It’s been a while since I released any code into the public realm. Until today \o/

Sadly, the code is probably not something that many people are interested in, but I was interested and that’s enough for me

Whetstone is a small application to help you memorise verses of scripture over a period of time. Currently it only runs on Linux, although the Windows version is around the corner. Testers are welcomed

mrBen

Back in May I asked the question as to whether or not I should have two blogs, my existing Jedimoose blog (which you’re reading now) and an additional blog to cover the new work that Heather and I were beginning in the church.

After a certain amount of internal debate, I chose a rough compromise – I would have 2 blogs, but I would post regular summaries of links here to posts on the other site. This has the additional benefit that the other site will likely contain posts from multiple people involved with the project over time.

And so, at long last, I am pleased to officially announce (meaning it happened a while back, but I didn’t get around to posting before) the life`boat project. If you want to read the posts regularly, you’ll find them there, otherwise there will be summaries here every now and then when I remember (I hope to get something automagic, but haven’t found a plugin to my liking at the moment).

Summary of all previous posts from life`boat:
First post (7th July)
Ships and the sea (17th July)
Back from CLAN (26th July)
Tasks for the next couple of months (4th August)
More from CLAN (10th August)
Influences (Part 1) (13th August)
Brief Update (6th September)
Influences (Part 2) (15th September)
Influences (Part 3) (23rd September)
Balancing Act (30th September)

Comments, as ever, welcomed, although I realise this won’t be everyones cup of tea

mrBen

Wow – this is quite late. Here are some basic results, although, as has been pointed out many times, this is far from statistically accurate or in any way a valid experiment.

There were only 7 completed responses to the survey, and the results go something like this:

Background:
5 Female, 2 Male; 6 UK, 1 US; 6 Christians, 1 agnostic (nominally marked as Christian, but neutral in belief in God and neutral in following their prescribed set of beliefs). All but one prayed for more than 25 of the 40 (the one being one of the Christians, not the agnostic)

Prayer:
There was a spread between the different options for what to pray for. The Christians believed that God would answer (although one was unsure it would happen in this timescale). The Christians all felt they had an answer, although only one thought it was “complete”. The agnostic gave it a -1, so not a complete opposite, but worse than a no answer. Interestingly, the number of times people prayed did not seem to have much effect – the person who prayed the least seemed to have one of the more answered prayers.

Changes:
The Christians had no change in their belief in God, but a little more faith in prayer. The agnostic had less faith in God, and less faith in prayer. The Christians would definitely keep praying, whereas the agnostic stayed neutral.

I’ll leave the rest of you to formulate your own opinions on this, as you probably would anyway. Thanks to those who took part (especially those who filled out the survey).

mrBen

Too funny.

mrBen

Well – Lent is over, and so it’s time for the Great Lent Challenge Survey.

If you took part, head on over to the survey to fill out your responses. Any problems or questions, please don’t hesitate to mail me – mrben -at- jedimoose -dot- org

I know some folks have got a bit of time left to wait on their answers or lack thereof, so I won’t be publishing the results until around the end of May.

mrBen

Joss Whedon receives the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism at Harvard University’s Memorial Church:

“Faith is something we have to embrace. Faith in God mean believing absolutely in something with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something which has a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers!”

Discuss……

Well, after 2 years of blood, sweat and tears, the new church website launched on Friday. It’s not ready, it’s not finished, but it is live.

My friend Innes put a huge amount of effort into designing the site – everything that looks pretty is down to him. Everything that looks a bit clunky is down to my implementation of his design

It’s built on (badly written) Django, and there are still loads of ideas and plans in my head on what else to implement. But hopefully it’s now a little bit better than the one-page excuse for a site that’s been up since 2007.

mrBen

I’ve had a couple of questions asked since I initiated the Great Lent Challenge – I hesitate to call them “Frequently Asked Questions” because they weren’t exactly flowing think and fast, but here we go with some answers:

1. What are you praying for? Well – apart from praying that everyone elses prayers would be answered, I’m praying for a guy I know who’s partner was recently taken ill.
2. Don’t clauses 1 and 8 contradict themselves? No. Clause 8 only requires you to invoke the name of Jesus, not to actually believe. It’s there as a control point for the end results – rather than people coming back and say that they’ve been praying to Allah or Vishna or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
3. How should I pray? It doesn’t really matter all that much. You can be as formal or informal as you like. If it helps, just make it conversational. Other people prefer something more structured, like “Jesus, please will you [insert prayer here]. Amen”. There isn’t a “magic” formula, so do what makes you feel comfortable. Avoiding blasphemy might be nice, but I find God is a lot more forgiving about that kind of thing than a lot of people

mrBen

Inspired by a recent rewatch (or, infact, 3 watches between Christmas and now) of the Prince Caspian DVD, I decided it was time to reread the full Chronicles of Narnia. I picked up this set from an Amazon trader for only £7.13 delivered, which was a great price, I reckon. It’s a boxset with the 7 paperback books. The covers are new, but the imprint inside is identical to the set my mother had when I was small (and still has), including all the original pictures that I remember. The books have been chronologically ordered (as opposed to ordered by publication date) – if you would like to debate the best order to read in, then there are plenty of places to do that online

