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:
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. 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’ve been tagged by more people than I can remember for this particular meme (not least Heather, Aq and Rob) so I thought I’d better get around to it at last.
1. I’m almost totally deaf in my left ear
2. I’ve supported Liverpool FC for over 25 years, but I’ve never been inside Anfield, and only been to Liverpool once.
3. My first ever internet domain was www.bird-in-a-cage.co.uk back in 2001
4. My first ever email address was at Uni – 9704293t@student.gla.ac.uk – can’t believe I still remember that.
5. I had photos taken with Cliff Richard on a double decker bus (as part of the press release for an event called Release The Power)
6. At birth I had severe muscular problems, and it was (I believe) questionable as to whether I would talk, let alone walk.
7. My best ever 10-pin bowling score is 128.
8. I’ve been a Linux user since 1998.
9. My Dad looks like Rowan Williams (current Archbishop of Canterbury)
10. The first car I ever owned was an orange Fiat Panda.
11. I didn’t fly or travel to another continent until after I was married.
12. Heather and I will have been married 10 years this year.
13. My wife, mother, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law are all teachers.
14. I liked all the Matrix movies.
15. I have never owned a new computer.
16. I’ve been a Christian for 23 years this Easter.
17. I’ll probably never be a best-man at a wedding. This makes me sad.
18. I co-host a podcast called Classic Yak
19. I have a Bachelor of Divinity degree – but I didn’t do honours.
20. My favourite beer is Pauwel Kwak, closely followed by Innis & Gunn and Moosehead.
21. I completed Tomb Raider 1 and 2 on the PC.
22. My first guitar was an ESP 300 series electric. My first acoustic was a 2nd hand guitar made by Hondo. (My parents let me return the guitar they had bought me, and then use all my 18th birthday cash to buy a better model)
23. The first film I ever owned was Inner Space.
24. When I was younger (and for many years), I really wanted to be a policeman.
25. I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was 8, or swim until I was 9.
mrBen
If you had one of these….
….would you want another?
Due date 14th August 2009.
mrBen
Suddenly realised I had a whole load of stuffs that deserved pimpage on the ‘Moose.
If you like your detectives hard-boiled, and your dialogue fast-paced and witty, then look no further than Black Jack Justice from Decoder Ring Theatre. 30 minute audio dramas taken from his case book sees Jack and his partner, Trixie Dixon, Girl Detective, deal with all the usual fray of your $35-a-day (plus expenses) gumshoe. The banter between Jack and Trixie is worthy of Joss Whedon in places, and, while hilarious at times, the series avoids being a full parody of the genre. Worthy of a place on your audio player.
The Scott Sigler machine continues to rumble on. Contagious (sequel to Infected, of course) has hit the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller list, but is continuing on as a free audiobook. If you haven’t listened to his stuff from when I’ve pimped it before, maybe now is the time.
Alternatively, if you prefer graphic novels, then both Siglers’ The Rookie and the first episode of Black Jack Justice are being serialised as comic books over at Addictive Comics.
Oh, and Classic Yak topped 700 overall downloads on Friday, and got 30 hits in a week for episode 7. Movin’ on up…
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.
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 have a Creative Zen Touch and I haven’t used it in AGES.
For the life of me I can’t remember why. Oh, that’s it, I was re-copying all my music onto the pc as .ogg format and not .mp3. And the Creative Zen Touch doesn’t support .ogg.
Bad boys.
But until someone manages to hack the firmware, because Creative will never release a new version with full support, i’m not loading any more music onto the device.
And I haven’t really used it since until, when charging the device to see if it still works, I discover that it has 17-18 gig of music I had put on it before.
And there’s nothing like walking to work to Rammstein and the Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back…
BigAl
Just checking in…
For the last week I’ve been suffering from some dread lurgy (again!) and have been not fit for much of anything.
After going to see Frost/Nixon on Friday night the weekend has been much of a waste of time, with me spending most of it bed. Normally that’s not much of a problem but if I want to waste time I’d rather do it on my own terms and not because I’m laid down with some mystery lurgy.
(Eventually I’m going to have to investigate why my health is generally so piss poor…)
And I missed work/Church totally today. Oops…
Still, the time I haven’t been totally wasting my time, I’ve been tinkering with web things, looking at the JediMoose theme with a critical eye, painting some miniatures and thundering away on my bass, all this while watching Ruthy come down with the same dread lurgy that I have… Result!
Note to self: my bass playing is only ever going to improve when I spend more then once a month or two on it…
BigAl
Despite my previous posts about the joys of Jeremy Kyle and his show, The Jeremy Kyle Show (get that man an award), I still find myself hypnotised by the infernal ringmaster and although I’m not able to watch the antics when they’re broadcast on ITV1 I like to catch up with the ITV online service.
Gah!
It seems that the daily episodes aren’t accessible online on a regular basis.
What use it that?
Where else will I get my regular dose of Jeremy bullying drunks, drug addicts and the mentally ill?
It’s enough to lose you faith in the internet…
BigAl
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
Well this morning I finally did what I was telling myself I would do since before Christmas; I have finally let go of the insidious grasp of Facebook.
I’ve closed all applications, changed my settings, and deactivated my account. I know that if I want Facebook to delete my profile then I have to delete each and every minifeed entry and e-mail, and I will do that in time but I’m happier right now with this first stage of just putting it down and walking away.
And already I feel it’s a weight off my shoulders.
Now my reasons for leaving Facebook aren’t about anything so noble (?) as privacy issues.
It’s just a waste of time.
(And I see no reason keeping in touch with people from my past who I have no other relationship with other than through Facebook. I wish a lot of them well but really I don’t care. I haven’t been interested in their well being since leaving school and it’s not going to start now.)
