impulsively yours...

Just for the record, I posted off my revised essay to the BPS today, shelling out a stack of extra dime to get it guaranteed next-day delivery so it can have arrived during my original 2004 registration period. (Trying to re-interpret their regulations a little here on re-registration, and hoping they'll join me in squinting...)

Hope I did a good enough job on the essay this time. It was definitely (more) well thought through. But I did kind of send it off in a hurry, at the end!

Ah to be young and foolish.   : )

darn

Today I did something I've never done before.

Last year—I'm pretty sure for my birthday—in the middle of the hottest summer the UK had experienced for years, my parents-in-law David and Jenny gave me possum and merino wool gloves for my birthday. At the time, they didn't make a whole lot of local sense, but I've sure appreciated them both winters. Last winter I developed a hole in the tip of the index finger on both gloves. I've been nursing them carefully since, making sure not to extend the hole, with the plan to eventually fix them. About a month ago I even visited our local department store, Elys, and extracted from them black darning wool and their minimum packet of about ten darning needles... (Lifetime supply?) Total cost: c. £1.50.

Today, in a fit of productivity during a break from playing, I reduced a box of papers to a little filing and a lot of recycling. To complete the occasion, I decided to finally fix my gloves. I had no idea how to darn things, though I'd heard of it and recall being vaguely aware of my Mum doing such things in the past. So as usual I turned to my ever ready teacher, the interweb. Typing “How to darn a glove” into Google immediately hit gold... a detailed, photographically illustrated guide to darning, even using the example of a glove.

Who knew how cunning darning was? I'd always presumed darning just involved criss-crossing a bit of wool about the place to pull the hole together. This guide opened my horizons! It was basically about using a needle to re-knit over the section with the hole. The heights of ingenuity. I gave it a go.

Admittedly, I wasn't able to follow all of the instructions... such as, “make sure you have your bifocals on”. But I did move to more light (twice). And that thread framework thing with the cotton is genuinely cunning, and ultimately worked really well, when I got the hang of it. I was genuinely impressed.

It's a fiddly and detailed job, with the original stitches on these commercially knitted gloves being small. But I was surprised with just how effective this was... I really have re-knitted a repair over the holes, and it's robust and not too obvious. The wool I used is not as soft as the merino and possum gloves, so that stands out, but the repair itself is pretty well seamless. I gleefully showed them round the flat and being honest I think I can say we were all surprised at how well I'd managed to get it to work. As a 30 year old male, I can't fully subscribe the author's final sentiments—"Sometimes you may feel like the women in stories and paintings prior to the 20th century..."—but there is a certain back-to-basics satisfaction about this. And since these gloves are an essential part of my survival here at the moment, it's a job I'll keep on appreciating.

Well darn. Who would have thought!

Back to work tomorrow for me...

just desserts

Christmas Day was a good time, with church in the morning for Bronwyn and I, followed by Salena and Steve joining us as planned along with housemates Nick and Hayley to make six. In hindsight we agree that we may have over-catered just slightly... We were keen to ensure that we had a good quantity of leftovers, with a collective recall that we were disappointed they had not lasted as long as we'd wished last year. Well, we succeeded in that, for sure, and two days on we are yet to cook anything.

In particular, we overshot somewhat on the desserts. I said in my Christmas Eve entry that we had around four plus desserts, but it was a few more than that. For the record, served on Christmas Day were:

• Nick's outstanding alternate Christmas cake
• Baileys and Chocolate Cheesecake
• Chocolate Brownie
• A rice-flour based Hayley-friendly Star Cake
• Chocolates
• ...and some sort of nice Berry Ice Cream.

Other desserts we had also prepared, but decided in the end not to serve included:

• Christmas Pudding
• Two varieties of Christmas Mince Pies
• Hayley-friendly rice flour-pastry Apple Pies
• Two varieties of Cheese, with Crackers
• Panatone
• Lemon Sorbet
• Custard
• ....and Vanilla Ice Cream

To work through all this we are implementing a carefully strategic plan, including having multiple desserts per day, and focussing our efforts on those items that have an early expiry date (e.g. Cheesecake, Brownie) while others at this stage remain unopened... The Panatone tells us it will keep till June, while the Christmas Pudding may at this rate be slated for a Christmas 2005 release. One of the things we've discovered is that my Chocolate Brownie seems to be a poison, for which the only known cure is a slice of Nick's Christmas Cake. I'm not used to being on the dark side...

We should perhaps be ashamed of ourselves. We will at least take the opportunity this holiday period to realise that we have many many blessings, beyond the mere gustatory. And we are humbled and grateful. May we generally use them more wisely...

praying for osama

I'm praying for Osama bin Laden.

