Where have I been?

It might come as a surprise to those of you who read this that I actually enjoy writing. It's been more than a year since I updated this blog. I wish it wasn't.

I constantly have ideas that I'd like to write about and I'd love to do more of those weekly summary posts - it was fascinating to bring together some of the stuff I was doing online and in real life. The problem seems to be one of time and motivation. It's the combination that's a killer.

I've got the day job, which I love. Problem solving, programming, technology; I love it! Then when I get home I want need to spend as much time as possible with Isaac. We're less than a month from 4 years old; he's a bundle of energy, but he's so full of life and love that I hate having to get other things done sometimes. I also hate it when I feel tired after a particularly mentally challenging day at work; sometimes I have to force myself to play, which is awful, but I do my best to give him some time whilst being honest about my limits.

Then there are the jobs that need to get done around the house and garden. I'm rarely on top of them all, but that's alright, I'll catch up later when Isaac is older and wants some time/space from his old mum and dad. As long as I can just keep it ticking over.

But that usually just leaves the evenings when Isaac is asleep, I can get some jobs done, but nothing too noisy. Usually by this point I just don't have the attention span to sit down and write. And I've got other projects that need my attention too. D'oh!

And then, just to make life even more interesting, we added Willow to the mix:

Something tells me these two are going to be the best of friends!

A photo posted by David Lumm (@cyberneticiandave) on Aug 1, 2015 at 9:51am PDT

It being summer, we're also spending a lot of time exploring beautiful Cornwall (as much as we can whilst she's not allowed on the ground) which tends to lead to a lot more blog ideas but even less time to write them. Ho hum.

I've been trying to write a little something each day, let's call it micro-journaling (it's like the Twitter of journaling...) but even with that I've struggled. It's trying to decide what is worth taking the time to write down that sometimes slows me down.

I'm resisting the urge to make any "I'm back" announcement, but here's hoping it'll be less than a year before I write again. I'd like to publish at least a post a month. Wish me luck!

Dew genowgh oll

What is blogging?

I have to be honest, I tend to try and use my blog (or rather blogs, I have a few that I maintain about as well as this one...) for big thoughtful posts. I tend to write short essays on deep topics, "articles" or reviews and things like that; but that sort of writing takes time, it takes time to think about what to write and how to write it.

A blog, short for web log, is a public form of journalling.... Dear diary, today I ate a sandwich... etc. But I write short updates about my life on Facebook, share geeky things on Google+ and publish pictures through both Facebook and Instagram.

I like having a blog, for those times I do have something to share, but perhaps I'm not making the most of it...

So here's what I'd like to do:
This blog becomes about me, I'll start trying to journal interesting events in my life, projects I'm doing (unless they're software-related in which case the TwinkleBob blog might be the place to do that), books, geeky stuff and perhaps a weekly update of my activity elsewhere across the interweb.

The BackRods blog I would like to become much more a journal of our family and our adventures in autonomous education, as well as the articles on our parenting choices (which is how it is primarily used at the moment). Again a summary of relevant updates from across the rest of the web might be nice.

The Mission Cornwall blog becomes the place to share all of my/our updates on deep faith related matters as well as adventures in serving God in this beautiful part of the country. Not that all faith-related stuff will leave this blog, but if it relates to both of us or specifically to our calling then that'll be the place it'll go.

And of course there'll be geeky/tech related reviews and articles on geek-speak.co.uk...

Let's see how this goes!

The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge

I love books, you may know that. What you may not know is that I also like Gilmore Girls - there, I said it. I want to live in Stars Hollow!

So imagine my excitement to find that someone has listed all the books that Rory is seen reading!

I've read a few, but there's plenty there to inspire me if I ever run out of ideas!

