Mike's musings

Gays, women and evolution

Drove into Cambridge today to buy a book about Windows 2003. Very big, very heavy book. Looks useful, though. Lots of work in the afternoon on Windows stuff and Xen, which I've decided to try out.

During the day, had a discussion on a mailing list I'm part of (hi, guys) about the Church. Why does everyone believe that the Church is backward-looking, reactionary and bigoted? That seems to be the set of messages that everyone picks up. So, questions ranged from whether women should be priests, to my views on homosexuality (I'm for it ;-)), to the virgin birth, to whether I believe in evolution (well, of course I do - d'oh!). It's good to have the opportunity to talk about this stuff with people, and I firmly believe that it's an important part of my calling. When I first felt the vocation, part of it was the question "if you were you, but not part of this Church, would you want to be part of it?" The obvious answer is, "no". And the obvious second part of that is, "well, go and do something about it then." That's what I'm trying to do.

Labels: church, friends, geekery, homosexuality, women

Today, I shall mostly be ...

• ... sleeping in (but not as long as Jo and Moo)
• ... taking the girls swimming with Moo
• ... spending more money than I meant to in Waitrose
• ... clearing the dog poo off the lawn
• ... mowing the lawn (first time this year, if you exclude the two strims it's had)
• ... stepping in several instances of dog poo that I missed
• ... barbecuing with Si
• ... drinking beer with Si
• ... eating the barbecued food with Si, D, Morgs, Boo, Moo, Jo and Miri
• ... drinking wine with Si and Moo
• ... geeking with Si
• ... whilst drinking more wine with Si
• ... going for a walk with the girls, Moo and Buster
• ... having a bath with the girls (but not Moo and Buster)
• ... putting Jo to bed (very quick!)
• ... clearing around a bit
• ... loading the dishwasher
• ... doing some washing up
• ... and ... finishing my last essay for ERMC. YYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSS!

Labels: drink, ERMC, family, friends, geekery, swimming, walk

Email and finalisations

(backposting) I spent most of the day sorting out email. Not just processing it, but getting work email to a point where I could use it again. Work has move away from Lotus Notes to Exchange, and I've had various problems getting it to work (I'm using Linux, of course, just in case my life were too easy), from accessing the server properly (which I just about sorted last week) to importing all my old emails. I'm used to having these hosted online, but that's now not possible, so I had to jump through some hoops go get them into Evolution. Specifically, import them into Thunderbird on Windows, flatten the folder hierarchy, copy all the files onto my Linux partition and then move them back into the right hierarchy again. I'm very pleased to say that I discovered that you don't need to import each folder individually in Evolution - a (long) Internet search led me to the discovery that if you put them in Evolution's mail hierarchy, it'll work things out for itself, which it does pretty well.

We (Moo and I) had a meeting with John, my training incumbent-to-be, and Hilary, the SSM coordinator, in the evening. It was much less fraught than it might have been - Moo was initially quite anti - and we got pretty much everything sorted out, including my working agreement. I'm looking forward to meeting the CME (Continuing Ministerial Education) officer for the diocese on Friday.

Labels: geekery, ministry

Joikuspot - a brilliant application

For the last 3 phones that I've had, I've spent some time working out how to connect my laptop to it over bluetooth, and then use the phone as a GPRS modem so that I can access the Internet while travelling. This hasn't always been easy, and I can only use my laptop - not multiple devices - as the connection can't be shared.

Yesterday, I met the guys from Joikuspot. I don't often endorse products on this blog, but I have no hesitation in telling you that if your phone has wifi (802.11a/b/g) support, then you just must get this free software.

What it does is turn your phone into a wifi access point. Simple as that. You get to choose what connection the phone uses to get Internet access, the AP name (ESSID) - which is prefixed with "Joiku_", which I think is fair enough - and WEP (64 bit or 128 bit), shared or open. I'm really, really impressed. There are further refinements coming, and a premium (paid-for) version on its way, but this is quality software, and it's free. I really can't recommend it enough.