It's Christmas Day, and we speak of a child born into this world, announced as the Prince of Peace, Emmanuel, “God with us”. 2008 years or so later, we're celebrating Jesus' birth in a world that needs a message of peace more than ever.

Current Western leaders seem clear on the agenda: we're fighting “The War on Terror”. It seems to me much of the time that this could better be called “The War of Terror", Western military might taking terror to the middle east, while our politicians ensure we continue to experience terror at home too—terror at the thought of extremist violence, our fear of immigrants and refugees, distrust of the Muslim and the Arab. And the objective of this? Western purportedly “Christian” leaders on both sides of the Atlantic pursuing their own version of Jesus' teaching... as one person at the inclusive church conference quipped the other week: Love your enemy; just make sure he is dead first.

I'm an uneasy pacifist. I find it hard to believe war could ever solve any problem. But I gulp when asked the trite-but-telling Hitler questions... Or Rwanda. Or should we talk about Sudan? How could we not stand up to evil? How could we not stand up to evil. When do we move from stand up to strike back? (But then shouldn't we strike first against evil... You can see where this goes. Yes, and who defines evil and so on.) Turn the other cheek. Yes. Allow blows to rain on the “other cheek” of a child... of my child? Hmm. Difficult teaching.

Yet amongst it all, when I simply wished for the violence to stop, for the terrorists on all sides to cease their escalation, what did I do? Nothing.

Just recently, in a conversation at our church home group I was challenged. Imagine if Osama bin Laden changed. Imagine if he no longer wished to unleash (in?)descriminate violence upon the world... western or otherwise. Imagine if Osama came to know a God who chooses not just to love but to define himself as love. How the world might change.

So today, as we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, I'm praying for Osama. I pray that God will bless Osama in every way. I pray that he evades the capture of those who would seek to harm him—including the representatives of our western governments. I pray that God protects him and those he cares for. I even pray that God will prosper his plans. But... I pray that God would break through the hatred, the distrust, the evil, any selfishness, and every thing that stands in the way of the Kingdom of Love. I pray that he would melt Osama, changing him as we all need changing from what he is to what he is meant to be. I pray that his plans will prosper because they are plans for good and not for evil, plans to build up and not tear down, plans that have grown in the heart of God, and born of the vision that I believe led God to become one of us, as baby born in a poor family, in an insignificant town, in an occupied country, and born to be the Prince of Peace.

This cannot happen. Not by human wishes, or the effort of individuals, or the intervention of the international community. But I believe nothing is impossible for the God who accomplishes the greatest miracle of all—to change people. So today, I'm praying for Osama.

christmas eve

The presents are all wrapped and under the tree—they've mostly been like that over a week. The lounge is tidier than it has been since we moved in. Even the new iMac has been relocated, from my desk (now to be the drinks servery) to inside the “fireplace” (not quite as dramatic as it sounds) to be primarily the DVD player for the next day or so... (Though with the magic of a wireless bluetooth keyboard this blog entry is being posted from there!) The (four) desserts for tomorrow (plus Christmas pudding, custard, and ice cream) are either already packed away, are cooked and cooling, or are chilling. There is a 6kg bird in the refrigerator reflecting that it didn't realise the potential full extent of “free range”... In a combination of Hungarian-tradition and some creative alignment with antipodean timezones, we're about it open the first presents. It's Christmas Eve.

Tomorrow we'll be joined by Salena and Steve, bringing us up to six New Zealanders in the house for a far-away-from-home celebration. We've already developed our own traditions, a finely-honed team where we're all happier because we've agreed that Nick is in charge in the kitchen! Christmas dinner will be served around 2.30pm, though last year's experience suggests the meal itself will merely be a high point in a continuous curve of consumption. Dessert forms the evening meal, and it's probably fair to say this is a household speciality. If an episode of Stargate isn't watched we'll probably feel slightly aggrieved, and all going well Salena and Steve may even be introduced to the Lord of the Rings board game.   : )

Before all that though, Bronwyn and I will be heading down to Worple Road Church, our “local” where we've been so warmly embraced over the last 20 months. We're feeling the pangs of departure already, as our countdown ticks perceptibly louder week by week. Between them and Nick and Hayley, we're not short of family here at Christmas.

We're looking forward to being back in New Zealand, though we're not in any hurry to leave London. Earlier in the week they were predicting a 30 percent chance of snow tomorow, but the forecast is now for dry and clear. But even without a white Christmas (and there hasn't been one here for years), we'll still enjoy the colder temperatures where the traditional Christmas dinner actually makes sense. Next year: king prawns on the BBQ?

