brummie@sea

Techy post

2011-12-12T02:43:00.001+02:00

I appologise for how techy and geeky and boring this post is.

I even find it so myself.

But I need to get this off my chest, so I can actually write about interesting stuff later...

And some geeky people may actually find something comprehensible in here. Perhaps even interesting.

If you want to read it, then if your eyes glaze over with techiness, then stop reading, drink a glass of water, scroll down to 'And another thing', and read from there.

So then.

Most of my recent work has been on the omnitube.org website.

It's a site I put together with David when I visited OMNIvision 4 years ago (now that seems weird!). We put it together in about 2 weeks, based on a well known large complex CMS (Content Management System) called Joomla, which was the OM standard web-site-software-package, a few very large complex modules for that, specifically "VirtueMart", plus a bunch of my own hacks in php/javascript, plus a load of very clever HTML/CSS from David. Since then, I'd done a few fixes for them, logging on from a 'net cafe in Singapore, and when Becky and I arrived at OMNIvision 2 years ago, it was basically in the same state.

The trouble was that in the 2 years since we'd put it together, the internet had changed quite a lot, and we hadn't had the time to really work on OMNItube to change with it. Joomla had advanced significantly, as had Virtuemart, and alas, we couldn't smoothly upgrade to the latest versions of those without majorly breaking everything.

About a year ago (from now), I decided it was about time to do something about this, as I was scared that a now 3 year old install of joomla/etc without being able to have security updates was a bit scary. Especially as we wanted to sell videos online, and DVDs, and so were doing credit-card type security stuff. And the system admin wanted to upgrade the server, and I thought doing that would probably break everything again.

I spent about a week trying to upgrade things to the latest versions of joomla and virtuemart. Some bits I got almost close to working, but in the end it just totally bogged me down. Joomla + Virtuemart + all the plugins and modules which were installed to make everything work as we wanted ended up at around 7000+ files, and 800'000 lines of code. Not joking. So tracking down bugs and errors and trying even to find which function I was looking for took forever, and I simply don't have a big enough brain to hold that much in my head at once.

So after a week or two of working hard to try and upgrade things, I gave up, it was just too big a job for me to do on my own. I'd made no progress, and it was still a big stinkin' mess.

We also had some new features we wanted to get working. Specifically, iTunes subscriptions, XML sitemap, facebook commenting/liking/etc, and related product lists. The "search" system was also very broken, giving pretty much useless results most of the time.

I'd just read an article online about making stuff simpler, 'the no-framework framework' or something like that. And looking at the SQL database, I figured I could write the iTunes and sitemap features we wanted in just pure basic php. So I did. It took about 3 days, which was pretty good, I thought, considering I'd not really done significant amounts of programming in about 4 years.

So then – perhaps alas? – I thought, well, why not re-write the whole of OMNItube in a similar manner? I mean, how hard can it be? It's a very simple website, after all....

In 2 weeks after that, I'd put together a quick 'demo' of the site, which took it's data from the joomla database, had all the basic functionality of the front end, but in 700 lines of code, TOTAL. No Joomla, No Virtuemart, nothing.

OK, so it was only the front end, if you wanted to actually add a new video or something you needed to edit the database manually, rather than use the horrendously over-complex somewhat-broken-by-our-CSS-mods joomla back-end, but hey!

700 lines of code is something I can hold in my head, no problem. Way better than 800 thousand!

So anyway, that's been the big project for me, over the last year. It's taken me 3 re-writes, which is what took so long. I really should have spent a lot longer learning stuff and looking at alternatives before launching in to it as I did...

I first wrote it doing all the SQL in-line, sort of saying "I need a list of the products, so the SQL for that is SELECT...blah.blah.blah" and so writing it then and there. Which works for very simple stuff. But I began to find patterns, of course, and so wrote functions and classes to abstract stuff out, which was good! But each time I did something like that, it meant re-factoring and writing stuff I'd already done, to make use of the new abstract methods I was coming up with.

Eventually, though, it was all working, pretty much.

I slowly switched over bits of the live system to my new creation over time, so the video embedding system was first, then the iTunes feeds, then the front end, eventually, and finally I was able to delete the joomla system, and run entirely on my much smaller simpler pure-php non-frameworked version. I guess about 6 to 8 months ago?

So after the crazy summer, I did a bit of cleaning up, backups, version-management, etc, And a guy called Chris came to work with us, who is interested in doing web / programming stuff. So I chatted with him, showed him OMNItube, as it was then, and told him about my future plans.

I'd found a cool looking database library for PHP called 'Propel', which did much of the grunt work of doing SQL database querying instead of us having to do it. I thought it looked cool, and would save us a lot of work in the future, and so Chris started work on porting OMNItube over to using Propel. He also figured out a bunch of stupid stuff I'd been doing before, and found much better, simpler ways to do it. Templating things, for the big example.

In some ways, I'd not really wanted to be working on any more OMNItube stuff for a while though.. I kind of thought 'it's working, I should probably just leave it until next year or something'. But then after Chris left, I wanted to get his project all merged in to the main system, and not leave things in a mixed state, with 2 versions, his almost-done version, and the online-one with changes to it that I'd needed to make since he started....

Anyway. I've spent the last few weeks hacking hard at OMNItube, until now it's stable and running well using the new Propel based system. It's much simpler, much better, the administration/back-end thing is very cool, and generally just works great.

The whole thing is now 7000 lines of PHP, plus a few hundred of javascript and html, but still, that's quite manageable, and I'm reasonably happy with it. I've even open-sourced one of the smaller more generic bits of the system, and plan to put a few more modules online too, in the hope other people can find them useful in the future.

I've learned a lot, during this project. I understand from experience a load of programming concepts a lot better than I used to before. I've learned quite how much I dislike PHP, for one thing. It really is a botch on top of a hack on top of a temporary way to fix a problem. If I were starting the project now, I think I would pick a cleaner, simpler, better language. Possibly ruby, python, LISP, javascript, perl5, or even haskell.

Another thing though, I'm really bored of web development. It's so much effort, and in the end, all you're left with is a bunch of patterns of pixels on a screen.

I SO miss acting, theatre, drama, etc.

And the trouble is, after a day fighting with programming problems, I don't then feel capable of doing anything creative. It's like my brain has just given up, as has my emotional capacity to care about creativity. All I want to do is crash, which isn't very nice for Becky, nor very helpful in building relationships, in staying up to date with anything actually interesting, or in keeping in practice with Clarinet or juggling or writing plays or whatever else I'd prefer, if I were less frustrated and computered-out to actually do.

Writing, for instance. When I've been writing code, or trying to write code all day, I have no ability to write on this blog, say. Or write newletters, or emails, letters, or even SMSs.

I've not really touched OMNItube now in about a week, which is why I'm able to write this post... but even still, I'm not quite able to break my brain out of that mould enough to write about anything interesting... all I can do is write about writing code.

Which I guess is a step in the right direction.

I'll write a more general, non-techy post soon

There is a reason...

2011-10-07T12:07:00.001+03:00

There is a reason why I prefer text based / commandline / unix interfaces.

"Why?" You may ask?

So I had to update a website – basically changing from '2011' to '2012' – for someone. Once I got in to the file manager (web based) I could find the graphics files to replace, reasonably easily, and upload new ones.

But I needed to update the text of the banner. No .html files, or .inc or anything to edit.

So I went to the "WYSIWYG" editor section of the site. I could edit everything, except that part. And the footer. And the page title. So, I could edit the "articles", but not much else.

After hunting around for a while, I decided to try the "Website Management" area. Total different interface again, loads of settings boxes and tabs. I found there on different pages where I could set the page title, and so on. But I couldn't find the banner! Anywhere!

Eventually, this morning, I found it.

In "Website Management" -> "Structure" -> "Website Settings" -> "Code Injection" -> "Advanced" -> "Site Banner HTML Override -- Edited"

I hadn't found it before, because the section I needed was "Site Banner HTML Override", and to find that, I needed to look through a drop-down box which was displaying "Extra Header Code (within )" with some javascript includes.

SERIOUSLY.

What is wrong with just having a bunch of text files, and then letting me type

"grep 2011 *"

And it giving me a list of files to edit? HOW is this graphical interface any easier?

OK. So 'grep' isn't common English, I know. Learning basic unix does have a steep looking learning curve. At first.

In case you're interested, I started, months and months ago, writing an "English-like" command shell.

So you could type commands like:

"list all files which contain 2011"

and it should tell you.

It's on sourceforge, the first alpha versions of the code.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/daftshell/

The whole idea of 'natural language' interfaces fascinates me. I should work on daftshell again, one of these days.

So. Yeah. Graphical "easy" systems aren't always easy.

Windows Movie Maker

2011-09-09T22:57:00.001+03:00

I wrote this a few months ago in a prayer meeting. I know. Very holy of me.

Windows Movie Maker [C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\MOVIEMK.exe] is a highly virulent productivity virus. Not only effecting the computer it is hosted on, but having a socially engineered payload which self-propagates through USB sticks, video/data projectors, and various presentation media.

Reports have come in of this virus' unique capability to be transmitted through analogue forms such as VHS tape, and occasionally film.

Symptoms:

Audience hypnotism
Hours of time wasted by 'editor' and 'viewers'
Computer lock-ups and data-loss
Lowered expectations of quality
Copyright infringement
Physical injury
Death

Response Actions:

CTRL-ALT-DEL

[small print. Dear lawyers, et al. This is what's known as parody. Just like the word 'Movie' is in the program title. In other words, a joke.]

Beauty in the eye of the beholder?

2011-06-22T16:43:00.002+03:00

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"... or is it?

By saying it is, we say beauty is only a subjective quality.

But by saying it isn't – by saying that something may be beautiful without our being able to appreciate it as beautiful – we divorce ourselves from our experience and our association between words and description...

Is it possible to say

"It's beautiful, but I don't like it."

Which I think I may have said, from time to time. In that I can see elements and aspects which, maybe I know, are considered beautiful, or perhaps I can see an underlying elegance and purpose, but aesthetically I find it displeasing... Some of Rembrant's paintings would fall in to this category.

The thing is, am I just susceptible to the cultural conditioning of my upbringing in saying something like this? I have preconceived notions of what is beautiful and what isn't? But then, my aesthetic sense is also formed (to a large degree) by the same...

So there's a whole philosophic field based around these very questions.

But I guess I'm kind of wondering... how variable language is. How our thoughts are modified by the language and words we use, and yet the language and words we use are modified and morphed by our thoughts.

So often, everything seems so vague, so fuzzy, so indefinable, so inexplicable, so possibly variable, so uncertain and indefinate, and so futile. *sigh*

You become your parents,

2011-05-31T20:46:00.009+03:00

Or so they say.

And hereby, I think I will prove it true, to some degree:

Yes, I'm blogging pictures of settlers games, and home made food.

Now for some context.

So we got back from honeymoon two weeks ago - which means we've been married now for a month! Incredible.

Honeymoon was amazing - the perfect holiday, I think. We stayed in this gorgeous cottage / gatehouse / lodge , in Gatehouse of fleet:

Went for loads of walks (Dumfries & Galloway are lovely!):

(where I took quite a few photos of flowers and insects, cos it's cool)

Yeah. Honeymoon was cool! I thoroughly recommend it. Getting married first is a pretty good idea, too.

We visited Cream of Galloway who make icecreams:

(I love this photo!!! Becky isn't so keen on it though. heh heh heh)

Drank lots of coffee:

(I figure if I put a funny one of me, I'll get less flak for putting a crazy one of Becky...)

The house had a log fire,
where we made smores:

And generally had a wonderful time. Thanks to everyone who came to the wedding, helped us in so many ways, and gave us gifts and all that cool stuff. Getting married is awesome! Being married is even better.

So now we're back, we've been playing with some new kitchen toys (real chef knives, a blender, breadmaker, new plates and bowls and pans and pots and a yoghurt maker... wow! I feel really thankful and very embarrassed in a good way...). Thus the food pictures:

(making pancakes using a blender to make the batter - is this the ultimate in laziness? Whatever - it's fun! :-) )

Yes - we're having fun. Not having to walk half an hour home each night is VERY nice too. I may well post more pictures too, as I slowly sort them out. We haven't actually got all the pictures back from the wedding, we've seen some of them, but I'll post some of those too, later.

briefupdate

2011-04-27T00:49:00.002+03:00

soveryquicklysorrythere'snotimeforalongerblogupdate,
I'mgettingmarriedin3daystimeandsoamquitebusysorting
outstuffandrunningaroundemailingandthingswhichiswhy
Ihaven'tbeenupdatingheremuchI'msureyouforgivemeso
longthanksI'llpostmorewhenbackfromHoneymoonGod
blessyouall,goodnight!

Jesus' teaching

2011-03-10T00:55:00.004+02:00

Sometimes it seems a bit scattered - all over the place. I'd wondered for a while about the sermon on the mount, as He seems to jump from one topic to another in a somewhat haphazard manner.

Check this out:

(on their site)
ESV Bible - Matthew 7:1-14
Judging Others
"Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. ³ Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? ⁴ Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when there is the log in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.
"Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.
Ask, and It Will Be Given
⁷ "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. ⁸ For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. ⁹ Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? ¹¹ If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
The Golden Rule
¹² "So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
¹³ "Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. ¹⁴ For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few...

This is how the ESV sets out the passage. As you can see, it's nicely broken up in to paragraphs, with nice easy to spot headings, different verse numbers, etc. Usual Bible Printing Style(.css). Same as the NIV, KJV, NASB, and most other Bibles you find these days.

The trouble is, I can't imagine Jesus teaching quite like that. No pauses, just "1,2,3,59,60,61,10008,10009,10010" kind of thing.. No "Oh yes. By the way..." between totally unrelated topics.

Yes, OK. So they're all related to love, and relationships. Kind of.

Try and find something Jesus said that isn't, in some manner of speaking.

Anyway...

I was trying to figure this out.

In our study group, we're using John Stott's notes, which give a rough interpretation as follows:

1-5, "Don't judge others"
6, "Don't waste your time trying to preach to unbelievers who refuse to believe."
7-11, "Ask God for stuff, and He'll give it to you."
12, "The Golden Rule".
13-14, "You must believe the right doctrine!"
15-..., "False prophets, etc"

Which although it fits nicely with the verse numbers, and the named paragraphs, jumps all over the place in terms of topic.

So Here's my take.

What if v6 ISN'T anything at all to do with unbelievers?

Check out 18:15-35, (the parable of the unrepentant servant, etc) as well as 6:14, just before this bit of the sermon as well, then Romans 2, 1 John (the whole letter...), and so on.

God seems pretty insistent about us forgiving others, and Him NOT forgiving us if we don't.

So as Good Evangelical Christians, we say "salvation is by grace, not works," and include forgiveness as a work - in other words - salvation isn't dependent on whether we forgive others.

BUT.

How can God forgive us when we don't forgive others? What if v.6 is actually about us Christians being the dogs & the swine? When we don't forgive others...

So then that ties v.6 in to the bigger picture.

7-11 is still a bit of a tangent.

I imagine Jesus trying to get his thought across, but almost stumbling over his sentences. Stopping, starting, trying again, trying to paint enough pictures that they would understand.

(He does rather lose His rag later, 15:16...)

So then. v7-11. (In the style of biblical re-interpretation popularized by the amazing Adrian Plass)

So Jesus pauseth, pushéd back his hair distractedly, and triethed another angle: "Look guys, God giveth to you, SO FREAKING GENEROUSLY, getst ye over yourselves already, and be generous to others... (includeth forgiving them)"(DSV).

Which ties in nicely, actually.

Then the rest of the chapter, taken in the same light, also works.

I'm not too keen on verse numbers and chapters. Certainly in the way that English bibles have of splitting them all up like this - perhaps in ways that aren't intended by the original author. We have no way of knowing.

If this passage is intended this way, then take the sub-paragraphs. The bit about "Ask, Seek, Knock", and so on, for instance. It's often / usually preached as a "Ask God for swag, and He'll give it to ya!" (and in more Calvinist churches, they add "As long as it is within His Will to do so..."). But if it's NOT?

Maybe there are lots of little things we take so totally out of context, that we might even think Jesus was OK with going to war over oil. Or revenge. Or giving up on people. Or loaning and expecting interest. Or using God's money to build a comfortable life for us on earth! Just think - it's hilarious what we might come up with.

Well. Hilarious in the "horrifying" sense of the word.

I know this is rather rough... but what do you think?

Theology and Perspective (Part 3...)

2010-12-23T01:39:00.002+02:00

First check out Part 1, and Part 2.

So, returning to my original quote: love isn't a feeling, it's a decision.

And I said, there's some truth to it. However - I don't think that's the whole story.

We all long for love, and when we think of it, imagine the amazing soaring heights: long walks in the woods; laughter; passion; kisses in the moonlight; being held by someone who just wants to be with you; that secret, hidden spark; being known and knowing, intimately, deeply, unjudgingly; the look that's meant just for you...

And Josh Harris et al. are right in saying it's more than just the feeling we get from these things (incredible, inexplicable, wonderful and rewarding though it is...), and we must have something more, a decision, an act of the will, which keeps us going through the dark times. Though thick and thin, health and sickness, better or worse, richer or poorer. The thing which keeps us going though we're angry and tired, and the one we love drives us mad. When everything goes wrong and we want to give up - that "not-giving-up-ness", is also love. And without it, all of the first list are just a crashing cymbal, or breath of wind, cool, sweet, beautiful, but perishable, and of no lasting significance.

But the thing is, I don't think that just the decision is love.

And I think we can - by looking at it, or teaching it this way - miss the fact that 90% of the time*, life isn't passionate highlights, nor terrible lows, but plodding along in the day-to-day mundane boring normality.
[*Yes, I know. Fictional statistic for the sake of rhetorical prose. Forgive me.]

Does that sound bad?

If you get married, and have kids, then by the time they are old enough to leave home, you'll have spent two thousand HOURS ... doing the dishes.

Is that bad?

No. It's an integral part of love. Without the details, picking up the trash and the dishes, vacuuming the carpets, driving to work, none of the "perks" of love can exist - nor would they mean anything if they did.

What we need, I think, is not to say "I have decided to love", but "I am love". Following God's description of Himself in John's gospel as love. The famous passage in 1 Corinthians comes to mind, of course, as well. So instead of thinking, "I've decided to love Becky", or "I feel in love with Becky", I must say, "I am love Becky." (grammarians, have fun)

Then the things I do, the things I think, the things I say, will all come from that. The who I am.

And it must become part of the who.

So then, how does this all reflect back to theology, and the my thoughts about our perspective on God?

Well, I struggle to connect a lot of the bits and pieces of Christianity.

The theology, on one hand, with the practical out-working on the other, loving people on the third hand, loving God on the fourth, loving myself with the fifth hand, spiritual experience with the sixth, and by this stage, I've more than run out of arms.

The Christian life is for Octopuses.

But back to the point of this - I believe we all long for the excitement and adventure of faith. Of being part of something enormously bigger and more fantastic than ourselves; of knowing something (someone) deep inside of our hearts; fighting against evil; forgetting ourselves as we proclaim with great passion and joy the great truths, of sitting discussing until the wee hours about how fantastically beautiful each aspect of our Creator is, delving deeper and deeper into something incredibly vast and unending, and also of going out amongst the poor and needy, healing the sick, giving up luxuries with joy, being a useful part of a bigger kingdom.
[Note the '3 winds', btw]

Adrian Plass jokes of his fantasy walking through a church hall healing people in wheel-chairs.

But the biggest thing, I think, within this is the aspect of "forgetting ourselves".

We're SO self-obsessed, and when we finally forget ourselves, and reach in the reality outside of our own pettiness, we truly live.

I've been thinking about it a lot. Why books can be so absorbing; why I want to escape to Narnia, or Middle Earth, or Hogwarts; why it's so much easier to watch an episode of "Top Gear" than to write emails or invite the neighbours 'round for tea...

I think firstly, losing ourselves; Not having to "think about number 1", and get away. But then there's also the other bits of faith - being part of something enormously bigger, deep truths and fighting against evil, growing deeper...

To me, Narnia and all that is so very attractive, as fighting dragons and hunting in the forests seems so much easier than the battles I face. Peter grows up and becomes a man through slaying the wolf of Queen Jardis. I must grow up by memorising verses and remembering to take out the trash?

I'm convinced that this "escapism" is not wrong. It catches us, with the secret "joy" that C.S. Lewis talks of, and awakens our hearts to the calling of God. I cannot believe that God did not intend us to be adventurous. Just as it takes forever for Gandalf to convince Bilbo that hobbits are actually very good at adventuring, and that a safe happy small life in a hobbit-hole is actually a wasted life.

What we need is to be those adventurers, those bold warriors, those royal alive on-fire Lords and Ladies, as we do everything. As we wash the dishes. As we scrape ice off the car. As we pay our rent.

Just believing the right Christian theology - isn't enough. Just making a decision - isn't enough. Just discussing the right Christian concepts - isn't enough. Just doing the right Christian things - isn't enough.

We have to be christians.

Most of the time, I don't even know where to start.

Theology and Perspective (Part 2 of?)

2010-12-11T21:32:00.006+02:00

Link to Part 1 (Read it First)

I played a bit with trying to make Venn diagrams in 3d. Using different shaped spheres, and so on. It's quite hard to make diagrams which actually help to make the subject clearer. Usually it actually becomes less comprehensible.

But here's the best I could come up with, showing 3 'winds' I believe are currently blowing through the Evangelical world:

Obviously, there's a heck of a lot more going on - just as in my previous post there are an awful awful lot of groups who don't fit into those gross generalisations. But I'm just focusing on a few areas - humour me. You can extrapolate the concepts out to whichever field of theological hooha you like.

