Simon’s got steamed up in his blog about the worship song “Indescribable” by Chris Tomlin. I know what he’s getting at, but I mostly disagree. Why?

But first a diversion. I’ve always found a particular type of passage in Revelation has always excited and touched me - for example:

And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living beings. And they fell face down before the throne and worshipped God. They said ‘Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and strength belong to our God forever and forever. Amen!’ (Rev 7.11-12)

I learnt a new song at Spring Harvest 2006: “Creation’s King” by Graham Kendrick. (Which was recorded for the ‘One God’ live worship album that year.) I loved it straight away, because it had a catchy tune, and it quoted a variant of this passage.

“Indescribable” takes this same type of passage, with a slight twist:

Indescribable, uncontainable … all powerful, untamable; awestruck, we fall to your knees as we humbly proclaim … incomparable, unchangeable …

So at least most of the chorus is Biblical, which is a Good Thing. It also has a catchy tune. And I like the poetry of

You placed the stars in the sky, and You know them by name … / Who imagined the sun and gives source to its light / Yet concelas it to bring us the coolness of night?

There’s not enough good poetry around in modern worship songs, but far too many tired rhymes. And this is a great summary of how God treats us:

You see the depths of my heart and You love me the same.

At the same time, I’d prefer to change a couple of the lines. It works better when sung in context that it looks like on the page, but “You are amazing, God” feels slightly vacuous, and I’d prefer “You are amazing, Lord”. Simon might still feel this is crass, but it is a simple statement of worship, which is what it’s all about. The bigger problem is with “Who has told every lightning bolt where it should go …”, which whilst poetically showing the power of God, just makes me think of the tens of people each year who die when hit by a thunderbolt - did God really aim them specifically at them? Unlikely. I’d prefer “Who could tell every lightning bolt where it should go …”.

The food at the Mayflower last night was good - Set Menu D worked well between the 4 of us. The conversation - at least about health - was more challenging than expected. In particular I learned that

• in any meal only the first 20g of protein can be absorbed by the body - ie, less than an ounce of a steak or of chicken is going to help us; the rest is going to wasted
• 4 cups of green tea a day is supposed to be the equivalent of losing 200 calories - and good at clearing out some toxins
• most obvious forms of gym exercise (weights, treadmill) or even at home (sit ups, press ups) are very specific to just a few muscles, and often more exterior ones. It’s more important to get the ‘core muscles’ sorted out, and the rest follow. Less rigorous stretches are what you need for that. So, the Chinese workers who gather for gentle exercises before work starts, seem to be onto a good thing

I think I need to do some exercise and find some green tea …

It was time to get some of my local web things working, so I needed to get the web server going on OS X 10.5. Obviously the main candidate is Apache, which is already installed on OS X. But, on my previous Windows laptop I’d gone for lighttpd for similar reasons to these given by Garrett at Ray Gun Robot:

Why install LightTPD when Mac OS X already comes with the Apache web server built in? Well, I suppose it’s a matter of personal taste. I personally like the web server to be running all the time, so that way, when I decide I want to start coding my site, I don’t have to mosey over to a Terminal window or System Preferences to start it up first. On the other hand, since it’s going to be constantly running, the web server should be using up as little RAM and CPU resources as possible. So I want to use a “lightweight” server so that the fact that it’s running all the time won’t interfere too much with my frames-per-second on Call of Duty 2 and stuff. On the other other hand, it can’t be so lightweight that it doesn’t support PHP, which is the point of all of this in the first place, right? So, for me (and possibly for you), LightTPD is the best compromise.

Disappointingly, it’s harder work getting going on the Mac than it was on the PC. For future reference, what I should have done was:

1. Install Apple’s Xcode tools first (free with the Mac)
2. Go to MacPorts and install according to these instructions
3. Sort out the $PATH to make it easier to run commands
4. Install the lighttpd package with this command: sudo port install lighttpd
5. Install php5 with fastcgi extension with this command: sudo port install php5 +fastcgi - takes quite a while!