Labels: geekery

Sick

Not me. Jo. She started around 2230 last night, and carried on till around 0330 this morning, according to Moo. I helped until around 2330, when I thought things had calmed down, and Miri joined me around 0350, and took an hour or so to settle. So, all-in-all, not a great day.

I took Moo out for lunch in Clare, and she accompanied Jo to pre-school for the first time, which Jo was so excited about. We'd been in two minds about letting her (Jo) go, as she'd been ill last night, but she was eating by the morning, and slept for an hour, so we risked it.

Got Moo's phone (a Nokia 6500) receiving and sending emails from her work today, with some help from them. I'm hopeful that this will reduce the time she needs to be spending doing stuff in the evenings, when she should really be relaxing.

Labels: geekery, sleep, work

Cool demo

(backposting) FedEx tried to deliver something on Monday, but I'd gone out for lunch (and not realised how quickly it was going to arrive from Canada), so today I drove to Chelmsford to their depot, to pick it up. It's a really cool demo to show off some of our technology. It's about barcodes, and digitally signing them. Nice stuff, and I'll be taking it out to Geneva next week.

This evening, I popped round to fix Charles' computer. He's the son of some friends of ours, 13 or so, bright, and a nice guy. Having fixed his PC (partially unseated RAM), installed Firefox and AVG anti-virus, his mum wanted to know how he should repay me. I'd given him a cryptography 101, and so I decided that that next time he sees me, he needs to be able to explain the differences between symmetric and asymmetric encryption. I even gave him the requisite wikipedia page. This is a bit geeky, but he'd shown an interest, so... We've also agreed that we're going to buy a cr*ppy old PC, rebuild it, and put Linux on it. Yes, geekery.

Tomorrow is Jo's 3rd birthday, and we wrote the card and wrapped the presents. Oh, the excitement.

Labels: geekery, Jo, work

To Heathrow in the rain

(backposting) As the heading said. Not for a flight, but for a meeting, which was very useful. Things are getting interesting work-wise, which I'm pleased about. Oh, and Certicom has appointed a new CEO. This means a new guy at the top for me: my boss' boss. Not sure what this means yet, but we'll get there.

I'm trying to arrange a meeting with the rest of the team for the possible title post, but finding a time when everyone can get together may be difficult. I spent a fair time in the evening trying to install AVG free on a friend/neighbour's computer. It's riddled with malware and full of randomly installed apps that mean it was difficult even to get AVG on it, but it's running now.

Watched more of The IT Crowd. I'm more Moss than Roy, I'm afraid.

Labels: geekery

Back to work

Not that anyone else in the UK seemed to be bothering. Got a couple of emails. Did quite a lot of reading about netfilter and iptables.

Oh, and I finished the 2nd of the two essays that are due on Monday, which is a big relief.

Labels: geekery, work

Nerd Type

Not surprised that it's a close-run thing, but I score rather scarily in rather too many of them.

What Be Your Nerd Type? Your Result: Musician   Doo doo de doo waaaa doo de doo! (<-- That's you playing something.) Everyone appreciates the band/orchestra geeks and the pretty voices. Whether you sing in the choir, participate in a school/local band, or sit at home writing music, you contribute a joy to society that everyone can agree on. Yay! Welcome to actually doing something for poor, pathetic human souls. (Just kidding.)
Literature Nerd
Gamer/Computer Nerd
Science/Math Nerd
Social Nerd
Drama Nerd
Artistic Nerd
Anime Nerd
What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace

Labels: geekery

Laptopery

Most stuff is working now. Can't get my machine to connect via 3G via my phone, but I've now got Skype working with my bluetooth headset, which is pretty nifty. /home and swap partitions encrypted, 2Gig RAM, SecondLife all there.

Jo decided to read me a story, and got a book out. "Stephanie and the bad hair day," she announced (she's into Lazytown at the moment). "Or Piglet is Entirely Surrounded by Water," I countered. "No, Daddy: Stephanie and the bad hair day." Fair enough.

