After the success of some earlier video loops playing subtly in the background of some of our services, I was challenged to find one for our upcoming ‘Passion for Life’ service. This ‘Sunday Supper’ at St. Matt’s (warning: light snacks only!) will be themed with spring-time yellows and greens.

We use the simple-to-use but cringingly badly named ‘EasyWorship’ software to display most of our visuals, and I knew their website now has lots of videos, stills and loops for sale. It turns out they’re drawn from quite a few different video companies that specialise in this purpose.

I landed up buying ‘Particle Vine 01‘ from Centreline New Media. (And whilst I was at it, I bought ‘Starline Flurry‘ to replace the current Christmas-y one. $6 each.)

Despite buying from them, I’m not that impressed with CNM. I scanned all their 200 or so loops, and almost all are too busy to go under powerpoint presentations or songs, as they claim. I will have to slow down the Flurry one before I think it would be usable, for example.

Other companies include Pixel Girl Media, Shift Media, PowerPoint Sermons.

Most of their loops suffer with the same problems, but Pixel Girl Media do show more subtlety at times, including various blue abstract ones, and Shift Media with Gold Concrete if it were slowed down.

Though in some settings this would be fine: for example ‘White Confetti‘ would be great at the end of a marriage service.

After several years of being fed up with Speed Hosting, I’ve finally upped and left. It wasn’t just their amateur approach to customer service, but the interruption to service that came too often, particularly to all the email to Martha and myself, which routes through their servers. So apologies if you’ve had odd or delayed responses to email recently … we had a 5-outage last week.

So we’re now with 5quidhost, who hopefully will turn out to be more inspiring than their name. They have very high ratings on some review sites (and not just ones from sites that turn out to be co-owned by the hosting service, like http://www.justhost.com/ do). I like their realistic attitude to support:

We prefer to handle all of our contact with our customers by e-mail, and we use it in the way it was intended: Prompt, timely, informal and information-rich. With no pointless delays, and no impersonal machine-generated responses to your questions. In emergencies, we do have a number you can call …

They also seem to understand Joomla and Drupal hosting, which could be important for the project I’m starting for CYFC. More on that another time.

I was slightly dreading having to transfer account, email and the complete blog history between hosts. But a big thumbs-up to cPanel (the software that most web hosts use): they have the ability to create complete backups, ftp it to a different server, and then recreate it all at the other end. That possibly saved me hours of work.

Two great subjects, and now Kester Brewin and some of the Vaux community are talking about them together, and therefore also probably talking deeply and using unusual words like ‘praxis’. And, wonderfully appropriately, calling it Apple.

Here’s a flavour of one recent post:

[Apple] is an evolving praxis around the core interconnected questions at the centre of human survival: how do we move beyond the perma-hunger of Capitalism, and how do we connect to an sustainable environmental agenda. Red Apple, Green Apple.

These do seem to be where the conversation about technology (tool-making and resource use) and theology have to go. In particular, over the last few posts I think I’ve personally hit upon a tension-space I want to map out more clearly:

Christianity has failed [in the public realm] because it failed to generate a radical economics. Marx failed because he failed to understand the human spirit.

I am not a Marxist. I am not chasing after an ideology. Rather, I think there may be some energy in the ashes of both ideologies, a burnt alchemy that may create hope from these twin failures.

Experiments, collaborations, conversations… we will attempt to traverse these failed spaces with failures of our own close by. Why? Because the only answer to ‘what is to be done?’ can be ‘not nothing.’

Yes indeed, Capitalism panders to some of the same human weaknesses that Marx(ism) failed to spot. It was mostly Christian voices calling for a fundamental review of our financial thinking as a result of the recent economic crises, not just tinkering with the role of banks. Those voices have gone quiet (or they’re not reported) and I’ve only heard Jonathon Porritt recently on this theme.

An important conversation, and one I’ll try to follow.

This is great: designers trying to improve the confusing and generally dreadful designs of boarding passes. The author’s original attempts aren’t nearly as great as the later offerings.

When I was in sixth form, I once wrote a piece that argued the case against Nuclear Power. Part of my argument was that it had huge costs, crazily more than the original promise of “energy too cheap to meter”. It obviously had, and still has, its problems on decommissioning spent fuel, and the attendant risks of another Chernobyl if you have a badly designed or maintained reactor. Many, perhaps most, shared these views.

So, it’s interesting to see how many people, myself included, are rather more positive about Nuclear Power these days, as it appears to be the most reliable large-scale carbon-free energy source around. Some of the more fundamentalist “deep green” environmentalists are still opposing it on principle.

I wonder if that will change, now that there seems to be a radically better Nuclear Power option? It was 50 years ago that the Thorium-based option for power generation was dropped in favour of Uranium-based ones, mostly because Uranium helps produce Plutonium for atomic weapons.

Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke is Wired Magazine’s article that explains this possible shift in more detail, and shows why it is more than 100 times cheaper, smaller and generally more interesting. And who’s now planning to use it at large scale.