Here's the list, stating which I've read.
1984 by George Orwell - Read

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - On my pile
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Archidamian War by Donald Kagan
The Art of Fiction by Henry James
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Babe by Dick King-Smith
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney
The Bhagava Gita
The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy
Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel
A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Brick Lane by Monica Ali
Bridgadoon by Alan Jay Lerner
Candide by Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman
Christine by Stephen King
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens - In my pile
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
The Collected Short Stories by Eudora Welty
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty
A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
Complete Novels by Dawn Powell
The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton
Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père
Cousin Bette by Honor’e de Balzac
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Cujo by Stephen King
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon - Read
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
David and Lisa by Dr Theodore Issac Rubin M.D
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown – read
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Deenie by Judy Blume
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx
The Divine Comedy by Dante
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
Don Quijote by Cervantes
Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn
Eloise by Kay Thompson
Emily the Strange by Roger Reger
Emma by Jane Austen
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Ethics by Spinoza
Europe through the Back Door, 2003 by Rick Steves
Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Extravagance by Gary Krist
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore
The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan
Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
The Fellowship of the Ring: Book 1 of The Lord of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien (TBR) – read
Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce
Fletch by Gregory McDonald
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
George W. Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg
Gidget by Fredrick Kohner
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
The Godfather: Book 1 by Mario Puzo
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Alvin Granowsky
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford
The Gospel According to Judy Bloom
The Graduate by Charles Webb
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Group by Mary McCarthy
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling – read
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling – read
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (TBR)
Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry (TBR)
Henry IV, part I by William Shakespeare
Henry IV, part II by William Shakespeare
Henry V by William Shakespeare
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris
The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III (Lpr)
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss
How the Light Gets in by M. J. Hyland
Howl by Allen Gingsburg
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
The Iliad by Homer
I’m with the Band by Pamela des Barres
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Inferno by Dante
Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
Iron Weed by William J. Kennedy
It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
The Jumping Frog by Mark Twain
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito
The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Lady Chatterleys’ Lover by D. H. Lawrence
The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway
The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Love Story by Erich Segal
Macbeth by William Shakespeare - Read, but only at school
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Manticore by Robertson Davies
Marathon Man by William Goldman
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir
Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer
Mencken’s Chrestomathy by H. R. Mencken
The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
Moby Dick by Herman Melville - Started, not yet finished
The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion by Jim Irvin
Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor
A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman
Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret
A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister by Julie Mars
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and It’s Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh
My Life as Author and Editor by H. R. Mencken
My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru by Tim Guest
Myra Waldo’s Travel and Motoring Guide to Europe, 1978 by Myra Waldo
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin
Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen
New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Night by Elie Wiesel
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John P. McGowan
Novels 1930-1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/Angels on Toast/A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell
Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck - Read (at school)
Old School by Tobias Wolff
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan
Oracle Night by Paul Auster
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Othello by Shakespeare
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan
Out of Africa by Isac Dineson
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde - Read
Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington
Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche
The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Property by Valerie Martin
Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Quattrocento by James Mckean
A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall
Rapunzel by Grimm Brothers
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe - Read
The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman
The Return of the King: The Lord of the Rings Book 3 by J. R. R. Tolkien (TBR) – read
R Is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton
Rita Hayworth by Stephen King
Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry Robert
Roman Holiday by Edith Wharton
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare - Read (at school)
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
The Rough Guide to Europe, 2003 Edition
Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi
Sanctuary by William Faulkner
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford
Say Goodbye to Daisy Miller by Henry James
The Scarecrow of Oz by Frank L. Baum
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman
Selected Hotels of Europe
Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965 by Dawn Powell
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Several Biographies of Winston Churchill
Sexus by Henry Miller
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Shane by Jack Shaefer
The Shining by Stephen King
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
S Is for Silence by Sue Grafton
Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Small Island by Andrea Levy
Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway
Snow White and Rose Red by Grimm Brothers
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore
The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht
Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos
The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker
Songbook by Nick Hornby
The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
Sonnets from the Portuegese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
A Streetcar Named Desiree by Tennessee Williams
Stuart Little by E. B. White
Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals by Anne Collett
Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Term of Endearment by Larry McMurtry
Time and Again by Jack Finney
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger – read
To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Tragedy of Richard III by William Shakespeare
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
Ulysses by James Joyce - On my pile
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Sylvia Plath
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Unless by Carol Shields
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
The Vanishing Newspaper by Philip Meyers
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground and Nico (Thirty Three and a Third series) by Joe Harvard
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Walt Disney’s Bambi by Felix Salten
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
We Owe You Nothing – Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews edited by Daniel Sinker
What Colour is Your Parachute? 2005 by Richard Nelson Bolles
What Happened to Baby Jane by Henry Farrell
When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
Who Moved My Cheese? Spencer Johnson
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum - On my pile
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

