Just to keep you up to date.

My mother came home at the end of last week, and she's doing a little 'better' - meaning that she's still up and down, butis less bad than when she went in to hospital. We are hoping she'll have her heart op in a few weeks time, and that will turn things around strength-wise for her.

Thanks for your prayers everyone.

If I told you I just bust a nut

and had to replace it, would you understand?

Really rough today.

All my joints seem uncomfy - even my hands hurt if I try to play guitar.

Blech.

The new corporate website is done!

Well, that is to say, I have a design, logo, various pages put together. Now it's being looked over by various people to make suggestions about text and appearance.

Who'd have though that red, green, blue and pink could look so cool together?

Let me say, it's not a marvel of coding techology, stunning javascript or astonishing python. It is however very small, fast and tidy. It works on small laptop screens (maybe even winbooks? I don't have one) but looks fine at 1600X1000 something.

To those who suggested I use The GIMP, thank you. It's a long time since I used a 'real' image editor, and although it took a couple of hourse to do it, I was able to make my text images with transparent backgrounds just fine in the end.

If you have my email address and want to see it before it goes live then drop me a line.

Welcome to the infection.

I seem to have done well with my cold.

The sinuses are now under pressure, face feels well-punched, joints twanging away.

It's been a busy but fulfilling weekend.

Not without frustrations, but they are outweighed the good things.

PTC was interesting on Saturday. The session on praying for people was challenging with being required to seek God for a 'word' with a 1 minute time interval. Roger (the guy leading the session) is someone I've known a long time, and he's really grown in this area in the last 10 years. He had some very key things for people.

The day was hard work generally, and by the end we were both pretty tired.

Today It was really good being with the housegroup this afternoon - there's such a strong sense of family with these people, and we are so going to miss them. It's also interesting how they can flow from having a deep theological discussion about the purpose of suffering and endurance into light hearted joking and fun, and back again.

And TBH we really love these people. Our moving is going to bring an opportunity to grow within many of them, but I wish we could take our family with us!

Something I never knew

All this time I had a cool html editor on this mac and I never knew it.

Opera.

Opera will open the page source and allow you to edit text directly, then save it again. If I had only known this I could have done most of the website on the macbook instead of the PC.

All I'd have needed the PC for then would be creation of the 'contact' image files. I know there's a print screen command somewhere in the Mac OS, but I can't remember the key combination. Something funny that I read on this topic in one of the 'migrate to Mac from PC' magazines was where the writer rubbished the single key PrtScn command (who knows what it's for? he said) only to then give the required key presses later in the article.

Oh, and I'd have needed an image editor capable of cropping and resizing.

Dan - I looked at the packages you mentioned - I'm reluctant to pay 50 euros or 100 dollars for stuff I can use free on the PC.

Fern - you're right. The Mac doesn't make me happy, and the more I dig the more annoyed the OS makes me. There are probably workarounds for all the limitations, but if so, they're obscure and hidden from me. As a laptop for limited business use it's great, but I don't want to pay substantially for occasional use software, and shareware is as expensive as full-priced app for XP it seems. I'll keep it because it IS a great piece of hardware, but I really must look into dual-booting or VM. I guess this is good, because it's helped me get past the 'I wonder if a Mac is better' thing. No amount of clever animations are an acceptable substitute for built-in control.

I never thought I'd become a Microsoft fan, but I think the tread the right place between linux excess choices and apple's limited options. If only stupid clever people wouldn't try to hack that OS.

So today I'm mostly

home with lurgy.

Runny nose, deep deep cough, swimmy head and achey joints.

:p

No-one is going to rub my head and call me a "poor little bunny" though - I don't do man-flu.


But I did discover something cool this morning. One of our cats (that likes to claw the carpets) was doing just that outside our bedroom. I stroked the cat to distract it and found that a couple of strokes was enough to build up a lot of static electricity.

Which discharged noisily and painfully onto the ears.

The animal was in confusion. It wanted the attention but didn't like the discomfort. Eventually it tried to bite and then claw my hand, which was fine as I'd seen the signs and was ready to move. Yet it seems the animal's memory was so short that within moments it was asking for attention (and shocks) again.

Anyone want a cat that's had electric shock aversion therapy?

Oh the joy

.......of building web pages.

In notepad.

I tried iWeb, but it made me very cross is a very short space of time.

Back to notepad then. At least that's an HTML editor I can understand.

Oh, and haven't apple learned about the negative impact of nagware yet (you know, stuff that reminds you to register for something every time you start it)? No, I don't want a mobile twit account - get lost!

Guardian to go online only.

Apparently the Guardian is giving up ink and paper publishing in favour of Twitter.

Fernando (arch socialist ;-) ) has the skinny, Also on the paper's own website.

I seem to be headaching today.

So sorry if I'm not talkative.

The odd sparkly light has also been making it's way across my vision, both yesterday and this morning. More sleep is probably not the answer.

Clocks have just gone forward 1 hour here.

Thank goodness we don't have small children and went to bed at a sensible time!

A new virus delivery for me.

Hello!

We were not able to deliver postal package you sent on the 14th of March in time
because the recipient�s address is not correct.
Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our office.

