I never finish anything

It occurred to me the other day that I never seem to finish anything. It's my biggest flaw.

I looked back over my education and realised this happened over and over. I completed very few of my DT projects, including my GCSE project. I failed to complete my A-Level Computing project to an adequate standard and had to redo it after I left college. My entire degree suffered because my final year project was naff.

I've started a mobile app for a charity back when I was unemployed. Should've been finished by the summer, still unfinished.

I've been meaning to redo my personal website. It's seriously poor for someone who does websites for a living. Not even started that one.

I keep saying that I'll put a media PC in at home, that I'll convert our existing old PC into a server, that I'll scan in all our documents that aren't vital to keep and shred them; all still not done.

Worse still, I said I'd read the Bible in a year. I started 1st January and, according to YouVersion.com, I'll be finished 1st July next year. Yep, that's right. Year nearly over and I'm not even half way.

I have a brain full of ideas most of which that I never get started and the rest never get finished.

I don't really know what sharing this will do, but hopefully it's the start of me working out some ways to get some things finished.

BTW. It's never been a problem with work, I always get my stuff finished. Weird, huh?

At the foot of the cross

Was catching up on Andrew Clark's blog today and came across a post where he mentions installing a mercy seat in his house. For those of you who don't have any experience of The Salvation Army, the Mercy Seat (named after an aspect of the Ark of the Covenant) is a public place of prayer where Salvationists have traditionally made their covenants and had some of their most powerful encounters with God.

Now personally the thought of having a mercy eat in my house seems a little strange, although I do miss it's focus when I'm at other churches. However, it led me on a train of thought about kneeling at the foot of the cross. You see, you kneel or stand in front of the mercy seat.

Anyway, long story short I was reminded of these words and wanted to share them with you all. It makes me ask myself, do I kneel at the cross enough? Do I humble myself before God and before my peers often enough, or have I elevated my own position?

At the foot of the cross - One Hundred Hours

At the foot of the cross,

where I kneel in adoration

And I lay my burdens down

I exchange all my sin

for the promise of salvation

And Your name across my brow

At the foot of the cross,

I give up my vain ambition

And I leave my selfish pride

In the peace that is there,

will You restore my vision?

In all the places I am blind

I will wait here at the cross

I will wait here at the cross

I will wait here at the cross

I will wait here at the cross

At the foot of the cross

there is healing for this nation

There is rest for those who wait

And the love that we find

is the hope of all creation

We are stunned by what You gave

We will wait here at the cross

We will wait here at the cross

We will wait here at the cross

We will wait here at the cross

We will wait at the cross,

a hungry generation

With our broken hearts and lives

Will You hear? Will You come?

Will You fill our desperation?

Oh God let this be the time

WebOS is dead. Long live WebOS.

So HP are pulling the plug on WebOS hardware development.

It's sad news, but apparently the OS might hang around a bit longer.

I love WebOS, I think it's fantastic. There's some things about the Palm Pre2 that I love, but it's sometime not quite powerful enough and the camera just sucks.

The TouchPad should've been brilliant, but they went all cheap on the hardware again. You'd think HP would know what they doing with hardware, but they let themselves down. They needed to build market share, so they should've built something incredible to match the software and practically given it away! Looks like they might be doing that now, so I'll keep my eyes open for a bargain.

I need to update my website

I'm not sure if anybody really uses it these days, but my personal website at http://david.twinklebob.co.uk seriously needs overhauling, particularly in view of my recent web design manifesto.

Plus I want to do some new stuff:

• integrate Google Buzz feeds into my update stream,
• use another profile to update the one there (so I don't have to update so many profiles all the time)
• have a hidden section of the site with my contact details on - to add to my email signature
• actually show (and have linkable) full blog entries
• have some kind of CV on there

I'm just putting this on here to remind myself and keep myself accountable!

Happy New Year!

So, it's another year. 2011!!

Hardly seems that long ago that we were celebrating the millennium! Man, that's a long time ago... so much has happened in the last decade!

But looking forward, what about new years resolutions? Well generally I don't make them, saying you're going to stop doing something is difficult. Having said that, we said we would stop watching as much TV and we're getting there with that. We've unplugged the freeview box for the last couple of months, but we've so far replaced it almost like-for-like with DVDs and on-demand stuff... we'll get there!

I read something in the Sunday Times at the weekend where someone spoke about resolving to start doing something instead of resolving to stop doing something - now that's resolutions I can get on board with.