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!

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...

Praise to the Holiest...

I just caught the end of Songs of Praise tonight to hear them singing "Praise to the Holiest in the heights".
I've always enjoyed singing the song, it's got lovely poetry and a nice tune.
Anyway, as I read the words going past I realised how much truth and power they contain! We are losing these old songs to our detriment!
To see the words take a look at: http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/p/r/praiseto.htm

Google Wave

Sorry to those who follow my blog and are relatively normal... this is another geek post!

So I've discovered Google Wave and managed to get myself an invite (just like when Gmail started, this is still invite only). To sum it up really simply, this is a combination of E-mail, IM, Wiki and social networking. Basically you start a conversation (a wave) with other people and the content of that conversation changes - every member of the conversation can edit every part of that conversation!

It's pretty exciting, useful for communication and collaboration (provided, of course, that it takes off).

The thing is, I have 18 invites remaining and it's a bit boring (and pointless) if I have no one to talk to, so I'm looking to get some of my friends on board - especially people who are likely to use it to communicate a lot. If you want an invite, just let me know!

Body Confidence

OK, so it's probably not cool to admit that I watch "How To Look Good Naked" (or that I actually enjoy it), but we'll ignore that point for a couple of minutes.

I want to promote the Body Confidence petition that they're currently running. They want the government to agree to putting Body Confidence on the national curriculum for girls AND BOYS!

Boys are equally affected by low body confidence as girls. For boys, they're "supposed" to be slim and toned, even muscular. For girls, they're "supposed" to be slim and curvaceous. The media puts these false images of perfection in front of us and makes us believe that we're not good enough! It's not on! Let's teach our children that they ARE beautiful!

All that's fine, but here's my main reason for posting this. A woman's body confidence affects us men too! When you watch this program you hear about men who have not seen their wives naked for years, some have NEVER seen their wives naked!! If we could make it so our wives had more body confidence now thanks to something in school before we even met them, wouldn't we?

This nations children need your help! They are surrounded by voices telling them they are not good enough and what's more they pass that message onto their friends without realising. Man, woman or child, please add your name to the petition: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/bodyconfidence/

Aggregating Vodcasts on KDE4

OK, so this is a really geeky post, so if you're not in the slightest interested stop reading now...

So I'm quite into the concept of vodcasting (Video-Podcast). Getting new episodes of a "programme" as and when they are released and automatically downloading them. For a while a year or more back I was using a program called Miro which was fantastic, but sucked the life out of my computer...

More recently I was using a combination of hpodder and reencode to download and encode the vodcasts for my GP2X and then watching them on the train to work. When I stopped taking the train, I stopped keeping up-to-date with the "channels" I was following.

I finally have my dream set-up in my office: 1 computer, 1 laptop, 1 keyboard, 1 mouse and 2 screens - all thanks to a KVM... woop!

Anyway, my computer has Kubuntu 9.04 (64bit) and KDE4 on it. Love it! Had a few teething problems with the network managers, but eventually found WICD (pronounced "wicked") which works perfectly! Also had some dodgy graphics and some issues with the dual screen, but that is all sorted now.

Anyway, thought I'd get a vodcast aggregator now that I have my own computer again (Lucy also has a computer in the back room, so at the moment there are 3 computers on... ooops). The question is, what should I go for?

