Emma’s learning to drive, and she’s now good enough to get taken out by her us in the small car. Today we thought we’d get her to drive out a bit further and get some practice on fast roads, and Martha realised we could combine that with a Sunday roast lunch at a pub. She drove well out to Andoversford - about 10 miles. And then for the first time, both Martha and I could have some wine, as we had a chauffeur that could take us back! And she got us back fine, too. She just needs more practice at good ol’ parallel parking. She should be ready to take her test after the exam period.

The pub, by the way, was the King’s Oak. It had quality food - particularly the ‘Belgian Waffle with Chocolate Sauce’ pudding - but wasn’t cheap.

Having set out to do some running again, I have managed 3 short runs in the last 4 days - helped by me being on holiday.

After a couple I received by Nike+ Sports Kit, so it can measure the runs, and upload them to Nike’s website for me, or all the world, to be, errr, underwhelmed at. (Well I certainly feel running at a rate of 9 min/mile isn’t that great.) I’ve decided to go public - so you can keep an eye on my progress as well.

I’ve also set a first goal: 10 runs in the next 4 weeks. Here’s the current state of play as shown by Nike:

My resolution at New Year was to get fitter - particularly by cycling more and taking up running. With time off work ill that’s hardly happened. Taking advice from runners, I decided to invest in some new equipment to give me a boost to get started. As I’ve long had my eye on the Nike+ Sport Kit, that allows runners to have their iPod measure their runs and progress, this seemed like the obvious answer. So yesterday I bought a pair of Nike road running shoes suitable for my kind of gait, and went for a 20 minute run this morning. All pretty good, except that 20 minutes after I finished the run, my heart-rate was still over 120 bpm. Shows that I need the exercise! (Though not of the mind: I do a few Sudoku or Ken Ken puzzles a week to keep mentally alert )

This morning the MacBook was behaving strangely … to the point that I managed to lose the menu bar entirely, and no apps were doing anything. I’m still not sure what happened, but it was refusing to shutdown to make it more annoying.

After a hard reboot, the pain got even worse, as it then got stuck in a never-ending loop of two different parts of the startup sequence (light blue background with spinny thing; darker blue background with just the cursor). No amount of forced reboots fixed it.

I then dug around and found the Boot Options for OS X 10.5, and so I played with those. Single user mode (Cmd-S on boot) just allowed me to verify that /var/log/system.log was indeed full of errors, though most relating to one area:

LaunchServices/5123589: coreservicesd is running an unsupported version, 0 ( we are 10500000 ), so we cannot talk to it.

Googling made me realise that this wasn’t a minor problem: a reinstall of the OS was called for. Oi! This is a Mac: this shouldn’t happen!

At that point I naturally started thinking about the Time Machine and SuperDuper! backups that should get me out of this hole. I plugged in the external firewire HDD with the backups, and tried the Target Disk Mode startup (T on boot). This seemed to work, but isn’t helpful, as it would allow other computers to see the files on the MacBook, rather than get the files off the HDD.

So then I looked at SuperDuper’s website to see what I should do. I’d spent many hours making sure that I could use it to reboot the Mac if necessary, but when holding down Option/Alt and rebooting, it failed to show the drive. Grrrr. And not surprising, as I then discovered on the SuperDuper! FAQ forum where it notes that many FireWire drives aren’t checked with Macs, and can’t boot from them. [An order for a recommended Maxtor unit has now been placed.]

Time Machine can’t do a bootable recovery, and I have a non-booting machine. So, a reinstall was needed. Grrrrr some more, as my last Time Machine backup was before Spring Harvest. But here’s the good news: the reinstall option (via the original OS DVDs) has a useful trick up its sleeve. It will archive the existing OS, install a new one, and then restore the preserved user’s data and settings - including most of the applications. This went extremely smoothly, and I haven’t noticed anything missing yet. All that was needed was to do a few rounds with Software Update to bring the Apple software back to the latest versions (particularly OS X 10.5.2).

In the end, this was probably easier and quicker than doing a SuperDuper-based boot, and then a long restore from Time Machine. Though it does leave the OS in a less clean state.

As neither of us could face the final ‘Big Top’ celebration at Spring Harvest, we took it easier on the final morning and decided to potter around the village of Dunster for an hour before heading home. The village itself reminded us of Bourton-on-the-Water, or other small Cotswolds villages, particularly with its ancient stone market ‘circle’.