Happy Christmas everyone. Peace and joy to all.

technical announcement: comments broken

Greetings esteemed readers. It has been brought to my attention this morning that the babbage.tv comment system appears to be broken. Even on the first attempt to post a comment the system initiates flood controls, and tells the commenter that they must wait a short while before posting a comment. This is broken behaviour.

I'm not sure how long it has been doing this. The last comment I received was two days ago, a piece of comment spam I've since deleted. However, I do know that my hosting provider was upgrading the version of PHP they are running to 4.3.10 overnight, something that probably directly effects the comment system on this MT 2.661 blog. So I'm wondering...

In the meantime, feel free to email instead! dblog at babbage dot tv...

This has been a technical service announcement, authorised by Kermit the Frog. Thank you for your attention.

Update: I've just found that on the other blog I host in the MT installation, timandmegan.babbage.tv, comments seem to be working fine. Now I'm really stumped.

Final update: A google search eventually led to this blog entry at The Zero Boss, which isolated the problem as being due to running two MT blogs here—this one and timandmegan.babbage.tv—set to two different timezones. Basically, it meant that any time you left a comment on Tim and Megan's blog, as I did last night, you couldn't leave one here for the next 13 hours (the timezone difference) and 60 seconds (the usual delay before being allowed to leave another comment). I got some further leads here at Twisted Spinster (beware: profanity) including comments from Jay Allen himself, which finally led me to this most excellent post at phil ringnalda dot com that provided the solution. So there you go. More than you ever wanted to know. And we're all un-broke now. At least as far as this goes.

failure

I may have thought I was finished my Statement of Equivalence for the local professional association, the BPS, but I was wrong. I got my results today, just short of the 1 January deadline by which they'd promised them, and they'd failed me! I was steaming.

Worse still, they failed me on just one subsection of an essay on professional issues... the mark for that subsection: 49%. The pass mark is 50%.

Admittedly, they've passed me on everything else, I can re-submit that section, and the resubmission fees are only £32, as it transpires. That's a small amount compared to the £1000 direct cost of the process to date. But it is still most irritating. I hate to have failed, even that one section. It's been a while, at least for anything of significance, I concede. And the conclusion on discussion is that the 49% mark is probably no coincidence... they deliberately selected it to fail me on that section in order to “teach me a lesson”.

The analysis of my boss, probably on the money I think, is that for this subsection of the essay I wrote only 833 words where there was a 1000 word limit. The implication? That I was not taking the process seriously enough, and didn't give the essay my absolute full effort, as if I had I would have used close to the entire word limit. And if that's the case, in a way the examiner is right. For the record, I thought that the ability to write meaningfully on the four topics in 1000 words each was extremely limited, rendering the process fairly vacuous. So it would appear they correctly perceived my attitude towards that part of the required work. Well done. And so now I am now being taught a lesson.

I can re-submit by the 20th of any month, after which it will take them three months to examine my resubmission. This means that by the time I hear back with the final result I shall be well installed back in New Zealand, where my at long last achieved Chartered Status in the UK will mean... squat. Isn't it ironic. I contemplated simply pulling out of the process, but at this point a little more work is worth it, principally as it keeps a door open. But hgnnnhhhhh...

Meanwhile, for something that won't ever fail, check out my Brownie recipe, just uploaded. I've developed this recipe myself after careful research, trial and error. Guaranteed to please, a must for every Christmas Day dessert menu. Just don't be counting cholesterol, saturated fats, calories, or virtually anything else... But trust me, you won't regret it!   : )

duncan's brownie

340g (12oz) butter or margarine
18T cocoa/an entire 125g tin cocoa
1.5c self-raising flour
    or 1.5c flour and 1.5t baking powder
1/4 t salt
200g dark chocolate (known as “plain” chocolate in the UK)
6 eggs
3c sugar
3t vanilla

Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F or Gas Mark 6). Grease a roasting pan and line the bottom with baking paper.

In a saucepan, melt the butter or margarine, sifting in the cocoa and mixing well. Once fully melted and mixed remove from heat and allow to begin to cool.

Sift flour, baking powder, and salt into your largest mixing bowl. Then in another bowl mix sugar, eggs and vanilla. Combine the egg mixture with the dry ingredients, again mixing well.

Take 170g of the 200g of chocolate, cutting it with a heavy chef's knife to break each square into about two to three pieces. Place these pieces into the large bowl with the combined egg and flour mixture. Eat 15g of the remaining chocolate. Add the cocoa mixture to the large bowl, folding the ingredients together sufficiently to fully combine without over-mixing. Pour into the prepared roasting pan, spreading the thick mixture across the pan at the desired depth of the final Brownie.

