Life of Wiley

My son, Euan, has started using a turn of phrase that I find very annoying. He is now inserting the word “so” in places where it’s not required. This phrasing seems to be quite popular amongst the yoof. I wouldn’t mind so much if Euan was a teenager, but he’s only just turned 5! I wasn’t expecting to have to deal with this for at least another 8 years.

It’s so not fair!

I’m not usually one to blow my own trumpet, but last night I played my own trumpet pretty sweetly! It’s been a while since I’ve managed to get a decent tone out of the trumpet; I don’t usually have a problem with that on the cornet, but the trumpet does seem more hit and miss. I’m sure it was helped by the fact that I was playing alongside my good friend and former tutor Ken Bache, a professional trumpet player. I find that when I’m playing alongside players I look up to I tend to up my game and play a lot better.

I’ll be glad when Eva’s a bit older then I can get back to practising at home and that should help with consistency, and improve stamina.

Talking of stamina. The test piece that Watford Band has to play at the upcoming regional qualifying contest in Stevenage demands a lot of the Repiano part; very loud dynamics followed by soft dynamics in the low register. By the end of the piece I’m having to blast out at fff in the highish register, the trouble is, by then my lip’s knackered. Fortunately the soprano part is playing the same and for her the register is not so high, so I can leave the hard work for her and just play the bits that stand out and no-one else is playing. That’s what playing in a brass band is all about, team work

Last Sunday we attended our church review to discuss where we felt the church ought to be going. It was good to look back over the last 5 years and see where we have grown as a church (although some of the things that were brought up as growth were really status quo). However, we spent far too much time looking back than we should have done looking forward. Consequently we found ourselves in the ridiculous position of not having time to discuss the most fundamental question on the review paper: “What is the church’s vision for the next 5 years?”

We’re increasingly becoming disillusioned with what is going on at Trinity and the lack of any conviction of what we should be doing in our community. I wonder if this is true across most churches? I read a lot about what churches feel they should be doing globally but a lot less about what individual churches can be doing in their community. Clearly there are some noticable exceptions, such as many of the inner-city projects that are being run by churches; but for your average urban church, what are they doing in the community?

In one discussion someone suggested that our community needs to be broadened to encompass the places from which we draw our congregation. Personally I don’t accept this since the community in which we live is served ably by another church, whereas the immediate community of Trinity should be being addressed by Trinity. I think part of the difficulty comes from the fact that Trinity sits in a predominantly Asian community. To my mind that suggests that we, as a church, can be doing work to promote racial tolerance and cultural education and integration. I’m not saying that we’re not doing that, but perhaps that can become part of our focus, part of our vision, working with the community in which we find ourselves.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time recently submitting links to del.icio.us and associating tags with all my bookmarks. I hadn’t quite realised the power and usefulness of del.icio.us until I read this article and how to make use of the Live Bookmark feature of Firefox. All in all, the two provide a powerful way to maintain dynamic bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere.

I’ve been doing some web development for a neighbour and between us we had created quite a nice logo. In order to put the logo onto the site I wanted to make the background transparent so that it doesn’t matter what background colour the site uses the logo will work on it. There are two ways in which to have transparency in images, one is to use the GIF format which allows for an indexed colour to be marked as transparent (that is 0% opacity) or use the PNG format that includes an opacity colour attribute.

Trying to use The Gimp to produce transparent GIFs I struggled and only managed to produce greyscale versions (as seen in the trumpet image at the top of the main page of this blog. Using PNG produces nice colour images that display well in Firefox but do not display well in Internet Explorer.

Where am I going with this discussion? Well here.

Please sign this petition to get Microsoft to include opacity support into Internet Explorer!

We’ve been put in a bit of a quandry in relation to our church just recently. We’ve been attending Trinity for over 10 years now and found the church to be very warm and welcoming. Louise and I were both brought up in the Methodist tradition and are comfortable with its social theology and doctrines, though it can sometimes be a bit astride the fence.

Sadly a couple of years ago a friend of ours died. She was one of the members that made us feel very welcome when we first arrived. She had moved away to train as a missionary teacher and went off to work in Jamaica for a few years before returning to the UK where she died a few years later.

Our friend had bequethed a substantial sum of money to Trinity without any covenants to its use. Some of this money was going to be used in building a disabled toilet on the church premises which would have been quite a fitting use for the money. However, at a recent church council meeting I discovered that the finance and property committee had decided that they would simply use our friend’s legacy to prop up the church bank account to maintain current interest rate payments. The disabled toilet being funded from a gift day taking place next week.