I thought about Miro, but when I went to install it, saw a whole load of gnome packages, which I wasn't really into. So I had a look around and found a KDE compatible equivalent... Kitty. To be honest, Kitty looks like it hasn't been developed for a couple of years. With just a few tweaks it could be really nice, but it was just too naff for me. It doesn't automatically download new episiodes and it doesn't tell you what you've watched.

I did think about just using my hpodder/reencode combination, but this would have the same drawback (although I could cron it to run regularly, there would be no way of seeing what I had watched).

So it's Miro after all. I like the way it has a great guide full of other shows. I like the fact that it automatically downloads new episodes. I love the fact that once you've watched it it gives you 7 days and then deletes the old videos unless you select to keep them. It's brilliantly thought out and I love it! Such a shame it's Gnome, but nevermind.

So, in summary, Miro is much better than Kitty.

Tech meets holiness!

I love it when I can combine my two loves, technology and Christianity! As I've said lots of times before, I'm trying to get myself trained up as a warrior. Recently, however, I've been a bit lax. I've let myself go!!

So here was my plan over a year ago now: morning and evening knee and sword drills - a good combination of exercise and discipline. The situation now? Unfortunately I haven't continued any one of those four exercises... oh dear!

It strikes me that perhaps God has postponed our engagement in the battlefront in Looe until we are properly focused on Him (especially me). I'm now working from "home" for the same company, and the joy of this situation is that they told me that as long as I was available 10-4, I could pretty much work whenever I wanted. The last few days I've been waking up at 9:30 and still having to rush to work... what's that about?

So, anyway, it's time to recommit myself and get a little bit more disciplined!! As part of that, I've been really impressed with SAYsoaps - it's an interactive daily reading guide provided by the Youth Department of The Salvation Army USA Western Territory (SOAP stands for Scripture, Observation, Application & Prayer). I wanted a way to view it on my phone and use it in the morning, so I played around with the site a little bit and I've managed to develop an RSS feed of yesterdays, todays and tomorrows readings.

The feed (built using Yahoo! Pipes) can be seen at http://pipes.yahoo.com/dave_lumm/saysoap and the RSS feed is there (or here).

In order to build the feed, I had to start with the yearly outline and build from there. It takes the list of daily readings and uses those for the item titles, the link points to the specific record on the SAYsoaps site and the "description" (or body) of each item is captured from the BibleGateway.com mobile website.

This means I can read on my phone and then comment on the site if I so wish. Good eh? I really love playing around with Yahoo! Pipes, they're brilliant!

OK, finally, what's the plan for my spiritual exercise and training?
Morning Sword Drill - SAYsoaps - Something big to wrestle with to get me going for the day (hopefully you can expect to see some output from these morning sessions on here)
Morning Knee Drill - Literally get down on my knees and thank God for another day, pray for people, situations and places, pray through issues of the day

Spiritual food/snacks (important to match exercise with a healthy diet ;-) ) - A few daily readings to provide extra bits of spiritual nourishment

Evening Sword Drill - Specific study of passages as led
Evening Knee Drill - Praise God for the day, pray through issues of the day

At least once a week Lucy and I will also spend some time studying, praying and worshipping together, something that we haven't done regularly for a little too long!

Cheerio for now!

Dave

Let your little light shine...

So me and a friend of mine have thought about starting a company to install multimedia equipment in homes, churches, workplaces etc (Shameless plug time: CJ Technologies) and to get a feel for the work and to build reputation we approached my Church to do their upgrade.

The work was planned to go over two weekends, little did we realise the sheer scale of the project. The job entailed new speakers, a sound/multimedia desk at the back of the hall, a new projector, mounting the projectors from the (extremely high) ceiling, a front facing screen at the back for the leader.

We had some major issues with the wiring - this being mostly that I have a fear of heights and Chris can't use the ladders at the moment and I had to try and secure the cabling at a height beyond what the ladder could reach, so had to do lots of leaning and stretching... I was not comfortable and it severely slowed down the process!!

