Life of Wiley

I’m getting an awful lot of comment spam, despite each spam having to be moderated. It makes moderation a pain. I’ll have to look into some sort of plugin to simply delete the spam rather than having to moderate it out.

Perhaps I misjudged Kidsports in this post as I had an e-mail from them this morning stating that as a result of mine and other comments they have reviewed their policy on charging for infants and will from today only be charging for infants 6 months and older.

At least some corporations do listen to their customers. Let’s hope they sort out their website soon too!

Some jerk pulled across my lane last night causing me to hit them, they then just drove off leaving me to call the police. Fortunately the folks in the van following behind were kind enough to stop and provide witness details and we both managed to clock the offending car’s registration. According to the police they were already wanted for a “failing to stop” offence!

Fortunately I wasn’t injured in the accident and no-one else was involved. What concerns me most is that it’s likely that I am going to be made to pay through the likely increases in my insurance premium even though the accident wasn’t my fault, presuming of course that the driver of the other car wasn’t insured (it wasn’t stolen, so why else wouldn’t they stop, drunk maybe?)

Very, very annoyed:(

On Sunday I had the privilege of participating in worship lead by one of Local Preachers on trial.

The theme for the service was faith and he gave a great illustration for the benefit of the children in the service at the beginning talking about the hazel tree in his garden.

Sadly, his confidence let him down, nerves got the better of him and I struggled to follow and in places hear the sermon.

What strikes me is that as preachers one of the most important things we need to learn (aside from theology and our own faith) is how to communicate with the congregation. Everyone’s with me so far as this is clearly obvious. I think the best approach and the one I use, is to speak using the same conversational style that you would use if you were chatting to your partner or friend. For those preachers who either don’t use notes at all or just use headline notes this will come naturally, but for those of us (like myself) who write out full scripts I find it helps to write it out as though I was conversing with someone. Then, by the time, I’ve thought about it, typed it out, printed and read it, and re-read it; the flow of the conversation is firmly implanted in my mind and it allows me to connect with the congregation with eye contact and gestures.

Most pulpits or lecterns will have the microphone (if there is one) positioned such that it works best when the head is raised, but if you are having to read the script then your head is down and not projecting into the microphone. The result is that you can’t make eye contact, making gestures is then fruitless and your voice ends up as a mumble. If, on the other hand, you have the conversation in your head you don’t have to rely on your notes so closely and can relax more with the congregation, making for a much pleasanter experience for the preacher and the congregation.

Of course all this is not just related to preaching but can equally apply to any form of public speaking. The more relaxed you are, the more effective you will be at putting your message across.

A warning to all would-be visitors to Watford’s KidsSports; Louise went this afternoon and had to pay for Eva. To put this in context Eva is not yet 5 months old, can’t crawl and slept for the duration of their visit! Utterly stupid in my opinion. Of course infants should be paid for if they can partake in any of the activities on offer at KidsSports, but surely they must realise that a baby that can’t even walk won’t be participating. The mind boggles.

I would provide a link but such is the professionalism of the organisation that they don’t even have a website!

Updated: I’ve found a link but the website is so appalling you wouldn’t want to go there!

Anyone checking out any of the sites I host over the last few days will have noticed some significant problems. This is due to spam.

I had been using SpamAssassin to filter out the rubbish before Exim delivered the mail. However I was noticing that quite a lot of spam was getting through and upon investigation it was clear that I needed to keep the rules updated. Whilst doing this I also looked at implementing rejecting the mail even before it’s accepted by Exim and adding antivirus functionality using ClamAV.

All this lead me down the path of configuring Exim with Exiscan and SA-Exim using this excellent document (pdf) as a guide. Unfortunately it turns out that this is very resource intensive which is no good if your server doesn’t have much memory as mine does (96MBytes). It also doesn’t help when the antivirus daemon, clamd, dies for no apparent reason.

The first problem, lack of memory, lead to the server getting busied out with swapping. The second problem caused all e-mail to be temporarily rejected until clamd was restarted.

I’ve now upgraded to a newer version of ClamAV and I’ve ditched SpamAssassin in favour of Bogofilter (what a great name!) running as a filter after the mail has been accepted.

Perhaps one day I’ll get myself a more capable server. I’m keeping my eye on eBay for a Shuttle.

I’ve had two great rehearsals this week with the bands I’m involved with.

Firstly, the rehearsal on Tuesday with Watford Band was excellent and a lot of fun. Not only did we get a good turn out, but we also worked through some good stuff and had a guest pro with us to rehearse for an upcoming gig. It’s always good to have pros playing around you as they not only make you up your own playing but they can also pass on valuable tips. In this case, Craig Patterson, will be doing The Lazy Trumpeter and he was able to give me some advice on bending notes.

Secondly, I got to play with the brass ensemble I play with. We are currently called City Brass but as we’re moving rehearsal venue and will now be based in Chesham, which is hardly a city, we will need to think up a new name. Anyway, it was the first time in a very long time that I was able to play my trumpet rather than the cornet. I also get to play alongside another pro, Ken Bache, who was also my tutor some time ago. Ken’s really good at letting me have a go on the 1st parts and providing good constructive criticism and advice.

On a final note, we’re in the process of approving the artwork for Watford Band’s CD, so hopefully it will be available within a few weeks. Order yours now via the band’s website and we’ll send you a signed copy, woo-hoo:)

This post caught my eye (via Connexions). I wonder if Michael Moore has seen this!

It seems to have been quite a while since we managed to get to a service at our church together as a family. We managed it this Sunday for our Harvest Festival. Our Minister Rev. Will Hunter lead the worship and used the Parable of the Sower for the basis of the service.

As it was a family service with the all the Guides and Scouts, etc. taking part the sermon was fairly short and took the form of a multiple choice quiz on the pertinent aspects of the parable, namely what happened to the seed the sower planted.

It was a pity that no-one had checked the microphone before the service started as the kids that read the lessons couldn’t be heard. This is frustrating for both the reader and the listeners. I think I’ll have to make sure that this gets added to the list of things the stewards should check before the service begins. Funnily enough the steward couldn’t be heard when she read out the notices!

It’s taken me a long time to figure this out but I believe I’ve finally cracked a URL rewrite problem that’s been bugging me for ages. When I moved from Movable Type to WordPress, WordPress produced a set of URL rewrite rules to apply to the apache configuration. All well and good, except I had applied them in the wrong section of the configuration. I’d put them in the main system configuration, rather than the virtual host configuration for wileysworld.org. Hopefully I now won’t get so many 404 errors reported by Awstats.