So anyway. The 3 "winds":

Proclamation: A lot of people, especially amongst the Reformed Christians, but also amongst the Positive Christians are very 'preachy' – in that their primary effort seems to be going in to telling the rest of the world their position. All the traditional study aids go into this: exegesis, hermeneutics, preaching, everything goes into 'Tell the world the truth!'. And it's not just the Reformed groups, but all across the spectrum. There isn't a lot of open-minded-ness, because there IS an absolute truth, and our job is to tell everyone about it! One of the major shortfalls is that the people most influenced by this wind tend (I observe) to not be willing to challenge their own beliefs, but once they've "got it sorted" and have answers they're happy with, are happy to debate for the sake of convincing others, but aren't open to changing themselves. I met some Mormons a few months ago who told me, 'We'd like to tell you about what we believe, but if you want to just discuss and try to tell us about your beliefs, then we'll just go elsewhere. We're not going to be converted.'

Discussion: Especially in the so called 'Emerging Church', much effort seems to go into 'The Conversation'. In many ways, I suspect this is a reaction against the proclamation group - who were very much de regueur during the '80s, and are perceived to have built into almost a fortress of dogma. The Discussion seems to be reacting away from that, saying, 'Maybe Wayne Grudem didn't have everything right. Maybe the world is a bit more complex than a quick Systematic Theology can describe. It's certainly open for discussion. I don't know, but it's interesting – what do you think?' And in a sense, that's the big difference. What do you think? vs. This is the truth! And it's not just one group saying this – I think it's across the whole Church. Some people are becoming more open to uncertainty and relational discussion – which is positive, I think. And also, everything being open for discussion is also positive. It helps us to not become blinded.

It is a harder line to walk with integrity, though, I think, as if everything is open for discussion, how do you really know what you believe? And do you really believe it? It can also turn very easily into 'There is no absolute truth? Right? 'Cos, everyone has their own perspective, innit? Whaddya say?'

Doing: Many people have become disillusioned with much of this 'speaking not acting', and have just said "Stuff it, we're going to go and DO what Jesus said, never mind if we get it a bit wrong. He said He'd be with us, I'm sure He'll help us get it right along the way." Inspired by Mother Teresa, Saint Francis, etc. The so called "New Monastic Movement" may well lean this way. I lean this way myself, I think. It's partly why I chose to join Doulos, rather than go to a classroom based theology study. I wanted to DO, and not be spoon fed theory any more. The strength of this group is that it can become very much more loving and a real force for good, and earn the respect of non-Christians, and be a very visible light and salt in the world. Sitting in a parish centre talking about obscure theology over bad instant coffee - or hollering hellfire-n'-brimstone from a pulpit on the whole just get us ignored. The weakness is a tendency to become very "social gospel". 'Jesus told us to feed the hungry, care for the poor, etc, and it doesn't matter what we believe! If you're a Buddhist, but you're doing what Jesus said, then hey! That's pretty good too...'

Now one point / question. Do you need Right Beliefs (Orthodoxy) to live the Right Light (Orthopraxy), or can you only really develop the Right Beliefs when you're already living the Right Life - already following Jesus?

OK. So all of this is still very basic, very simple stuff. It is building there, And I will get back to my first post's beginning, very soon. This is definitely the sceneic route to where I think I'm actually going with this blog topic thing...

[on to Part 3]

Theology and Perspective (Part 1)

2010-11-21T12:06:00.006+02:00

We frequently get told the typical 'Love isn't a feeling - it's a decision' aphorism beloved of the Joshua Harris school of thought.

And, of course, there's a lot of truth in that.

Going by the Self Help philosophy, virtually everything is a decision. You can decide to be happy, sad, excited, motivated, depressed, whatever - and Make It True In Your Life™.

And of course, we do have an element of choice in how we react to situations; our responces are not all pre-determined by DNA, our upbringing, nor instinct. Choosing to live purposefully (not in the Purpose Driven Life sense) - saying 'I'm going to sail to this specific place, whether or not it's easy, whether or not the wind is against me, whether or nor it's raining.' is more likely, I feel, to lead to something meaningful than simply being tossed around by whatever weather (whether favourable or not).

Ha! I managed it. Weather followed by whether in a sentence. Betcha didn't see that one comin'. All this blogging stuff is helping my spelling to impruve.

Now the Perciever (MBTI) in me says 'hang on a second, mate - you've got the whole thing backwards. It's not about the destination, it's about the journey. So actually, taking what weather comes at you along the way - being flexible; able to adapt to the situation; enjoying the mood - is more important than whether you're actually got some place to finally end up. And when you end up there, you're really just en route to somewhere else! There are no desinations, only stepping stones.'

So here's now an interesting concept. Totally un-scientific, un-tested, un-official and un-ilateral (OK, OK, superfluous punctuation for the sake of continuing the sequence humour. Sorry). The Church, in general, especially the Reformed branches of it, are dominated by J types. The theologians, especially, of the NTJs. This leads very easily to Us/Them; Saved/Unsaved; Elect/Damned; Christian/Heathen; Religious/Secular distinctions. At some level, this is fine. When it's implimented by well integrated balanced and loving Js, it can become an inspiration to many, and allow huge, complex theological issues to be understood slightly better by us plebs. The trouble comes when we don't realise that it is an abstraction, and that every piece of theology that we come up with - no matter how brilliant or water-tight it seems - is merely the wrestling of a fallen finite mind with concepts of an infinite perfect God.

Those of us who are not NTJs, when we pick up on NTJ thought patterns, and try to live that style, often pick it up very badly, and express the worst elements of it. I feel that myself, when I try to think or live as a Calvinist, become the worst form of Calvinist. I don't have the capacity inside to take those black and white and apply them without either falling into Lord of the Flies over-bearing judgementalism and pettiness, or else wishy-washing it out into something which would have me burned at the stake for relativism - should the Reformation Inquisition ever catch me.

My natural tendancy, I feel, would be to go to almost the other extreme, and say 'Look at Jesus' life. How He seemed to get distracted along the way by the people He met. He didn't go charging around from destination to destination, but wandered around meeting, healing, teaching, loving. We're not called to judge people as saved or unsaved - we're called to love them, and point them to Jesus.'

There's quite a lot of books being published basically saying that. Theres whole streams of Christianity going into this philosophy quite deeply. And it annoys the hell out of the Reformed dudes. I saw a video clip of that scarily smiling Joel Osteen bloke saying "You know, I ain't called to tell people they're, you know, like, going to hell. I'm just called to encourage them to go to God. Tell them about His love, y'all.". This was being mocked by the Reformed crowd, who were saying 'unless you tell people that they're going to hell, and the only way to salvation is through Jesus Christ, then you're leading them astray, Osteen, you're a false prophet!'

Now Joel Osteen is on one waaaay out limb of the Feel-Good Self-Help neo-Prosperity Post-Schuller "positive Christianity" thing, while WotM and others who mock him are waaaay along the other wing. Most of us, I suspect, are not exactly "somewhere inbetween", but more like a third group, wandering after Jesus, trying to love Him, love others, figure out exactly what we believe, and trying not to get hit by collateral from the missiles being thrown around in the wings.

Something like this, maybe:

Although I think the following may actually be better:

Where do you fit into the spectrum?

(Part 2 of at least 3)

Areopress, coffee, etc...

2010-11-13T13:40:00.004+02:00

So I thought it might be interesting to post about some things which are adding to my life here.

First post is coffee. I'm quite the coffee fan, over here. Compared so some people, not so much, but for Carlisle, quite high up the coffee freak ladder.

Unless there is a hidden coffee community I'm not finding somehow.

I don't have a massive budget for going to flashy cafes or expensive bistros or whatever all the time, so what I'm more interested in is good tasting home coffee.

Here's my current collection of coffee related clobber.

First a fun story, and then I'll go into more detail about everything else, so if you're not interested in coffee, then you can skip the end. :-)

So when I moved into this house with Euan, there was a french press / cafetiere in the cupboard, so I thought "Oh good - I don't need to buy anything for making coffee, I can use that". So the first morning I boiled the kettle, let it cool for a while I put some ground coffee in the cafetiere, and then poured the water in.

I thought it was a pyrex pot, but alas, I was wrong. There was a tremendous 'crack!' sound, and coffee started to leak from the bottom. Oh no! What to do, lah?

So since it was only leaking very very slowly, I thought, well, I won't waste the coffee, I'll let it brew, plunge it very carefully, then pour the coffee out - if any glass did shatter, the plunger/filter will clean it out, and then I can see how bad the damage is.

So duely I followed the above plan, until the pouring bit. I lifted up the pot, only to find that in fact the crack had been ALL the way around the base! So when I lifted it up, the base stayed on the work surface, and the rest of the pot came up in my hand.

The coffee, alas, followed the laws of physics (I know, I can hardly blaim it...) and went everywhere.

No coffee for me that morning.

So I bought a new french press to replace the one I'd exploded, but by that time, I'd already found
...
A Krups espresso/filter machine.
...
in Charlie? (the used clothes / stuff team cupboard, when you leave, you can leave anything you don't want to take with you for others to have).

So I was quite surprised to find this in Charlie - until I looked it up online.

It has terrible reviews.

Here's my take - it's kinda fun to play with, but I'm not convinced by the 'crema' that the espresso part produces. It feels kinda fake to me, almost like the machine is somehow 'frothing' it to make it seem more real or something. The coffee doesn't taste too horrible, just ... meh. Not really rich and interesting. Maybe un-set up temperature and pressure stuff? I dunno. I'm no expert on any of this! The milk steaming wand is very cheap and plasticy, as well as seeming near impossible to actually steam milk in proper microfoam also seems to taint the milk with a kind of rubbery aftertaste. Maybe it's just me though...

The coffee grinder I bought in singapore a few years ago, and it's been getting lots of use over the last 2 and a half years or so. A very worth while investment - grinding the coffee beans freshly makes the biggest difference to taste of anything that I've found.

The Moka pot is also lots of fun - it's quite a lot more work than the areopress to make coffee and clean again afterwards, but also makes very good coffee, with quite a different flavour to -

the weird syringe thingy on the right of the picture.

It's called an Areopress - it's a relatively new way of making coffee, very 'low tech' in some ways. It makes coffee in a kind of hybrid way between french press / cafetiere and a filter machine (with hints of espresso method dashed in for extra flavour). You mix the ground coffee with hot water, and let it get totally imersed, like a french press, and then use the synringe bit to push the drinkable coffee through a paper filter. It's incredibly easy to clean, makes very nice coffee very simply and quickly.

I'm totally a fan of the areopress now. It's so portable and rugged too, I'll easily be able to take it to conferences and other events.

So that's my first coffee post this week. We'll see if I can remember to post further...

Back in the UK - for a while.

2010-10-10T12:37:00.002+03:00

Hello Blog.
Hello everyone who reads this blog.
Hello google-bot.
Hello world.

It's me. Daniel. Back again. Exciting, wot?

So, we're back in the UK. I arrived back here literally 4 hours before getting on to a bus to go to TeenStreet in Germany, which we (OMNIvision) were doing video and some sound and lights and so on for. After two weeks of running this event, which I will tell you all about - later, which was very cool, we came back to the UK.

10 days later, Adam, Becky and myself went across to the Nederlands for our friends Jurgens and Eleanor's wedding. Which was lots of fun. We came back after that to the the UK again.

Bridget (from that biggish place near New Zealand... um, forgottern what it's called. Aus something? Something with trailers? or something?) also came with us back to the UK, and was here with us for about a month, hanging out, working at OMNIvision, and so on.

Then 10 days ago (or so) Bridget took us over to Malta, so see the Logos Hope for a few days, and also Becky's dad and church there. I'd never been to Malta before, but Becky grew up there, so that was VERY cool. Malta is beautiful.

I'll be posting more detailed stuff and photos later.. This is just to catch y'all up to date, you know.

So. We then came back to the UK, last week.

Now for the next scattered layer of events in between those all.

Yesterday we ran the video and lights for the Northern Women's Convention, which we've been doing for the best part of a decade every year now, I believe.

On friday morning, we set up our whole smaller OB unit (the bus - aka "The Tardis") at the main office for devotions, we filmed a bunch of stories people were telling. We hadn't set up the unit in a while, so this was good to check everything was working before the Women's convention... one bad camera cable, one missing focus adaptor, not much else actually wrong.

Two weeks ago, just before going off to Malta I ran sound and we did a spill-over room for the local Baptist church - as they had a new minister arriving (for the first time in decades) and so there were a few hundred people along. I'm in the middle of overhauling our sound equipment / side-racks stuff, so it's good as well getting these smaller gigs to test things on.

I also went down to the Quinta and ran sound for them for their big 30 years Quinta+OM celebration a few weeks ago.

I do enjoy doing live sound stuff. I still wonder quite frequently if I should somehow go and do some more official training for it...

Oh well.

So, that's the grand scope of my last few months, I'll post more details soon.

This week...

2010-06-18T18:03:00.003+03:00

Some pictures from the week.

Treatment for insect bites.

Measurements of the new theatre building.

My blender mockup. We're still discussing.

You can't work efficiently in blender on a laptop without an external keyboard and mouse.

Beautiful Greek letters! I find keyboards and mice from supermarkets are the cheapest, and the longest lasting. Apple and Microsoft branded mice - just say NO!

More clutter destined for the trash.

Why it may be worth going to Sunday Morning "Church Services"

2010-06-16T15:56:00.002+03:00

At a Sunday morning in Birmingham, the dude running the event got up to lead a prayer. Being an Anglican service, it was a pre-written one. Alas, he picked the wrong one, and only realised half way through:

"Lord God, we have sinned, oops. Sorry..."

Thoughts...

2010-06-10T21:44:00.004+03:00

We've booked our tickets to leave Cyprus in a month-ish. This time has gone SO fast ... it did last time too.

I've started thinking about "stuff". Very vague, I know. More, possessions type stuff. Here's a picture of my cupboard:

as you can see, crammed full of all kinds of bits and pieces. From recorders (blockflöten) to juggling balls to old marmite jars with elastic bands to rope to old telephones to candles to old CD players to scissors...

I know I'm naturally something of a hoarder, and don't want to throw stuff away... but on Doulos I think I either learned to be more balanced, or else some how got even more messed up! :-)

By the time I left AV, I had picked up quite a bit of "are we using it? No? Is it working? No? OK, then throw it away." - I know Ant and Adam will claim somewhat otherwise *cough*oldA&Hsound-desks*cough* - but I know I've actually changed a lot. So now, looking at all this stuff in my cupboard, things I haven't used in over 4 years now... I find it really hard to want to keep it.

How is it helping me to have this here? How is it helping anyone? Am I using it? No. Is it working? Well, some of it, kind of. Will I use it again?

Probably not... well... some of it? Maybe?

Sentimental value seems to be something I no longer really care about much.

I've thrown out the old hand-made juggling clubs (plastic milk bottles, newspaper and kitchen-roll centers :-) ) and broken telephones (for a juggling routine to do with communication), and some other odds and ends, but amn't sure what to do with the rest.

Does it actually behoove me ( I've been wanting to use that word for AGES! ha! Done it! ) to throw stuff away?

Now I'm going back to Carlisle for a few years, and getting married next year, I need to think more about such stuff, I guess. I will no longer be a batchelor, able to just keep random clutter in a cupboard. I'm fine with that. (I'm pretty sure I'll end up picking up more...)

I do have a lot of projects on the go at once. Juggling stuff - one day I will get back into it more; Obscure music stuff - I will take up the bagpipes one day; art stuff - I love painting, I just haven't done any for a while; computer programming - a hobby. I don't want a job of this! But a little is fun; graphic design... etc... etc...

But it's not very efficient. I know I need to prioritise, cut away the cruft. I don't NEED this stuff! But maybe not? Maybe actually having lots of clutter and things on the go is actually how I function best? Or maybe not?

Isn't it great being decisive? Well, perhaps? Or perhaps not? Some times? Er...

So.

2010-06-06T09:05:00.001+03:00

How do you make big announcements?

Do you blow trumpets and dance and stuff?

Or pretend like nothing is up and act all blasé?

Which is less pretentious? Which is less gauche? (I am enjoying using all these fancy words, but I have to use the flippin' spell checker to make sure I get them right, which rather spoils the whole sophisticated air of the thing. Oh well.)

I kind of feel I should respect my British heritage, and get all worked up about the tiniest things (such as toasters, knots, AV, coffee machines, and so on) and drop big announcements as if they're specks of dust being flicked from ones mess-jacket (not that I have a mess jacket, but it sounds right, Bertie Woosterish).

Enough of this blithering.

I'm engaged to be married to the most wonderful girl in the world! Life is a happy thing, full of kittens and sunshine and gentle summer breezes, and stuff!

Hopefully that somewhat fell between the lines of fanfare and faux pas, hint and hyperbole, I shall now go and dance for a bit.

The Abomination is Dead.

2010-06-03T17:57:00.003+03:00

I don't like Mobile Phones.

I was somewhat forced by various parents (well, mine, actually) to take one with me, when I first went off to Doulos, 5 years ago.

Here it is:

I named it "The Abomination".

5 years later, I have conceded that they are somewhat useful. Alas, I dropped it this week. It now only does this:

So it is deceased. Good bye Abomination.

Rest in Pieces.

Larnaca

2010-05-26T16:58:00.003+03:00

We've been in Larnaca for a couple of weeks now, it's good spending time with mum and dad, the cats, friends, supporters, etc.

Not so good are the mozzie bites. I'm being rather eaten - if it's not mozzies, it's some other kind of wee beastie of the "eating daniel" variety.

We've been spending a lot of time reading, resting, and meeting people.

And playing a LOT of Settlers of Catan, probably the best board game around.

between a clock and the next place...

2010-05-02T14:37:00.005+03:00

Again, it's that weird time - about a week before leaving. Time to start packing and preparing, yet also not quite late enough that you can pack everything without needing to unpack bits again over the next week.

I've just been reading this book, which is quite challenging. I recomend reading it. Basically, it's the story of a young radical student type, who couldn't sit back and watch all the injustice and insanity in the world, and couldn't support ways to end it from his couch or by sending a tenner a month to TearFund, but actually had to get his hands dirty, go live with the homeless in his area, visit Mother Teresa, work with them, and so on. The longish review on Amazon.co.uk is good - it is quite an americo-centric take on things. But suck the juice, spit the pips, you know.

So - yeah. Becky and I will be heading over to Cyprus in about a week, for a few months. It feels quite weird. We should be back here by September, God willing. So many details to organise, and also so much to just trust God about, things we have no control over.

Oh, btw, Bridget, this photo is for you:

OMNIvision's new mobile book shop opened for the first time yesterday! Since Becky has been running the thing so far, sorting the books and generally making things happen, she was running the cashdesk (the ones from Doulos, strangely enough, which got shipped over to us) and I was able to take her out for a tea and cheesecake break in the afternoon. Cheesecake is good stuff. The bookshop is doing well, we're all pretty excited to be able to provide this service for the church in Carlisle.

And here's the last photo for the day:

Playing with my camera, I found some open source firmware which lets me do very fast shutter speeds. A bit of a hack, but hey. Fun to play with.

at quinta again

2010-04-11T22:16:00.002+03:00

Back from Spain. It went really well. Really great people, and it was cool helping to support technically all these guys who are so excited by what they're doing.

Quite a surprise that some friends from Cyprus were particpants at the conference! So it was quite cool meeting up with them!

We've been back a week now. Becky was with some friends down south, and I was up in Carlisle finishing off some projects, and then we met up again on Friday, here at the Quinta.

Last time I was here, was for a few days break after my first 2 years on Doulos. I'm now here with Becky for a couple of days debrief with our home-office, and talking to some of the new people who are joining the company in september about life on board the ships.

It's again quiet, relaxing, and also very good hanging out with some of my friends from the Doulos who are living and working here now.

I managed to spend catch lunch with my brother and some friends in Birmingham on the way down.

Here's a crazy story:

Trying to buy tickets to get here, straight from Carlisle to Quinta would cost 40 pounds+... but if I booked Carlisle to Birmingham, and then Birmingham to Quinta, it cost 26.

I do NOT understand why. I blaim computers. They're evil. It's all a conspiracy.

We only have a few weeks more at Carlisle, for now, and hope to fly to Cyprus in about a month. Probably.

Then, hopefully, God willing, etc, to come back here for a few years starting some time in the summer.

We'll see how that all goes.

Travelling again...

2010-03-19T16:17:00.003+02:00

This evening we'll be heading down to catch a ferry to Spain.

Exotic holiday time? Um, no.

Eloping? Um, also no.

Work? Yes. My name's Daniel, and I'm a workaholic. I know.

So, there's a conference in Spain, which our team here is covering the audio/visual side of. So we'll take the Outside Broadcast bus down by ferry, stuffed to the gunwhales (if busses have gunwhales, but anyway. Stuffed...) with equipment, and also a blue van equally stuffed full of equipment. Due to ferry time-tables, we arrive a bit earlier than we need to, so Becky and I can visit her mum for a day or so en route - which is pretty cool! Then we'll arrive at the hotel, and set up. The reason for the whole bus is that they also want everything videod and recorded, so we'll be doing a 3 camera shoot, and producing DVDs of it.

Becky will be running a camera, while I'll be in the bus operating the Camera Control Units, routing, recording, graphics and so on. I'm quite new at this - and while I got to do some last time I was with the team 2 years ago, I'm also quite glad that it's the usual chief engineer directing, so I can learn from him.

Anyway. Time to go and pack...

What the heck is twitter?

2010-03-16T18:46:00.002+02:00

Apparently there's this new thing called Twitter gone and showed up while I was out drifting the ocean waves.

What the heck is it?

Just WHY is it popular?

What is the point, pray?

Why do posts look so UGLY with it?

Is there any reason to use it, and how can it be used usefully?

Half the media seem obsessed with it, the other half seem scornfully scathing of it...

New Blogging Software...

2010-03-09T23:19:00.001+02:00

I just got some software, “MacJournal” which looks like it may be cool, I bought it with a bundle of other stuff. Hopefully this helps me to be a bit more disciplined with my blogging.

Let’s see.

New Blogging Software...

2010-03-09T23:19:00.000+02:00

So... Blogging.

2010-03-04T22:10:00.002+02:00

Today marks 2 months of Becky and me being at OMNIvision, up in Carlisle. Time... is weird. It has gone so fast, and yet it seems like we've been here for only a few weeks, and yet Doulos is like another world away in the past.