So here's my list:

• Learn Cornish (got some useful aids in this respect for Christmas)
• Read my way through the Bible (already failed as I didn't start straight away, but I can catch up)
• Sort out my office (well, a man can dream...)
• Relearn to play the piano

Be interesting to see where I am in a few months!

Here we go again...

We went away at the weekend up to Newcastle to visit some friends. It was a lovely trip and it was great to see them. Whilst we were up there they took us to Durham Cathedral, Sanctuary21 in Durham and Lindisfarne. All excellent places. The conversation turned to celtic christianity and monasticism and also how The Salvation Army fits into that.

The Salvation Army is, in many ways, an early form of neo-monasticism. It is an "order" of believers who take on a burden above and beyond that required to be a Christian.

A big part of Celtic Christianity, Monasticism and, at least the early, Salvation Army is a daily rhythm. Bizarrely we tend to have a dislike of things like a liturgical calendar or whatever, but many people actually swear by such a rhythm to their life. Having prayers and bible passages that you can recite just like that has it's benefit.

Also, by taking up such a rhythm, there is a visible constant in your life through your ups and downs, a gently reminder of the constant presence of Christ. No matter how your day, your week, your month or even your year (couldn't resist a friends quote there) the prayers are the same, gently building your faith and reminding you that the big picture is much bigger than a single person.

Those of you who have followed my blog for a long time will probably recognise a recurring theme here (hence the title of the post). I keep coming back to this idea, yet always fail to actually put it into practice.

I like the old Salvation Army terms for this practice, they used to call it Knee Drills (for prayer) and Sword Drills (for Bible reading/study). Much as other drills, they sometimes don't appear to have much link to reality - remember the drills performed by Daniel in The Karate Kid? What about the daft things that soldiers do tossing guns around? It's about making certain actions completely second nature. So it should be with prayer and study.

So, I'm once again having a crack at this. I've started reading a Bible in one year plan, although I've decided to start on the correct date than from the beginning. I'm also planning on at least 3 separate prayer times through the day - Morning, Noon and Evening. At the moment I'm not sure what prayers I'll say at what point, as it's important that at least some of those prayers be consistent, so that they can be learnt. I'll need to do some research, but I'll get back to you when I've got a plan.

Pray for me that I stick with it and establish a pattern of prayer and bible reading!

Rethinking the Desktop

WARNING: This post is extremely geeky and most like boring. I've only written it here because it's the best place I could think to show it! Don't read if operating heavy machinery...

Recently I've been reading a lot of (geeky) stuff about the state of our operating systems. In the first (http://kellabyte.com/2010/10/23/the-desktop-os-starting-to-bore-me-how-do-we-get-the-lustre-back/) KellaByte (not her real name... at least I don't think so) talks about how boring the Desktop OS is these days and how incompatible it is with touch. The second (http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/10/31/apple%E2%80%99s-next-macintosh-os/), a response to the Apple "Back to the Mac" event, speaking about the pains of backward compatibility.

The problem is, we're still using the interface paradigm set out by PARC back in the early seventies. We're still using the basic hardware ideas as set out in the 70s/80s. What happens when you ignore everything that went before and start all over again?

GPUs can perform some calculations considerably faster and better than an x86 processor - people are just starting to get to grips with using them for non-graphic processing. What happens if you build a processor with 4 gpu cores and 4 ARM-based cores, for instance.... what could that machine do?

Could we redesign the bus on a motherboard, could we do it better? What about memory? Could we use mixed memory types to squeeze effectively 32GB of RAM into the space taken by a single stick of 2GB? If we were to speed up the bus and the primary storage, would we still need as much RAM at all?

So, brand new hardware... what about the OS? These days, it needs to be able to fit on everything from a tablet/netbook all the way up to a 24" widescreen monitor. It needs to be built for touch, but still be mouse/keyboard compatible. It needs to be clean, simple and light (on resources). It needs to be able to be simple to use for the average user and for tablets/netbooks, but it needs to be able to knuckle down for high-end stuff (developing, multimedia etc).

The way to go is probably the Linux route - 1 underbelly with a slightly different Desktop Manager for each of the form factors. You have SomeOS Lite for the tablet/netbook/novice user, SomeOS Mobile for the upper-end of the Laptop market and SomeOS Max for the high-end desktop user.

In terms of user experience, you have an App Store - including third party pay-for apps, community developed free apps and OS updates (like an overlap of a mobile app store and the ubuntu package repositories). That way you can fairly quickly have a large collection of applications available for your new OS, despite the fact that nothing ever created before will work without some kind of emulation.

I wish I had the money to put together a team of experts and create something totally brand new. I think we'd give Apple a run for their money...