Unfortunately in the long php5 install steps, it failed on libxml2 v2.6.30, with a checksum mismatch. I can discover (using port livecheck libxml2) that the most recent version is v2.6.31, but running the MacPorts port -d selfupdate doesn’t seem to bring in the newer version.

I have a confession to make. Today we took receipt of a new car (well, new to us). And it doesn’t replace our existing estate, so that takes us back to being a 2-car family.

It’s certainly painful to the wallet, particularly the insurance costs as it’ll be used a bit by the kids when they’re confident enough with their driving. (No way we were going to have them driving the bulky and large-engined estate.) But I can’t decide if it’s good or bad news to the environment.

It’s a 1.2 litre compact, that’s only 4 years old, so I’d hope it’s emissions aren’t too bad. And being very light I hope the fuel efficiency is good - though maybe not as good as the 50mpg we can get out of the diesel Skoda estate. On the positive side I expect our yearly mileage to go down, as M isn’t going to be working 45 miles away so much. But maybe there’s another negative: town driving, which is what it’ll be used for, emits more per mile than motorway driving. I think. Anyone know some real stats on all this?

(Added later) I’ve now found What Green Car? website which rates different cars by its fuel cycle, life cycle, and impact of emissions. The Skoda estate gets 53, and the compact the rather better score of 93. The top score appears to be the Hummer which gets 91 - I’m disappointed that the Skoda is only half as bad as that monster …

Maybe I should keep track of our mileage in both, with the aim of looking to make it reduce each year. I have a very basic device on my bike that I think ought to be able to act as an odometer as well. Or do I just have an unhealthily scientific interest in measuring things? (Still the mantra of the most senior techie at work is “If I can’t measure it I can’t manage it.” which does make a lot of sense.)

Apple Macs do have the advantage over PCs that they come with most software that you need pre-installed. However, I’m not most people, and I tend to do rather more with it. Here’s my current list of what I’ve added to it, in rough priority order …

• Firefox - plus a range of extensions to help ease the browsing experience
• Google Earth - see the world!
• iLife ‘08 (Keynote, Numbers, Pages) - Apple’s take on the basics of a creative’s office suite. Only played with Keynote so far, which is not hugely different from Powerpoint, but does seem cleaner
• Quicksilver - the swiss-army knife of launchers
• Microsoft Office 2004 - I had a license anyway, so more useful to have it on the box to deal with complex files I get sent
• Thunderbird - set up all nicely to be the local IMAP cache to GMail. (I had to switch back to US settings as the IMAP mode in GMail hasn’t been released to UK users yet.)
• Mozy - for online backups (still in beta, and less powerful than the PC equivalent)
• Cyberduck - FTP
• Chicken of the VNC - Screen Reader (I’m not sure whether this is strictly needed, as I’m not clear quite what OS X 10.5 has built in)
• TextWrangler - feted text editor
• CocoaJT and iRecordMusic trial - to download BBC radio shows. Need to explore some more here.
• Exchanged XML Lite - for XML file manipulation. Feels clunky compared with my ancient copy of XMLSpy for Windows
• Photoshop - on order. At long last I can try the full fat goodness of PS. I do also have The Gimp which is in many ways excellent, but understandably lagging behind PS in its ease of use, and some of its advanced vector and bitmap editing support.

I’m also intending to try Midnight Inbox which is a gorgeous-looking GTD tool, straight out of David Allen’s book. Currently it doesn’t have a mobile offering, so I’m likely to stick with Toodledo, which I really like. (It even has a Toodledo Dashboard widget (plus one for Vista), so unfortunately it looks like I don’t have that opportunity for an interesting new programming project.)

My one main problem area is in photo management. On Windows I’ve been delighted with Picasa, but they’re unlikely to port that to OS X. iPhoto is obviously in the same space, but few seem that happy with it. I shall have to give it a go, though, particularly as its ‘08 version has some extra ‘Events’ goodness.