I guess there will be another 200 odd people around the globe feeling the same way right now... and about 300 people every year have been feeling that for the last 30 years.

Our work is a bit random - we hardly know what we'll be doing, one day to the next. We spent a lot of time in our first week or two pulling wires out of a big OB truck, then about 10 days sorting out books, inventorying, etc, then a few days moving a server rack across the building, including making and crimping all the new cables/extensions. Then a bunch of random small editing projects, a live concert in Manchester (me on a camera, Becky as my "cable monkey"), Becky is working a lot on admin stuff - figuring out some of the shipping arrangements for equipment, and writing the OMNIvision manual, and I've been doing some cleaning, sorting, lighting design, editing, fixing stuff, inventorying equipment, measuring cables, pulling electric cables through ceiling spaces, writing 30 second advert clips, and so on...

Yes. Quite busy.

And yet, not... it feels in some ways a lot more relaxed and slow than Doulos... yet also it feels a bit like I have less free time.

Becky and I live about 20 minutes walk apart, and neither of us have cars. The Office - where we go 2 mornings a week - is 15 minutes one direction, and the Studio - where we work the rest of the time - is 20 minutes the other direction. Busses are slow, somewhat irregular, and expensive, so we're spending a LOT of time travelling. Also all the regular domestic stuff - cleaning, cooking, washing up, etc, takes time. On Doulos, I'd frequently be working until 6.15, pop down to the dining room, grab a plate of food, and the continue working while eating my meal. Same for lunch, and often Breakfast. Here, a meal can take over an hour. I guess it's good, helping me to slow down... but BOY is it frustrating.

Like yesterday, I hoped to get a video project edited and finished... but then after Prayer Breakfast at the Office, I got a lift to the Shed (where we keep the vechicals), and picked up some equipment there, then got a lift to the Studio, and it was already 12.30. At lunch, there were a whole bunch of announcements and talking... and then with computers taking a long time to work, and Final Cut Server being a pain, I didn't actually get to editing until 2.30pm!! And then Final Cut Pro decided to act stupid and to forget half the work I did with the Multi-Camera Editing tool (which otherwise is VERY cool...).... So I only really got about 2 hours work done. Still, I'd done enough prep work with the lighting to make the keying and stuff a fairly easy job. I spent most of today editing too, and so that's another piece basically finished.

I'm not sure if I like editing and that or not... in some ways it's a lot of fun, and I do enjoy it. Yet I also miss "live" theatre.

So. That's a bit about what we've been up to. I'll blog more about future plans... in the future.

Contrasts

2010-02-17T21:10:00.004+02:00

Very Hot:

Very Cold:

email down...

2009-12-23T14:28:00.000+02:00

Hello. Not especially bloggy, but enough people read this who might want to email me that it's worth saying...

I.T. have re-routed my on-board email to go to my gmail account, which is fine. The trouble is that I can't access my gmail on board, as their firewall blocks it. So I'm offline re. email until next week some time, probably.

Kind of makes things on board a bit more complex too, as almost all meetings and information about various events, etc, is communicated via email.

I'll try and go to the mall or something and get email access there somehow, but it'll be sporadic at best.

Today...

2009-12-20T16:50:00.000+02:00

We saw a Penguin today, and named it Bridget.

Long time no update...

2009-12-14T22:21:00.000+02:00

So I guess I'd better try and get back into the swing of things.

Well, it finally happened. Doulos is officially ending. In just under 3 weeks time.

Surprised? Well, I wasn't. We'd known that many issues were coming to light during the drydock, and it turned out the issues were more than were worth trying to sort out, for an increasingly short possible length of time.

You can read more about it on http://www.doulos.org/ if you hadn't already heard...

It's been public for about a month now, I guess... and so my girlfriend and I will be leaving Doulos in exactly 2 weeks.

We'll be going to work with OMNIvision for a few months, hoping to get a clearer notion as to whether we should go back there for a few years longer, later next year.

Right now, I'm pretty tired. I'm officially not AV any more, but working in training department, but still with many AV commitments, and jobs. I've not been able to hand over some of the last bits to my friend and replacement, as too many bits were caught up in the whole drydock thing, which didn't really end solidly, so stuff just dragged out.

I'm getting bits of my new jobs kind of messed up to - down to forgetting to organize someone to lead music this morning at the "Tuesday Morning Devotions".

I'm horribly behind with email, blog, newletters, packing and preparing to leave here soon, I'm behind on days-off, I have large projects I don't even know where to start on, and so on.

I'm writing this at 5am, after having stayed up all night working with the videographer on finishing an "End of Doulos" presentation video which is needed later today. I was mainly doing audio engineering / cleaning up work. We still need one shot, and so a couple of guys are heading out at in half an hour to go shoot it - us sailing Doulos into Vivo City in Singapore for the final time. Then it'll be rendering all day until getting shown this evening.

I also need to rig up an amplifier for some speakers in the bookshop this morning, and then I'm going out off the ship with the other Training Department people for the day.

It's busy.

More Before and After pics

2009-11-12T06:50:00.005+02:00

Here you go, Carlien.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

With nowt but vacuum cleaner and soft paintbrush (of course not stolen from Liezel, who's doing much more interesting things this dry-dock), this has got to be one of the most satisfying and easy jobs on the ship.

Non-AV post

2009-11-10T13:28:00.002+02:00

So, dry dock continues.

I'm not hugely productive, alas.

I just can't seem to build up momentum to get a whole lot done in a day. I suspect a large part of it may be how horribly messy AV is right now. I'll spend as much time as I need tomorrow in cleaning up.

So, other stuff.

A List Apart is a really cool website. I've done enough web design to find the articles very interesting, and was just reading some of the ones about typography. I think I need to work on my blog to make it a little more beautiful to read.

It's unfortunate, I spend just enough time on the web and doing designy things to not be comfortable using the default layouts and all that, and want to make my own, but not enough to actually be able to do it very well. So the titles & dates, on this blog, for instance.

I modified the design last year while on furlough, and, having not spent enough time to really get my brain all the way around EMs and ENs, alignment, leading and everything, used something of a hack (I think) to get the date and title of each post a little closer together.

It looks OK to me, currently. However, if I forget to put a title, then it shifts up the date do that it overlaps some of the blog text.

Not good.

So, the answer, of course, is to insert a non-breaking-space into the title block.

But blogger won't let me do that! So, instead, I'll just have to keep on remembering to put in titles.

I'll be thinking a lot about vertical rhythm of text layout, and possibly make some changes to size and stuff later. I like learning these things as it helps fill in gaps in my head.

I sometimes wish for a fuller education. But given that I'm interested in EVERYTHING, it could take a while. Someone suggested I take a Liberal Arts degree or something like that. But then that doesn't really cover physics, electronic engineering , accoustics, psycology, software design, or that. It might help my spelling, I guess.

If I get a chance (which means, a bunch of years in a stable job with enough free time), then I may try and do something like that by corrospondence. But otherwise, I have wikipedia, a list apart, google, and the other tools of the 2009 home-educator's mind...

...

2009-11-09T02:29:00.003+02:00

I found out that some of our panels were modified by someone in the past to do ... interesting things.

Home built new video-patch panel. Waaay more sensible, understandable, and usable.

AV updates, mid drydock.

2009-11-09T02:13:00.003+02:00

Before:
After:

I think it looks a little better. Still messy, but at least understandable. Pretty much everything is plugged in now, and from preliminary tests, we appear to have somewhat better clarity in EVERYTHING, and some of the video signals are visibly higher signal-to-noise with much less interference.

We bought two new audio patch panels too, Behringer ones. Strangely, Behringer also seem to do unbalanced patch panels. Fortunately, the shop had both, and I noticed. What on earth would anyone want unbalanced patch panels for?!

I also had to butcher the two panels which we were replacing to get enough parts to fix a third panel which was very glitchy. Here are some of the internals which are slightly broken.

You can see a bit of corrosion on the top contact - even with jackplug cleaners and everything, the equipment is just plain old.

Today, hopefully, I can do the full system tests (need to borrow a oscilliscope and reference signal generators...), and then get the whole thing boxed up and leave it until the end of drydock. Then I can work on more fun projects. Videos, song composition, etc.

That's all for now, I'll post more shorter posts later, with more pictures.

Life carries on...

2009-09-20T18:06:00.001+03:00

So. Short post.

We're in KK, Malaysia. Beautiful place.

A whole bunch of people left, and a whole bunch of new 'uns joined.

The crazy Swedish dude left my AV team and headed home, after two years on board, and now I've got a new American the team. It's fun training him, although kind of strange. I've taught AV stuff to so many people now. It's hard to remember what I've taught to whom. I've got a basic Doulos AV curriculum, finally, but it's difficult to get it all together. Theres so many little bits of randomness.

So now the team is one Korean, one Brit, one American, and one confused-not-quite-sure-ean(me).

Amongst the new recruits is one of my friends from the UK, which is very cool. She seems to be enjoying the ship so far, and is working in the "Accomedation" team, cleaning the inside of the ship, doing the laundry, running the bookshop cafe, etc.

Anyway. So. This was intended to be a short post, and mostly informational...

Yeah.

It's my girlfriend's birthday tomorrow. The whole present-buying-birthday-celebration-rituals-cultures-thing terrifies me. Like, I dunno. Something about my INFP/TCK nature, I guess. I want everything I do to be meaningful, and genuine. Especially with those who are really dear to me. That's the INFP side... But also, I feel like so many things (such as buying presents on birthdays, putting up signs, cards, etc) are very superficial, and just a crass part of some culture.

I want to buy presents that are really real - not just bought "because" of the birthday. Yet I don't know if buying presents *for* the birthday, like, "doing the birthday thing" is also a way of being real, within a culture?

I don't totally relate personally to any culture, really, and find almost all cultures have things which offend me, and which I don't fit into.

Also, on the other hand, more practically, I know that there is an element I also probably ought to have of simply "Daniel, just grow up, accept the fact that you're not all that great at buying presents, so get over it, stop making all these stupid theoretical excuses and work harder than everyone else to actually do it well, and on time. Stop being so lazy."

Oh dear.

2009-09-08T07:41:00.001+03:00

Modern Christianity.

2009-09-06T06:29:00.000+03:00

We're not sure of the difference between baseless optimism and faith.

Blinded by love?

2009-08-31T12:45:00.000+03:00

Just a random thought.

I was walking past a sign today, I don't remember what the whole sign was about, but it contained the phrase "love makes you blind".

Does it?

It's a weird concept. I know what it means, but isn't it kind of antithetical to what we would want to believe?

We say love (in it's purest form) is the highest of virtues, biblically, it's one of our main goals, God uses "love" to describe himself, Paul waxes lyrical about it, and almost every page of the scriptures are saturated in it. Songs have been written from the beginning of time about it.

Surely love does the opposite of blinding. It's only in love that we are actually able to see. Without love, we are blind.

If what we call "Love" causes us to no longer see (flaws, problems, sins, etc), then is it really love? Or infatuation, idolatry?

Bolts and other bits and bobs

2009-08-11T16:10:00.003+03:00

Ever wonder what a stainless steel bolt looks like when it completely rusts into oblivion?

Well. Now you know. This fell off one of our lifeboats. Makes you feel very secure, right?

This is the latest addition to the AV room:

It's getting quite full, these days. Well, it has been for YEARS now. Any time we want to change anything, it gets quite major and complicated, trying to shuffle things around. Basically, I was fed up of having our stationary drawer jam because of too many tools inside it, so had the carpenters make us this. Makes me feel all reminiscent of the keyshop. *sigh* good old days.

Here it is, in place. As you can tell, the room isn't all that tidy, still. Just SO MUCH STUFF! Other additions, the mug hooks on the wall, the per-day form hooks too, and also a removable wall-mount for the fan (which always used to just sit on the floor and get kicked...)

and lastly, we've FINALLY got the slot on the door for request forms!

exciting! I'll post pictures of the opposite side of this amazing slot soon. It's small, subtle, elegantly engineered and discreet. You'll love it.

Avoid Sudoku!

2009-07-13T08:55:00.002+03:00

I hardly ever do Sudoku.

But occasionally I fall into temptation, and picked up the following problem:


[4][ ][ ] [ ][ ][3] [ ][9][ ]
[5][1][ ] [ ][4][8] [ ][2][7]
[ ][2][ ] [ ][9][ ] [ ][8][ ]

[ ][4][ ] [3][7][ ] [2][ ][ ]
[7][ ][2] [ ][8][ ] [9][ ][ ]
[ ][ ][6] [ ][1][ ] [ ][5][3]

[ ][ ][7] [8][6][ ] [4][ ][9]
[9][6][ ] [ ][ ][7] [ ][ ][2]
[ ][ ][4] [ ][ ][1] [ ][7][ ]

Apparently DEAD EASY to do. It took me about 2 minutes.

Except the last 4 squares, which are impossible.

I'm almost annoyed enough to almost go learn what the rules for making a sudoku are, and find out which one this particular sudoku has broken.

Grr.

"I don't like being a Post-Modernist"

2009-05-23T16:39:00.000+03:00

It sucks.

I'm somewhat tempted to leave the post at that, but feel a little elaboration may be at least polite.

We are finite individuals. We cannot know completely, comprehensively. We can only know in part.

Modernism claims that we can know definately. That our knowing something to be true can be true, and right, and accurate.

I don't believe that. Our finite, human perspective is so limited, so small, so warped, that how can any one human's perception be absolutely comprehensively true? It could, in theory, be an absolutely honest viewpoint, but a small, finite, limited and warped honest viewpoint, nevertheless.

So then. Where does that lead us?

Claims of truth being relative.

Counter-claims by modernists that not believing in God as absolute truth absolutely denies you access to Him.

Declarations of nonsensical "Pan-Everythingism" as Francis Shaeffer would call it.

Refutations by absolute logic.

Definitions of logic as equally relative and therefore meaningless.

I dunno.

-------

There is a road, and along the road there are signs pointing along it. Some travellers wear green-tinted glasses and so say "The Signs are Green! Unless You Believe In the True Greenness Of The Signs, You Will Never Reach The Destination!"

Others have red tinted glasses, and so say exactly the same, "The Signs are Red! Unless You Believe In The True Redness Of The Signs, You Will Never Reach The Destination!"

Others wear glasses where the tint is red at the top, green at the bottom, yellow on the left, blue on the right, and purple in the middle. "It depends which way you hold your head!" They say. "Everyone has their own perspective on the signs. There is no absolute colour of the signs."

I have several sets of glasses, and I can put them both on. Neither of them really fit my nose, but without them my sight is so poor I can barely see anything. Everything looks distorted, confused, and wrong when I wear the glasses, and I don't want to settle on any one of them.

I want the sign maker to come, take my hand, and lead me to His home: the destination at the end of the road to which the signs point.

I trust Him. I don't know fully where I'm walking, but maybe that's enough.

broken stuff

2009-05-13T19:17:00.002+03:00

I don't like broken stuff.

Currently:

Our main pulpit/lecturn mix suddenly for no apparent reason completely died. No signal, *nothing* any more.

About half the outputs of the audio distributor. Why? I dunno.

The door request form box (as of about a month. The carpenter finally came around yesterday, and said maybe he'll get a chance to fix it sometime in a few weeks time...)

Two more of the TVs in our "Main Lounge" auditaurium seem to be going on the blink, just a little.

The main desk connector for the camera control unit doesn't seem to be able to last longer than about a month. It's broken again.

The door between our main and forward lounges. This time the carpenters don't seem to know how to fix it or what to do.

The main stage floodlights dimmer knob has become suddenly wobbly and probably the whole unit needs taking off and fixing.

The port side BOSE speaker is making funny noises. It sounds like it's bust a cone or something. Fluttery. I need to investigate that as well sometime soon.

The main rack preview monitor is (I think) giving out some kind of weird electrical/magnetic/radio/something interference on to every other video signal in the vicinty. As soon as it's switched off, a whole bunch of problems go away.

The AV room amplifier/speakers are distorted.

Almost all of the mics seem somewhat wobbly on the ends of all the cables, and occasionally drop out.

For some reason I've not been able to get our usual wireless bodypack to connect to the violist's pickup/bodypack, and so have had to use a SM57 for him for about a month. It always worked before, and I can't see anything that's changed. We only ever encounter problems like this during a 10 minute line-check and so don't have time to fully explore what's not working.

I've only got 3 mostly working DI boxes left.

I've got 4 VHS tape players in the rack, because they are all only capable of playing some kinds of VHS tapes correctly.

All of the amps have been dropping out occasionally, randomly.

The book shop sound system is falling apart, I fear. The fan in the amp sounds about as loud as a whole fanroom is supposed to.

The main computer VGA->composite video scan converter is distinctly unhappy, and takes about 10 minutes to turn on.

The computer sound input is *very* noisy. I don't know why.

I have two wireless mics in the UK for repairs right now. Hopefully they'll make their way back here in a fixed condition at some point.

The video distributor for the Book Ex screens seems to be glitchy.

All of the jackfield/patchpanels are somewhat ... odd. I'm working my way through cleaning them all, but some of them just seem sad and tired. the sockets wiggle about and the connections as glitchy as you would expect.

The folding doors between our port and main lounges seems a bit squint and is now very hard to open or close.

The rubber mats on the starboard side one is equally falling apart.

Our chair broke again today.

The beanbag is more like just a bag now.

All of the music stands are slightly broken.

All of the mic stands are slightly broken.

And that's just off the top of my head right now.

...

I'm just plain tired of it all.

I have no training or knowledge about anything. I'm just a headless chicken, running around bleeding all over the place.

And I suck so much at delegation and actually getting other people to get things done, that it feels like nothing is getting done.

I know that's not true.

I'm just tired and complaining. I should shut up, finish the port shedule, and go to bed.

--

Oh yes. I just remembered the whole point of this post.

Yeah. Anyway. So, we've got so much *stuff*. It's insane. So many things. We're incredibly blessed, I guess is the good christian way of saying it. We could do without so much. We don't, honestly, NEED a lecturn mic. Yes, a mic on a stand next the lecturn looks ugly, but hey, looking good isn't a need, right? Most of what gets actually spoken through it is boring anyway. And we don't need non-distorting preview speakers in AV. Just enough to hear "oh yes, there's sound!", right? Most of the sound we have to play sounds bad in the first place, so what's the point of telling just exactly how bad it is? And it doesn't matter if there are wavey interference lines all over all the TVs, becauase as long as the audience can see at all, anything else is just "nice" but not "needed"?

I dunno. I'm frustrated. I don't know what is actually needed or what is just nice. I could make most shows happen with just a boom-box, laptop, and kareoke mic. It would sound and look a lot worse than currently, but it would still happen.

So much of the musicians themselves are so undertrained and unarranged, getting better speakers in the ceiling would help a little, but somehow persuading them "y'all don't actually have to strum every single chord in every single bar in every single song!" would help a lot more...

I've lost perspective, I think. I'm working out of what I think I can kind of expect, given the current state of things, but it's hard to know what stuff is my vision for improvement, what stuff is worth replacing, what parts of the work should be continued, what should be scrapped, etc.

The grass is always greener, though, hey?

If I could actually spend my whole time teaching music theory, I'd wish I could just do easy stuff like fixing mic cables and not have to worry about how to explain syncopation.

Funny. Being human and all.

"Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus."

A few days mixing

2009-05-09T20:58:00.001+03:00

You know you're not going to enjoy the evening when you get told before sound-check "make sure I'm very quiet in the mix, because I'm out of practice".

That was a few days ago. Today:

Our keyboard output stopped working between soundcheck and performance. We didn't know until there just was no sound as the musician hit her cue *after* the soloist started singing. We couldn't do anything in time, eventually we managed to get it working for about half the piece, and they carried on very professionally, but it died again. She left the stage in tears. That really makes you feel crap as a sound-guy.

We then got a SM58 microphone and clamped it to the top of the keyboard's built in speakers. That worked well enough for the rest of the show.

I hate stuff like that.

It's fun, showing up at venues, and having comments like "Oh yes, well, all the tweeters are blown, that's why it sounds bad. We haven't replaced them yet". (Well. Thanks for telling us the same day we need them!)

I spent about an hour today trying to figure out the wiring for the venue on shore, it was "broken". everything held together with tape, wires coming out of the wall without labels. I managed to get some working, and watching the little blue sparks flying around was quite amusing when I was trying to find which speakers were attached to which wires, and which amplifers actually worked... I gave up eventually and just used our own speakers.

I screwed up a lot today. It could have been a much better performance. I didn't manage to get the compressors hooked up into the system in time, even. And the MC and translator were all over the place with their level. Crying out for compression. Painful, even.

If someone feels like randomly donating something expensive to me/Doulos, I really wouldn't mind about 4 or 5 of these: http://www.amazon.com/DBX-1046-Quad-Compressor-Limiter/dp/B0002H0QHI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=musical-instruments&qid=1241888411&sr=1-1 ...

I really need to start playing worst-case-scenario with my people more. I can generally problem solve and get something working "well enough" fast, but they can't (yet), and I could do so much more, and better, if I could a few arrange things ahead of time, and think in advance, and not do everything by the seat of my pants.

*sigh* So much to work on. So much to do.

TV stuff

2009-04-29T03:29:00.004+03:00

Here's a conundrum for you.

If you're not interested in video, then this may be boring as anything for you.

Then again, you might find it facinating.

OK. Here's the deal. A conference, and it's Mandarin. The main speaker is American, and speaks no Mandarin whatsoever. So he has a translator. No problem. Now say you have an audience of 300-ish, and are using live video to show the speaker on TVs around the room so people can see. OK, again, no problem. But, since the speaker and the translator decided to stand far apart, if you show a shot wide enough to get them both, they're so small on screen that it's totally pointless putting them on screen. Usually, I believe, it's normal to just go for a close-up of the speaker. So, then, if you have audience who are all old people and probably somewhat hard of hearing, they'll want to lip-read the translator at least somewhat. So. What to do? Cutting back and forth between two cameras is too much work, and tiring, and probably more annoying to watch than anything else.