Bake at the very top of a 180°C oven for 10 minutes to give a crunchier top, then moving the Brownie down to the middle of the oven for a further 15—25 minutes. Cook until there is no moist mixture when the Brownie is probed but before the sides begin to blacken. (Beware of being fooled by melted chocolate chunks when probing.)

When cooked remove from oven and allow to initially cool in roasting dish for five minutes. At that point, turn out Brownie onto a cooling rack. Resist temptation to eat first slice immediately while it is still hot, as you know you will get indigestion. Eat the final remaining 15g of chocolate as consolation. Then eat a slice of the Brownie immediately afterwards anyway. You know you want to.

When cool, cut into slices and store in an airtight container in a radiation-shielded clean room. (You can never be too careful with good Brownie.)

Cellaring characteristics: On day of baking, excellent crunchy top and good centre. On second day, Brownie achieves highest standard, with softening top more than offset by the full fudginess having developed in the core. By day three Brownie is well edible but past its best (so bake on Christmas Eve). And it would just be wrong to leave any till day four. The recipe only makes about 30 pieces, anyway...

seven more sleeps to go...

'Twas a week before Christmas, and all through the house, not a person was stirring, not even... Well, ok, maybe I've been stirring a little. But it's only been good natured ribbing. Nothing more, and certainly no sarcasm...

It's been a flat activity over the last couple of months to watch Stargate episodes on DVD together—we've polished off the 21 or so first season episodes, 42 minutes each, and are currently working our way into season two. We may not have a TV in the house, but don't think we're completely inoculated against small screen entertainment. In this programme our intrepid heroes, lead by Richard Dean Anderson (formerly of Macgyver fame) make their sarcasm-powered way across the galaxy, with an obligatory “With all due respect, sir” to a superior officer at least once an episode. Tonight though we took a step back and watched Nick and Hayley's new DVD of the original feature film (in glorious iMac widescreen action, of course!) It was interesting to see the same characters, almost all played by different actors, and the similarities and differences between the two. Nick and I (who'd seen the movie before) and forgotten a lot of the detail, particularly how much of the technology and underlying story they introduced in the movie. It was interesting to see the differences too, most notably a distinct lack of sarcasm (replaced by just being jaded for the most part) and not a single, “With all due respect, sir” in sight. Like me, must be trying to be on the “nice” list rather than “naughty” list in time for the end of the week.

Speaking of which, yay it's almost Christmas! And Bronwyn and I think we've finally got every present sorted, and have nearly every single one wrapped and under the tree (or, or course, dispatched appropriately). Bronwyn continues her usual tradition of refusing to label gift cards to stymie the curious. Ah, tradition.

It's late. Time for sleep. Let me finally, however, welcome to the blogosphere Tim (husband of my previous supervisor Nancy)... Today Tim's cats have been building a particle accelerator... my kind of blog!

evolution of the species

On Monday night we took a step forward into the future, with the arrival of our new iMac G5. This monster of a machine is of course our “new arrival", previously discussed. So I've been reflecting back over the computers I have owned over the years—all Macs—and how far things have come. They're displayed above, so you have two choices: either just consider the pictorial history above, or to join us in geekiversity with the full story, click continue...

new arrival

We had a new arrival today.

I am told by Bronwyn that Stephanie (her sister) says I've been dropping little hints here and there on the blog about upcoming announcements and things that are on the way, so that some people may have gotten the wrong idea. Well, I can't clear absolutely all of that up today, but let me make a start. There is still only two of us in this family: (#1) Bronwyn, and (#2) Me. That's not two-point-something either.

Apparently our announcement ten days ago that we were returning to New Zealand was not sufficient to explain all the subterfuge. You could just put it all down to my desire to be an International Man of Mystery. (As a compromise, I will settle for any two out of the three... As long as one of them is “Man”.) Or you could put it down to me also referring to our new arrival, which finally new-arrivaled today. From China, I am reliably informed.

Unfortunately, my sanity advisor (Bronwyn) tells me I am not allowed to tell you what this is, or at least not quite yet. It's for highly mundane reasons... Just give me a day or so. But I will say this: this is my (primary) Christmas present this year, but it was too big/good a present for me to wait until Christmas Day to be allowed to play with it. I considered coming home, cooking dinner, eating dinner, rinsing the dishes, and even waiting for Nick and Hayley to wash the dishes, to be quite a long enough wait. Practically equivalent to actually waiting to Christmas.

This is the best Christmas present I have ever got, bar none. (And Mum and Dad, I am even including that long holiday to New Zealand from Australia when I was six.) It is so coooooool!