The first thing that really struck me as I reread these books for the first time in over 15 years, is that they’re really short. I managed to read a book a day on the train to and from work (roughly a couple of hours reading a day) and I’m not a particularly quick reader. They are obviously books aimed at children – you don’t have the depth of history or explanation that you do in, say, Tolkein – and although they do appeal to an adult audience, it would be unfair to attempt to rate them alongside books that aimed at adults. Having said that, in some ways I find the world of Narnia more vivid in places than the world of Middle Earth. I certainly found myself more attached to Narnia, for reasons that will become clear.

I found that I had remembered only bits of all the books. The LW&W is probably the most vivid in my memory, but then, it’s also the one most referenced and made into film. The other books all produced some vague memories, but nothing totally concrete for any of them. This may be, in part at least, that the sparsity of the writing (and I don’t mean that in a negative sense) allows for the wild imagination of a child to be set free, but these imaginings don’t necessarily create the same lasting impression as a written description.

One of the things that brought me back to this series is the closing music piece on Prince Caspian – “The Call”, by Regina Spektor – it’s a haunting piece of music that, I believe, really captures the sense of sadness of the Pevensies having to return to their own world, knowing that nothing there has changed, and also that 2 of them will not be returning to Narnia. This is reflected in the books, and it feels that CS Lewis felt a genuine sadness for the numbers of children who find the faith of their youth fading away as they grow older.

Faith is a definite theme within the books, and still causes a lot of controversy. JK Rowling and Phillip Pullman have both been on record as objecting to the work of CS Lewis, particularly his treatment of women generally, and Susan in particular, although I am not convinced that either author hasn’t read more into his writing than was originally there. For me, however, both as a child and now, there is some wonderful imagery for faith within these books. The creation of Narnia in A Magician’s Nephew, and the depiction of heaven as Aslan’s land, painted gloriously vivid pictures of creation and heaven that still appeal to me all these years later.

Ultimately, I tend to find that the books that impress me most are either those that surprise me, or those that leave me feeling a sadness at their ending. The Chronicles of Narnia, as a complete work, definitely fall into the latter category. If you read them as a child, I would recommend a re-read. If you didn’t, certainly read them, but suspend your disbelief as an adult and see through the eyes of a child if you can.

mrBen

OK – so I’m a few days late getting this posted, as Lent started on Wednesday, so I apologise. A couple of years ago for Lent I committed myself to posted on a daily basis. This year, I want to something of an experiment. And that is that I want to challenge everyone to pray for one thing every day for the rest of Lent, and then collate the “results”. Here are the “terms and conditions”:

1. You don’t need to believe anything. You don’t even need to believe that prayer does anything.
2. You do need to commit to praying daily for the same thing until Sunday April 12th. (If you really want, you can skip Sundays, because traditionally the 40 days of Lent don’t include the Sundays)
3. Your prayer cannot be for yourself, or for something that would profit you most. It must be for someone else.
4. Your prayer must be measurable in its result.
5. Your prayer must be “local” in its scale – for someone you know or a situation that is personal to you (bearing in mind condition 3). World peace is not an option here (maybe next year).
6. At the end of the challenge there will be a simple survey for you to fill out to collate the results. (Said survey will not reveal names or identities)
7. This is a viral challenge – post it on your blog, or on your facebook, or where ever, and challenge other people to be involved.
8. Like it or not, I am a Christian, and this is a Christian challenge, so your prayer needs to invoke the name of Jesus.

My commitment is this – whatever the results, I will definitely publish them.

Are you up for the challenge?

mrBen

Looks like it might be relatively interesting. Plus, if I post the below link, I might win stuff….

mrBen

I reckoned it was about time to write a decent retrospective of the last 6 months in the life of mrBen. It’s been an extremely hectic and tumultuous time, but, as these things tend to be, quite important. I’ll try and step through it systematically, but I apologise in advance for both rambling, and repeating things I’ve already posted about.

