the departure lounge at Narita Airport, waiting for my flight to be called. So yeah – I’m coming home. I won’t have internet access for next week, and will probably be sleeping a lot before then, so normal service may resume from now. (Normal service being more infrequent entries, that is.)

I return home to Thom Yorke, Muse and Keane’s new albums, as well as another Death Cab for Cutie CD. The Muse album particularly intrigues me – hopefully I’ll write a review at some point.

Anyway, there’s not much to say now. My flight awaits me. I’d write “matane!” in Japanese but this airport computer, oddly enough, doesn’t do Japanese input. Ah well. Matane anyway. (That’s “bye for now”, in case you were wondering.)

Matthew @ 04:57, July 18, 2006 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (2)

Shinkansen

One thing they don’t tell you about the Shinkansen is the incredibly cheesy music they play as you approach each station. You’d think that one of the most technologically advanced trains in the world would show some sophistication, but unfortunately not.

It’s also not nearly as exciting as the nickname “bullet train” suggests. Actually, the name came from the shape of the original trains, one that they no longer use, and not necessarily anything to do with their speed. Which is fast, but not as impressive as you might think.

I’d heard various things about how you could stand on the platform with your watch, and at exactly the right time to the second the door you needed to get on through would become stationary right in front of you. It’s probably true, but unfortunately I’ve only travelled from one end of the line to another, meaning when I arrive at the station the train is already there. Plus my watch is slightly wrong.

Inside it’s just like any other train – in fact, not as good as some UK trains in that you don’t get electricity for a laptop. The food is ridiculously expensive as you’d expect. There’s not much footroom, but then Japanese people are generally shorter than me.

All that said though, it’s still the bullet train, and the bullet train is cool. You should all be jealous of me*.

* Note: don’t be jealous of me. Jealousy is bad.

Matthew @ 09:56, July 17, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (2)

My last night

I’ve just said goodbye to more than half the people I’m leaving behind in Japan, and I’ve suddenly realised how much I want to stay.

Leaving people is hard.

Matthew @ 15:54, July 16, 2006 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (6)

Late at night

And with sleep rising up to meet me like a warm fog, this conversation took place:

Matthew: I wonder what these two bites could be if they’re not mosquito bites

David: Maybe… spider bites. Or a snake bite.

Matthew: Yeah, they’re equally spaced, they could be a snake bite.

David: Technically, any two points are equally spaced.

Matthew: Oh yeah…

Matthew @ 15:08, July 15, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (0)

The last onsen

Last night we took two new short-termers to their first onsen, in what will almost certainly be my last.

As David said to them last night: “Did you ever imagine you’d be sitting outside in a hot bath with four naked blokes?” I’d add: “Did you ever imagine that you’d miss it?” The onsen is culturally very Japanese, and it’s only our Western culture that makes the concept seem strange. (The mixed baths are another matter entirely.)

Matthew @ 23:28, July 14, 2006 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (2)

Apples

You know when you think of something amusing you could have said about five minutes too late to say it? I’ve just had that, only it’s a month too late. You might recall the proliference of Macs at the conference I went to. Three things suddenly occured to me just now:

Something along the lines of:

Actually, perhaps it’s best I didn’t think of this at the time. Now at least I retain some kind of respect for posting this in an ironic fashion – back then it would have just been a poor pun.

Irony: making bad jokes acceptable since ages past.

(People of the blogosphere! Your task is to come up with more taglines for irony. And possibly bad apple/Apple puns if you are so inclined.)

Matthew @ 10:40, July 14, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (4)

Shopping

Guys, you know that feeling when you’re out shopping in a mall or somewhere, and suddenly you notice that all around you are shops full of women’s clothes and accessories, and there’s not another bloke in sight?

Now add the fact that you have no idea whether any of the shops actually sell men’s clothes as well, so are trying surreptitiously to look round the skirts and blouses (and other more personal items) to see if there are any normal t-shirts lurking at the back.

Now imagine what that’s like when everyone’s staring at you because you’re a foot taller than them and obviously foreign.

Got that picture? Right. If you’re ever in the above situation, here are a few things you can think to yourself to help cope, and some things that really won’t.

