So much code - so much fail.

It seems that I can no longer post by copy and paste direct from word:mac into blogger without the formatting being seriously messed up. I'd written a couple of long catch-up blogposts, of which the text below is a later sample, only to paste them in & find fonts, spacing and some characters messed up.

Of course where there's a will there's a way, and (hopefully) Libreoffice to the rescue - text without formatting.
Note: it appears that blogger is messed up, rather than the word processing applications. It will no longer change text copy/pasted in to the default blog style, either font face or size, and doesn't interpret spacing well. So it seems the only way to write off line for now is to put them in as html and add spacing etc manually. Nice - not.

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Blogpost 5th November 2013
No gunpowder, not especially much treason either. Plot? Lost a little now and again.
Time to resume writing about things and catching up.
First off: I’ve just finished book 1 of Josephus’ Wars of the Jews. It seems amazing how nothing has apparently changed in the way people in that part of the world treat each other over the last 2000 years. While it may not be factually absolutely accurate (which Josephus himself refers to in Antiquities) it does paint a picture against which one can understand Herod the Great’s killing of all the boys under 2 in Bethlehem to try to eliminate Jesus. Compared to him, the Tudors look positively trusting and benevolent.
It has also been helpful explaining the political backdrop and recent history to the period in which Jesus ministered. It was my assumption that the Jews had been invaded and conquered by Rome, rather than the reality, which involved the Romans more or less being invited in to help one of the heirs of the leaders of the Maccabean revolt attain ascendency over his brother. The slope downhill from there was steep and bloody, and mostly down to local politics than Roman military action and greed. Loonies, the lot of ‘em.

In other news, we’re in the middle of the bathroom saga.
We had hoped to have the shower all sorted while on holiday, but life doesn’t seem to be like that, and here we are, several weeks down the line in the absolute opposite of what we wanted, with a bathroom that looks like a building site. Progress is happening gradually, and this week I finally got agreement from the people we bought the shower cabin originally to refund instead of just giving us a credit note. They didn’t have anything else that was a suitable replacement, and after talking with a sales guy they weren’t at all difficult. However we haven’t actually seen the money arrive yet, but hopefully that will be a mere formality.
In terms of sourcing an alternative, it’s curious. I spent an hour with someone in a bathroom centre showroom yesterday, and he was really struggling to understand a) what I wanted and b) why I wanted it. There was a bunch of stuff on their company website he seemed completely unaware of, and kept diverting me from when I tried to talk about it – a little disappointing since talking about this stuff was the POINT of visiting in person . Ho hum. We kicked ideas around and he made suggestions which we’ll probably adapt to move forward. Essentially it’s going to be a custom build (nuts) which will hopefully not create yet more problems – or more leaks.
Why is it people don’t get the idea of a shower cubicle that stands freely, and is designed not to leak from around either the tray or the sides by being self-contained instead of butting against a wall? Love will find a way, but it’s tricky to help someone adjust their thinking when they have ‘always done it that way’.

And on to worship and music.
I so appreciate the guys I’m working with right now, and really not to throw stones at anyone else but it’s wonderful that there’s no tension under the surface, no ‘precious’ bits or demands to “do it my way” (I hope they feel like that about me too!). And the chemistry is good to, with each of us doing things differently from how we’d do them alone, and working together to create a whole. There are times we don’t even need to look at each other to know where we’re going next, and that has caused a certain amount of amusement too. Each one has different strengths they can bring and different preferences, and I hope we’ll follow each of those a bit further too, so that we don’t just sound the same all the time following mine.
But it’s been so good to be able to go along, try stuff out, laugh when it’s not worked (and when it has sometimes, for the sheer fun of it) and to have a sense of worship when it’s flowed. There’s a way to go, but this is bringing healing for me after the previous 5 years.

Camera? What camera?
There is a natural path in me that’s hard not to follow. Once the gates of acquisition are open it can be a real struggle to start closing them, but this is exactly what I need to do. Over the last few years I’ve been really careful not to buy stuff like I did when I had a regular & substantial salary, but then recently we have been able to ease that a little. I don’t buy junk or tat and I don’t buy toys – everything is useful and has a purpose. But since getting the camera I’ve spent hours online trying to identify which lenses to acquire in order to be able to create really good images.
For a lot of people this would be really tedious, but the thing with research about technical stuff is that it fills a work and knowledge shaped gap in me that enjoys and embraces the all consuming nature of that kind of thing. I am therefore trying to back away from all that for now, do the things I should be doing, maybe even spend a little time in quiet and prayer instead of giving myself to anything else. There’s nothing wrong with hobbies, research etc, but when they start to become consuming then you know there’s something wrong. I had become very consumed and not in a good place.
So I’m leaving it at home, making time to pray, to be alone a bit, to do the bits of work I naturally shrink from. Does it make me righteous or holy? Nope. Does it help me walk with Jesus instead of polishing my own pleasures? Yes.

And sometimes I see stuff that makes me shake my head at progress.
I came across the application of LEDs in the kind of spotlights used for building sites, PIR intruder lights etc in place of 500W halogen bulbs recently. We’re not talking about those silly lamps with a 1000 bubble-style LEDs pushing out 50 lumens either, but of a 50W LED delivering a theoretical 5000-6000 lumens, or about 6-8X the output of a car headlight. The lights in the chapel building have given trouble over the years, and it would be really nice to replace them with something using 1/5th the electricity and having 20X the lifespan of a big PAR floodlight. It was then but a small step to look at the other kind of LED lights available, and to find that the cost of crazy-bright bicycle lights was now so low as to be laughable – less than £20 for a 2000 lumen output system. And that’s just nuts.
Chris was behind a cyclist last week whose rear light was so bright that she was unable to see the road ahead. Being sensible she decided to hang back, and could then overtake in a wider, better lit area. There used to be regulations in the highway code surrounding type and output of lights on bicycles, but they seem to be changed now, only requiring a steady white light at the front and rear.

Finally Canada. We bought a book on Saturday (rough guide to Canada) and Chris is gradually working her way through, becoming familiar with Vancouver* and what we might do while there. She had already picked out some highlights (the Capilano suspension bridge, Granville Island and others) and has now decided we probably don’t have enough time to see & do everything. C’est la vie. Next chapter is the Rockies, and I suspect we won’t have enough time there either.
My suspicion is that the Rockies will be lots of woods, mountains, lakes and wilderness. Lovely to look at, but pretty similar most of the time, but we’ll have to see. That’s not in any way a criticism, but natural beauty is ever changing and yet so often the same, and we have been spoilt over the years for natural beauty and sometimes been disappointed. So I’m not going to pre-judge this one, just like I tried so hard not to pre-judge Africa (occasionally fantastic, but mostly dull - or maybe it seemed that way because I am calibrated to appreciate a certain kind of beauty?) and we’ll see what we’ll get.

*I notice that the Mayor of Vancouver is in the news right now, smoking crack cocaine and being drunk in public (he apologised for not staying home to get drunk). A supporter they interviewed was speaking up for him, describing him as a rock star. One can only shake one’s head sometimes, but it seems the electorate do get what they deserve.