The time issue really is a big thing. I have precious little time as it is to do the things I want to do.
Goodbye Facebook. I won’t miss you.
BigAl
Last year, I posted a list of projects I wanted to complete in 2008. How did it go? Well….. not brilliantly:
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
Wanted to put down some useful things I have learnt about dual-screening in Ubuntu since I moved over to working under Linux full-time at work (and thus using a dual-screen environment more consistently).
1. The Intel driver for their gfx chips can’t do 3D on a combined screen size of wider or higher than 2048. So, if like me, you want to have your 1440 to the left of your 1280 monitor, with a total size of 2720, then you can’t have Compiz desktop effects enabled. (I think the solution would be to have them on top of each other, which would be <2048, but I haven’t tried that)
2. The guide here has some handy stuff about setting up xrandr to detect at login whether or not you have 2 screens connected – works great for me.
3. GNOME by default will always put it’s panels on the external monitor in a dual-screen setup. However, I discovered that you can tweak this by editing gconf when you login, adding a couple of lines to the ones added in step (2). (In file /etc/X11/Xsession.d/45custom_xrandr-settings:
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
xrandr --output $INTERNAL_OUTPUT --auto --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT --auto $EXTERNAL_LOCATION
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel_screen0/monitor 1
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/monitor 1
else
xrandr --output $INTERNAL_OUTPUT --auto --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT --off
fi
4. If you have your virtual screen size set up appropriately, then the System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution dialog also seems to work pretty well for times when you’re adding a projector on (although you’ll need to drag panels across from the projector as per (3) – haven’t worked out where I can add the gconf changes to make this happen automagically)
Anyway – still a work in progress. This was all done on Hardy – Intrepid upgrade on the to-do list once the relevant packages for my work software are available. The screen handling stuff may well be better in Intrepid.
mrBen
November was probably one of the busiest months I’ve had in a long while. All the weekends contained some sort of activity, split evenly between church and Invest events. Added to that a load of stuff at work, including a 2 day conference in Edinburgh and a job interview, and things were a bit hectic. Here’s to a quiet December!
At the Customer Contact Association conference in Edinburgh, a lot of folks were talking about Net Promoter Score(NPS), which is essentially a gauge of how likely people are to recommend your business to their friends. Interestingly (but not surprisingly) most banks score very low on this, although First Direct apparently is consistently high (60-70% better than most other banks, from what I could tell).
In lieu of this, I thought I would recommend a company that has been getting a chunk o’ money from me in the last few years. Regular readers of this blog, or regular visitors to our parties, may remember the infamous party at our flat in Haldane St that was a hotbed of inventiveness, being the source of not only vodka-cheese, but also a tasting ground for various bathroom products. By way of apology, the instigator of the madness purchased a number of replacement products for myself and Heather.
One such product was a set of King of Shaves lotions, and I’ve stuck with them from that day forward. The KoS shaving gel is great in that it produces virtually no foam, which makes it much easier to see what you’re doing, and doesn’t clog up the blade nearly as much. I also like their facial wash and aftershave kit. And, due to a need for replacement blades, I recently succumbed to try out one of their new Azor blades – a full review on that once I’ve used it a few times! (My previous weapon of choice was one of those vibrating Mach3 Turbo things, that I bought to shave off my goatee all those years ago, which was also a good blade, but replacement heads are a good deal more expensive than the KoS stuff)
Any products out there that you swear by?
mrBen
At the back of my mind… is what I originally wanted to post about. Damn, it’ll get back to me eventually. It always does.
I’ll have to remember to post about it then though, and not wait thinking I’ll remember…
Oh, well. To fill the space I’ll share this.
I has a mock assessment this morning at my course and I did… not brilliantly. That’s what comes from writing 50 thousand words when I should have been studying. Some things are just more important I guess.
And because of some unnecessary aggression from one of the students there, not me I can assure you, I was particularly taken by the last panel of this comic.
It truly is the simple things in life that keeps me entertained.
Oh, and before I forget, I saw The Mist last night. It’s a Frank (Shawshank Redemption) Darabont film based on a Stephen King novella. Genuinely terrifying.
Anyways, time to get some work done…
BigAl
Glad tidings one and all.
And what have I been upto all this time that I have not been updating the blog? Well, i have been doing (and completeing) my NaNoWriMo for the year, more of that exciting journey can be found here, and i am very pleased about that.
Yes, indeed I am.
Classic Yak trundles on, being the indispensable guide to christian life that it is (or something). And there are the never ending lists of things that I have set myself and have yet to do/finish/start.
So today, after having finished my 50k words for nano, I am sitting in the 13th note and enjoying bashing some more words into the story that i am a baw hair away from finishing. Very exciting stuff there.
I have an almost few fully painted squads for Warhammer 40k, a project that I insist on doing even though I am 33 years old.
Hey, I tried to grow up and found it a distinctly unimpressive experience. Sue me.
Oh, and I braved the shops this morning. I was inspired by the winding queues in some of the shops I went into (and the inspired to leave just as quickly) and had a wonderful chat with one of the guys, Chris i think, from Games Workshop Glasgow about the benefits of running full ten-man squads of Grey Knight Terminators in games of 40K. Just have to get enough painted to play first.
And I popped into the Dragon and George (or George and the Dragon), on Parnie Street in Glasgow city centre (I am boycoting Static Games, you have to speak to me directly to find out why), and had a wonderful chat with the guy in there about the state of the gaming industry in the current economic climate. Always keep up wth current affairs i do…
And Ruthy is, with the bulk of the church, currently in the Whiteinch Centre doing something called a solemn assembly. Hopefully between her and mrBen i’ll get an idea of what I missed.
Perhaps I should have been there, but God knows I have to get this novel done… 
BigAl