Girls, have you ever thought about how easy you have things while shopping? You can go anywhere. If you’re older than about twenty-five and in the men’s section, people assume you’re buying stuff for your husband – under twenty-five, your boyfriend. Or even for yourself. If you’re a guy in the women’s section… well, let’s not go there.

Matthew @ 13:22, July 13, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (0)

Weather

So, what’s the weather going to be like my last week in Japan?

Weather prediction for the coming week

Finally. It’s been getting more and more oppressive, and this is exactly what we need to clear the air.

That, or the icon it gives for “incredibly humid” is the same as for rain. That would explain the humidity and absense of rain today, even if we’re predicted rain. Oh joy.

(Update: well, the icon predicts rain, but it doesn’t say how much. We’ve had a little rain, but mainly just incredible humidity. Oh, Tokyo is going to be fun… even higher humidity and potentially thirty-five degrees!)

Matthew @ 09:07, July 11, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (0)

Interest

Given my attempt to post more entries in this month than any month up till now, I thought I would draw a graph plotting how interesting any given individual entry is in its own right, with the frequency of posting.

Graph showing interest against frequency

As you can see, the more entries posted in a given period of time, the lower the quality of the individual entry. Conversely, the more sparsely updated this site is, the more interesting the entries will be when they come.

This could also be represented in another way. Imagine C as the total amount of interest in any given period of time t. C is a constant. Then take frequency (f) as the number of entries (n) divided by time. The variables form this equation, where x is the interest of that particular entry: x = C/f.

As you can see this means that x is inversely proportional to f, meaning that the more often I write entries, the less interesting the individual entry gets.

However, this is a gross oversimplification of the problem, and I’m sure our resident mathematicians will be able to expand on my formula and come up with a much more accurate model, taking into account the anomalous variables that arise as a result of:

They may even be able to include a variable allowing for differing opinions as to what makes a good entry, what is actually funny and what isn’t, whether geeky entries, film reviews and “go see my latest photos on Flickr!!” entries really count towards frequency, and if so under what circumstances etc. etc.

In the meantime, I have conclusions to draw, and I’ve drawn these conclusions:

The island of Conclusions

Matthew @ 15:51, July 10, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (2)

Things I won't miss from Japan

Matthew @ 14:20, July 10, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (0)

Things I will miss from Japan

Matthew @ 14:20, July 10, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (3)

A new thing every day

Things I gleaned from Wikipedia today:

(Yes, I’m trying to make this month have the most entries ever. Well spotted.)

Currently listening to Death Cab for Cutie – What Sarah Said

Matthew @ 11:09, July 7, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (0)

Painting and digging

One of the things I didn’t expect to be doing when I came to Japan was practical work such as digging or painting. I suppose if I’d thought about it, I might have realised it might be a possibility, but I find it very hard to remember what I knew before coming here. I now know that Martin, my boss, enjoys building and construction work (so, since I’ve been here he’s built a sound loft for the main church hall, as well as creating a parking lot from a garden complete with stone wall); I also know that this is a community of farmers, meaning practical work comes naturally to most of them.

Then of course there were my particular skills: with websites and computers (I’ve been programming a content management system for my redesign of the church’s website for the past few weeks) and music (I play in every evening service, and sometimes the morning as well). I didn’t expect to be doing one of the things I was least good at and had very little experience at: digging and painting.

Wednesday I was up a roof for the hottest part of the day painting, hence sunburn. I then spent the next day digging trenches, looking for water pipes, which is not the best of jobs with sunburn. (Must stop complaining, must stop complaining…). I also managed to get insect bites all over my legs, which have somehow not been quelled by my insect-bite-eradicator thingy. Maybe Japanese mosquitoes are more potent than European ones, I don’t know. They were certainly large enough.

What else has happened in the past few days? Well, I took my camera to the parking lot construction to get before/after photos, but forgot to put a memory card in. I cycled to a new store that opened yesterday with Bethany, expecting the entertaining mass crowds she’d described yesterday, only to find no-one, just a female clothing store on its second day of opening. So I cycled home. (Bethany came home later with the news that it actually sold male clothes too, but too late.) I fixed the final Internet Explorer rendering bug in the website, and practised my sermon for the first time (it was too long). I also took part in my first adults English class, which involved (among other things) eating pure sugar, drawing a picture of a duck on a whiteboard, and asking one of the class where she would advise me going on holiday if I wanted to learn how to juggle. (She didn’t know, worse luck.)

