blogging, so 2006

not blogged for ages, why is that? Am i too busy or can't i be bothered, or maybe it's so 2006. Blogging's for nerds who aren't busy enough. But i like blogging and maybe i miss it a bit. Or perhaps it's cos i'm reading jPod and i'm feeling all nostalgic for 2007. Loads of interesting stuff must've happened and will i miss those memories and thoughts not captured here? Were hours spent on facebook worth it. Seemed fun at the time, but it seems these days i can't be bothered to keep up to date with a myriad of people. Any way stuff has happened, good and bad and days, weeks and years have been ticked off. So anything to show? weddings, friends, kisses, life, death, job, worries. Anything new? dreams. is there time to dream. yes. no. but dreams stay dreams, time moves. can you strive for something tangible, or are all tangibles fleeting? Yes i'm getting all douglas coupland, and that's why i love his books. do i Like them because i elements of myself in his characters or is he astute at capturing the zeitgeist. Do i wish i was the Zeitgeist. Or am i just a nerd that gets excited when someone writes about a character that is excited about pi and prime numbers. I love coupland's quick and crisp narrative that floats between story and random interventions. Pages of chinese characters, computer code, lists and ingredients. There's something that excites me and compels me to read. mediocre. life. nonsense. there is so much to see and do yet time just seems to slip through and if i sift through all the mundaneness is there anything of value left. and who measures that value? what about the kingdom of god? Is that mundane too? maybe i should blog just to remind myself how mundane life is, and maybe i will see things that count. what counts? and who says it counts# who says i need a question mark^

just downloaded a new version of iTunes, probably sold my soul by agreeing to the new terms and conditions, waited ages for the installation, rebooted and not a lot has changed. i can still play my tunes.

Friend Wheel

So I haven't blogged for a while, time to break the fast. To start a quick geeky post, following up on my earlier post about how much I liked the friend wheel application on facebook. It's now got even better, as you can open the wheel in flash and zoom into all the nodes, move them around and see in more detail how all your friends link up. Check it out.

Interconnected

I came across this facebook application, friend wheel, thanks to ben askew. It links all your friends together by who they know. Ben's wheel was very well interconnected suggesting a lot of people he knows all know each other. My wheel is quite different and suggests a number of disparate 'communities' which i belong to. I'm quite interested in what communities mean these days and which communities we belong to. This wheel shows church friends, people from the youth group i used to help lead, uni friends, highway projects, music friends etc. There are also quite a few people i know that none of my friends know, does that mean i am on the periphery of their communities (or just cos other people from that group of friends just aren't on facebook yet). It's interesting, a geographical one would be interesting too. Geographical communites eh? That's so twentieth centuary.

updating blogger

I'm slowly bringing my blog into beta mode, and i've found this lovely code to make a label cloud in the side bar. If you want the code it is from phydeux3. I'm struggling to get a last.fm widget to work. It keeps throwing up and error that has me clueless. I'm slowly back blogging a few items too. Sorry I've not been around on the blogosphere much, I've been carried away milling on facebook.

Malcolm Middleton

Thursday night i went to manchester with ad to go and see malcolm middleton. The one time guitarist with arab strap was promoting his third album, and i enjoy his music. Combining a rare gift in lyrical astuteness with a superb guitar playing ability. Most of his lyrics tend to be down beat and self loathing, covering failed relationships and sadness. He sings how he wishes he could have a run of happiness and then he could put away his guitar, as he would have lost his depression induced inspiration, and just go and get a job like 'normal people'. Despite the sombre nature of the lyrics, they are delivered with wit and sly self mocking accompanied with upbeat melodies. In fact, I think Malcolm is one of the best guitarists I have seen, effortlessly moving from complex plucking melodies, to riff driven noise. He makes guitar playing look simple. For the most of the gig he was backed by an able posse of musicians, including Jenny Reeve, who also supported. I'd seen Jenny a few times as part of the live band touring with arab strap where she would play violin. This evening she performed as 'strike the colours' and showed that she was also an accomplished guitarist and decent singer, and then later as part of malcolm's band she added keyboards to her reportoir.

I was also able to tick off another blogger in my 'i spy' book of bloggers on my blogroll. I came across being felicity whilst searching reviews for an arab strap gig at the leadmill i went to ages ago. It was a good review and i left a comment, she returned the comment and thought that she could discern the back of her head in one of my photos of the gig. Read a few more of her entries and enjoyed them and so she was added to my reading list. When i arrived at the gig with ad we found a couple of spare seats and sat at a table whilst i looked around the audience to see if i could spot her. Well it occured to me that i didn't really know exactly what she looked like having only seen glimpses in photos. Looking around the venue i spotted a good candidate sitting near the front. But how to find out for sure without it being embarrasing for both parties if the answer is a negative:
'excuse me, do you write a blog?'
'a what?'
'a blog, i thought you were someone whose blog i read'
'weirdo'

thankfully it was and we had some good conversations using the gift of speech, as opposed to using these new fangled electronic medias.

Photos of the gig, on my flickr page, and a clip of Malcolm performing 'Monday Night Nothing' on youtube below:

Posada

My friend and fellow blogger has taken part in the blog posada, it's well worth visiting here.