Anyway, there we were working through the night between Saturday and Sunday, to make sure it was all working for Sunday (which it did perfectly, with the exception of the projected images being tiny... doh!) and a couple of thoughts came to me.

Firstly was commitment. We were totally committed to the job and did what needed to be done, we kept going till it was finished. So there's your first lesson in the Christian life: make a commitment and stick to it until the task is complete, no matter what the cost is.

Second lesson comes from the fact that I was wearing a white t-shirt whilst doing very dusty dirty work. It was gross by the evening. I was walking up a ladder past a hanging globe light and a thought struck me - it wasn't the obvious about how the light showed up the dirt, I knew how drty I was, I could feel it in the material and could smell it... The thing that struck me was that despite how dirty the light was (and it was far dustier than I was) it was still bright enough to make my dirty white t-shirt look a bit whiter.

It made me realise that however useless I am (even when I predict that a 24 hour job will only take 6) my little light can still shine and can still make a difference - it still works better when it's clean, though!!

Michael Jackson

I'm not the first to blog, tweet or comment on this and I'm certain I won't be the last.

I was shocked to find out this morning. Just after I started the van up and was setting off to work the radio came on with the news: Michael Jackson has died.

He was a leader in the music industry and really helped to shake things up. He was an eccentric character (aren't all the best geniuses eccentric?) and was greatly troubled. Those close to him should never have allowed him to get into the situation with those children, however innocent he may have been - this was his ruin. His fortune, his possessions, his lifestyle and his vibrant character were robbed from him.

I pray that God will be with his family and his children at this time. I hope the fans are courteous and gracious, even those that paid a lot of money for O2 tickets (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8120412.stm for more info).

The king is dead! Long live the king? To be honest, I don't know who could take on that crown next, is there anyone big enough?

Thanks to the British way of dealing with such things, expect a lot of jokes to come out in the next few days.

All I can say is "Thank you for the music" and I hope he was saved so we can boogie down in heaven!

The problem with consistency

Followers of my gorgeous wife's blog will know that we're trying to live an organic and ethical life - she sums it up perfectly as SOLES (Seasonal, Organic, Local, Ethical and Sustainable). As Christians we believe we should do no less (it's part of our holiness), and would encourage the rest of you to give it a try.

There's only one problem with making a statement like this, only one problem with making this stand: consistency. Now that we have made this decision we cannot go back on it and we really shouldn't compromise.

At the moment we're going through a bit of a financial crisis. Ho hum, it happens. We're trying to work it all out. In the meantime, we're buying more expensive stuff, because of our rules. Normally in this situation, I would have downgraded as much as possible to ASDA Smartprice, not this time (and never again). So what do we do?

We're trying to eat less, waste less and make more of what we have. We're trying to buy the minimum we can. It's tough, but people used to live like this all the time. For instance, the other week we had quite a lot of our vegetable box left over, so I made stew out of it and froze them. Minimal waste. Perfect!

Look out for tips on saving and making your ethical produce go as far as possible on Lucy's blog.

Say goodbye to "Pick Your Own"...

The idiots of this land have done it again. Taken away something beautiful just because they can't look where they're walking.
There won't be as many Pick Your Own places any more, because the Health and Safety inspectors are saying they're too dangerous and demanding a lot of expensive "improvements", on top of that Insurance companies are pushing up their premiums. Why? Because some stupid woman is suing some Pick Your Own farm because she fell over.
Did she not know she was on a farm? Did she not look where she was going? Did she not enjoy the opportunity to have strawberries so fresh because you have just taken them from the plant?
People don't seem to understand the damage they do by suing someone else, they just think about themselves and how they can make some money out of an accident. Well because of this one woman, a British summer-time institution is slipping away.
See this BBC article for more information: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/8082238.stm
Goodbye "Pick Your Own" and thanks for all the fruit!

