Apologies for the outage – apparantly the server woz hacked. W00t! Anyway, everything should be back to normal now.

One of the aspects of being a Christian that I find tricky is remembering it. I don’t mean in the big sense, but in the everyday hustle and bustle of working life. I sometimes find that I’ve gone the whole day without any particular reference to God. Other days I’m very “tuned in”, and keep firing up short little arrow prayers, and know just the right things to say, and can feel like I’m spending time with Him even in the midst of debugging code. Why does it matter if you remember God or not? I guess there’s a couple […]

I’m definitely getting braver in my old age. Today I took calculated risks with two fairly precious items – my watch, and my Canon EOS 300D. The second is the point of this post, but the first is worth a quick mention. My watch ‘glass’ (don’t know what it actually is) was fairly scratched – not the extent of rendering it unusable, but enough to be a pain when reading the time. I discovered on t’internet that Brasso (!) can be used to remove small scratches on watch glass – and it works! Thanks to Steve Waddington for giving me […]

Twitter has now turned off Basic Authentication, so apps have to use OAuth. In case you missed it, I have a page which says how to a PHP twibot using OAuth, and I’m grateful to Shadowfax for highlighting some of changes he had to make to get it work in CentOS. Enjoy!

Thanks to The Church Mouse, I’ve come across 7 link challenge – and it seemed fun. My first post: Untitled Rather a poor show – Also decided to keep a mini-diary. At that stage it was almost like Twitter, with very short “newsy” type items. Due to a strange quirk, it was post #99 in the pre-Wordpress database! A post I enjoyed writing the most: Probably Music, music, music My review of an evening with John Barrowman. Fab evening, and really enjoyed writing it up. A post which had a great discussion: How to win the lottery Technically not a […]

Had a trip to casualty on Friday evening. Nothing serious – I was having a session at the Harrogate Climbing Centre (which, incidentally, I can’t rate highly enough) on Thursday, when I fell off the bouldering wall awkwardly and landed on my ankle. Hobbled home (well, cycled actually) – pretty painful but that’s how it goes. Anyway by Friday it had swollen to twice it’s usual size, was a horrendous purple, and was very tender to the tough. The good Mrs H. said I needed to take it casualty for an X-ray to make sure nothing was broken. At this […]

Well, had my new phone for nearly a month now (if you squint a bit). I’m definitely getting old, because there great swathes of it I haven’t really touched yet. I usually explore every nook and cranny of a phone the day I get it, but somehow I’ve had other things to do. This is also unusual in that it’s only a “partial” upgrade – but which I mean I fully intend to jump to a full smartphone when my contract is up, and finally retire my Palm. This in turn has reduced by excitement for setting it up just […]

Very excited – new phone in the post. SHould be here Weds. I have to say that ever since I strayed from the One True Way (Sony Ericsson) I’ve been a bit disappointed with my phones. I got a Samsung P300 (weird calculator phone) several years ago, which was very cool in terms of size, battery life, and features – but a pig to use because the UI was horrendous. Right up the day I retired it, I often pressed the wrong button in response to a UI prompt. I then jumped ship to 3 (largely because of free ‘unlimited’ […]

Oh dear. The Church does get itself in a stew, doesn’t it? I’ll be honest – I struggled with the ordination of women. My understanding of the Bible was that women should not be in a position of leadership over men. However having met women who seem genuinely called and gifted for the Ministry, and who are annointed leaders, plus a re-examining of the scripture, I have to say I’ve changed my tune. I believe it is quite possible to make a coherent case for not ordaining women. It’s also possible to make a coherent case for ordaining women, and […]

When I was on a stag weekend last year, conversation turned to music (as so often it does), and for some reason we started talking about bass breaks. A bass break is where all the other instruments stop for a bit while the bass does it’s funky stuff. For some reason this discussion really captured my imagination, and I have been pondering it ever since. Of course, as soon as I think of a song I forget it again – so here’s my attempt to draw up a list. I imagine this will be a kind of rolling edit job. […]