I tried to be a bit clever and "TVish" this time, but I still am not totally pleased with it.
If the speaker and translator decide to move around a lot, remote cameras just will not cut it.

Can you fix this?

2009-04-24T06:27:00.002+03:00

"We dropped this. I think it's broken."

"Can you fix this please?"

Long time no update

2009-04-09T17:25:00.004+03:00

Hi Blog.

Long time no update, I blame I.T. and specifically I blame Blip, who works in I.T. I don't blame her because it's probably her fault, but because she deserves it. I can't access blogspot, so have to go back to the old email-mum-with-stuff-to-blog method.

Anyway.

So. Many changes in the last few months.

I went on break for a week last port in Manila. Yes, Manila again. So I've been there 3 times now, total of 3 months. Quite cool. Anyway, we only managed to actually get to where we wanted to go for 2 days of the week of shore-leave, but it was so peaceful there. We went up to the mountains, near a place called Taal where there's a volcano and so on.

Back on the ship, AV wise, I've been doing a bit more guerrilla carpentry.

Here's our laptop/workstation. Things to note: the amazing wall-mount for the screen. Made from 100% recyclable natural products. Also, the big screen is showing mac OS. This is from Ant's mac mini which is also hidden in the shot. The laptop is the A/V laptop, and running windows. The big screen can also show the A/V second screen quite happily, just by pressing a button on the screen. So. Two computers, but only one mouse and keyboard? Yep! Thanks to the amazing "Synergy" software, you can scroll the mouse off the left of the laptop screen and it jumps onto the mac, and vice versa! Very cool.

We had a Jazz recording session last monday, our amazing sax player just left the ship, so before he went we spent a whole afternoon recording with the band, and then had an evening for the ship's company to come and hang out while the band jammed in a quiet atmosphere. This is the old 4 channel data minidisk recorder that we found in a closet and used for recording each channel individually as well as the main mix on the computer.

And team changes. Here's one of the mainstays of the AV team, who just left yesterday. She's finished her commitment on Doulos, and has gone back to Europe. I'll miss her a lot. She's American. On the team currently we have a Swedish guy, two German lunatic men, an American videographer dude, or cat, or whatever historical term of endearment he currently is using, one strapping British lad who's currently in the UK for 2 months cross-training/work with the team there (like I did last year) and me.

Notice anything? Yep. All Westerners, and all guys. In a sense, that's pretty understandable. Of the kinds of people who join the ship, the western guys tend to be the group who are into tech/arts. But, it's also quite unbalanced. So in a week's time, we'll have a new member of the team, a Korean lady! She's worked as videographer in a big church in Korea for several years, so that's quite exciting. Both of the Germans will be leaving at the end of this port, around the 30th, and the Brit will be coming back. So we'll be somewhat smaller again, hopefully we'll get someone else soon, but who knows.

Anyway. It's a time of changes. I'm excited, and hope I can use these changes to bring better changes throughout the whole team and work we do.

And finally.

This is proof that the evil sock monster exists. We put all our underwear into bags before it goes to laundry, to keep it together and not let anything get lost, and yet, somehow, I've got here 7 - yes, count them - 7 non-matching socks.

What the heck?!

Part 2

2009-01-26T05:10:00.004+02:00

OK. So finally I'm getting around to an explanation of the previous post.

My current - I'd use the word dialemma, but it's not. It's more a trilemma or quintalemma or something - is (somewhat) about copyright. The laws are fairly complex as what we're doing here is basically a live theatre venue, church, theatre company, video, dance and creative arts training and production centre, bible-school, and a few other things too. The people who were supposed to be taking care of the whole copyright thing have been doing a really poor - or at least misled - job for a number of years now, either that or else no-one ever bothered even trying to figure out what taking care of it really meant.

We're slowly getting there, I think, I hope. But currently I find myself saying more and more "no, sorry, you can't do that, that's illegal", without really having much viable alternative to offer.

And that sucks.

Part of the thing is what is copyright law really saying?

"This is mine, for me, and not for you, or for God. It's mine. Shove off."

Which people object to, obviously. Thus an argument often raised is

"Well, the artist who made this is a Christian, and so wants to glorify God, right, and we're trying to glorify Him too by using it, so we're fine to copy and edit it..."
Well. If the artist wanted you to just use it for whatever you want without checking with them first, then they wouldn't have put "Copyright 2003. For personal home use only. All rights Reserved" on it...

It gets worse with the internet.

"Hey, my pastor just sent me this really cool video I want to show in the programme tomorrow!"

"Well. The music backing to it I recognise, it's a song by Hillsong UK, and there is no copyright notice anywhere in the clip at all, one of those opening still-pictures you can see has part of a copyright label in the corner, but half cropped out, so we can safely assume that many of the images are taken uncredited from the internet, and even the one you can half read it's web address isn't being credited properly. That interview clip with the kids outside the theatre is almost certainly just filmed without their parents consent, and you want to show this clip to paying public?"

"But they played it at my church last week!"

"So?"

"So it must be alright!"

"Wrong."

"What can we do instead?"

Indeed.

So now the whole issue of making our own material. Last week a couple of the programme staff went out with a camera and asked a bunch of random people on the street questions, then asked me how to edit it (for 2 days later). So I kind of pulled stuff together, found an old recording of a couple on-board musicians jamming which kind of fit.

The end result wasn't great. In any sense. It shouldn't even have passed my own quality control.

Nevertheless, I'm trying to get the programme staff to come to us, the AV team, when they want multimedia materials, rather than them spending hours and hours making them themselves improperly, and then asking us to either fix it, or show it anyway.

Trying to build up relationships and trust and the kinds of working interaction I believe is vital for where we MUST go.

*sigh*

A big part of me wants to scrap using most video stuff altogether, as most of what we have, or can do, sucks. I want to have a very high standard, and just drop anything that fails to reach the bar.

But I want to do that with other live programme material too. Skits, songs, dramas, sermons, personal stories (yes, most personal "testimonies" suck. It's not that the people telling it have anything wrong with them. But they suck at telling it.).

So, if we want to "compete" in the world of mass <-> mass media (to coin a phrase), then we have to have some standards. Most of the visible world seems to not care tuppence for copyright, and is happy enough to disregard it on every corner.

Likewise for many issues of video "quality". Framing (putting peoples faces (and everything else) in the correct size/ratio in the right part of the screen), using tripods, cutting "with" rather than "without" the backing music, colour correction, audio normalising, S/N, compression, codecs, details, details, details.

We (in both terms of the ship, and the world), seem to have become very used to absolute crap video production quality, and to absolute crap copyright and control quality. Many argue that we should join in the mass production of media as publicity from us. I've thought about it myself, it would be very cool to have weekly video "podcasts" from the Doulos.

But can we get the video quality (including copyright) sorted out and good enough to actually DO this at a "good" level?

And production of videos for on board? Even showing of videos on board?

Is my refusing to show a video because it (to me) looks shoddy just interlectual snobbery due to some small background in multimedia?

Is my refusing to show a video because it breaks copyright me being pigheaded and daft over laws which (honestly), no-one in the room watching cares about?

So, personal integrity, and God.

Does God care if we break the law?

I think so.

Does God care if we show crap videos?

I think so too.

"But it's powerful!"

So are many things. I don't think it's stretching the truth to say a vast majority of the church and their spirituality would benefit from being more relaxed, but we're not going to start distributing tranqulisers.

Ethics

2009-01-15T17:36:00.002+02:00

"The Good is often the greatest enemy of the Best." - Maxwell
"If anyone turns a deaf ear to the law, even his prayers are detestable" - Proverbs 28:9

Which is better, to spend ones time sitting with street kids loving them and giving them hope for the future, or sitting in an office, wading through tedious documents that it's actually your duty to understand?

Which is more worthy, to slog away at understanding a law you know that 99% of people really care nothing about, nor even believe in, enforcing it over others and creating unheaval and more work and stress for all of them, or to spend time creatively working on more fun and generally well-recognised projects?

How do you find motivation to inconvienence yourself and others to a phenomincal degree, appearing to red-light and be negative to all the other people you want to encourage and help, in order to fulfil a law you don't even agree with yourself?

For the Christians in mainline western churches:

If your country declared it illegal to meet in groups larger than 15, would you keep meeting
as normal in defiance of the government and protest the loss of your "rights", or find a way to keep "doing" church and fulfilling the call of the bible within the constraints of the law?

Which is more important: Comfortably doing what you're used to, or uncomfortably denying yourself in order to be a righteous and unimpeachable testimony?

Guitar Repair

2009-01-09T11:16:00.002+02:00

Time for a short post.

My guitar has had this annoying buzz on it for months now, and I finally got around to fixing it, which basically meant opening it up, finding the buzz (a slightly loose structural support beam) and gluing it solid. No big deal, but I've been avoiding guitar practice for AGES because it annoyed me so much that I couldnt' play. It took me half an hour to fix, and now I've been practicing every day since.

Moral of the tale: Um. Do I really need to tell you?

Welcome back, me.

2009-01-07T13:53:00.003+02:00

Greetings.

It is I, author of this blog, and spokesperson of the incredibly inconsideratly inactive bloggers foundation of Doulos, and I have returned! Yea, verily, verily, etc.

So. It's been 5 weeks since I last posted, roughly. And it has been quite a busy, time, yes, of course, that's the way it is around here. And is that an excuse for not blogging? Well, probably not. But I'll use it as an excuse anyway.

We're currently sailing between Kuching, Malaysia, where we spent Christmas and New Year, to Cebu, Philippines, where we were 2 years ago.

Every 6 months or so we get a new batch of recruits, who go for 2 weeks of safety training, and that group of people is usually fairly "clannish", and are known as the "Preship" group of whichever port they did their training. So I'm from the "Sharjah Preship". Other famous past examples would be the Manila Preship, Banjul Preship, Istanbul Preship, etc, etc.

Anyway, 2 years ago we had the Cebu Preship join us, and they'll mostly be leaving in the next month or so, and the next group of recruits will also be doing their training in Cebu... This is NOT normal. It's the first time we've had this, ever, to popular knowledge. Normally it's at least 7 or 8 years between being back in the same place at the same rough time to be able to do this, so every Preship is a different city.

This might seem like a very minor thing, and from a completely outside viewpoint, it is. However, Doulos isn't just a ship full of people from different places, we also have a very strong Doulos Culture, which has devleopped over the decades as result of our rules, regulations, work habits, and the bizarre lifestyle which we have on board.

"Preship" groups are almost like your family, or clan. Whenever someone gets up to say something in a community meeting, for instance at the end of a port when we get together to share stories of what we (and God) have been up to, most people will introduce themselves with something like "Hi, My name is Daniel, and I'm from Cyprus, and the Sharjah Preship!" or whatever. At this point, everyone else from Sharjah will shout and scream or chant, or whatever.

OK, so the people from Sharjah probably won't, since there's only about 5 of us left, and we never managed to get a chant to work properly, but everyone from all the other active preships on board will for their people. So, to have two groups of people from different Preships, with the same name, is a bit weird. It's like having two football teams with the same name. If they played each other, who would you cheer for?

So. There's a random piece of Doulos culture for you. Now for some thoughts about it.

We are incredibly clannish, and seem, as humans, as christians, and as Douloi, to have an innate capacity to draw lines between each other, and to divide on the slightest pretext. And partly I object to the amount that the training department push Preship identity during the training. I can also see the side whereby this "Preship " concept can be used positively to establish a home base and place for people to live and identify themselves in the community.

And identity is such a weird thing. Who are we? The good evangelical in me says something like "My identity is in Christ alone! All other things are slag!" And yeah, yeah. OK, so that is true, of course. But we do all seem to use boxes, either rigid or flexible, to put people and everything into. We constantly talk about getting "out of the box" and "not putting people in boxes", but is that really practical? People's individuality MUST trump any box we put them into, and anyone MUST be able to climb out of that box, and we must not dump people into boxes and judge them there and leave them forever, but is it possible to truly not create comparisons and labels?

Some days I get really fed up of the boxes and labels, and try to rebel.

"Hey! Are you the AV guy?"

"Nope."

"Oh. Who is working tonight then?"

"I am. I work here, but I'm not the AV guy. I'm Daniel."

I don't know. Enough rambling. It's time for sleep.

Drydock '08

2008-12-02T01:18:00.003+02:00

The sweat drips from my nose, and splashes, sizzling, onto the soldering iron.

It's roasting hot, and the cables are all around me, as squashed into a small space behind the audio rack I put the finishing touches to the new audio lines I just ran across from the desk opposite.

It's dry-dock again.My third, now, and this time, I'm just not enjoying it.

I have quite a lot on my plate at the moment, what with trying to sort out many technical issues in the A/V equipment, and also get as much as possible done to allow us to expand and use what we have better throughout this coming year.

Also, the other members of the A/V team are busy with other projects, and I'm helping out a bit again with the deck ladder-repair and making crew.

Bink!

That's the sound that the lights make when blackouts happen.

We just had another powercut.

Vrum bzzzzzt! Klunk! Klunk! Klunkklunkklunkduhduhduhduh!

That's the sound that the fanrooms make when the power comes back on again.

The power just came back on again, by the way.

So, anyway. Right.

Yeah, there's another fairly huge but unofficial project on which has pretty much sucked all the free time out of one of my team for the last 10 months - even from well before he joined AV - and also has been increasingly impinging upon the time of the rest of us.

They created an(other) unrealistic deadline to finish it before the end of this drydock, and I knew he would push all his time and energy into it.

So I pretty much gave him his work time to get this thing finished.

Which is good, I guess.

I mean, he's not dead, which if we'd pushed hard at the AV jobs as well, I think he would be.

He just wouldn't have slept at all.

We barely did anyway.

I was up until 3 one night working on an animation for the project.

Anyway.

Many of the AV tasks I had (I wrote down 58 jobs I'd have liked to either do, or investigate the feasibility of) have not been done, and most of them I didn't even get a chance to investigate how possible they were.

So.. somewhat frustrating.

The first version is done now, which is good.

Anyway.

Still plenty of logistics and miscommunication issues to sort out.

So.

What else...

I've been making sure I keep time for myself, not burning out, and part of that includes focussing more on painting and artwork.. we've begun "creative communities" on board - basically an internal art/photography/creative writing club, with picking a theme per month.

The theme last month was "Freedom".

This month it's "Love".

Here's a painting of mine - "Searching for Love"

I helped out a bit with the ladderwork again this drydock.

Pretty much the same as last year.. this time we stretched the rope slightly more thoroughly.. Check out before and after stretching:

Quite impressive.

I feel somewhat drawn out and stretched myself.

I don't think I'll snap.. but hopefully I'll be all the more resilient to whatever life throws at me in the future because of it.

And my current work in progress.

Being Nasty at the desk, and nice the rest of the time.

2008-10-30T15:06:00.003+02:00

Well... it's been busy.

It is busy!

We've left Australia, and are sailing currently to East Timor. The programme team have a new manager, who is bent on reforming them and is changing many ways of working, becoming more team based:

brainstorming rather than ivory tower development of programmes,
Flexi-time working, everyone chipping in rather than fixed hours, and so on.

The AV team isn't really part of the programmes team (go figure), but we work a lot with them, and so I've been trying to push my team into being at as much of this voyage's programme team time as possible. Attending devotions with them, being at the creativity sessions, and so on.

This morning we had a fairly good session, which I led, I was trying to get them to think outside of the box in reguards to how we use our venue. The on board "Main Lounge" is most frequently set up with all the programme happening in one "stage" section at the front, and then rows of chairs at the back, or tables in a cafe setting. Often the most transformation the room gets is having curtains put up, perhaps fairy lights and lots of flags (you know, the whole international thing).

Anyway. We can do so much more. Once we started imagining things, ideas like turning the whole room into a Japanese Garden, with an island in the middle and a moat and bridges and stuff came up. Building a slum from Manilla out of the whole room, hanging the curtains to turn it into a ginormous beduin-style tent, and so on. One group even thought of having a "Indiana Jones" type set up, with different areas of the lounge being different places around the world, tying up some of the audience with a knife suspended above their head and then dropping it on them if their team-mates didn't answer the questions of a quiz correctly...

Some of the ideas may take a little modifying. Health and Safety, you know.

Still, it was a good session, and then we looked through a lot of our video clips collection, to talk about what we can use, how we can use videos we have more effectively, and so on.

This evening was the weekly prayer-night, which this week was being run by the on board School. It was somewhat chaotic, as these kinds of things are wont to be.

Anyway, the guy who was leading the musicy part of it didn't bring me a song list at all (which is mentioned on the pre-event A/V form, which he otherwise did fill in), and then half an hour before we began, during his sound check time, he brought up two new songs which needed to be entered into the database while I was trying to sound check them... He know's it's supposed to be 24 hours before an event that they give in any new songs.

Still, I told him off, but put the songs in anyway. So, quite hectic. It all went really well in the end, and sounded pretty good, all the songs worked, and so on. Apparently I made an impression on him though, as after the evening was finished, he showed up at the sound desk with a large bar of chocolate to say sorry for being so late all the time!! Amazing!

Makin' a movie

2008-10-16T11:40:00.002+03:00

I'm working on another short film/video project. Here's a few frames from it for your enjoyment.

I'm still quite tired and frustrated and so on, but a bit better. I've had a day off since my last post, which was good, and another few days off in the next few weeks too, so that's good too. I'll be writing a longer text blogpost soon.

Handover

2008-09-28T03:51:00.003+03:00

I'm tired. I'm stressed.

I won't pretend to hide it.

I'm pissed off at the system, thoroughly fed up of how things currently are - in my work, my life, and in many things around me.

Yet, still, most things are going fairly well...

I'm now the "AV manager", and discovering more and more how disorganised and messed up it is.

We have small forms in the drawer under the computer which are used during the sunday service on board, we give out the little forms, then people can fill them in if they want to, so that they can give to the weekly offering (usually to help a local ministry, or work in India, or similar) direct from their on board account, rather than having to use cash.

Anyway, this morning, the guy running the service came up and asked for them.. We had 10. Not good enough! So, I told him a few ideas of who he could ask for more, but this was at half an hour before the service, on a Sunday Morning. Not the best time to go looking for people to do random work like that.

We need to have once a week or so someone to check how many we have, say on a Friday, and then to get at least 200 before the Sunday morning.

Not a big deal, right?

Well, no, not a problem at all. Just the problem is that there are *hundreds* of little issues like this. Every day. And *NONE* of them are written down. When I started, there were no current weekly checklists or anything.

I don't want to become a lists and rules based dictator, but how on earth else do you manage to get everything done that needs to be?

When I took over this job, there was maybe 1 hour of discussion between me and the predecessor about stuff, but none of these little details were noted. Each day day I find mord

And it was the same thing when I became waterman, 2 years ago. There's no consistancy! As soon as people leave, things get dropped.

It's why ships tend to have such strict and over the top and detailed procedures - everything gets written down.

Anyway. It's just intensely frustrating. I'm so bad at admin, so weak at organisation, so forgetful about details, so easily overwhelmed by situations, so inexperienced at leadership, so unknowledgeable about everything technical I should know about, so young!

I guess in one way it's kind of exciting. I mean, whoopee! So much stuff to learn! So much I can improve!

Yet it's kind of hard to say that and not at least have some irony and sarcasm in it too.

Yes, it's good to be stretched and have all this improvement to do, but at the same time, it's "live". We're not playing with blank bullets. Every round is for real.

Every time I start a video playing in a programme, it's not school, not training. People are in the programme, watching, and notice if things don't work.

The audience have paid, usually. The programme organiser has spend hours arranging everything, and if I screw up, it's her work that gets ruined.

Trying to set priorites, and figure out what actually is realistic and achievable...

And then how to make sure it happens. And each day discovering more things which have got dropped and then not only do we need to carry it, but we have to stop, pick it up, clean it, do repairs on it, and then start carrying it again.

I could go on. My list of current frustrations and things we're doing badly is pretty much endless.

And I know I'm a perfectionist, but this isn't perfectionism.. This is realism.

Wireless Microphone Batteries Dying mid-show
Cables going glitchy
Videos playing during rehearsal but then refusing to play in performance
Audio levels on all videos being different and needing constant riding
Audio patch-panels/jackfields acting
The trash not getting taken every day
The room looking a mess all the time
Cables not getting fixed or taken out when they break

Those are all itty bitty technical details. But they effect almost every programme we do.

And why?! Why have they not been fixed? And how can they be fixed easily, or at least dealt with, or worked around?

Well, they can. But we're lacking any way to report problems, to deal with them, or do anything in a purposeful or directed way.

And it's not just about technical details. Those are the easiest for me to see - of course - and those are the bits that are our job. From a programme side, this show up as mics dying unexpectedly, feedback, disruption, long pauses, lack of flow and professionalism, etc, etc, etc.

And we've all become so accepting of it! And that's wrong. We cannot accept crap, when we are capable of beauty, and if we're not capable of exquisite complex beauty, then we must simplfy until what we do is excellent at that level.

There's so much attitude and team thinking that has to change too, and just as soon if not before the technical bits can get solved. I really am trying to focus on the people, in the team and those we work with/for, and that's a topic for a whole other post, or possibly whole other blog. So I'll just stick with the technical day to day bits today.

Everything is so reactive. Like the offering forms this morning. Having problems show up, and then deal with them.

Honestly, we - the ship - has been doing programmes for so long now that ALL of these things should have become non-issues. And once we can get out of this constanct scrambling to pick up the pieces of something that's just exploded, or running around like headless chickens to stop something from exploding, then we can actually start enjoying it, and being creative and actually going somewhere positive and improving.

But man, it's tiring right now.

Un-named Haiku

2008-09-18T09:00:00.001+03:00

This blog post is short.
It is for my friend Bridget.
The sentence count: three.

Getting to know me, or not.

2008-08-31T12:07:00.003+03:00

Good morning, blog. Although, actually, it's more like evening, seeing as how it's 7pm and everything.

It's probably morning somewhere in the world.