I suggested we said a prayer after the light was turned off. I suggested praying for Mummy, Daddy, Miri and Jojo, but Jo came up with a lovely little prayer thanking God and Jesus for Father Christmas (and not just giving her presents, but everybody). She also reckons he brings Christmas trees, but hey. It was a beautiful prayer, and I was very impressed.

Labels: computers, geekery, Jo, prayer

Laptop

Spent a fair amount of the day speccing a new laptop. Oh, yes.

Labels: geekery

Going home

In an hour and a half's time, or so, I'll be getting on a plane to go home. I've accrued enough air miles that I'm able to upgrade to "Executive First", so I'll get a good seat and a chance to sleep, which is good. I'm ready for home, I really am.

I've bought lots of presents for the girls (including Moo): just one of those trips (and the Canadian dollar's very weak at the moment, which helps).

Did some coding today. It's been a while. Nice to have the chance: I'm working on a PoC (Proof of Concept) for an idea I had this week.

Enough. Home soon.

Labels: geekery, home, sleep, travel, work

NFS, compiz, amarok, firefox

Some keywords: .kde, .qt, .mozilla, .config

It turns out that compiz doesn't like being run where the home directory is mounted on NFS. Specifically, you need to softlink .config to a local directory.

Similar problems with firefox: softlink .mozilla

Similar problems with amarok: softlink .qt and .kde

This took quite a lot of investigation, mounting, remounting, linking, etc., but my main box is getting close to working as I'd like it to. It also appears that amarok isn't desperately keen on building a large collection on a samba share, but we're getting there on that, too.

Labels: geekery, linux

Compiz

Having all sorts of problems with Compiz on one of my machines. Spent too much time during the day playing with it, and had to spend extra time in the evening making up the time doing some proper work. Didn't just play with compiz - work stuff too, mainly catching up with stuff from last week while I was in Canada.

Labels: geekery

Tomorrow already

According to my laptop, it's already tomorrow. Which means, I suppose, that I'll be home today. My laptop's on UK time, my watch is on East Coast time, and, to be honest, I'm not quite sure which one I'm one - leaning towards the latter, I think. It's never much fun coming back eastwards - the jetlag hits your harder - but hopefully it won't be too bad this time.

I've had a productive trip, all in all, and though one of the tasks I'd hoped to achieve was less successful than I'd hoped, the other went very well, and I've got lots of other things done as well, which is always pleasing. I've got lots of writing up and new work to do when I get home, so that'll keep me pretty busy.

I've spent some time this evening responding to a document discussing some of the legal issues around services in SecondLife, which is quite exciting. I was also very touched to be invited to the ordination of a good friend. Unluckily it's in New Zealand next month, so I don't think I'm going to get the chance to attend, which is a pity.

On a geeky note, I've just managed to install compiz on my laptop, which rocks. Lots of lovely 3D desktop effects, etc. which I'm looking forward to applying to my desktop machine at home as well. There are some performance problems which I need to address, but that's all part of the fun: tuning is definitely part of the deal.

Well, on a plane soon, then home.

Labels: geekery, secondlife, travel, work

Presentation

Next week, I'm in Mississauga (our Canadian HQ), and I'm due to give a presentation to anyone who wants to come. I've chosen the topic "Getting Paid to be Evil: the joy of audit", because auditing can be fun, and creative. And you get a chance to be evil by trying to work out how to break other people's stuff, but you don't have to fix it. Lots of fun. So today I wrote the presentation. There will be references to Sneakers, Spooks, Cryptonomicon and Hackers in it. Just because I can, and I'm a sad geek.

Labels: geekery

Funeral visit

I went on a funeral visit with Ian today: the first one that I've attended. The family had very kindly allowed me to come along, and it was very interesting. Difficult, at time, but Ian has a very light touch. This is one of those occasions when I absolutely can't discuss what we talked about, but he allowed the family to talk, led them through the service and was calm but empathetic at the same time. I was very impressed, and learned a lot.