Your personal manager: Marcus Rushing,
Customer Service: 1-800-CALL-DHL
Fax: 888-221-6211
DHL International, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

There was a .zip file attached.

I am not expecting any DHL deliveries.

Also a big give away is the use of a US number in the contact area.


These guys are quite clever - anyone in the US with stuff outstanding from ebay could be fooled.

My mother appears unwell again.

This is becoming almost more than she can bear right now, and we're hoping she might get taken into hospital again today. I'm probably not going to be talking here much for the next little while, but if there are updates then I'll post them up.

And after the whole fuss about gay marriage in the US

I wonder if they'll legalise polygamy? There's a good strong historical Jewish precedent for it.

This is not good

If this is found to be true then I cannot see how Israel can hold up it's head on the world stage. They need to be righteous, not cruelly vengeful.

Off to London later today

That *should* say tomorrow.

Went to bed at 11pm.

And 2 hours later got up again.

:p

England and Austria

In English news papers there has been enormous interest in the Josef Fritzl case, as one might expect.

One of the observations that was oft repeated today was puzzlement over the attitude of Austria to the whole case. There was no lengthy trial lasting weeks or even months, no extended public wringing of hands, of introduction of draconian privacy laws in order to "prevent this ever happening again". In other words, Austria has handled this in its own way, and without the prurient public washing of dirty laundry, now so beloved by the British media, and presumably public (whoever they may be).

While I can hardly claim in depth knowledge after having so little contact, I do know that Austria is a deeply conservative nation with a strong sense of national pride and classic religion.

Rather than wail about the whole thing for years, they would much rather deal swiftly with it, lock the guy away for the rest of his life, probably quietly investigate and close the case. There are unlikely to be TV programs about Elisabeth's life underground, and also unlikely to be a wave of copycats, all glorying in trying to outdo the original. There *may* well be other cases like this, and they may all have a common root (and what might that be? A little peek into Austrian history going back 80 years might well provide some clues) but thank goodness they're not wallowing in it.

The British could learn quite a lot of positive things from this, instead of complaining about how their chance for a media circus has disappeared overnight.

Ebuyer are now selling Apple.

See here.

The discount is not insignificant either, but only on the laptops: the desktops are more expensive than the UK Applestore.

Weird.

OK, this is when it gets scary.

When you write your first real purchase order on a piece of 'paper' with company name, number, registered office etc on it.

And when the cost including VAT would pay for a nice holiday somewhere warm, sunny and distinctly foreign.

Gotta have those kits. Gotta make product.

Apparently my Macbook is fixed.

Time to go collect it. Wonder if it's the full fix or just for a couple of weeks?

Seriously cool

Now THIS is what youtube is for.

The Macbook

Is booked to go back to hospital tomorrow. Now it's all backed up and everything I'd like the display issues sorted properly before I start work in earnest. Also it's fallen over a couple of times and is distinctly slower than when it was new. And mail still doesn't work.

So I *hope* the mobo replacement will make it a happier bunny. We'll see.

Chris just pointed out to me

...... that people God used in the bible were often pushed outside where they were happy or comfy. I guess the good side of that is that we are probably in the right place and being used - or at least will be in the future. And this has nothing to do with my previous post about business.

I suspect there's a slant on this

But it's fascinating for any non-jew with an interest in Jewish practice to see.

BBC pictures and comments about the purim festival as it is currently celebrated.

As of this afternoon

The Control Company Ltd. became a real entity.

Thank you Mark, for your help and advice. Lisa and Lilian for sorting out space for me to work in.

Looks like it's real then.

*edit*

Or not.

I had a phone call this afternoon. It appears that one cannot register a company using 'the' as a prefix or company and limited as suffixes. i.e. the company name is only the 'name' word in the middle of all that.

The name 'control' is owned by what seems to be the corporate equivalent of a cybersquatter that appears (from the business name - I won't publish it here) to have bought it speculatively. I have 2 alternative solutions, so we'll have to wait and see what is acceptable.

Signed

Mr. Doubly Grumpy.

Calling Randall and Lauralea

(and a little bit of Dixie)

Chris and I saw this today at a seminar on parenting. Laura - it made us both think of you!

Youtube linky.

Apologies of you already know it.

I have decided

That this is a great opportunity for God to do a bit more refining. So I shall try to stay thankful, and attempt to retain toys within the perambulator at all times.

It's about time I had some more direct challenges (hope I can cope!).

I feel miserable about playing guitar

Mostly because I feel I'm being boxed in and put under pressure to play acoustic.

There are some songs where an acoustic guitar is THE right instrument, some where it can do a tolerable, though sub-optimal job and some where it sucks harder than a hoover. It limits the feel and freedom of a song, and constrains where things can be taken.

If it's necessary for me to just suck it up and get on then I shall, but if it's just a case of being reigned back 'just in case' then I'm not happy with that. And there's a side of me that doesn't want to submit to being boxed in. I need to find a way through that is both acceptable and doesn't crush me into the shape of a doormat.

Oh the fun that is managing people (including oneself).

Nail, hit-on and head.

Youtube clip here about Facebook.