I have a friend on this ship who has a fetish for "Awkward moments". I'm sure he wouldn't like it to be called a fetish, but whatever, he really loves them. He savours them, as a connesour, specially saving them up and preparing them, finely planning moments of Awkwardness in the same way that a conductor of an orchestra prepares the finale of a grand opera.

He'll often say stuff intentionally to make people uncomfortable.

So I asked about a week or two ago, why?

And his response was something like,

(a) it's fun,
(b) I enjoy seeing how people really are.

And the second one is the bit that I took issue with.

He said watching how people react when they don't know how to respond gives a great insight into them, and let's you see them without the pretence and acting that accompanies so much of human interaction.

What's there to take issue with?

Well, seeing people when they don't know how to react, is that really how they "really are"?

It seems to me to smell slightly of the whole humans-are-nought-but-animals thing.

And also, the "You know the real person by seeing how they behave under pressure". - Likewise, the same.

There is some truth to it, of course. It's much easier to act nice and give a good image when you are relaxed and can concentrate on impressing others, or on behaving well, than when things are stressful and you're under pressure and don't have time to think about what to do next.

Others have also said that you know how someone is by what they do in their spare time, or when no one else is looking, and so on.

Some people seem to do well under pressure, and be able to think quickly and clearly. Others don't. Some people find it easy to find jobs to do and to use their spare time productively and pro-actively.

So... it's often very useful to know how someone behaves under pressure, but I don't think it really shows who they "really" are.

This would have been all nice and theoretical, and all that, except for this week.

I got sick.

And, it turns out, I don't act very nice when I'm sick.

Usually, when I'm healthy and fine and everything, I tend to use a lot of hyperbole, sarcasm, and irony in my general day to day language. It tends to be (I hope!) fairly good natured, and over-the-top enough that others realise it's not intended seriously.

"Could you play this CD for me?"
"Nope. It's completely impossible - the computer can only play CDs on Thursdays."

and so on.

Well, the thing is, recently I've started to tend to mix double meanings and more biting sarcasm into what I say, and, usually, it doesn't mean anything - to me.

Ie, "hey, the programme schedule says you're doing a song later, but you haven't put a form in saying you want any microphones or instruments or anything, so it's just a Capella, right?"

It appears though, my sarcasm and hyperbole and so on don't pan out so well when I'm tired/sick or stressed.

We had a wedding yesterday on board. About half way through the ceremony, right in the middle of a song just as I was mixing the band and having to be constantly mindful of the two wireless mics the MC and someone else had and things were quite hectic, when one of the people who was videoing it (a local) came over and asked "Do you have any power sockets? I need to re-charge my camera batteries".

"Yes, right here." (pointing at the sockets)

"Ah." (he pokes around)

"They don't fit..."

"Oh, right. Um, yes. It's European, sorry, the whole ship is set up with European sockets. It's a European ship, after all."

"You mean you don't have any standard sockets??" (disbelief in his voice)

And this is, I'm afraid, where my stunning wit came to the fore again, and really didn't help the situation at all.

"No, no. They're all standard sockets." *helpful smile* "European standard."

Very helpful, wasn't I. - I don't think!

Yes... I don't think. Maybe that's the problem.

I'm struggling a lot right now with trying to balance work with relationships. Not in that I work too much and don't spend enough time with people, but in that when people do things which really mucks up my work, I find it very hard to still be nice.

Part of it is I just really have no idea how to be nice.

Middle of a programme, pressing buttons and cueing video clips and trying to make the whole thing smooth and beautiful, and someone comes into the AV room from behind me, is standing right where I need to move to press a button on the video mixer, and asked "hey, would it be possible for you to play me a DVD in the other room in an hour or so?"

How do you respond to such things?

"Go away. I can't listen to you now." - Not really polite.

"Dear brother! I would be more than glad to hear from you, and to help you in any way I can, even though you've broken two of our published policies in the last 10 seconds, nevertheless, I completely forgive you and forget all about it so if you come back to me in 20 minutes then I'll be very happy to hear your request and see how I can most elegantly acquiesce to your desires." - too long, and I'm already late for a cue.

"Ask me later." - Usually what I'll try and say but, unfortunately, what people want is something they need more input for. And usually they leave it right until the last minute before asking us. Usually the reply I'll get from them (while they're still standing in the way of my mixer) is "Well, I need to know now so I can arrange a laptop or something if you can't do it."

"Oh, are you running the programme now? Since you're in the right place to press the buttons, does that mean I can leave?" - Unfortunately, something close to what's likely to be my first response.

And it's not that I really bear them any ill-feeling, or even that I mean to be nasty, mean, or sarcastic.

Sometimes as well, I've noticed I have a tendancy to use hyperbole, sometimes in ways which just don't make sense to anyone other than me:

"Oh yes, it's horribly frustrating when people forget to hand in their forms on time. I feel like screaming like a little child and jumping overboard whenever they do." - yes, it's frustrating, but not that frustrating.

I dunno.

I feel kind of like I've picked up some really rude sarcasm and humour somewhere. And especially when I'm tired, frustrated, under pressure, and sick, it really comes out and is just plain nasty to everyone.

Is this the real me, coming out at last?

Or is the real me the nice one?

"When a man's at his worst, then you see him the best."

or

"It's not how good you are, but how good you want to be".

*sigh* I have so far to go...

From Carlisle...

2008-08-20T02:50:00.002+03:00

Wind tore across the darkened misty moors of the Lake District, pounding along the side of the tent like a tidal wave breaking upon the highcliffed shoreline of a forgotten arctic land. Outside of the tent, tiny rabbits huddled together in their burrows shivering due to the icy drafts, while inside and close by rain-drenched men struggled through the mud to complete their epic task.

Less then 3 hours previously 6000 people had been standing while the melodious hymn of Amazing Grace washed around them, many, even 200 of them touched to the heart made their way forward to pray and be prayed for, to receive the greatest gift in the history of the world.

3 hours later, the knowledge of this gift was the warmth that glowed inside the men labouring to bring their flight cases, amplifiers and speakers into a truck and depart from the now empty canvas cathedral.

Finally the dismissal was given, and as the last few items were loaded in the the crew slowly dispersed. The 4 OMNIvision men removed their mud covered shoes, and climbed into their small car, and drove out through the dark unlit pathway to the main road, and off into the night.

Soaking wet, muddy and weary in mind and body, their spirits were none the less high as they left the town and none of them were expecting the sudden sliding skid towards the roundabout and the ominous crunch into the other car which told them the journey home would be longer than they had anticipated.

The driver -- a Scot -- immediately turned their car towards the side of the road and drove up onto the curve to inspect the damage. They climbed from the vehicle shocked but glad that none had been injured. The other car was significantly dented, but the driver was unhurt. After the routine exchange of sarcasm, licence and telephone numbers and insurance policy contact details, the other driver perked up and laughed. Quoth he "At least it wasn't my car, it's a company one, I'd have been really pissed off if it were mine!", whereupon he grinned, hopped in to his, or rather his company's car and drove away.

The four traveling companions were not so fortunate in their predicament. The bumper was only attached by one nut and dragging along the ground. Inside, the plastic wheel frame was twisted into the wheel, and the headlights were no longer attached and pointing in various directions. With still more than 100 miles of motorway to cover before reaching their destination, it was decided that to attempt to complete it in that mangled condition would be folly.

A phone call for help from the Automobile Association was made, and they settled back to wait for the assistance to arrive.

It was not long until it arrived, and their disfigured ride was lifted on to the tow. The driver, a friendly Newcastle man was quick and efficient, and as he climbed into the cab a few minutes later, he turned and said "No hado sinye fine sell bacun ahl droye temsix unwil mitwethe rileh tuhye hom. Shubetheh intwenni mints."

Our Scottish companion seemingly spoke this language and so replied, sitting in the passenger seat next to the driver, they passed the time chatting about the evening.

The two Germans turned to the fourth member of their party, a native of the land, although one who had spent most of his life abroad, and asked for interpretation. His eyes were as confused and uncomprehending as theirs, and much merriment was made by the continentals for his lack of understanding.

After about half an hour, they reached a certain motorway service station and they stopped there and moved the car across to a longer distance relay truck, and after buying coffee, bade farewell to the first driver, and climbed into the new cab and made acquaintance of the second.

The next 2 and a half hours passed fairly quickly, and they arrived at Carlisle before dawn had touched the skies with her pink streaked palette. The derelict car was left inside the shed, and the four weary travelers collected their belongings and went their separate ways.

I myself am one of these bold companions, and survived this ordeal with the a moral which I will now pass on to you: If you must drive around at midnight on wet and slippy roads in cars which have seen better days after yourself having worked for about 15 hours hauling heavy cases all over the place and are tired as anything, then drive slowly. Especially when approaching roundabouts.

In case you hadn't guessed, the above is from when I was in Carlisle, I wrote it as an email, but was informed that it needed to be posted as a blog article. So. Now it is.

Here's some food.
And some coffee.
I like coffee.

So, it's currently a voyage on the way to Sydney, we just finished our first port in Australia, Brisbane, hanging out in AV, blogging and emailing and listening to Flanders and Swann.

More up to date blog posts to follow, of course.

At LAST...

2008-08-13T12:23:00.001+03:00

OK. So, due to popular demand, this service will resume shortly.

It's now then.

I'm back on Doulos, I took the train down to Manchester, from where I flew to Dubai, from Dubai to Bangkok, from Bangkok to Sydney, from Sydney to Auckland, and from Auckland to Wellington where I joined up with Doulos again.

That was an epic adventure, in itself. There was a bombthreat in Dubai, with some English nutcase got himself drunk, and just as we landed got into a fight with a steward, and declared he had a "device" that he would use to blow up the plane. Of course, the crew had to take it seriously, and so we were sitting out on the tarmac for about an hour or so surrounded by police and firetrucks and SWAT teams and so on, before they managed to sort him out and let us off the plane.

Oh well, another day in the life of the brummie-not-yet-at-sea. Well, the trouble then came when about half of us from that flight were now late for our connecting flights, and so had to stay 24 hours in Dubai airport for the next plane.

If you're going to get stuck in an airport for 24 hours, it might as well be Dubai. I know it quite well, of course, and they did very nicely give me a hotel room overnight, and 3 meal vouchers. It was a bit complex trying to figure out sensible times to eat them, as I needed to leave the next morning at 6am, and was about to fly to Australia, so was trying to get my bodyclock as sorted as I could. So anyway, I slept the whole day, worked the night, and ate my mealtickets-worth at random times when I was awake.

So, right. I eventually got to Wellington, where some of my great friends were there with a ginormous paper origami crane bird thingy they'd made, attached onto a crown of old toilet-roll-cardboard, with dangly bits and all which I had to wear. It was so good to see them again. (In case you wondered). I'll see if I can find a photo of the amazing crown. It wasn't really my style, as such, but one does try to fit in, after all.

so. That was like a month ago now, and I'm settling in quite well. AV has been undergoing a few changes, some good, some... well, I have a differing opinion about them to the people who instigated them.

We're now in Brisbane, Australia. It's cool. I like it here. It's good to be back on the ship again. Many people are about to leave, and there are 60 odd new people... But, new in that they joined 6 months ago, just as I left, so they're already "old hands", yet I don't know them!

Anyway. It's traditional for me to start new paragraphs with "Anyway" for no apparent reason. Here I am, I've started writing again, and so new posts will be forthcoming, fear not. I have a few more stories from Carlisle which I'll be posting soon, but I figured it's best to get the blog going again up to date, before launching into the past.

Oh! Right, yeah. I moved cabin, so I'm now in a smaller but very nice 2-man cabin, with this funny Brazilian guy. I managed to bring my coffee-maker with me from the UK, and it looks a bit strange of course, so he was wondering what it was. I explained and he nodded and said "oh, that's nice.". Then, a few days later, when I started making coffee (using the steamer to steam some ex-vanilla-icecream that had melted, to make vanilla-lattes), he just sat and stared, and said "Dude!" occasionally. He is now, in his own words, very happy to have me as a cabinmate, and has forsworn local cafes in lieu of his own cabin. I still like the local cafes. I still have so much to learn.

So, that's the basic overview of the last 2 months or so, I'll fill in the details as and when I get time. Thanks for listening! (Or reading, or whatever)

There and back again

2008-05-30T11:49:00.003+03:00

Before I begin today's tale, there are a few things I must first explain. The first is that the UK has these things called "Bank Holiday Mondays", which basically means most people with office-type jobs don't work on random mondays throughout the year. Nobody whom I've asked seems to know what these Bank Holiday Mondays are in aid of, nevertheless, they seem quite keen on them, generally as they happen to be some of the people who don't work on these aforementioned Bank Holiday Mondays.

The second thing I'd like to mention is that I'm kind of used to the Doulos work week, which means that also, most people don't work on Mondays, however, we do work every other day, including Saturday and Sunday.

So being here in Carlisle, where the team has 2 days off per week (Saturday and Sunday) is quite a rare and interesting experience. Then these Bank Holiday Mondays on top of that, wow! It's surprising they get any work done at all! We had one of these Mondays about 2 weeks ago.

The third thing, is that you should now promptly remove all of the above from your current thoughts, but allow it to drift uninhibited and unwatched into the depths of your subconcious general knowledge. This will put you in a better frame of mind for listening to the rest of the tale, but also put you in roughly the same state as I was 4 days ago.

I got up as usual, showered, dressed, and made myself a rather tasty cappuccino with my breakfast. I headed early to the Shed to start getting some audio files ready for posting later on this week. So I got to the shed about 10 past 7, my housemate was still asleep when I left, and while I was walking to the Shed, I thought
"Once I've got these files going, I'll try walking to the Office (which is on the opposite end of town) for 9am devotions" (that we have together with the Office staff 3 times a week).

So once my audio files were happily working, I set out from the Shed at about 8:15 and started walking at a reasonable pace towards the office. I kind of hoped to see the bus at the bus stop as I went past, and maybe see my housemate on it.

No sign of the bus.

"Hm," I thought, checking my watch.

"8:23.. that bus must be a bit later than I thought."

I picked up the pace a bit, thinking, "I wonder if I can get to the office before the bus and my housemate do!" and briskly hopped down the steps to the underpass, and headed through the park.

One cool thing about Carlisle is the rabbits. There are wild rabbits all over the place! I'm sure the local farmers hate them and so on, but I quite enjoy seeing them all over the place as I walk about early in the morning, and while along the footpath I saw a rabbit jumping out of my way.

I continued up the main road, noticing a large car boot sale in the yard of the Catholic church, St. Augustine's.

(USAian translation: a "car boot sale" is a kind of a communal garage sale not in a garage, where people bring stuff in the trunk of their car (which they call a boot) to some church or other parking lot and hopefully make a bit of money for the church or whoever as well).

I'd still not seen the bus, so thought "It's 8.45, I'm sure it can't be behind me, and should have overtaken me by now, if it was, which means it must have been ahead of me when I passed the bus stop, so I must be quite a way behind schedule if I'm going to get there by 9.."

So I again increased my perambulatory velocity, and strode purposefully past the church, and up the hill towards the industrial estate.

The road was longer than I thought, and so soon it was 8.50 and I still wasn't at the office, so I again sped up and was charging along the road at as fast a walk as I could happily manage, wishing I hadn't worn my safety boots that day. I felt sure blisters were developing on my heels.

Eventually I got to the estate, and negotiated the roads between the shops and warehouses, noting the fact that it was now 9.05. Oh well, I'd be a bit late, but not too bad. I got to the office, and paused at the door.

There were no cars in the car park. That's a bit odd.. And no-one arriving late.. that's even odder. I was about to go in anyway, when I remembered that I don't remember the alarm code, and if in fact no-one was in the building, I'd have no way to switch it off, and the police would show up and drag me away and lock me up for years and years, and I'd never see my beloved ship again.

The thought didn't appeal to me too much, so I rang the mobile of one of the others on the team, to ask what was going on.

"Hallo" said he.

"Hallo" said I.

"Where is everyone?" I queried, "I'm at the office, and no-one is here."

"Ah," came the response, and with it enlightenment, "It's Bank Holiday Monday."

"What?!" disbelievingly quoth Yours Truly, "Another one?!"

Whereupon he laughed and verified that yes, it was another Bank Holiday Monday.

I sighed, squared my shoulders, and slowly began to make my way back towards the opposite end of the town, and the Shed again.

As I left the estate, I began to laugh, realising that I had indeed managed to reach the office before my housemate, but that it had done me no good at all, and all I had gained was the knowledge that the bus is indeed faster than walking, and perhaps a few more blisters on my feet.

What I really wanted was somewhere to sit down, drink coffee and rest my poor feet for a while. Pubs in the UK don't seem to open before 11am, so I couldn't even stop for a beer anywhere, which would have been equally welcome.

As I got to the church, the thought crossed my mind that perhaps they might have coffee and cakes there. So I popped into the yard, and went in search of coffee. They did have some, but nowhere to sit, and no cakes, only what a sign called "a biscuit" which rather put me off, so I wandered though the cars, and managed to find a few things I'd been looking for: a couple of small espresso cups, a mug tree for the kitchen, (40p the lot) a few more books (20p each), a cork pin board for my office (50p), a maglite and multi-tool (3 quid the pair), and a small filter machine for 2 pounds which I could take to the conferences.

Bundles of cheap second-hand clutter in bags, I continued to hobble on my merry - if slightly painful - way.

A few streets on I was accosted cheerfully, if rather extremely frailly, by an old lady who wanted to know if it was a Sunday, or in fact a Bank Holiday Monday, as they all seem the same to her. Apparently I either must deceptively look knowledgeable about such things, or I'm just perhaps the only person in this country who seems to pay any attention to other people around them. It's really weird. No-one ever wants to make eye-contact.

Anyway. I explained about having been bitten by the situation myself, and we chatted for a while. She told me (twice) that she was from the highlands of Scotland, that I shouldn't ask her why she was living in England, and that the reason she was living in England was because her husband had told her (when they were much younger) "We're going to live in Carlisle", so they did.

A brief aside: I promised my friend Kris from Doulos that I'd mention her in a blog post, and so I'll just mention that the little old lady I met was about 50 years older than you, Kris, and about half as tall.

Anyway. A very sweet lady, and quite funny and friendly too. She told me I mustn't go to work, but should go home.

I didn't however, and instead went back to the Shed - after meeting briefly a beggar in the underpass who was being ignored by the rest of the general population walking past him in that peculiarly oblivious British way - and spent the rest of the day finishing those sound files. By the end of the day my brain was almost toast after having stared at audio waveforms for almost the whole day, and half of the week before.

At least I got some exercise, I suppose.

Photo time

2008-05-23T13:36:00.005+03:00

I'm feeling a little bit Italian, right now. Not much, but just a bit.

This morning I made myself and housemate espresso before getting the bus down to the Office, where we have devotions with the office people 3 times a week.

Then for lunch, I had a mozzarella and sun-dried tomato panini, from the local "Sandwhich club" which Euan and a bunch of others often get lunch from to bring back to the Shed.

Then for dinner, I made lasagne. Myself, I kind of like this whole cooking thing. Especially when I remember to not try and burn down the house (I'll tell you about it later...), and don't squish eggs in mid air all down the side of the cupboards and on the floor, and also when I don't by accident tip the slice of cheese-on-toast over and dump hot cheese all over the base of the oven.

Yes, all of those have happened this week. I'll explain later, but right now I want to talk about my lasagne, as it really was quite OK-ish, maybe. I'm always terrifed about making food for people. But it's one of those "I'm scared because I'm scared" things, rather than "I'm scared for a good reason" things. And I'm trying to learn to (a) tell the difference, and (b), ignore the first kind of scaredness.

Well. I thought the Lasagne was alright.

Anyway. He did have seconds, so it can't have been *that* bad.

And he did say he wasn't hungry really, before eating.

Maybe that's cos I'd said I'd never made lasagne before, and he's seen all the other chaos of the kitchen I've had this week.

Anyway. So at the end of the lasagne, post washing up, what's the first thought to my mind? Well, after the Espresso, Panini and Lasagne filled day, only one thing remains!

No, it's not a good red wine. I wish we had some for dinner too, but we didn't. It is, of course,

Gelato!

OK, so we don't have any Italian icecream in the house, but we do have some old random English ice cream which past housemates have left.

And I have an espresso machine.

So, Hot frothy chocolate, and icecream! What a way to finish the day.

My otherwise quite unflappable very German
amused-in-a-quiet-way-at-Daniel's-cullenary-insanity housemate is truly
shocked at the idea, and tells me I will explode one of these days.

All that sweet stuff right before bed.

Maybe he's right.

Those Germans can be quite sensible, at times.

Nevertheless,

"Shiver me timbers!" I cry, and reach for the chocolate sauce!

It's been a while since I posted any photos here, so here are a few choice pics for your enjoyment, and for the general visualness of this blog.

So, because of the whole coffee obsession thing that's going on right now, here is the first ever coffee-type thing which I managed to get out of the machine:

Kind of bleh... Which is why I moderately proudly present:

Cappuccino! Well, almost. It tastes better than it looks. And, being a computer image obsessive person as well, I had to play with the colours. Dunno if it makes it look any better, or worse, but it was fun, anyway:

OK, so enough playing. Now for some shots of work. Here is our DVD duplication zone of the Shed. Thankfully this isn't really my job, or else I'd go much crazier than I currently am. I'm making the DVD masters, which are then duplicated here.
What I have to contend with is this:
As one of my friends insists on saying "Stupid Mac!" or alternatively "Brood of Saruman!" We're developing quite a system of which computers are which species of evil around here.

And so as to not end on such a pessimistic note, here is some more coffee. Trying to get some finer foam, and aim towards latte art, at some point. Still, a long way to go, of course.

And some colour playing with, and adding some fake DOF and so on:

Of Boys, Toys, JWs, Anoraks, and St. Augustine (or, The Coffee Maker, Part 2)

2008-05-18T16:12:00.005+03:00

I always knew a few people who loved trains. I even knew one or two people who built model rail-ways at home, usually in some deserted far off loft or study.

I've suddenly discovered, much to my surprise, that this is not one or two isolated individuals, but in fact apparently a large percentage of the male population of this part of the UK.