The place is overshadowed by its Castle, and we saw that it had some gardens, so we decided to pay up (National Trust) to wander round them briefly. The sun came and went, and I kept busy trying different features of my newish camera on the many great views, and some of the plants and trees. Martha then had the great idea of making a day of it, and so we gathered some more clothes, our books and a drink, and wandered around more slowly, stopping to read in the sun from time to time. For lunch we wandered to the character-ful Luttrell Arms, named after the family who owned the Castle.

“Gardens” makes it sound too formal; it was more like well-constructed walks amongst the steeply sloping grounds around the castle. The best parts were along the River Avill, with old bridges, fast flowing streams, ferns, massive bamboos, and the rather ugly gunnera plants. (Or ‘gonorrhea’ plants as one of the estate workers first named them. Which is possibly why I landed up calling the various camelias ‘chlamydias’ )

There’s a mill by the river, and it wasn’t open as we walked past, so instead we had an expensive cream tea at the place next door. And then drove home, hitting the rain as we entered Gloucestershire.

I always expect it at Greenbelt, but I forget it might happen at Spring Harvest too: bumping into old friends or family. Last night I spotted Rob from work — who I didn’t even know is a Christian — coming out of the Tim Vine gig. Today I bumped into Auntie Rosie, and then later managed to have a great couple of hours catching up with her and Dougie. Clearly important things are going on at their church in Lymington under Peter Salisbury, ably assisted by Sarah. We bump into them later on, plus Nicola and Roger (from LiveWires) and Toby (from school).

All of this happened in the ‘Skyline Pavilion’ with its pretensions of being a big tent. (Which Tim Vine had caustically noted in a short interview make this a perfect place not to attempt doing any stand-up comedy. Which made for a surprisingly serious, and rather pointless interview. But I digress.)

‘Vision’ is just a short way of saying ‘frustration’.

Just one of Steve Chalke’s pithy sayings from Spring Harvest. He describes himself as being a visioneer, and therefore finds himself continually frustrated. Old friend Martin K describes originally got drawn into ordained ministry because he was frustrated at how he saw others doing it, and thought he could do better.

So interesting that Jo’s response to chatting and catching up with Martha and I was to comment “you seem very frustrated, Jonathan”. More confirmation of what I’ve been feeling for some time: I’m not using my God-given gifts and talents in a way that’s fully expressing who God has made me to be. Hence no surprise to find myself frustrated.

That’s the easy bit: the harder bit is divining what the next step in life is. And deliberately divine-ing: time to get seriously praying about it. And, I realise with some dread, that this would be a good time to practice some fasting as well. Hopefully this will help sort out which of many of my interests and motivations I should focus on. I hope to keep you posted …

(Added later: Steve Chalke’s new book Change Agents covers some of this ground.)

One of Spring Harvest’s aims is to be a resource to the church around the country the other 51 weeks of the year. One of the very commendable things they do is to hold some seminars on the technical aspects of making audio and visual systems work in the setting of the 10s of 1000s of churches around the country. Brian Hillson continues to lead them, and continues to be extremely scattergun in what he covers - but perhaps that’s somewhat inevitable when there’s days worth of material and only an hour available. But he is generous with his team’s time to answer 1-on-1 questions from punters like me.

Anyway, enough intro. When playing or singing in a band with more than a few others, getting the audio foldback right is always a challenge. The ideal would be that each musician can mix exactly the combination they want, normally with themselves ‘highest in the mix’. Currently it takes about 30 minutes each band practice to get this right in my band. And even then it’s still a crude approximation of what we’d really like as we only have 2 foldback channels and 7 or 8 musicians. And its controlled at the back on the mixing desk. Big name artists get a better deal - a separate whole foldback mixing desk next to the stage, with lots of channels.

So, what got me so excited was seeing a small box of tricks that gives individual control for each musician. It relies on having a Cat-5 (or Cat-6) distribution system, which is no small deal, but allows each person to mix up to ZZ inputs. Wahey! Now I wish I’d pushed harder to get a Cat-5 distribution system in for the video signals - so we could re-use it for the audio as well. Time to go and check out AVIOM’s website for more details …

@@@ Mention model name, # inputs + add picture