Time for blogging

So it's been a while since I've had opportunity to update this blog and I think I'll undertake a bit of back blogging. The other day I chanced upon an email from john as I was glancing through my old fish email account as I knew someone had sent me an email to that account by mistake. It turned out that he would be passing through sheffield today and wondered if we might meet up at the train station before he caught a bus for his onward journey. After work I headed up to the station and had just got into the foyer when I bumped into another friend, steve, who I'd not seen in about 8 months. Then john appeared, quite strange to have just stood in one spot for barely a minute and have met up with two friends. Turns out that as I had got john's email late he had not received my reply so my presence was a bit of a surprise for him. He had in the meantime organised a lift for his onward journey, so we had very little time to catch up. In fact no sooner had we sat down with a cup of tea then his lift arrived. Despite the meeeting being brief it was good to see him outside of the blogging hemisphere.

Back from Greenbelt

A shower and a shave this morning, a welcome relief after a weekend with no showers and no inclination to get my razor out. It starts on Thursday, and after giving a talk to house group members about my time in israel/palestine, I meet up with helen and chris. Now the plan to travel to greenbelt involves four of us, two tents, camping stove, food and clothes squeezing into the fiesta, so when h arrived she was mocked for elephantine travel bag. Next stop andrew's house where we would spend the night giving us easy access to the m1 in the morning and to collect utensils and pans etc too. It's just gone 10pm and everything is going to plan, andrew asks h and c about collecting their tickets at greenbelt. Tickets, hmmm, that would be useful, and I knew exactly where mine was, still in the safe location back at my house. So back to the car and back to mine to pick it up, what an idiot. Still, better making that journey at night than getting caught in rush hour traffic!

So starts our journey.

In fact the travel down is pleasant, the roads aren't too busy and we make good time, reaching the site around 1030. This year, not only does greenbelt have the opportunity to explore creativity, listen to music, be challenged by talks and spend time in worship, but a chance to perhaps meet one or two bloggers whom I became aware of after blogging about last year's festival. One such blogger is 'world famous' dave walker of cartoon church. A blog that has been an amusing read all year. A few cars ahead in the queue to enter the site we spotted a camper-van, and knowing that dave is an owner of such a vehicle, we wondered if he would be on board. Alas, no, just another punter, still not to worry, there would be opportunity to meet him during the weekend at either book signing or the wibsite get together. Once on site we headed over to campsite 9 taking random turns in a search for a spare plot of grass on which to pitch our tents. Due to some erroneous manoeuvre we seemed to end up traversing outside the cordoned road way, with no apparent route back onto the correct path, in fact we seemed to be heading further and further towards the perimeter wood and fearing getting the car stuck in a bog, drastic measures were called for. The cordon, appeared to have quite a bit of give in it, so chris got out the car and held the cordon aloft as I drove underneath in a kind of car-limbo dance. Ahead we spotted a space, but as we were still confined to the maze-like road network, we decided to employ our cordon defying technique and take a cross country route to the sighted plot. Off we headed, chris in front lifting cordons, me squeezing the car underneath. The plot was reached, next job to check that it wasn't being reserved for a multitude and to scan for any children under ten who may be awake and playing football against the side of the tent come 6am. No kids, good, check with the neighbours, and wait a minute, we have only just gone and pulled alongside cartoon church dave!

"Hi, are you cartoon dave?"
"I am."
"It's chris, I read your blog a lot and commented a few times as the moog"
"Who??"

Obviously my blogging exploits haven't set the blogging world alight, much to the amusement of my friends.

Still, dave is a very friendly chap and we soon make ourselves his neighbours and settle down to read the programme and decide what things we wanted to do.

So that is the tale of how we arrived at greenbelt, when I've uploaded some pics to flickr I shall give a review of some of the things that I did over the weekend. Which reminds me, I've got a new camera, decided to treat myself and replace my camera I lost earlier in the year in Cambridge.

greenbelt2006
greenbelt

Stuff to do

mow the lawn, pack my bags, watch the football......

talking of which it's made my life a bit more easy in a logistical way has this england defeat. It means that I now don't have to wait for the end of the semi final tomorrow to travel down to hemel. It also means I don't have the potential of missing england in a world cup final cos I'm in the house of a palestian family who are not interested in the football.

Anyway, met up with my m+d and sister on sunday to celebrate my mum's b'day and my m+d's wedding anniversary, pearl, and would you credit it, wilko's actually stock pearl wedding anniversary cards! They're a bit rubbish, but I had to get it. That shop stocks everything! nice to see them, but i was hoping to go and see my friend, he's very ill at the moment, and was too ill for visitors. His wedding has been moved forward, and thankfully i am just back from israel so shall be able to attend. His ill health has been a worry to me too, he's a very good friend, and we've know each other since we were small kids.

So what to do whilst I'm away and you are bored, waiting for additional blogs. Well i suggest you browse some of my links to the right. I'd also like to point out that helen c of made in deptford fame, has re-started her blog.

and if you've got some money to spend on clothes, why not take a visit to people tree, cos they have a sale on their superb range of organic and fair trade clothes.

see you all soon

Last fm

So I heard about this a while ago from ben askew. Then i saw something about it in some music mag or other and thought I'd check it out. So now you can see what music I'm listening to with this handy little chart thing in the side bar. It can also recommend other music from monitoring the kind of stuff i like to listen to. I'll see how it goes....

My last fm profile is here

Just a quick note

Siobhan has updated her blog about her experiences in Kenya. As ever it is well worth reading.

T(r)ying ties

I rarely wear a tie, and so when it comes to occasions of state, when one is required. It can often take a number of attempts to atire oneself with a tie that has a good knot and is of sensible length. However, Dave at cartoon church has drawn a guide that is most helpful and should surely ensure that I look quite dapper whenever the wearing of a tie is required. Perhaps I'll send it to the guys on match of the day, as I notice some of the ex-footballers are so bad at donning a tie that they just do without alltogether.