I never expected to learn that.

They call themselves Anoraks, and about a third of the people I'm working with belong to this group.

OK, So trains can look quite cool, and I am working with the media and computers team of the company, so it's no surprise, I suppose, that you find a higher pecentage of people here with high IQ / arcane / obscure hobbies...

But it's not just little nerdy geeks with glasses wandering around with notebooks and flasks of tea getting all excited about 7.25" gauge K1 engines and 1937 liveries, it's a lot of guys, of every background, upbringing, shape, size, character and personality.

We had finished setting up for one of those J.John conferences, and were hanging out round the back waiting for it to be time to start, when this anglican vicar looking bloke wandered up, and they all ended up chatting about trains.

And all the rest of the guys too: those few who don't have a thing about machines that roll around the place on parallel tracks get excited by all kinds of other things.

There's a bloke here who gets very excited about trucks, vans, busses, and other large automobiles.

When I say "excited", I mean in the kind of "eyes light up, bounces up and down and starts talking animatedly and waving his arms around" kind of way.

And he's not a tiny geek. He's an (roughly) 8 foot tall construction yard manager from London.

I watched two guys across the room at a pizza evening last week. They were discussing the intricacies of the AT command set, and the fun to be had trying to fix router systems by logging in backwards through a modem to solve networking problems.

Let's turnout to a diverging track for a few moments, and I'll see if I can work us back to this rail at the next set of points.

I went out yesterday an bought a whole load of books at charity shops. I finally got a copy of St. Augustine's confessions.

"Even now I cannot fully understand why the Greek language, which I learned as a child, was so distasteful to me... "

I found this sentence funny, in itself, but lets keep reading for a while, and a few pages later get to this:

"For I understood not a single word and I was constantly subjected to violent threats and cruel punishments to make me learn.

"As a baby, of course, I knew no Latin either, but I learned it without fear and fret, simply by keeping my ears open while my nurses fondled me and everyone laughed and played happily with me.

"I learned it without being forced by threats of punishment, because it was my own wish to be able to give expression to my thoughts. I could never have done this if I had not learnt a few words, not from schoolmasters, but from people who spoke to me and listened when I delivered to their ears whatever thoughts I had conceived. This clearly shows that we learn better in a free spirit of curiosity than under fear and compulsion."

Here we go! A rallying cry for Home Educators world wide, written over 1600 years ago in 397 AD!

OK.. so it's a bit longwinded, and in Latin it's not really the kind of thing you'd stick on a banner and wave at demonstrations.

Unless you're at very well educated classical demonstrations, or something.

"... in those days 'one and one are two, two and two are four' was a loathsome jingle, while the wooden horse and its crew of soldiers, the burning of Troy and even the ghost of Creusa made a most enchanting dream, futile though it was."

And Augustine is worried by all this. He calls it sin, and says how sad and fruitless it was.

Yet, I can't help but think it's not quite so black and white as he does, nor in fact sinful to be enamored by stories and battles and glory, and not by Arithmetic.

If Arithmetic is your thing, hey, go for it. I'll ask you for help with my accounts. And a certain amount of maths is useful for everyone, sure.

Now let's take another track again, and yes, we are headed back to the first line.

Yesterday, before I went out book-shopping, two JW's came and banged on my door and told me they were here to encourage me to read my bible. I had literally just closed my bible to come and answer the door.. So of course I invited them in for tea or coffee or something. Not that I ever got around to making it.

Anyway. They spouted scriptures at me for about half an hour, gave me a couple of "Watchtower" magazines, and then headed off home to make tea for some of their friends they were expecting.

A few things struck me. Firstly, they seemed to put all their faith in their organization. Well, no surprise, I mean, they're followers of Watchtower. The magazine basically defines who they are.

They asked questions about what I do, and tried to distance me from the rest of the church and the people I work with. Yes, I don't agree with everything absolutely that the rest of the people I work with believe, but so what? We are different, and although I am not a complete relativist and believe there is no truth, I do believe that our view of the truth will be different from everyone elses. God made me to reflect his light in a way that *no one* else can. We're all small panes of glass in the magnificent stained glass window that God is building, each one of us reflects and refracts the light differently, each one of us is a different shape.

Take a look at this awesome stained glass window at coventry cathedral.

So yes, some times there are bits of glass which look like they might be part of the window, but in fact are from a totally different light source, and instead of pointing you towards sunlight and freedom, they actually have you shooting for a big ugly wall lamp.

Not all roads do lead to the truth, but the truth is bigger and more beautiful than any one person can fully comprehend.

The JWs didn't seem to get this, and seemed to want me to join their organisation.

Great! Just what I want to join! A group of people calling themselves Christians who are even more strictly extra-rule-keeping, pharisaical, exclusionist and cultic and anti-everyone-else than the ones I currently hang out with! Whoohoo!

I mean, heck, even if they didn't totally abuse and twist scripture more than the whole Purpose Driven thing does, and even if they didn't have a completely messed up un-biblical view of Jesus, the trinity, the church, the bible, and virtually everything else, I think that's about the last thing I need.

So now, how are we going to get back to the Anoraks, and what was the purpose of quoting Augustine? And why on earth could this possibly be anything to do with coffee makers? Well.

My housemate has been laughing at me because of the coffeemaker. And he hasn't even read my blog post about it all. He's laughing, because of the explosions of milk and so on.

I learned very quickly:

"Don't open the steam valve while holding the nozzle above the top of the milk, unless you like getting milk and steam all over the kitchen".

Useful thing to learn.

Anyway. He kind of teases me about it being a toy and a mad hobby of mine, and if I like getting clouds of steam all over me, and having milk all over the place to clean up, then he's fine with that.

I'm glad he's fine with that.

And the coffee actually is coming out quite well, these days. I'll post some photos, soon. I'm not really spilling anything anywhere, or exploding anything any more.

The point though, for this post, is how it is kind of a hobby, I suppose. Yes, a good cup of coffee is *really* nice, but also it's more than that. I really want to learn, and am enjoying the learning/developping thing more than the actual coffee, I think.

And I guess it's the same with the train-people and the truck enthusiasts.

I don't think it's wrong to get all excited and enthusiastic about "stuff". I think God made us that way. A lot of evangelicals seem to be almost gnostic, and have a kind of misplaced ascetic idea that "if it's fun, or you enjoy it, then it's wrong", kind of like Augustine seems to be leaning towards.

Sure, if it distracts you or pulls you away from more important things, or becomes an idol, or god, then there's a problem. And I think it almost did become an idol to me. Even before I bought the silly machine. Now how sad is that?!

But God made us to enjoy delving into deep things, seeking out answers, becoming experts and specialists. We're not all the same, and God's creative genius made the universe so enormous that there's plenty of room for all of us to explore and become brighter and brighter, and keep on refracting more of His glory.

It's about time for me to go home and make some lunch, and have another go at making some really tasty coffee...

Work in Carlisle

2008-05-16T19:08:00.002+03:00

OK, after that huge long ramble about my personal life, now a bit about work.

Written almost a week ago, which is a bit confusing for me reading it now, but the internet has been sketchy.

I'm quite busy. In a good way, I think. We've got these conferences of J.John, which are kind of messing up everyone's schedule down in the shed. Basically it's every Tuesday and Wednesday, in 2 different cities. So we send crew down Tuesday morning at 6am or so, rig all day, gig in the evening, pack down, finished by about 2am or so, then the same again the next morning, finishing everything and back to Carlisle at around 3amish.

This week was week 3, out of 10, and was my first time on crew. The team leaders here had figured out a complex scheme to try and reduce the load on the crew, by sending different shifts of people from Carlisle, so that no-one had the complete 2 days of 6-am to 3-am, which is kind of killer. Anyway, I was in the car that shuttled down at 6am on Wednesday, arrived about 10 past 8, rigged all day, did the conference/thing, de-rigged, and then came back. I got dropped off home at around 4am.

I was expecting to be doing graphics, mainly using a programme called songpro (evil programme. the latest incarnation which they have here is even more evil than the old version we have on the ship...) for displaying lyrics on the screens during the singy bit and also some titles and playing videos too. The guy who was supposed to be doing the graphics the first day, however, didn't go back to Carlisle, but instead stayed on for the second day, and said it made no sense for him to no do graphics, since he knew how it would all work with the band and everything, and so could get it perfect.

Not everyone from the first day crew, however, came back the second day, so I ended up "shading". I hadn't been shown yet how that all worked, but had a basic idea. At the most basic level, shading is kind of just doing changing the Iris levels, gamma and blacks and colour correction live on the cameras, from the OB truck, during the whole show, so that cutting between shots it looks the same, and so that the image on screen looks good and is "Legal" TV levels all the time. So once we'd rigged, I spent as much time as possible playing with the controls, figuring it all out.

I also had a bit of time before the event to play with the Jib a bit. Now that's fun. I thought the crane on the cranedeck was multi-tasking while swinging a big stick around. Well, the jib is even more complex, as not only do you have the big stick, but you have a *lot* of people sitting around underneath it, and have various screens and stuff to not bash into while swinging the big stick around, and also all the usual pan/tilt controls for the camera at the end of the big stick, and Zoom and Focus as well.

As with shading, I think it's one of those skills that I'll get better with, with time and practice. Hopefully I'll get both. I didn't kill anyone or destroy anything or knock down the tent while I was trying it, so I don't think I've been banned yet..

Anyway, sitting next to the director in the truck for the whole event was kind of stressful, in a good way. It does need to be right, all the time, and I'm not all that great at it yet. By the end of the show he had stopped reaching over to grab the shading controls from me and fix things I was messing up, and wasn't having to shout at me to fix things myself quite so much. I think that's a stage in the right direction, for sure.

The whole rigging/de-rigging thing wouldn't be so bad at all, if we only had out equipment to set up. We're only doing video for these conferences, so it only takes us about an hour or two to get it all done. 1 fixed camera on a tripod, 1 on a dolly, and one on a jib, 4 screens and projectors, and all the cabling.

However, the sound and lights guys really don't seem to know what they are doing so much, or have enough people to rig it all, so we end up doing huge amounts of the rigging of all their gear too! Including building their speaker-stacks. Heavy, backbreaking kind of work.

Still, fun.

On the way back, we did get a bit lost. We also blew a tire at 2.30am. That was fun. So we had to figure out where the spare tire was, and how to get the wretched thing out of the enclosure. It was only 4 of us, coming back 2 hours after the rest of the team who had been there for the 2 days (but with a longer break in the middle) had left. Stupid Ford car. Inordinately hard to get the silly spare tire out. We managed it, however, and eventually got home. After dropping off two of the other guys, we were stopped by the police just to check who we were while driving about in the backstreets of Carlisle.

My room here is really nice. Small, comfortable. One really nice thing is how the sunlight comes in in the morning. It's really great. But, if you only get to bed by 4, having the sunlight coming in at 7 really isn't so wonderful. By 7.30 I couldn't sleep any more, so got up, had breakfast, and went into the shed. I was kind of supposed to have the day off, after the conference long day, but the video of the conference needed to be edited and made into a DVD, so that we could sell them next week. So I got started on that.

Next day, Friday, I'd basically finished the editing, of the first conference, anyway, and was missing the tape from one of the cameras, which strangely enough I've since found out the director had found in the tea-bag box he had taken home with him... anyway, at lunch time on Friday, 6 of us headed down to Manchester for the Northern Men's Convention, which we were doing Lights and Video for, again. Ian stayed back, as he's waaay too busy and we could manage without, which meant Euan directing, myself doing graphics, shading, and lights, another guy doing the songpro stuff (evil programme), and the 3 cameramen. Fun. They looked after us much better than the J.John thing, providing sandwhiches and drinks and so on. We rigged on Friday, slept at a Travel Lodge inn, then did the conference all day Saturday, and headed back to Carlisle that evening, arriving back around 10.30pm or so.

The shed gate/door thingy jammed, as we were putting the van inside, so I ended up at the top of a shakey wooden ladder with a big crowbar whacking the thing to make it go back again. I miss Deck Dept...

Today is Sunday, and I spent the morning reading my bible in Costa Coffee, and drinking a rather nice Cappucino, and then popped into the shed to get my email, and start off the DVD duplicating (which I didn't have a chance to do last night). Stupid duplicator makes about 12 bad DVDs for every 10 good ones. At least we can put 100 or so blanks into it and just let it run though. So kind of better than the one we have on Doulos, which does 10 at a time, and has to be manually re-loaded, and printing on top of them has to be done 1 at a time by hand. Except for the stupid problem with the bad DVDs....

Anyway. When I'm not rushing around to these conferences, and editing the footage from them and making DVDs, I'm also working on the back-end to the new OMNItube website we're making. I'm writing the code to do automatic video conversions to produce streaming flash video versions of the hi-res files we're going to be selling, which is not really so much fun, but fairly productive, and an interesting project, getting to know the deep murky internals of Joomla CMS and the PHP language... I've got most of my end of the programming done, so hopefully can finish on that soon, and pass it all back to the web-designer, who will finish the site. (I hope.. I have a nasty suspicion that the designer wants me to do quite a bit more work on the site than I really want to do. I'm happy to just do the deep back-end programming bit that he can't do.. meh. We'll work that out later..)

Tomorrow we should have a load of new equipment and stuff showing up, including a "Jumbotron", which is an ENORMOUS screen/projector thingy, several thousand folding chairs, a load of translation equipment from Billy Graham's organisation, and so on. I've no idea where we'll put it all. The shed is kind of stuffed already. We also will be preparing for the next J.John conference which is Tuesday, again, so I'll have to finish the second DVD and make sure they're all duplicated...

Also the new Bus is being got ready to be driven on Thursday over to Germany, where it'll get most of the steel-work done, before being driven back here for the re-fit, which we need to do in the next 6 weeks or so, ready for the really busy conference season in the summer.

As we only really will have 2 days between conferences or events *ever* during the next 2 months or so, and we need to either have the Truck (which we'll be gutting to fill the new bus) or the Bus (which will need to be completely fitted with all the gear from the Truck...) that changeover will be complicated, and very busy too.

It is busy here, and there is a lot to do. However the scheduled work time is relaxed, and one can take a lot of time off, officially. Whole weekends, for instance. From what I've seen, there is a huge need for more organisation/management here. I'm normally opposed to the whole over-managment emphasis that most of the west, and especially the ships have. I'm sure that there is way more beuracracy on Doulos than is healthy, and that gets in the way of real work. The team here seems to kind of has the opposite problem, I think. Partly, and perhaps mostly, it's because of how much the director has been away, recently. And when he is here, he's got so many conferences and all that to actually be at and direct. Last week, he said he had 92 hours of conference work he need to be at, as well as getting all his usual 100 or emails every day to work through. That's insane, and that's totally without being at the shed to make sure people are actually doing stuff that needs doing at the time. The guys are great, doing good jobs, very clever and so on, but some of them are perhaps not as focussed, or focussing on what needs to be done at the time.

Yes, I know. I'm not immune from that myself. I'm very easily distractable and end up taking way more time on stuff that really doesn't need it. :-) Hopefully being here and seeing it taken to an artform will help me avoid and combat that tendancy in myself.

Anyway. That's a sort of longish overview of what I'm doing at the moment. It's fun. I'm enjoying it, but I miss the ol' M.V. rust bucket like crazy.

Oh? You wanted to know about the coffee maker?

Well, I bought it. Wasn't that hard at all.

All kind of anti-climatic, actually. I mean, after all that agony and everything.

You know, I do kind of wonder if I went though all that just because I was supposed to write that blog entry, or something.

It's really cool, makes good coffee.. It's obviously not expensive. Some parts of it are very cheaply made - I don't think they'll break or that; but just the way the metal is finished inside - and some of the joints really are not polished.

I still haven't learned how to use everything properly, the whole "stretching milk" thing I think will take a bit of practice. I'm not actually using an espresso type of beans, actually, but a random fair-trade colombian blend I found. Tastes pretty good to me. There's still a bit of a "new plastic" taste to things, which hopefully will be gone soon. If not I'll have to run some vinegar through it or something.

The hot chocolate made with steamed frothed milk is veeery good though :-)

And it's really nice to have decent coffee at breakfast time, or when coming back from work.

Instant coffee: just say "argh, no, yuk! bleh, what a horror and a disaster, oh my goodness, what an awful idea, good grief do you think I'm crazy or something?"

Of Coffee Makers and Consciences (part 1?)

2008-05-11T22:50:00.004+03:00

One of the things I love about the "Peanuts" cartoons are the tiny little things that I love. If that makes sense. For instance, this one thing I love about the Peanuts cartoon, is Snoopy's book that he writes occasionally "Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?" as part of the whole debate thing with Lucy. I love those books.

Anyway.

Has it ever occurred to you that you might be mad?

It's been of late the rather disagreeable experience of mine to have occurring to me with disturbingly increasing regularity the possibility that I myself might be in a somewhat insanitous state.

I challenge anyone to diagram that sentence, and send me the picture...

Insanitous sounds rather unhygienic, but it's not. I just mean "mad", in a slightly more complex way of speaking.

To take simpler mode of address, I'll quote Freddie Mercury:

"It's finally happened, I'm slightly mad."

Anyway, the current evidence I have towards this conclusion is The Strange Affair Of The Coffee Maker In The Daytime.

I feel remarkably Adrian Plassish as I type this, in a "this is dead serious to me, but I get the feeling people will laugh at me about it, because it's so stupid..." sort of way. Like his paper-clip story.

Settle back, gentle reader, and prepare thyself for an epic journey into the mind of one convinced that he is no longer all quite there.

It all began like this...

This house is great. I'm really enjoying living here. right now, I'm sprawled across one of the *three* sofas in the living room, with my laptop, and a pot of Earl Grey tea.

Seriously, how can life get more chilled out than this?

What could there possibly be to complain about?

Well, there's no internet at home. Is this a bad thing? Well, kind of. But also, it does stop me spending inordinate amounts of time online, which I did over the whole furlough, to my shame. 3 months to rest and do anything, and most of the time I spent online. Silly. So, it's probably a good thing that I'm not online here, and can just write emails that I need to write, and then send them from the Shed. And spend the rest of my time at home cooking, reading, playing clarinet, and exercising. Oh, and sleeping, of course.

Secondly. And far more seriously. There is no coffee maker here.

I say it again, for emphasis.

There. Is. NO. Coffee. Maker. Here!!!

Shocking! But true!

There is a kettle, and a teapot, and plenty of instant coffee, of the "Fair Trade" and the "Nescafe" varieties - both of which are vile - but a brewed mug of the real stuff? Not a chance.

So, how can I solve this crisis, I wondered, then had the brainwave: I can buy a coffee maker.

In the UK they have this really weird store called Argos, where everything is in this funny HUGE catalogue that you can get, and then you write down the item order numbers, or SKU or something, give it to the clerk, and it gets brought in to you via conveyor belt, or so. No browsing around the store, just the catalogue.

Anyway, we happened to have an Argos Catalogue in the house, so I looked inside for coffee makers. Of course, there are plenty. About 20 types of filter machines, and about 30 types of espresso machines, in various shapes, sizes, colours, etc, etc, and every other type of coffee maker I can think of. And 2 things caught my eye.

Firstly, that there was a filter machine for 6 quid. Woah, now this looks like my kind of budget!

And secondly, an espresso machine for 17 quid. Hm. That's about 100 pounds cheaper than I've ever seen before, and just about within my pricerange... so very tempting.

3-5 bar pressure, not amazing, but probably acceptable, milk steamer/frother too... so would be good for hot choc as well. Mmmm.....

And I've wanted to learn how to make espresso for ages.

So. Here it seems is a perfectly normal life situation. Nothing to stress about, nothing to worry about, just a simple domestic "which should I buy? Hm, the espresso machine, OK, lets' buy it, done."

10 minutes, all told, and not even really worth blogging about.

Except! This is no ordinary story! Not to be stumped by even the more mundane of situations, I find myself wrestling to gain even the fleetest of footings while hanging on to the horns of a stampeding dilemma!

I have been fretting about this! I have been wandering around the town wondering if I should buy the wretched thing or not. I've prayed about it, numerous times, and still have no reached any kind of satisfactory conclusion!

Should I buy it? Should I not buy it? The question is easy enough to state, and the pros and cons can easily be listed.

17 pounds is really not all that expensive, and I checked online the website, and found it had apparently gone to 11 pounds. So, even more reason for this to be a minor and inconsequential affair.

The thought occurred to me "If you had this machine, you wouldn't need to buy expensive coffee at cafe's After 9 cups you would have saved money!" See how insiduous advertising is? I don't need all that coffee, and I might not have bought it anyway, thus I've not saved money at all, but in fact spent more! I'll write about this more some other time..

Anyway, I frequently find myself wanting to drink a decent cup, and the only place available is expensive, and so if I did buy this machine, and if I had been buying one coffee a day there, then by the end of a week I would indeed have saved money. But, no.

I just haven't been able to bring myself to go and buy it. Every time I set out towards the store, I've felt an almost compulsion to not buy it, and the weird sensation that I'm doing something wrong.

I was asking God, "Do you want me to buy it? Do you not want me to buy it?" and then asked "If you don't want me to buy it, don't let me.", which is a dangerous sort of prayer, and then after work 2 days ago, while praying this, I went to the store, and low and behold it was shut.

Hm! Is this some kind of sign?! Or is it just that they close at 5pm, and it took me until 5.45 to get to the shop?! Is this divine guidence, or just a coincidence catalysed by lack of time management and me not remembering which road it was on?

Do I even believe in coincidence anyway?

As a good evangelical, I know I should not.

But I'm not a good evangelical. I know that God is in control of everything, but I also know that the world is so sufficiently complex that if we want to see correlations and coincidences, we will, without God going out of His way to make sure certain things coincide.

But, argues the pig headed annoying evangelical so-and-so who lives in my head: If I'm asking God something, couldn't He also make it so that things don't coincide, just so that I don't see the coincidence that I asked about?

Yet that also totally stuffs God into a box, and is very unfair to Him.