Microsoft Announces End of the Road for Encarta - ReadWriteWeb

It's the end of an era! Microsoft have made the inevitable decision to stop making and selling Encarta!

Those of us old enough to remember the oddity of owning a computer without access to the internet will remember how important and useful Encarta actually was.

Sadly, Wikipedia and Google together provide a free and relatively easy method of finding anything you want. Encarta was well put together and in many ways far superior to Wikipedia, you were far more assured of it's accuracy. Wikipedia is of course a growing and developing site, with many of the articles written by experts in the particular field, but it's also open to abuse... beware you students who submit Wikipedia articles as coursework...

If you have access to an Encarta CD, look after it - it's an important part of IT history!

Microsoft Announces End of the Road for Encarta - ReadWriteWeb

ASDA Razor

I'm not a fan of shaving. I'm lazy and I can't stand the faff. You shave; it takes ages, hurts, makes you bleed and you still end up with a face covered in hair. Joy!

I've heard some good things about the King of Shaves Azor, so was holding out to buy one of those. Unfortunately we shop as ASDA, one of the few places that don't sell it (yet, presumably). So I was forced to rethink, and quick, because I'd already thrown my last razor away...

As well as shaving, I'm also not a fan of spending money. There was just no way I was going to pay Gilette money and end up with the same result... Frankly the Sainsbury's own disposables had been doing almost as good a job! So I thought I'd try out the ASDA Triple Blade Razor. I was impressed!

Honestly! I know this sounds a little "out-there", but it's a surprisingly good razor. It's a good weight, it picks up the hairs well, it's smooth, it's close (but doesn't slash my skin to pieces). It even manages to cope with my patch of multi-directional hairs which even caught out my old Mach3! I'm still going to try the Azor when this runs out, but this one's pretty good.

Moral Code for Military Robots?

Just read an interesting article on Times Online about some research being undertaken by the US Navy regarding AI in field robots. Interesting stuff, although it's all been talked about for quite a while now.

Two key questions come up:
1. How do you stop the robots from going all Skynet on you?
2. Who's responsible when the robots go wrong?

You can see the article here: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5741334.ece

Everything is now a computer...

I loved this article on Wired.Com

It's about a computer system that uses your phone, a camera and a small projector to make everything more interactive.

It's cool, but on the other hand it means there's even less chance of breaking free from your phone.

All those poor people who can't break free of their Blackberrys will never be able to escape!!

Yahoo Pipes

I've recently created myself a new "homepage". A single page combining my presence on the internet into one bitesize chunk. This means that anyone can come and see what I'm up to! This is, of course, a public site, so I don't want to give too much away (or say anything that my employer or future employer may find offensive, disturbing or generally off-putting).

I'm getting my current Facebook profile picture and status using a Facebook "badge", my 4 most recent blog posts using feed2js, my pictures using Yahoo Pipes (and Picasa Web albums) and finally a list of top links again using Yahoo Pipes (and Google Documents).

I can't believe Yahoo Pipes! It's so incredible! For instance, the list of links is actually a spreadsheet on Google Documents with 3 colums (Name, Link and Description). It's then published as a CSV which my Pipe then takes and reencodes as an XML compatible feed. What's even better is that you can then stick that on your page as a "badge" like the two I have on mine. Brilliant!

As an aside, I've also updated my profile on here so that it no longer says that I'm getting married, but that I am...

Sci-fi

It's really great to see the resurgence of sci-fi as mainstream telly!

The BBC are doing really well with it too, as they've got Doctor Who, Torchwood and Heroes. It's just a shame that ITV got the Bionic Woman. But why are they showing it on ITV2? Still, that's more mainstream than the other two ITV channels.

I loved Heroes when it was on, I had to record the programs because I was at work, but hey. Can't wait for the next series. And the Bionic Woman is looking good too. Can't believe it's that woman from Eastenders! You really don't think about that while you're watching!

Anyway, just wanted to say how pleased I am with current TV choice :-)