• The end of LugRadio (even with the prospect of LRL UK 09 still on the horizon) did have a significant effect on my life, although looking back I can kind of see how it seems to have fitted in nicely with a change of direction in my life as a whole.
• Not least, of course, the start of Classic Yak way back in August. We’re consistently getting 50+ listeners for each show – not quite up to the LR standards, but the Christian online community appears to be much more fractured and disorganised than the FLOSS community (no surprises there). We’ve just released our 7th episode, and have plans for 2 more episodes in Season 1, and then a bit of a break before Season 2 kicks off
• In September Heather and I began the year-long Invest program. Every time I’ve mentioned Invest on this blog, I’ve said “I’ll explain more later”. I guess there’s no time like the present…

Invest is a year long program aimed at (to quote their site) “equipping pioneering church planters”. It was established from our church in (if memory serves) 2006. The program involves some residential teaching (a weeks induction, and 4 weekends in various places around the country), time in a placement church (ideally around 4-8 hours a week, I think) and individual study and reflection. Additionally, there are essay assignments of 2000 words before each weekend.
Heather and I have been placed in the Rock Community Church in Dumbarton for the past few months. Their Sunday meetings are in possibly the most orange room ever constructed. We were also involved in the Dumbarton Alpha course, which is jointly run by people from the Rock, the CofS, the Baptist church, the Brethren church and the Roman Catholics. (I don’t think I’ve missed anyone out…)
So why, you may be asking, is a Linux geek getting involved in such a course? Now – you might not be asking that at all, but I’m going to tell you anyway But it all needs to be put into a context that some of you may not be all that aware of.

I first came to Scotland in 1995 at the tender age of 18, to spend a year working with Scripture Union Scotland. At that point I was intending to become a youth worker, most likely within a church. After a year traipsing round the Borders and Edinburgh, mostly doing schools work, I had to make more decisions about my future. I decided that the appropriate continuation on the path was to take another year out with SU, ideally doing work with churches, rather than around schools. And then I was going to University to do Divinity/Theology, in order to get a good theoretical background to underly the experience I had in youth and childrens work.
And so, in 1996 I found myself in a team of 1, working for a barely-conceived church of 8 people, under Alan McWilliam. Being part of Whiteinch Fellowship, as it was then, has shaped the last 12 years of my life considerably, and has fostered me through University, marriage, fatherhood and my 8 years at IBM.
From the beginning of my time at Whiteinch, I was aware of certain skills and gifts that were coming to the fore, not least in leading worship, and teaching. Plus, I had (and have) a fascination with church strategy. I think at that point I knew that one day I would lead a church.
Fast-forward through that year out, 3 years of university, 8 years of work, and probably the most spiritually dry 10 years of my life to date, and you find me in the middle of last summer, agreeing to do Invest, but at the same time having God reach down and give me a good slap and telling me to get my act together.

“And so here we are on the raggedy edge…” I’m fairly sure that within the next 3-5 years myself and Heather will be part of a team beginning a new church. It probably won’t look like what most people imagine a church to be. It probably won’t be what I imagine it to be at this time. But it will definitely be an adventure.

“I aim to misbehave”

mrBen

I was really struck by this video of Penn Jillette that was linked to on a site I read yesterday:

The whole thing is interesting, but the bit that caught my eye (or ear, rather) was when Penn, as a confirmed atheist, says (paraphrase) “I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize…. if you believe that there’s a heaven and hell and that people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life…. how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize”.

So….. sorry.

mrBen

Last year, I posted a list of projects I wanted to complete in 2008. How did it go? Well….. not brilliantly:

• MythTV – box didn’t get touched, let alone back up and running, although it did see use at Camp again as the shop database.
• Church Office:
  • Display machine – yes! this got fixed (mostly) using keyjnote (now impress!ve) presentation software, which is much more stable than OO.o seemed to be with this display adaptor. May well try OO.o again once it’s upgraded to Intrepid Ibex
  • File server – same as MythTV box; untouched other than some crayon courtesy of Mira
  • Firewall – still working perfectly, still not upgraded
• Linkpot – I handed this project over to schwuk when I realised I didn’t have the time available, and other projects became higher priority
• Church Website – well – it’s “almost” there. Watch this space

The other projects didn’t even get a look in, but I did gain a new project in the “Invest” programme (which will eventually get a post of it’s own), plus another project that I’ll be announcing next month. Oh, and Classic Yak kicked off too, which has been very significant.