Why on earth should God go out of His way to modify something running really quite well (ie, what time a certain store closes) on the earth just so that one of his slightly deranged sons gets an answer to some pointless question he asked in an absurd and arrogant way!? I mean, what if I asked for the moon to turn somersaults and the sun to go back one hour? Even if that did happen way back in the O.T...

I dunno. I mean, before, when God has got me to stop sinning in certain ways, I've really not wanted to stop, and so I've asked Him for help, but in ways that are really not helpful. The kind of thing being "If you don't want me to lie to so and so about why I haven't done what I promised, then please could I not see them today...".

This kind of thing. I mean, yes, it's asking God for help. And yes, it's kind of admitting a problem. But is it really sane to expect God to tweak reality because of my selfishness? I mean, I know He loves me, and I know He can modify reality more easily than I can breath, but, well, isn't it kind of forcing Him into a box? Trying to exert power over Him, and manipulate Him like a Genie?

And "trying to manipulate God like a Genie" is one of those things that definitely falls into the "Unwise bordering on Stupid, yet Amazingly Typical and very Human" category.

And the thing is, usually, if I start praying things in the form "If you want me to not do... then please do..." it's usually ended up being something that I really shouldn't do anyway, and a fairly good hint that I already know what the answer is, and what I should or shouldn't do.

Imagine the little boy saying "God, if you don't want me to steal the sweets from the sweetshop, then please would the shop owner be standing next to the box I want to steal from when I come into the shop", knowing full well that the shop owner is always sitting behind her desk on the opposite side of the shop, and can't even see that aisle.

Well, duh!

Yet that's exactly how I behave to God, quite frequently. And then, even if the situation I have asked God about *does* happen to be a "no" thing, then I'll repeat the experiment again, with more obscure clauses, or else repeat again and again until it's not so. And this is *so* stupid. I mean, if I really want to sin that much, then I'm gonna find a way to do it, even if it means totally ignoring what God is shouting and jumping up and down with a big sign on a stick telling me about.

Yet, the issue at hand isn't some kind of sin. This isn't stuff which is even kind of borderline/dodgey, such as using "bad language" on stage at the theatre (one of the issues I fought long and hard with, and with God about, a few years back).

This is a flippin' coffee maker!

I mean, for crying out loud!

OK, so I can imagine maybe God has some kind of plan, to teach me a lesson in something, or some life skill or something, and so this coffee maker was part of it, but I can also imagine Him putting his head into his hands and saying "Good grief. Just buy the stupid coffee maker already, Daniel. Look, I'm not going to send you an army of angels just to tell you to do your blinking laundry just because you feel doubts!"

And also, I can kind of imagine maybe that God doesn't want me to buy the coffee maker. I've not been so great with my money, in how careful I am about it all, in remembering to give regularly, or in being generous, or whatever. And there is so much poverty in the world, and the current joke here in the office is about the "rich missionaries" with their iPods and iPhones and iBooks and living at Starbucks and being far too damn comfortable. Jesus never told us life would be comfortable, as His followers. He told us it would suck, majorly.

Yet He also said that workers deserve their wages, and that we shouldn't worry about what we eat or drink, as if we look first to God's kingdom, He would provide these things anyway.

And it's not that I'm worrying about coffee. I'm not addicted, and can quite happily go for a week or two without tasting a sip of coffee without headaches and all that. I just like the stuff!

Yet I am worried. About getting too comfortable. About becoming a sleeping Christian, not really in the world, not really living radically, as a revolutionary of Christ in this world. About picking up the strings and rags of this earth, and becoming attached to them, and not scorning them for the true garments of heaven.

Yet Jesus also spent His time at parties, as J. John said in one of his sermons, if Jesus was a stuffed up christian bore at the parties, why was he invited to so many? He'd have been told to stay at home! We are supposed to live life to the full, to not skimp and be prudes and wusses and all that.

I guess it all boils down to this:

Is it better to wait and not do anything because it's not what God called us to, or to do something we think is from God, even if it's not?

If I have a course of action in mind, but no "calling" or direction to it from God, is it still a good/the right action to take, or should I only act on instructions?

Or, is this kind of nagging doubt really from God? Or just my messed up personality? Insecure INFP that I am, and everything.

Is it better to do things only we *know* are from God, or to do things that might be from Him, even if they're not?

And can we know for sure, most of the time, anyway?

*sigh*

Life is so complicated.

And all this just for a coffeemaker.

The whole "having peace" about something just doesn't seem to work for me. I don't really "have peace" about things very often.

Is it better to do something we think might be God's will, or to not do something we think might be against it?

Action and anti-action! And inaction and anti-inaction.

And this has been going on for about 4 or 5 days now.

Back to Peanuts, apparently I'm fairly similar personalitywise to Charlie Brown.

If ever we (Charlie Brown and I) seem kind of indecisive and wishy-washy, this is why. We're going through this kind of trauma about every single thing in life. From whether to kick the football or not, whether to write the valentine or not, to whether to buy the coffee maker or not...

A part of me, now, says "Just do it, lah" like one of my Malaysia friends had. I mean, God is so much bigger than I am, and if I screw up, He'll catch me and help me back on my feet again.

It's just, well, He also gave me the ability to look at issues and find more deep consequences of them. Shouldn't I use that?

And if I don't try to figure things out, because I know it just ends up with inaction and all that crap above, then how do I know what to do? What can I trust?

Instincts? Dangerous. Others? Unwise. Myself? Stupid. A pair of dice? Ridiculous!

A big part of me says "Yeah, I'll buy the coffee maker. No biggie."

The other half shrieks and says "You don't need it! And you MIGHT be going against what God has told you, because you are not sure, and so are acting in doubt, and according to the bible: that is sin! It's not worth it, just for a coffee maker!"

Either it's just a normal bit of being human, in which case I am weak and indecisive and a wimp, or else I'm slightly schizophrenic.

Either way, life promises to be - if nothing else - interesting.

Almost a week in Carlisle...

2008-04-29T10:57:00.004+03:00

What ho, blog. It's me, the author of this blog, writing again. I do that, every so often, you know.

I'm sitting in my house feeling very domestic, and kinda lonely.

House did I say? Yes indeed. It's a fair sized place, 3 bedrooms, dining room, kitchen, sitting room, bathroom, etc, etc. And only 2 of us living here at the mo. And my housemate is frequently gone, filming abroad or doing a bunch of conferences for "J John". I'll be helping with that from next week.

Anyway, I'm feeling very domestic as I just made meself a slightly over-large mexican meal, so feel kinda stuffed, and have done the washing up, and have a load of washing in the machine, making churney sorts of noises at me, as those machines have a want to do.

I've been here in Carlisle for about 6 days, and it's been a very random week. I arrived Tuesday evening, and this dutch bloke, one of my new colleagues, gave me a quick tour of 'the shed' where we work (an old bus hanger that they've taken over and have a bunch of OB-trucks (Outside Broadcast), busses, and so on and offices in.

My housemate, and most of the people who work in 'the shed' were out doing the first of these conferences for J John, and so were not around. So I was wandering around this house, making myself at home, buying fruit and stuff, in someone elses house, whom I'd never met. Weird feeling, to be sure!

Wednesday and Thursday we had a set of "fund raising training" seminars we had to attend, with the whole staff of our company here in Carlisle (quite a lot, about 30 or so), and a few others from other groups about the place. So that was lots of sitting around and classroom stuff, basically.

The conference people had got back very early Thursday morning, and were asleep most of the day, but then we met up that evening, and basically most of the single guys who work at the shed came and invaded our house, we cooked some pizza, and watched a stupid rubbish movie.

(If anyone offers to watch "You, me, and Dupree", don't. It's a waste of time, vulgar, and so totally down-the-line american comedy it's just not funny. Virtually no american comedies are really funny, but this one is just resoundingly boring. About the *only* redeeming feature, and this doesn't by any way redeem so far as to make it worth while, is that the young married couple don't get a divorce, decide at the end to stick togeather, and that their guy friend doesn't have sex with either of them. Bleh.)

Hey, the pizza was alright.

Friday was my first "real" work day, I got myself a tiny wee office, have a funky mac book pro to work on, with Final Cut Pro Studio on it, and was editing/top and tailing the footage from the J John conference, so we can make a DVD and sell this week's talk at next week's conference. This is apparently going to be one of my tasks while I'm here. Not too difficult, but took me waaaaay longer than it should have done. I guess I'm just out of practice, and trying to get my bearings in the office, and all. I'll get the footage from this week on Thursday, so hopefully can get this one finished a lot faster.

Saturday I set off very early on the train, and after 4 hours and a changeover in Glasgow got to Edinburgh about 10 am. There I met two of my old close ex-Doulos friends, and spent Saturday and Sunday hanging out with them, and seeing Edinburgh. One of them is working in Cardiff, and had flown up for a long weekend, and the other is studying at Uni. in Edinburgh. One of her friends was out for the weekend seeing his girlfriend, so I was able to stay in his room at the upstairs flat in this student accommodation.. Very nice! Small rooms, very Logos Hope cabin-ish, except 1 person and 1 tiny bathroom per "cabin". But really modern, clean, cool places. I kind of felt "wow, if this is what 1st year student accommodation is like, I'd kinda like to be a student!".

Then again, my housemate is out still, so I'm basically sitting here in my own complete house, which is also really nice, so I can't really complain or anything!

I'm also more likely to end up on Logos Hope, actually, which is pretty similar, cabinwise.

We met up with a few other ex-Doulos people, and also the Logos Hope advanced preparation "line-up" team for Edinburgh. We ate lunch together at a pub, and then my two friends and I went for icecream, and then wandered back to the train station, where I caught a train back to Carlisle at 18:45.

Strangely enough, the train back took about 1 hour. 4 hours to get to Edinburgh, 1 hour to get back, and the same price both ways. Funny British train systems!

Today, Monday, we went in to "The Office", which is where the rest of our company people in Carlisle - mostly admin, finance, and computer techies - who are not with the media group in "The Shed" work. There we had devotions, and then I met up with the Personnel bloke, who got me some money, and so on.

So. That's been my week. Pretty mixed up, so far, and also pretty relaxing. I'm sure once I get more involved in stuff, it'll get busier, but for now, it's quite chilled out.

We officially get whole week-ends off here! It's quite exciting, after the Doulos 6 day 50-something hour week. Again, of course, when it's very busy I'm sure I'll be working harder and longer, but hey, I'm enjoying it now. :-)

Just thinking about it, I've been travelling a lot, recently. Sunday I was in Edinburgh, the sunday before we spend most of the day in the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus, the Sunday before that we were in Cairo, and the Sunday before that I was in Famagusta in North Cyprus.. wow.

Anyway, so, I'm off to make some hot chocolate and cook a small apple pie I bought, so while I'm enjoying them, here are a few pictures from Edinburgh for you to enjoy. Scotland really is beautiful, and Edinburgh is a cool city. I hope I get a chance to go back there at least once before I head back to the ship.

New Template up and running. Perhaps.

2008-04-17T00:59:00.002+03:00

As well as the Cairo Curse, I'm also having to put up with the Curse of Being a Web Designer.

That is to say, never being happy to leave something well enough alone.

Anyway, on this machine the blog looks fairly happy now, using the new blogger template system, and some new stuff I'm playing with.

Some random geek knowledge for you:

The traditional/oldschool method of introducing new technologies/research, or protocols for public use was to write an "RFC" or "Request For Comments".

Basically those were (usually) longish documents available online freely, waaay back even on ARPANET, and have shaped the internet as we know it today.

More information about RFCs can be found on the wikipedia.

What was the reason for this brief history lesson?

Well, none at all, really. Except that I would like to request comments on the new theme / style of this blog. Any comments?

(yes, I know the images are missing from the side-bar. I'll try and code a new sidebar image thingy tomorrow in perl or something so I can get the more modern pics too...)

Last week in Cyprus blues...

2008-04-16T16:03:00.002+03:00

Well, we're back in Cyprus. Egypt was fun, I like Cairo. I don't like the Cairo Curse however.

The Cairo Curse is the euphamism for a local stomach bug which quite a few people seem to get.

I got it. Woke at 4am on the day we were travelling back, and wished I hadn't. Not a very pleasant day, all in all. Anyway, I'm mostly recovered, I guess. Still don't feel to wonderful, and realised today I leave Cyprus in 7 days. So that means I have a heck of a lot of stuff to do.

So I started doing the ones I can manage without leaving my room, speaking, or walking too far. Such as updating my blog to the new blogger template system... Alas, it's all going a bit pear-shaped right now, and as I have to finish making a slideshow for tonight (I'm doing a Doulos presentation thingy at the Anglican church "upper room", if anyone sees this and is interested, 7pm, all welcome....), and the template thingy didn't quite back up all as I wanted it to, it may take a bit longer for me to update to the new template than I hoped.

So if the site looks a bit of a mess at the moment, I'll get it fixed and pretty for tomorrow.

I'll also blog about Egypt as well.

Preview of waterman video

2008-04-10T12:45:00.003+03:00

OK, so here's the project I did yesterday and this morning for fun. I like keynote.

It'll be much better, the timing is rubbish, and audio isn't very good, and the graphics are in need of much work, but I'll be away for the next 4 days, so I'm sure the vast community of brummieatsea readers will tear it to pieces by the time I'm back.

(may or may not work. try again if it doesn't. Google video doesn't seem so reliable with this for some reason)

More photos, and not much time left

2008-04-10T09:45:00.006+03:00

Dear readers,

I've found that blogger has kindly been putting my photos I upload here to the blog into a "Picasa Web Album.". Wasn't that kind of them? So, it's possible to look at all the pics in one place. Very spiffy.

The link is right here:

brummie@sea

It also can do flash slideshows and all sorts. So I'll be playing with that. I need to update this blog design a bit anyway. I also will try and write a perl script to make the picasa album appear as the old fliker one does in the sidebar ->.

I don't have much time left in Cyprus. We're going as a family to Egypt this evening, for 4 days, and then after that I leave about 5 days later. Kind of scary how fast time has flown.

Then it's off the UK for 2 months, then to Doulos.

Here's another couple of boat/sailing sketches. The one on the left could be a Wayfarer, but the one on the right is way bigger.

I've been trying to make a video about Doulos to show later this week (once I'm back from Egypt) to people, and will probably post some of that later on.

I'm not very happy with Apple right now.. I had to reinstall the computer *again*. That's like 7 times since I got back from Doulos. Why? Well, many of the times is not Apple's fault, it's true. I did replace the hard-drive, with a bigger one. That was moderately monstrous. They really hide those hard-drives well inside the poor laptops. Virtually impossible to get out. Anyway, the reason I had to this time was because I upgraded to Leopard, but alas, half my software doesn't work properly with it. It's a much nicer OS than tiger (looks-wise, but also technology like Quick-View, Spaces, and so on.

The version of Garageband that came with my laptop (only 3 years ago) doesn't work with Leopard. I'm supposed to pay for the upgrade, which I've read may not work on this old a mac. This old?! Good grief.

Then Final Cut Express 4 doesn't capture video properly on Leopard. It does about 3 mins, and then freezes.

Also Protools doesn't work (even though I don't have a copy, we were using it at the office for the show of Esther audio last month, and had to keep a Tiger machine around to use it...).

Anyway.

However, Apple Keynote is a very nice programme. I've used it to make some presentations, about Doulos, and now I'm actually working on an animation about the ship. It's so basic, for animation. Almost too basic, I think I'm kind of pushing it's limits, but it works. Once I'm done, I'll post the video here.

I really have so little time left, and so many ideas and projects I wish that I'd spent more time in. Part of me feels really worried that I've wasted this time, and not used it as I could. On the other hand, I have this other either lazy, or else wiser, part of me saying

"There's *always* good projects about mate, and if you try to do all of them, all the time, you'll never get any of them done, and, you'll burn out. This is the only time you'll get for just reading and reading and hanging out with your family and cats, so enjoy it."

Oh well. I need to start cleaning up my desk...

I saw 2 ships come sailing in ...

2008-04-05T22:08:00.006+03:00

I'd like to spend a few minutes waxing lyrical about ArtRage2.
This is one of the coolest programmes I've seen in a long time. It's a computer art / painting package, is relatively cheap ($25 USD), and very easy to use. Here are a few of my latest works:

Which is my dad and I sailing, on his boat. (Wayfarer, MK2). And...

I feel kinda homesick for the big ol' rust bucket named Doulos. Both from memory, (well, I did check the number on the sail for the wayfarer, and I did have to check where the name was painted on in relation to the Anchor (sad!), but other than that, no ref. photos or anything.)

2008-04-03T15:57:00.004+03:00

I was just up in Famagusta over night, meeting the Anglican church there who've been praying for me while I'm on Doulos. I'm slowly putting together a video about Cyprus, and so while there was able to get some photos and a bit of video footage which hopefully I can use.

Cyprus is beautiful. The Anglican church there meets in an old old church which has been in disrepair for quite a while, and now is actually a cultural centre for the university, or something like that. So there are plenty of old icons around.

We've been out sailing a few times now, it's great. The boat is pretty well amazing with all the new ropes and such we've put on it.

Here's a quick photo of the Out-haul on the mainsail (the yellow lines and tackle which pull the sail out along the boom, making it slightly wider, and the shape flatter, which can help to get ripples out of the sail, thus improving the shape, and speed, take a bit of power out of the sail in heavy winds, and so on.)

Dad's quite happy with it all, but alas last Saturday when we went out sailing, the waves were very big, and while coming back in we managed to damage the centreboard (the big wooden thing I spent time sanding and varnishing a few weeks back). So now we've taken that out again, and today I've added some glass-fibre filler stuff, and will try and finish it back to decent shape again by this Saturday. Yes, I did leave it a bit late.

Last Saturday's sailing was fun though. We and our sailing friends went out only for about an hour, and crossed pathes a few times while tacking, so when we did the first time, I put on my best piratey third-mate voice and roared "Port side cannon teams 1 3 and 5 fire a full broadside! Naaar!" and then the next time we crossed, they made cannonball flying and splashing noises, so just as they passed us, again I shouted "All torpedo tubes togeather, fire!"

So. There you go.

3 weeks until I'm back to work, for a while I'll be in the UK working at the office there doing mediary things, and learning stuff to bring back to the ship.

Still almost 3 months 'til I'm on Doulos again though.

2008-03-22T22:01:00.003+02:00

I was about to slightly repremand a friend for not updating their blog recently, but realised that would really be far to hypocritical from me.

So. OK. Now I've updated mine, I can go winge at them....

Maybe not.

I've kind of given up on those wretched photos for now. I'll try again sometime. Maybe. Seriously, I uploaded them about 4 times. Those photos just *dont* want to go online. Weird.

We've been out sailing a few times. It's cool. I love it!

I have some photos of that too.

I re-installed my comptuer. Again. I took it apart, and put a new hard-drive in. Replacing HDs on iBooks is a *seriously* over-the-top procedure. about 45 screws came out, and it took me 2 HOURS just to ge the old HD out of the box! OK, admittedly, we did have to go buy a new set of screwdrivers and a mini-mini torque wrench.

You know, big water valves are a lot easier and less fiddly than computers, when it comes to overhauling. With computers, if a bit get's stuck, you can't hit it with a hammer until it comes loose. Well, you can. but it tends to STOP it working, rather than make it work better. The engine-room motto is something along the lines of "The bigger the problem, the bigger the hammer". Doesn't work with computers. If I get tired of A/V, maybe I'll go work in the Engine room.

I'm enjoying Cyprus. But I really feel like I'll be ready when I can go back to work. I got an email saying I'll be working with the UK office doing media and getting A/V training for 3 months, not 1 month, so still 4 months until I get to see my beautiful ship again.

Old rust bucket that it is.

*sigh*

I'll post soon about life in Cyprus. I have a few stories about kind of reverse-cultureshock coming back here.

But right now, just to add some tofu to this post, I'll talk about Opera Web-browser. I decided to try it out, about 2 weeks ago, and so have been using it since then, as my web browser, and also email client.

do I like it?

Well, some of it. It's quite fast, most of the time. And has a lot of features. And integrating web and email is alright. Some things I just don't like though.

It doesn't seem to cope with more complex web stuff so well. Like now, on this blog typing page, for some reason it's not put the images in for "insert link" and so on. It just has the alt text. It usually shows them.

It sometimes goes *very* slowly. Like, almost freezes, but not quite.

I like that it nicely links up my RSS feeds, email, and webpages though. And for most things, it's really fine.

It's really slow when trying to switch tabs which show video in. Especially if they are both *playing* video at the same time. That could be pushing it a bit with any browser, I suppose.

Anyway, it's doing an OK job, and I'll probably stick with it until I go back to Doulos. Then I'll go back to the simpler Safari/Mail.app combo. Mail.app deals with the on-board exchange email system better than opera. The reason I won't go to that now, is I can't get Mail.app to work properly with the secure email system I have back to the ship now... and I tried the opera mail client, and it just worked. So.

So. It's late. I have to get up early tomorrow to play music for the Western Easter sunday service down at the salt-lake. 6:45am pickup. Sometimes I let my mouth run away with itself, which is how I got into that one.

Happy easter, western world.

2008-03-06T17:56:00.003+02:00

The Austrailians have a great phrase. Actually, they have lots of really great phrases. But this one is obscure to the point of being silly, and yet apparently universely understood by Aussies.

"Not Happy, Jan"

This phrase is generally used when something stupid happens and the person is, in fact, not happy. It came from a TV ad a few years ago they had. Bridget, this video is for you.

ok. so now, you're probably wondering "Why did Daniel post this?"

Well, firstly, it's because I've been having Aussies telling me "Not Happy, Jan" for the last 2 years, and finally I've got a chance to go looking such things up online. Now I know.

Secondly:

I took a bunch of photos of work on Dad's boat, got them all colour corrected and so on, and uploaded them into blogger to post. Whereupon, I must have pressed the wrong buttons, and it'sjumped me into the address bar or something, and took me to a different page, lost the pictures somehow from the Auto-save/draft thingy, and I could find no way to bring them back.

Not Happy, Jan.