Still to do while I’m in Japan: the remaining items of my list, preaching my first sermon, finish the church website, take photos of the family I’m sort-of staying with, and buy some more t-shirts.

Update: I forgot. I also need to finish learning Katakana and buy some kids Japanese books so I can go home and practise.

Currently listening to Badly Drawn Boy – Have You Fed The Fish?

Matthew @ 08:21, July 7, 2006 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (4)

The eighth miscellany

Following my brother’s speculation on what a strawberry and maple tree looks like, I bring photographic evidence:

Maple and strawberry tree

On Japanese geography:

David: “Is Jonan in south Hirosaki?”

Matthew: “I think so. Aaron, is Jonan in south Hirosaki?”

Aaron (fluent Japanese speaker): “Of course, that’s why it’s called Jonan.”

His logic was inescapable, if incomprehensible.

And finally, you may not be aware of the net neutrality debate going on at the moment, but in case you missed the technical side, a US Senator can explain.

Matthew @ 14:21, July 5, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (17)

Ow

Japanese people don’t get sunburnt. I hadn’t really thought much about this fact until I realised that there is no such thing as aftersun cream in Japan.

Ow ow ow ow ow.

Matthew @ 12:46, July 5, 2006 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (2)

Civil partnerships and the Anglican church

First Ben Bradshaw, the first MP to have a civil partnership ceremony, says the Church of England’s stance on them is “ludicrous and unworkable”. Then the Nigerian Anglican Church says that the Episcopalian Church of the USA (both Anglican churches like the Church of England) should be “excised” after Rowan Williams writes of preserving unity.

Apparently the the Nigerian bishops commend Dr Williams’ idea as “brilliant as the heartbeat of a leader who wants to preserve the unity of the Church by accommodating every shred of opinion no matter how unbiblical”. Williams wants to keep ECUSA in the Anglican Community, and he wants to do it by allowing them to be “associate members”. Now that seems unworkable. How far away from what the Bible teaches can a church go before they can no longer be “associated”? Where do we draw the line? I’d draw the line by saying churches that don’t take the Bible as their ultimate authority should be out. Unity is only unity if we have something to be unified about; if we don’t have the Bible as the source of the Church’s teaching, then we have nothing to be unified about.

Onto Ben Bradshaw, who says: “The priest who blessed us was breaking the rules. Those rules allow clergy to be prayerful with and about same-sex couples but they expressly forbid the blessing of civil partnerships. This is ludicrous and unworkable.” Well, it’s certainly ludicrous – if you’re allowing clergy to be prayerful about same-sex couples you might as well allow them to bless civil partnerships. Not to do so is inconsistant. Of course, to do so ignores the Bible, which brings us back to the Nigerian bishops’ point. What Bradshaw doesn’t understand is that Christians should have the Bible, not national law, as the ultimate authority. Christians are called to submit to national law as long as it doesn’t contradict what the Bible says. We have a higher authority. I’ll save discussion of calling church pastors “priests” to another day. Maybe when I tackle calling the church a “temple”, or what we do in church “worship”. (Yes, one of those is slightly more common than the other. I said I’ll save it for another day…)

Matthew @ 12:19, July 5, 2006 to Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posting with TextMate

So the wireless connection in my room drops out just as I want to write a blog entry, and my trial period for MarsEdit ran out last week. So I open up TextMate to write an entry, and suddenly think “Didn’t I read somewhere that you can post blog entries directly with TextMate using one of the bundles?” Turns out I did. So then I got thinking.

The way the blogging bundle is currently implemented isn’t ideal for my needs. Firstly, the template includes an “extended entry” separator by default. Still, that’s easy to remedy.