I’ll be posting this years plan later on. Maybe.

mrBen

Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted. And there’s _loads_ of things I could say, but I’ll make do with a few catch ups:

• New phone – got myself a Nokia 6500 Slide phone on a contract from Orange, after my previous phone (an aging Motorola V220) lost the ability to put sound through the earpiece. First impressions of the new phone are good, although the keys feel quite small at times. And the preinstalled Golf Tour game is really addictive!
• Severed Fifth, which I have blogged about before finally released their debut album, Denied by Reign. If you’re into chugging heavy metal, then you might like it, although, in a weird twist, I find that some of the “clean” vocals sound a bit weird.
• Ubuntu have released their 8.10 edition, the Intrepid Ibex release. Came out yesterday – get it while it’s hot (or wait a couple of weeks for the servers to cool down, and initial bugfixes to be released )
• Classic Yak continues to chug along nicely. Episode 4 came out last Monday (just). We’re getting about 60-ish downloads for most of the episodes, which is not too bad. And the editing quality is getting better. Mostly
• Heather and I continue on the Invest course. But more of that to come at a later date.
• I’m finally getting round to building the relatively huge Django project that is the church website. Also more of that when there are things to actually see in production

That’s probably enough for now.

mrBen

(culled from The Resurgence)

A truly fascinating video (particularly the Q&A session at the end) of Tim Keller, a Christian author and apologist, speaking at the Google campus, as part of their Authors@Google series. He’s talking a bit about his book “The Reason for God”.

(or click here if it’s not embedding where you’re reading)

mrBen

Classic Yak Episode 1 (“Things to Sing in Lakeland When You’re Dead”) is now available!

You can download it direct from ClassicYak.org or listen from the streaming media player.

You can subscribe using your podcasting software from one of the links at the bottom of the main page.

You can find it on iTunes at http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=286589056

You can sign up for the forums or email us.

If you’re in church on Sunday, you can get a free sticker!

For those who missed my original post, CY is a monthly podcast aimed at discussion real-world issues from a Christian perspective. Hope you like it.

mrBen

OK – I’m back from a week away at my parents, and I have 2 big things I want to talk about. The announcement of the end of LugRadio could, I guess, be rolled up in this post, but I think it deserves a post of it’s own, so I’ll get to that soon.

However, my last post hinted at the arrival of something new, and then I completely failed at setting up a post to be published on Monday.

So – what was it all about. Well, the answer is Classic Yak. Classic Yak is a brand new project, put together by myself and Al and a couple of other guys in our church. It’s a monthly, discussion based podcast (definite LugRadio influence there) aimed at tackling real-world issues from a Christian viewpoint (less of an LR influence ). We released the pilot show last Monday, and will be releasing on the last Monday of each month for at least the next 6 months.

We hope that it will be an entertaining listen, and will stimulate some useful discussion. There doesn’t appear to be anything quite like it in the Christian podcast market, so hopefully there is a niche there we can fill. Our first episode talked about Big Brother, but we’re aiming on having a full blooded discussion about the Lakeland Revival as the main segment in Episode One (due out 28th July).

Feel free to take a listen (apologies for the odd audio glitch in the pilot) and give us some feedback on show@classicyak.org.

mrBen

This is a Christian kids Manga-esque animated thing.

I managed the first ten minutes before it got switched off.

BigAl

Having had a chat today with someone (who shall remain nameless to save his embarrassment) about tithing. That is, the giving of a tithe at church.

Now, without getting too bogged down in theology (and to generalise), tithing is the giving back to God what is his. Specifically, in today’s society, 10% of what you earn.

Depending on how much, or how little, you earn that can be an inconvenient bite out of your monthly finances. And yes, I do tithe because I want to support my church and the valuable work in the community that it does.

But there are people who don’t tithe. They go to church and they don’t tithe. They see the work that is done and they don’t tithe. They see other people tithe and they don’t tithe.

They just don’t tithe.

And that’s fine. Really. No-one HAS to tithe. It’s not like the Church Gestapo will come a-knockin’ at your door if you haven’t tithed… (Hmm, Church Gestapo. Maybe I should suggest that…)

And there are always factors that eat away at your finances that you can’t control.

Fair enough.

But maybe people aren’t given the right encouragement to tithe. Perhaps we should be preaching that giving your life over to Jesus Christ just gets your name on the list of the saved. Keeping it there depends on your continued financial support.

Your salvation is dependent on your 10%.

How about it? How much does eternal life really cost?

Ten percent of what you earn in non-sequential ten pound notes every month, if you don’t mind. Just slip the envelope under the church door and that’ll be fine.

(No cheques please. Just cold, hard cash.)

I’ll take care of it from there, from my office on the beach…

BigAl