Discovered that it was a real pain not having a main machine, and after trying to use the server, I discovered that it was struggling. so, I've ordered a new one. Or pieces therefore to build one. Moo loves it when I do these sorts of things.

Labels: ERMC, geekery

God be thankit for geekery!

I hope to be able to stream and text the service tomorrow at 0800. Recompilation, after lots of failed attempts. God gives gifts (and then forces us to use them).

Labels: geekery, secondlife

How geek am I?

Depressingly less than I thought:

Thanks to Sally for this

Labels: geekery

Back to work - and London

(backposting) One thing I forgot to mention about yesterday was the amount of rain we had. Of course, I walked the dog through it (neither he nor I care, to be honest). But we also lost power for a while, and it seemed to kill one of my Wifi routers. The LAN interface was fine, but not so much the Wifi interface. So, binned it was (Yoda).

I went London today for a work meeting, and managed to find the time to buy a new antenna as well. Good meeting - unluckily I was back after 2100, and didn't manage to walk the (somewhat stressed) dog - but the antenna didn't work well enough to sort things, so I ordered a new router, too. Rather more expensive than planned.

Labels: geekery, work

Tutorial, Ubuntu upgrade

Had a tutorial for the Life and Service module. Should have finished this module by now - or nearly - but I was too ill earlier. At least I've started.

Also upgrade Ubuntu from 6.10 to 6.16: nice. Just a bunch of improvements, to be honest. Still playing.

Labels: ERMC, geekery, linux

Title post

I'm well over a year off ordination, but I'm having to think already about where I serve my title post - or at least what sort of title post I'd like to consider. Let me explain about this, because it's not sure how much people reading this will know how it works. I'm also aware that some of our dissenting brethren (well, sustren - that's our Methodist friends, to be clear about it) read this, and there's no reason why anyone should know how the Anglican church works. Noone in the Anglican church does, after all. I only found out fairly recently. Let me explain how I believe it works:

• training (3 years in my case)
• ordination as deacon
• start title post (working as a curate in a parish)
• ordination as priest (1 year after ordination as deacon, in most cases)
• continue in title post for 3 more years
• do something else if required.

Looks almost like pseudo-code, doesn't it?

Anyway, I have to come up with some suggestions about the sort of parish that I'd like to spend the next 4 years of my life in.

Aaargh! Do I _want_ to do spend 4 years of my life working in _any_ parish? I guess I do, but I'm not sure to what extent I expect my ministry to be parish-based in the long-term. Is this taken into consideration? I'm not sure it is, but there's a lot to be said for spending time in a parish, settling into a pastoral context, a worship context and the rest. Anyway, what do I want? I'm thinking hard, but music and respect and a receptiveness to the power of online communications: I guess they're all important. And respect for women and for homosexuals. I mean: how can we not?

Oh, if you hadn't realised it, I'm back, and I'm geeky as ever. Still not entirely well, but getting there. All I can say, is
ssh -X -C -i hostkey.kpa host

Labels: geekery, ordination

Family and geekery

So, Moo's sister and brother-out-of-law, Jenny and Jake, came over with their daughters (our nieces, Jo's cousins) Turtle (Aurora) and Mouse (Mercy). We had a lovely time, as did Jo. It's always good for Jo to spend some time with slightly older children, and Turtle's 3 and a half. They get on very well, and Jo's come on so much since the summer, when we saw them last, that they can have real conversations, let each other know what each of them wants. Unluckily, I missed the bit where everyone else went on a walk, and Jo got so tired that she fell off a bench as she fell asleep at the end of it. Got lots of baby clothes.

While we were clearing out Jo's new bedroom ("when you're 2..."), we came across Moo's old machine. It's a lot more powerful than the machine that I've had running as a server until recently, and as we're sure we won't need it for Moo, I decided to replace one with the other. Got it done today - it's fun to geek away for a while - and things are much, much faster, and I've now got some spare cycles to use.

Labels: family, geekery