Secondly, Allan (TextMate creator) demonstrated uploading an image to your website just by dragging the image onto the entry. While doing this inserts the correct code well enough, I can’t get it to upload mine. That needs a play with then. A related issue is that I store my images in a different place depending on what they are. A desktop background goes in images/desktops/, whereas normal blog images go in images/blog/ – and sometimes even in sub-categories. So either I change my mind as to how I organise images (which, for the sake of consistency, means editing past entries. Maybe come September – to do this simply and accurately would require exporting a MySQL database from this site, importing it on my localhost, and writing a PHP script to automate URL changing, followed by re-importing the database on this site and rebuilding all the static files), or once I’ve got this feature working, I hack it to do what I want.

Thirdly, there’s the new release of Movable Type 3.3, which includes various new ways of doing things which would require a new version of this plugin. Hopefully one will be short-coming so I can have a play, but seeing as the final release hasn’t even been reached yet (though it’s any day now) I doubt it’ll be quite yet. Still, no rush.

Fourthly, there’s the issue of posting photos from Flickr. Once I’ve got the whole drag-and-drop image thing working (which I’m sure I’ll sort eventually, just not before my hectic summer and certainly not before I come home from Japan), there’ll still be the issue of Flickr photos. There’s no point in hosting all the photos I want to post here locally – I want to use Flickr. So, I need to write a command that allows me to input a Flickr URL (or possibly just picture ID), and it automatically creates the right code to insert a Flickr image into the page with a link to the photo page on Flickr (as per their terms and conditions).

One other TextMate thing to mention, though this time it’s not related to the blogging bundle. Snipplr (you can tell it’s cool because it ends with an “er” without the “e”) allows you to post little snippets of code, which can be tagged, and then inserted at the touch of a button (or two). So if I save the following text as a Snipplr snippet:

if (!is_object($db)) {
    global $db, $vars;
    $db = new DB($vars['db_host'], $vars['db_user'], $vars['db_pass']);
    $db->connect($vars['db_name']);
}

I can simply press ⌃⌥⌘S, type in “db” (one of the tags I saved it with) and select it from the list to insert it. It’s basically like TextMate snippets, only you can easily add other people’s – plus it’s slightly easier to add them than adding TextMate snippets. I’ve yet to decide whether it’s useful enough to me to start adding things to it, instead of just adding TextMate snippets (which can be searched in a similar and equally simple way). The main advantage is adding other people’s – but because everyone has a unique way of coding, and TextMate’s own snippets are so useful, it’s probably even better just to copy and paste as a TextMate snippet.

So, to round the entry off, TextMate rocks supremely. Seriously, if I had to use Windows to use TextMate, I’d do it – and people who’ve talked to me about anything technical for more than five minutes know Windows drives me mad. (Vista does look better though, if they sort out the whole security concept and make IE 7 support web standards as well as Safari.) This is what this entry looks like in Textmate, and if you wanted to know what the entry I wanted to write was, then tough – you’ll have to wait. (Possibly indefinitely too – I think I’ve changed my mind about posting it. As often happens when I listen to advice involving photos of me from friends.)

Matthew @ 07:59, July 3, 2006 to Geek | Permalink | Comments (0)

The seventh miscellany

Quote from a Sun football pundit on the radio, commenting on Rooney’s untimely exit: “That was one of the worst decisions I’ve ever seen in a football match! Of course, according to the letter of the law it was a red card offence, but…”.

Text from a t-shirt I bought recently: “Late take off: the newborn type that surfers in the world enjoyed it”.

Some more search terms:

This last one is particularly perculiar: I have never mentioned the Penguin Cafe Orchestra on this website before, and have in fact until yesterday never heard any of their music. A sudden desire gripped me, however, and yesterday (without seeing this search term in the logs) I bought a PCO song. How incredibly perculiar. (It’s pretty good, if you’re interested.)

Muse have decided to spite me by removing the preview of their album from their website just as I discovered it was possible to play it there. Yes, I know it was released in Japan before any other country so I could just have bought it here. CDs are expensive in Japan though. (You thought they were expensive in the UK? You have much to learn.)

You should go watch the Studio Ghibli back catalogue, in Japanese if you can get them (with English subtitles of course). I saw Castle in the Sky on Friday, and it’s brilliant.

</ramble>

Matthew @ 05:05, July 2, 2006 to Miscellaneous | Permalink | Comments (7)