I am firm believer in God (obviously!). I am also a firm believer that He is interventional, and takes a daily and individual interest in us (supremely shown through Jesus of course). On the back of those beliefs, I further believe that God moves in ‘waves’. Almost like 90% of the time we just have to get on with life and the Great Commission, but every now and then He steps in to shake things up a bit, and give us a boost. No, not even that. It’s more like surfing. Every now and then a big or special wave […]

Well, I’ve taken the plunge and added the facility to comment on this ‘ere blog. To be honest I’m not sure how robust it is. Although I have written a “mathma” that asks you to solve simple arithmetic to prove that you’re not a robot, which was fun. I don’t yet have a nice webby way of removing or editing comments (I have to delve straight into the database), but I can switch them off if spammers come to visit. There’s e-mail notification (to me) of new posts, and in the future I will probably add e-mail updates to posters […]

There’s a part of me that wishes I was a teenager now, in the age of Facebook. And there’s a part of me that’s glad I’m not. When I was a young lad, I used to fall in love at the drop of a hat, and be utterly and totally besotted with various young ladies (usually more than one at once). There was one particular girl who I was obsessed with for about 5 years (but never actually had the courage to do anything about, beyond name a MUD character after her). I met her at a New Year’s Eve […]

Had out first visit of the Tooth Fairy on Monday night. The boy’s first tooth came out, and that most magical of creatures visited and placed a coin under his pillow while he slept. It got me thinking about pocket money. I remember one talk I heard by John Wimber when he was talking about pocket money – and he said that he always gave his children pocket money in small denominations. So (to translate to Stirling), if they were getting 1 pound of pocket money, it would arrive as ten 10p’s. The reason for this is so the kids […]

I’ve been chatting with friends recently about job satisfaction, and it’s actually quite hard to put my finger on what it is. Several people love their jobs, others are sick to the back teeth. It’s easy enough to identify highs and lows of any given job (and every job has both). It’s also easy enough to identify frustrations and sources of stress, as well as the ‘buzz’ points. Obviously there is a corpus of research on job satisfaction, none of which I have read particularly, so these are just my own thoughts and conclusions. My definition of job satisfaction would […]

About this time last year, I finally called time on the inkjet printing thing, and moved solely to laser. To be exact the Samsung ML-1440, which has done us proud for it’s 8,850 pages. In fact, if it were possible to get parts for it still, I probably wouldn’t have changed it.. But change it I did – to a super special offer on a Xerox Phaser 6125, which is a lurvely colour laser printer. Sure, images don’t match up to an Inkjet on photo paper – but pictures are still jolly impressive, are a fraction of the cost, and […]

Derren Brown’s latest stunt (where he ‘predicted’ the lottery numbers) has been the cause of masses of discussions at work about how he did it. There are plenty of theories about how he did it – so here’s my analysis. First of all, what do we know? He turned around a plastic podium containing 6 balls which appeared to show the numbers drawn for Wednesday’s lottery. Nothing that he said or showed during the program was necessarily true. Nobody knew what Derren’s ‘prediction’ was in advance – his ‘prediction’ was only revealed once the answer was already known. Actually that’s […]

Eight years ago I was at a BMVC conference in Manchester for the week. I had been browsing an art gallery(!), and wandered out and switched on my phone. Text message from my supervisor, saying he was in the Wetherspoons Pub. This in itself was a bit weird, as he would never normally willingly enter a Weatherspoons… We found it, and discovered the rest of the crew absolutely glued to the telly. Someone’s flown two planes into the twin towers. Sorry? We just saw a plane fly into the World Trade Center, and then saw both towers collapse, live on […]

I’m working on a little theory about why we watch television, or rather what we watch what we watch. This comes from two observations – firstly the popularity of soaps, which I completely fail to grasp, and secondly the shows that my 5-year old likes to watch. I should add that I’m excluding programmes that are principally about disseminating information, such as the news, or documentaries. In other words, we’re talking about entertainment! I might need to exclude ‘direct’ comedy too. Here’s my theory; we enjoy watching shows that we (secretly) wish we were in. It’s like a whole vicarious […]

I had some crème fraîche and maple syrup cobbling around the fridge, so I decided to do an ice-cream experiment. I thought that something else in the mix would be nice, so I experimented with various combinations, and settled on added chopped up walnuts. My approach was simplicity itself. I’ve guessed the quanitities, as I didn’t bother measuring them. Ingredients (makes about 500 ml ice cream) ~300 ml crème fraîche ~100 ml milk 50-100g sugar 4 tbsp maple syrup 75g-100g chopped walnuts Method If using a ice-cream maker, do the freezy bowl thing plenty in advance. Put the crème fraîche […]