But OK, I will say this: a relevant question for you to ask me when you see it might be: “Ohhhh, cool. Does it have Bluetooth?”   : )
 

long in the tooth

It doesn't seem that long ago that I got my (free) Nokia 8210—a discarded used mobile that with a new chip became my very own. It served me relatively well for the first half of its 14 month service, but latterly the screen has started to malfunction... apparently a known fault on this model. Anyway, it got to the point that the only way to use any screen-based functions (e.g. looking up someone's number) was to squeeze the phone quite hard just to the top left of the screen. When trying to txt, which takes (me) a little longer than just looking up a number, I discovered I had to squeeze so hard for so long that my hand would start to seize up. I began to wonder if this was such a great idea...

I still didn't want to actually buy a new phone though, so I just kept on using old faithful. Being on a pay-as-you-go plan I was never due a free phone upgrade, but here's the thing I've noticed: everyone else gets upgrades on a regular basis. And the phone companies never want the old phones back... Sure enough, after quite a while of people noticing my dilemma, and even another offer or two that didn't pan out, my friendly OT colleague Lisa arrived at work the other day with this little beauty. It's a Sony Ericsson t68m, not the latest model on the street maybe but a huge upgrade for me and thanks so much to her boyfriend for passing it on! At some point someone's cat decided to put a little more teeth into its Bluetooth capability, leaving matching bite marks on the front and back face of the phone (see top right). So I was hoping for a phone with a screen that worked, but got as well a colour screen and that so cool Bluetooth wireless networking. Thanks Lisa and your boyfriend! You rock. Now, I guess I'll just have to hope that maybe one day I'll have another Bluetooth capable device that it can network with.*

* hehe!

happy birthday dad!

From across the miles I was pleased to be able to make contact with my Dad last night, phoning him as his birthday began down under and catching him at my brother's place just before they all went out. Recently arrived and appropriately highly esteemed first grandchild Fin was already packaged and ready for departure, so the converstation was of necessity short. It is always good to speak on the phone though—and have that sense of immediacy. As I was speaking to him I was realising I've only ten working weeks left, and about a week after that we'll be seeing them in person in Sydney! After two years away we're looking forward to seeing them—there's nothing like family.

Tonight we continued the celebration of Bronwyn's birthday too, going to The Messiah at the Royal Festival Hall—thanks from Bronwyn to Nick and Hayley for making it possible. The performers were in period costume which was really cool. For New Zealander's benefit, if the inside of the Aotea Centre were young, attractive, cool Elvis, the Festival Hall would be Vegas Elvis just before the end. The place is seriously worn. The location though—right on the Thames—is unbeatable. The music was excellent. A soothing end to a busy week. We had a great time.

Happy birthday Dad!
 

update on david

I want to give an update on David's condition, for those who are not getting information directly from Jenny and him. David was diagnosed with three Primary Osteolymphomas, one in each of his hips and a further one in a rib. He's been having chemotherapy for a while now, and these things take time—not something one can easily blog about daily, though we certainly think of him every day. His progress is encouraging, however. Probably the best thing I can do is simply quote some of one of Jenny's recent email...

I believe David's final chemotherapy session will be administered the day before we arrive back in New Zealand. We are so looking forward to being able to show our love and care to David and Jenny in person again, rather than from the far side of the globe.

I spent the whole day today at The Inclusive Church Conference, run by emergent uk and Oasis/church.co.uk. It was well worth being there. I'll be blogging about this over the coming week. I need some time to percolate.
 

birthday fleetings

Two years ago today this blog was born. At that time we were busy preparing for Christmas, saying goodbye to friends, and preparing for a trans-hemisphere move. So it seems only fitting that today on this day, in my fortnightly meeting with my HoD, I gave my notice—I'm leaving my job. The reason for this is simple: we're returning to New Zealand!

A whole range of factors underlie this decision. David's cancer diagnosis is without question the lightning rod that drew the specific decision. (It's fabulous to report he's making great progress—I'll write more on that tomorrow.) But there are multiple factors involved. We'll be back in time for Stephanie's wedding. We can't wait to see my new nephew Fin. And we'd known that one day we would return to New Zealand. I'd always said that it would probably be time to be back in New Zealand, before we would feel we were done in London. That's the way it is. And we're OK with that.

My last day at work will be 18 February 2005. We will leave London on the 24th, travelling via Kuala Lumpur and Sydney to finally arrive in Hamilton initially on March 4th. There's a lot to happen between now and then—rest assured, we're already working on it.

Meanwhile, for those who were born in the 70s and grew up in the 80s, if you do nothing else this weekend, follow this link, and dance your cares away... (Link kudos to Beth Cherry.)