It appears to be seriously good news, at a time when we really need bright new options in how we produce and consume energy.

A previous boss taught me that “you can’t manage something until you can measure it”. You have to be careful to measure the right things, obviously …

… but I got thinking about how I use my time. At work I have to measure my time, though no-one knows quite how of why its used. But how I use my ’spare’ time is important to me, so I decided to start measuring it. Then I’ll know whether I need to manage it better.

After some hunting and testing I settled on KronoX, a simple open-source application for Mac OS X to record what I do. I started by just tracking my sleep, and then moved onto the main types of chores, relaxation, ministry and (inevitably) my work hours. These are the things I could change; I’m ignoring meals, and getting up, and other things I can’t really do much about.

I started with my sleep patterns. Just how much sleep do I really get? Here’s one view of it …

(Hour intervals run 10pm to 11am from left to right. Amount of sleep in the hour is shown by how dark the blue colour is. The days go down the page.)

Nice graphic, but lots of not-very-encouraging holes where I wake up in the middle of the night. Further analysis shows that maybe it’s not as bad as it looks: I’m still getting on average of 7.6 sleep hours per night.

I’m continuing to work to produce more interesting analysis and graphs from this, but there I’ll pause for now.

I’ve just read the Eight Best Films Of 2009: According to Simon Dillon. Unfortunately, I’ve only seen 3 of them.

So, the following need to go on the must-see list: The Hurt Locker, Up and A Christmas Carol. And, if we can stomach the relentless depression of A Serious Man, or the sci-fi of District 9, those too.

Anyone reading this will be at least fairly familiar with the internet, and has learned to use wrestle with a computer. Some geeks like me are somewhat of a black belt at wrestling, and enjoy the experience. But most people aren’t like that.

They just want a computer to be invisible. They want the answers to their searches to be visible. They want to see all the photos they took on holiday last year. They don’t want to worry about files or viruses or updates or even the applications themselves.

Yes, the iPad is in some ways just a large iPod Touch. But the most intriguing part of the announcement to me was that Apple have ported the iWork suite to it. (For non-Apple types, that’s the equivalent of Word, Excel and Powerpoint.) These are real get-business-done applications, not ‘mere’ video players or music players, or tip calculators, or neat games. (I mean no disrespect here: several billion app downloads show they are entertaining and/or useful, but they’re not what most office or lab or creative types use in their work.)

From what little I could see from the on-stage demos, Apple have managed to do away with the ubiquitous File/Edit/View menus. And more importantly, it seems, even the concept of files and folders themselves. If I have this right, this is showing us a new paradigm of computing. One where we don’t need to wrestle with learning the black magic of precisely ‘where’ things are stored inside the computer. And then re-learning it for different applications, and re-learning it again when you have to upgrade something. This is a future where you need to know less about computers, and in some ways you can’t fiddle around as much. The geeks will lose out, but the ‘normal’ user will only gain.

Old World vs. New World Computing is a post that takes this same idea, and explains and expands on it very clearly.

2009 was made possible, or made more fun, with help from the following:

And, for the record, some numbers:

• 16,500 miles in the car, fuelled by CoffeeNation and Werthers Originals (for the drivers!)
• 1,100 miles walking Monty the dog (almost all by Martha)
• 110 miles running (Jonathan), helped by Nike+, and music from the iPod
• Jonathan was reading 120 different blogs that averaged 1,500 posts a month between them.
• Jonathan wrote 85 posts on this blog, and a similar number on his work blog with a much larger readership

Happy New Year 2010 (photo credit: ayeb at deviantart)

“Aim at nothing, and you’re sure to hit it.”

With that quote in mind, we’ve been thinking about what we want to be working towards in 2010. We thought we’d write them down to help make us more aware of them. And why not share them here, too?

Martha’s aims are

• read 50 books (not counting books of the Bible!)
• lose 3 stone in weight
• establish Parish Nursing in the Whadoon/Priors/Lynworth parts of Cheltenham
• arrange a Reunion for the nurses she trained with
• become more creative in her Card-Making
• walk 10,000 steps a day
• rejoin the library and stop buying so many novels
• start doing some Running again (perhaps!).

Jonathan’s aims are

• spend more time praying
• be more creative: doing more design work for voluntary organisations, or learning some metalwork
• continue his running, and take part in another race or two
• cycle to work much more
• bring down his cholesterol level, which is way too high, despite exercise
• play the piano a lot more this year, particularly working on jazz
• find at least 10 geocaches
• get back to doing some more preaching in the next academic year
• read all of the New Testament, most of the Old Testament, plus at least 6 secular fiction and 6 non-fiction books (easy to do if I finish all the books I have started in the last few years, ahem)

Together we want to continue seeing more of the family, reorganise our study/office space at home, do some decoration in the house, and continue laughing more.

We’ll post again to see how we did at the end of the year …