Alleluia, Christ is risen
8/4/2007
My laptop, on the other hand, seems to have died... I really cant survive many more escapades like that... Some great power decided it'd be fine to have the family service running all the usual tech - laptop, projector et al - starting effectively 5 minutes before the last service finished. So less than zero setup time, and as everyone's experienced at some point, it's times like that when things that are normally 100% reliable will go wrong. And so it was with the laptop. It might recover with a full reinstall of linux - it may just be software and files that have disappeared. Or it might be hardware as well, I'm really not sure yet.
However, I suppose if I'm going to trade a risen God for an old laptop it's not so bad ;-) Anyway, next week will be rather low on updates - the family Fleming is off on a canal boat for the week. See you in a bit.
Keeping the watch
6/4/2007
Last night I found myself, entirely unintentionally, with the church youth group, keeping the watch... trying to do what the disciples couldn't, and stay awake with Jesus, at least for a while. Of course, being weak and feeble, we don't even try to do a full night - the idea is that everyone does at least one half-hour stint, and between us and the less knackered adult congregation we make sure that there's always at least a couple of people there. That didn't make it much easier tho - I spent a bit short of 2 hours there, in 3 chunks, and by the end of each section (and from fairly early on in the last) I was struggling to keep my mind from wandering. It's probably wise that we recognise our weakness - I doubt anyone would be in a condition to achieve anything after about 11 if we tried to do the whole 8pm-8am run.
I had some fairly serious thoughts in the process, and while I promise I wont make a habit of this, I'm going to put a few of them down here. The reason this doesn't go in the "Thoughts" section is that these ideas aren't the sort of stream-of-consciousness ramblings which that page is designed for. Everything here has been thought ought, and hopefully will make sense. Well, it's worth a try.
Gethsemane is a very strange place. Although I've got to avoid basing too much thinking on Jesus Christ Superstar, I think it's safe to say that this is where we see Jesus at his weakest. At his most human. Perhaps this is the place were we can most easily make a connection, try to bring ourselves to that point so that we start together and he can carry us on. It may well be heretical, but the feeling I always get from Maundy Thursday is that we're trying to do a favour, to help Jesus out, if only a tiny bit. Because we all know those feelings: desertion by a close friend - I suspect that the greatest pain of the week for Jesus was seeing Judas betray him, and destroy himself - and then isolation - just when we most need human contact, almost for its own sake to get us through the night, it's then that there's no-one there.
We try to stay up, to pray with Jesus. It's hard not to try and have all the noble thoughts of taking just a little of the pain for him, but we have to realise that the pain he felt was great enough to obliterate every happiness. As God, he was omniscient, so all the blissful moments anyone had ever had, or would ever have, were in him, but Gethsemane was too much... We can't get too close to that pain.
We try to get to the same level, while he's at his weakest, but inevitably we fall away over the next few days - the places he goes now we can't follow. Perhaps it was neccessary for him to have this time, where he's at his most human, so that in a few days' time he can be at his most Godly. A need to keep the balance that is the essence of Jesus, between human and divine. By being at his most human and most divine he's really just being his most Christ-like. Which shouldn't be surprising - after all, the next few days are ultimately the reason for him being here.
So we've tried, and failed, to help a little. Each time I went in to pray for a while I lit a candle. And each time I came back, the last one had burned out.
Stumbling around
5/4/2007
I've just heard that this site has found it's way onto the StumbleUpon database, so if you're ariving as a result of that, I'd like to offer a warm welcome to my little square of the internet. Believe it or not, there's no pornography here! For anyone currently in the dark about stumble, as I understand it it's a great idea whereby you install a little extension for Firefox, then when you're bored you just click on a button and get taken to a random website that others have found interesting/entertaining/whatever. You then rate it yourself, and your ratings a) help it decide what else you'd like and b) help it decide how highly to rate the site you've been to for others.
I say it's a great idea, yet it isn't in my list of recommended tech bits. This is because I know my own weakness... I'm well aware of how much time I waste on my computer already, and I've no doubt that if I had something like stumble installed I'd never get anything done at all, so I've never installed it. Those braver than I, or more able to control themselves, are welcome to have a play, but if you need to make yourself work it sounds like a dangerous tool...
ITT2007
4/4/2007
I've mentioned the great world of online thud a few times before, but it's reached a special time: the Iternational Thud Tournament 2007. Last time around, in the very first ever international thud tournament, I managed (by some fluke) to get to the final, losing to Palm. Having played only one or two games since the last tournament, I somehow suspect that I wont improve on my previous position, but I'm having fun anyway... Thank heavens for Pratchett, and all his many minions :-)
Magnetic north
1/4/2007
As you may well have heard, one of the remaining mysteries of physics is why the magnetic north and south poles have, in the past, switched a number of times. According to analysis of the geological record the last time they switched was around 780,000 years ago, which would essentially mean that all of a sudden everyone's compasses would be pointing in the opposite direction... However, today there's been reports that the next switch, apparently already overdue given the rate at which they've happened before, is going to take place later this week: at 9:35 BST on tomorrow morning in fact.
What's especially interesting is that at that instant as the polar attraction swings round, magnetic north will be directly below a series of points on a longitudinal line - and that line is expected to be 2° 16' 0"W. This line runs, wait for it, right through manchester. So, for a split second on monday morning, there's expected to be some very intersting magnetic activity in Manchester: magnets would fall off fridges, compasses would spin, speakers would become distorted and so forth. Apparently anyone with particularly good examples of this should contact the british association through the email address magnetic_disturbance (at) the-ba (dot) net.