I’m all for gift days raising money for this kind of project, but I think that the use of our friend’s legacy to simply maintain bank interest payments is both inappropriate and disrespectful. We both feel that in this regard our church (or at least those members in the positions that matter) is lacking real vision. To put it bluntly the church should be relying on its living members to maintain its financial viability and be using bequests of its faithful servants in a more respectful and forward-thinking way. Our friend was very pro missionary work and this was reflected in her life, surely we should use her bequest to support projects like The Watford Town Centre Chaplaincy, or to provide books for schools in poorer countries.

The result of the church’s decision has left us considering whether we should seek an alternative congregation with whom to worship. A congregation with more vision about its role in our community and our world. What I think we will do though is bring the issue up at our forthcoming Annual Church Review (which happens to coincide with the Gift Day) and vote appropriately at the Annual Church Meeting.

Euan‘s seems to be making very good progress since moving up in to the reception class at his school. He’s starting to take the first steps into reading and writing.

Eva is also doing well, she’s sitting up on her own very well and has started issuing forth “Dada” between blowing raspberries. No sign of any teeth though, but that didn’t stop her wanting some of my apple this morning!

Had quite a good weekend at Butlins in Skegness this last weekend. I was there with Watford Band to compete in the Mineworkers Open Contest. Unfortunately the band didn’t do too well coming 12th out of 14. However, we played quite well (even though I did miss an exposed bar!) and fell down mainly on interpretation which is subjective.

The weekend would have been much better if Louise and the kids had been there, but I suppose Eva’s still a bit young. But Euan would have really enjoyed their swimming pool and Keith Harris and Orville (yes, he is still going, and doing the same act by all accounts!)

From the band’s point of view the fact that we had two players under 10 playing in their first ever contest was good, and they definitely enjoyed the experience.

I just wish there wasn’t so much aggravation and stress leading up to these things. I can’t get on being bullied into playing as our MD seems to want to do; and from what he said at last night’s rehearsal it seems it may only get worse for the Regional contest in March. It wouldn’t be so bad perhaps if there was any praise for when people do things well to balance the barrage of criticism. Perhaps I should just hang up my contesting boots, after all I don’t like them.

No posts for a while, and then two come along at once; typical!

I can’t quite remember how I’ve got into this but I have become in an alternate reality! That is to say I’ve joined in some Alternative Reality Games or ARGs. These are games that are played out via the Internet typically, but could also involve messages being passed in real life in real locations.

There has been some recent press about these games in marketing media as a new way of promoting brands. A current ARG that is going on at the moment called “Sable and Shuck” is being promoted by Stella Artois.

The start of a game is not obviously widely advertised, though you may come across weird adverts in magazines or newspapers or even flyers at the airport of coffee shop. The adverts/flyers may have some cryptic puzzles on them to solve which usually leads to a website known as a rabbit hole into which you become involved in the game. In the case of Sable + Shuck the rabbit holes are: http://www.hewalksamongus.com and http://www.helpmefindjon.com. From these sites you are lead to a number of other sites each that have puzzles to be solved. I won’t post them here otherwise it would spoil the fun!

The puzzles in ARGs are often to do with various forms of writing hidden messages, e.g. cryptography, steganography (the hiding of data within images), GPS co-ordinates, postal code/zip codes, etc. Puzzles are often found in the source of the websites too. Because of the wide variety of puzzles involved and the global nature of the ARG, there are forums available for folks to co-ordinate efforts to solve them. The most popular seem to be Unfiction, Immersion Unlimited and ARG Insider.

An ARG that has me hooked at the moment is one that is just about to get going known as Wildire Industries. This is going to be about two companies competing against each other, Wildfire Industries and The Rainman Group. These two companies are “hiring” people for their respective e-business ventures with hiring expected to be completed on Jan 28th. Flyers are being distributed in several locations around the world including Glasgow. I was in Glasgow yesterday when the location of where the flyers had been put was revealed in an Internet chat room, it turned out to be Borders bookshop on Buchanan Street. Sadly I discovered this as I was about to get into the taxi to take me to the airport and didn’t have the time to make the detour. Such is the nature of the ARG.

I seemed to have hit a time warp this evening: Iron Maiden are number 3 in the UK top 40 singles chart with “Number of the Beast” and Elvis Presley is number 1 with Jailhouse Rock!

Don’t much care for Elvis, but Maiden rock!