So. Here are some more pictures of Dad's boat.

No. Here are not more pictures of Dad's boat. I just tried to upload them again, and after uploading 1.3 meg, it then told me "failed!".

Not Happy, Jan.

See how useful the phrase is?

I'll post the photos tomorrow. Or later. Or something.

2008-02-24T18:37:00.010+02:00

As I type this post I can hear car horns blaring in the distance. They've been going for about 2 hours solidly. Yes! It's election-time. No! I'm not talking about the US of A.

Cyprus has a new President. Most of the world probably hasn't noticed, unless you guys can hear the car horns from outside? You can probably hear them in Egypt. Normally you only hear car-horns blaring for ages when someone gets married here. Or, rather, I suppose, when two people get married. But anyway. Then they drive through the whole town, down the seafront, with loads of guests following with all the horns blaring.

Part of me usually thinks "there they go again! noisy so-and-sos." in a not especially interested kind of way, another part of me thinks "lucky them" and is slightly jealous.

I've been doing quite a bit more work on Dad's boat again. I really miss having access to loads of decent tools easily... Especially marline spikes and sailmaker's palms. Also good strong needles. I've broken 2 so far. Sorry mum..

Anyway. This is my current "ditty bag" of stuff. (Speaking of which, I should make a real ditty bag. Another good project to start looking into...)

Needle and thimble (borrowed from mum.). A thimble kind of works as a palm if you reverse it, put the needle base inside the thimble, and push from outside.

Swiss Army knife, a birthday present from before I "ran away to sea".

And a new mini-marlinespike/fid. (The blue thing) I think it's supposed to be a die or other kind of hole punching thingy, but I saw it in a hardware store and thought "ha! finally!". I need to file the end a bit, and perhaps try and drill a hole for a lanyard, but otherwise it works well.

This is the new rudder downhaul. The thicker part is "shotcord", springy rubber-filled bungy-line, and the thinner part is a basic thin braided rope with the core taken out for flexibility. The whole is used to pull the rudder down into the water. We're currently totally overhauling it, dad's made a new stock (top bit) for it, and I'm stripping and varnishing the blade. This is the old rudder downhaul.

Not terribly good condition.

And here is the new join between the shotcord and regular line.

Two seized eyes together.
Same kind of work as the ladder making, just a lot smaller!

And here's a slightly more "artsy" shot of my tools.
I'm also remaking my website, doing a total re-design and everything, this time using CSS. I'll try and link more with this blog, and get some of the more interesting bits of the last two years as proper articles there, so it can all be linked up nicely. I've not done any web-design for about 3 years, so I'm a bit out of practice. It's fun to get my hand in again. Some parts of CSS are really annoying me though. I had some ideas for the design which I think would have worked well, but I just could NOT get to work with CSS in any normal/sane way. Anyway, it's mostly working now, designwise, I just need to add all the content to the new design, then upload everything. I'll keep you posted.

2008-02-19T20:56:00.010+02:00

So. More about Cyprus. It's wintertime, right now. That means cold. Freezing icy blasts of super-chilled air writhing and curling around in whirlpools of semi-defrosted almost-liquid oxygen, CO2, cigarette smoke, car fumes, and various other frigid things which make up common Larnaka air.

OK. So, slight exaggeration on the whole coldness thing. It was about 12 today, I guess. Still, that's pretty cold, especially as it was about 37 when I left Doulos.

Also, Larnaka is really clean, mostly. Not so polluted at all. It's beautiful, actually.

I've been helping a little at the theatre where I was working. This is the set from their new play "The History of Cyprus in 60 minutes", which my dad and I helped set up the lights for last week. I also recorded it on video for one of the actors. I'd love to actually record it properly, with multiple decent cameras, tripods and so on. This was just a single home camera.

I've also been helping my dad a little at the office, doing a bit of logo/animation, and probably will do some more soon.

I've been helping him a bit more with his boat too, whipping/splicing/seizing, etc. This is the new out-haul block (I think. So many ropes on this little boat, I forget what they're all for right now, as I've STILL not been out sailing on it...).

Anyway. It's funny doing all this ropework on such tiny little ropes. Kind of like working on a model railway, or something. It's nice though. I like it a lot.

Here is the new jib sheet (again, I think). We got this rig idea from his Wayfarer Book, and then I whipped it up. There are 3 seporate seizings to to make up this next piece. It should hold nicely, and will be good to work with. I've no idea how much pressure it'll actually be taking, so I look forward to going out sailing soon to get more of an idea.

Today we also started work replacing the rudder stock. The old one is kind of shot, and so we're making it almost completely afresh from (hopefully) marine ply. This is the old one (dismantled).

And here is the new one to be. We've jigsawed it, and now it's being held and glued overnight so we can finish the two halfs and then start varnishing the pieces tomorrow, hopefully.
So, I'm still getting to use my Deckie skills. I miss ships so much. Maybe it's just I miss Doulos... but I do miss ships. I miss sea-watch. I miss working with cargo, mooring stations, ropework, water tanks, painting, loading water, blocks and purchesses, bosun's chairs, stages, all of it. *sigh*

Is it the work I miss, or is it just the people, my ship, my home of the last 2 and a bit years?

I feel part of it is the work. I also know I was so tired of it by the end. So tired of Deck Dept, so tired of the long hours and stress as waterman.

Will I ever do that work again? Except in Dry-docks on Doulos? Only God knows...

2008-02-14T22:23:00.005+02:00

Yes, I'm back in Cyprus, at last. My last post showed a photo from the window of my accommodation at our office in Quinta, so now I'll start with a photo showing the view from my bedroom at my parents new house:

These are water tanks, so of course, of special interest to Yours Truly, being an ex-waterman, and everything. The top tank is a cold water tank, and the lower one hot water. The two panels by each box are the solar-heating panels for the hot water tank. These tanks are quite a bit smaller than our Doulos tanks, of course. Combined volume on these tanks would be roughly 1-2 tons, as opposed to the roughly 800 ton capacity for freshwater on Doulos, that's theoretical, as normally we'd have to be much much less loaded, as the ship would be too low in the water.

Virtually every house in Cyprus has one of these dual-tank combinations on top. Sometimes, as in this photo, a house will have 2 sets of tanks. Cypriot architecture is usually great, I love being back here in Cyprus, seeing all of the lovely houses and Mediterranean styles of building, but the omnipresent water tanks are a massive ugly blot on the face of Cyprus building style.

My parents moved house while I was gone. (They did tell me...), but it's a bit odd, anyway. Kind of being "at home", kind of totally not. It's a really cool house. It's got a single level guest flat on the ground floor, and then a totally separate 2 story house ON TOP of the first one! So excellent for having guests/familys to stay. Speaking of which, we have a family staying with us right now, really cool family.

I'm speaking about Doulos at the youthgroup tomorrow, and then probably at church sometime soon, and perhaps the other churches around soon as well.

I'll blog more soon.

2008-01-17T17:37:00.000+02:00

Hm.

I'm at the UK office now, staying at their guest accommodation.

It's very quiet, lovely here. I have the apartment all to myself, and can cook and eat whenever.

It's so quiet. I can hear sheep bleat occasionally.

Tomorrow or the day after I will head down to see family and friends all over the UK, and the fly back to Cyprus in about 10 days. I don't seem to be suffering jet-lag, which is good.

2008-01-15T15:57:00.000+02:00

So. I'm in Kuala Lumpuaa, Malaysia.

Why?

Well, it's called "furlough", basically, I'm off home for 3 months, after being on the ship for 2 years. After 3 months, I should come back to the ship again. I probably will delay my return, and actually go to work with UK branch of our company doing an AV exchange programme with their much more pro AV people for 3 months ( its much cheaper to go from Cyprus than later from back in whereever the ship ends up being).

I just had to say goodbye to most of my really good friends, many of whom I wont see again, until Heaven, probably. In one way, I find it easier, because I really do just see it that way, that I will see them all again. On the other hand, some people I really will miss. I don't know how I feel about it all right now.

One HUGE amaizng thing (thankyou God!)is that I can fly to Frankfurt with probably my best friend on board, who is also just finished 2 years on board, but instead of going for furlough, is going to work on our company's other ship for a while (they need deck ratings). I'm kinda proud, He is apparently getting some leadership position in the deck dept, because of his qualifications. He was one of my students in doing his EDH (Efficient Deck Hand) Course last year. One of my students is gonna be a bosun or something like that! Wooo!!.. Another of my students is now Bosun on Doulos too.

Ma boys is agrowin' up, and dere Papa is proud as heck!

Kind of. They knew most of it already. But anyway.

Need to run. no battery.

2007-12-18T21:44:00.000+02:00

PM shift today, so I spent the morning drawing...

2007-11-26T15:51:00.000+02:00

Today we went a bit mad with a jigsaw. We cut a huge ugly hole in the main lounge desk, and found we'd cut into a structural support, and that the muppet who installed the whole desk made it all to NOT line up with the bottom desk supports.

So we had to screw all kinds of things together (literally. We borrowed two electric drills).

At this point, we realised that the AV manager would be coming back to the ship after three weeks away during dry dock.

We also realised that she would NOT be happy with a dirty great ugly hole in the middle of the AV desk. Also that we were kind of stuck, as the jigsaw wouldn't fit under another part of the desk to finish re-cutting the hole...

So we pulled even more of the desk apart, cut more holes, screwed things back together, drilled dholes, and generally had lots of very stressful fun.

The other AV guy was sweating like crazy. I was laughing and loving it, in a stressed kind of way. Kind of like the waterman thing, leaving port with transferring water all around, ballast tanks, and overflowing, flooding places, and so on.

Fun, fun, fun.

Anyway, we eventually got it all back to a fairly good state. It all looks pretty good now:

I won't post a hi-res photo.

Anyway, the lights are working well too. We need a few sockets for the ceiling - we'll buy them in Manilla. Otherwise things seem sane and happy.

Those lights can be put anywhere in the ceiling - we can position them in any place! It's great.

We also pulled the AV computer monitor out of the rack mount, managed to get a small LCD display from IT, and replace it with this. Now no more evil flickering and madness from engine/ship magnetic interference.

That was horribly complex too, with the other AV guy lifting the monitor from the back of the rack, and me trying to fit it through the hole on the other side with a screwdriver.

Anyway. All seems well.

We've also taken all the video tapes out of the wall, and put them in boxes. The carpenters will take out all the shelves and make us some wall mounts for the lights and cables, so we can keep them there. We never use the video library anyway (well, hardly ever). Hopefully we can make it all more efficient and sensible (and fun!) around here.

2007-11-24T16:41:00.001+02:00

We're now sitting at anchor just outside the dry dock, as there is a typhoon around, and heading our way, and the dock master doesn't want our big heavy solid-as-a-rock ship smashing up his quayside. Also the ship next to us just started sand-blasting their hull, and we don't want all that sand all over our nice clean ship.

As well as making rope-ladders, I'm also working at the new lights installation in our Main Lounge. As the ladders team is quite small, I feel kind of guilty and silly trying to get time off that to make the lights, and we have 3 ladders to make and everything, so I'm kind of doing lights and video stuff in my deck dept "off time".

This is one of the finished products, this amazing bar will attach into our ceiling (or false deck-head, or whatever you want to call it) at any place in the Main Lounge.

This is the clever fitment idea from our ex-electrical officer. The blue rubber is actually from a stethoscope that we attacked, and then a wing-nut underneath tightens the bolt which squeezes the rubber and makes it hold into the ceiling. Amazing...

We then have 6 places in the ceiling which will have 4 power sockets for them, which are linked to our dimmer pack. We also have made a patch box which allows us to run DMX (lighting control signals) down our "comms" system (a complex head-set communication system built into our Main Lounge, something far too complicated and big for such a small venue...), and so to plug in a bunch of coloured LED bars lamps on the floor. Fun stuff.

My parents actually bought these lights just before LAST dry-dock, that is, about a year ago. Then, due to ship-politics, mis-communication, and lack of real push, they never got installed until this dry-dock. Rather sad.

So as not to end on that unhappy note, the lights are being installed.

And now for something totally different...

I went to get some coffee. it appears that the Programme Room coffee maker hasn't been used in a while:

2007-11-19T20:02:00.001+02:00

This blog post is dedicated to my wonderful Dad who read the Horatio Hornblower series of books to my brother and I when we were younger.

Thank you.

Dear readers, I feel it is time for your nautical education to be expanded. I'm going to teach you about making rope ladders.

We're currently in dry-dock, Doulos is out of the water, and so we can do an awful lot of big jobs that we can't do at other times during the year.

I'm on the lifeboats team this time, and so we're making a few new ladders for the life rafts, as the old ones are really nasty. I've spent 12 hours a day for the last 2 days making this one, and I'll be at it for another week or so, and I think you might enjoy.

First you will need some 2 mm tarred hemp (a lot), about 45 metres of 22 mm manila rope, about 30 wooden steps with two holes at each end, a hard metal eye/thimble, some plastic spacers, and some tools (heavy duty needle, sail-makers palm, knife, marlin spike, Swedish fid is very nice, and a threading spool. Although you could probably get by with a bit less. You will also need a wooden block with slats cut out for at the right distance for the steps to rest in while you make the ladder.

First soak and stretch the manila rope. We stretched it overnight with a chain block over the top of the book exhibition roof.

Next, once it's dried, cut it in half, so you get two (roughly) 23 metre lengths.

Next divide both in half, and put the thimble in place, and seize it into a hard eye, then add a few extra security whippings.

After you have got these in place on both, you will need to thread the rope into all the steps. They should be quite tight, and it may be horribly difficult.

Once they are all on, you can start getting them ready on the ladder block. This block lets the steps sit at the right distance from each other while you seize/whip them into place.

It's very important to make sure the first step is the right distance from the hard eye, on both.

If you get it a bit wrong, all the rest of the steps will be wrong too. Don't.

A small aside... you should use tarred hemp for this kind of thing, as the thread. tarred hemp lasts much longer, and holds together well. We don't have any right now, and the Chandlers are very late in supplying it, so we have to use regular un-tarred hemp, and wax it ourselves. We're doing this by running all of it by hand through blocks of wax.

I also am using one of these threading spools to hold the hemp once I've waxed it. Saves a bit of time, and makes handling it all a bit easier.

So this is how you attach every step. First, place a (plastic) spacer between the ropes next to the step on both sides.

Then sew a small (40cm) length of hemp through the two ropes, so that it pulls the spacer back towards to the step. Don't make it too tight yet, leave it for later.

You can use a sailmakers palm to sew the hemp through the rope, as you need a lot of force when the rope is tight, and you will be doing this a lot. Sailmaker's palms are wonderful, but even with them you may get a few stabs and minor cuts.

I've got blood on the ladder twice so far...

Then sew a 2 metre length of hemp into the top rope, about 5-8cm from the end of the spacer,

and make it fast with a constrictor knot, or another knot of your choice.

After it's on start binding the two ropes together with this hemp working towards the spacer. This photo shows me using a marlinespike (& marlin spike hitch) to pull the hemp tight. Marline spikes and their hitches are your best friend. Bind over the top of the free end of the constrictor knot you just made, so it is trapped underneath and cannot come loose.

Once it's at the spacer, make a couple of hitches/clove hitch (or another constrictor knot, if you feel so inclined) around one of the ropes, and then loop around the entirety of it twice or three times, going between the two ropes, pulling the previously made binding together more, and adding strength.

These turns are called "frapping turns". Once you've done a few, make it fast again with a constrictor knot, or clove hitch or something, and then sew it once through the rope, and tie a small overhand knot. Then sew it once more through the rope, and cut it off flush with the rope.

After that's all done, you can then tie off the first bit of hemp you put in around the spacer. Once it's tightly bound and made fast, sew the ends through the main rope, make a small overhand knot, and sew through once again.

The way I'm trying to get the team to do it is to leave no free ends of hemp hanging around at all, everything should be ended by sewing through the main rope, preferably twice. Once, then an overhand knot to secure it, and then again to bury the end. It looks so much nicer, and can catch on less and is much less likely to come apart.

Use the valleys in the lay of the manila main ropes to bury the overhand knots too, and then they can less likely to come out either.

Anyway, that's about it. You go through all of this 4 times for every step, as you put a space in on both sides of the step, and facing topside and bottom. It takes between 10-30 minutes for each one. So about an hour per step, working full speed. And this ladder has 20 odd steps, plus extra time, and teaching the new people how to do it all, and so on.

You never realise how complex rope ladders are until you make one.

2007-11-07T14:40:00.000+02:00

Doulos. Drydock. Batangas. 2007.

Here's a few random pictures.

I moved into a new cabin a few months ago, when I changed jobs to AV, I could no longer sleep in my beloved Waterman's Cabin any more. My new cabin is alright. Not anything really special... Actually, it is quite special. The bathroom and main doors are in exactly the same place, in a tiny corner of the room, making it a health hazard if you happen to try to open one while someone else is opening the other. Speaking of the bathroom, here's a rather nice photo of the flush valve on the toilet.

There. Isn't that special. It leaks a lot, which is why it's encrusted with green salt-crystal thingies. Doulos toilets are flushed with salt water, by the way. Thus we have a slightly strange feeling (for europeans) system, that you can have only 3 minutes of shower per day (which is fresh water, and expensive), but are expected to flush toilets for a minumum of about 20 seconds, to keep the system well cleaned out. Our toilet blocks a lot, probably partly due to the flush valve, which you've just seen. It has this helpful sign above it, which never ceases to amuse me:

The actual meaning of the author is probably lost in all antiquity, as is his identity, which is probably a good thing. They also left this charming inscription on another note stuck up by the sink:

Ahh... the joys of living on a multicultural almost-english speaking ship.

2007-10-08T02:46:00.001+03:00

Hong Kong is beautiful. The colours of the place are really spectacular. It's kind of similar to singapore in some ways, yet also totally different. I feel it's kind of more peaceful, and also more human. Some of the countries/places we've been in the last months have been very clean, tidy, and beautiful, yet also, almost too stark. From the tiny ammount I've seen of HK, it seems less so. Still clean, but not clinical. I like it.

I bought a camera here, something I've been thinking about for about 3 years, and here is my first photo I've taken and been happy with. Hopefully this will also encourage me to post more frequently.

hmm

2007-10-06T04:44:00.000+03:00

I've just set up this blog to now accept my posts by email from my
Doulos account. If it does work, it should be even easier for me to
post. So hopefully I'll be sending more interesting entries a lot more
often.

I'll keep you updated.

_____________ NOD32 EMON 2572 (20071004) information _____________

This message was checked by NOD32 antivirus system
http://www.eset.com

2007-10-03T06:17:00.000+03:00

So. First Post in a LONG time.

I'm sitting in a starbucks in Hong Kong, so this is also the first post I have personally posted in a long time too. Mostly I send my entries via email to Cyprus, where my family upload them here for me.

On Doulos we do have an internet connection now, and have done for the last year. This is via a huge golfball stuck on top of the book-ex roof. OK. It's not really a golfball. It just looks like one. It's actually a satillite dish inside a globe, so it can swing around and point the right way without getting stopped by anything or fall off or something.

A few months ago one of the I.T. techies came out from the USA and did some clever stuff with the connection packet shaping and bandwidth distribution, so now all ship computers have internet access, and when we are in port we usually have a wired local broadband connection. Personal laptops don't have access to the net, only our doulos email accounts, but I (theoretically) could post from the computer inside the AV booth.

Speaking of which, I'm now working as an "Audio Visual Operator" or possibly "technician". Yes, after all that hassle. It's great. Totally different work, but getting to work with on board shows/programmes every day is good. I really enjoy that, and have many ideas I want to try, and hopefully will get a chance to soon. Learning/practicing live sound mixing is also good. Not something I feel very confident at yet, but it's something I really want to be good at, and so working with AV every day, I'm getting better. Some nice things about being a musician and doing AV, I'm trying to be able to say "that echo/feedback/noise/loud-part-of-voice is B, one octive above concert A" and then be able to EQ it out straight away... takes practice though, to be able to do it fast enough to not be noticed. Anyway, I'm out of battery juice on this machine, so should head home. It's lunch time. "Cold cuts and cheese" Yum.

2007-08-17T21:19:00.000+03:00

I'm quite tired today. I-night tomorrow. Didn't really get a whole lot accomplished these last few days. A bit depressing.

I feel slightly directionless at the moment. I have so many things to do, and to be doing, and yet not getting any of them done. I join AV in two weeks, but I really want to finish Deck well.

I was given three days to do the lifeboat videos, during the time these guys are doing their training, to video them doing everything, basically.

Today was my last day given to do them. I've got the script of one of them done, 1/4 of the second script done, a bit of B-roll filming done. But none of the blocking done, none of the real filming done, and so, obviously, none of the editing done.

I'm VERY excited to go to AV. I really look forward to leaving deck. I don't know how it will be at all. Really weird. Kind of like being a kid, who was in school, suddenly being home-schooled, or something. I enjoy deck work, and too easily and probably too much see myself as a deckie, and a waterman. I am already doing video stuff and some AV programmes in my free time. I have so many ideas, but no way to play with them and try out.

Suddenly, it will be my job.

On one hand, sounds wonderful. On the other, slightly worrying.

Also I still have a problem really accepting that I will be joining AV. , even though I've had an official letter from Personnel about it, at last. I still honestly have a 80% belief that I'll be told "Sorry, someone is leaving, you need to stay in deck" or "Logos Hope NEEDS people, you're the only one who can go, even possibly. We don't NEED you in AV, we could take someone else, but if we don't send 2 deckies, they can't sail." Silly, I know.

2007-08-15T21:16:00.000+03:00

Pretty good day today. Some lifeboats videoing, some script writing, some fireman maintenance work (so the fireman can do lifeboats training!).

Found found a weird inconsistancy in the liferafts procedures, so chased it up, asked the captain about it, and have emailed a picture and full explanation to both captain and safety officers.

It's so strange though... I actually quite like ships, and all this safety stuff and all.W orking within the ISM and all the regulations and stuff is quite fun in a weird sort of way. Maybe I would make a good maritime laywer or something....

2007-08-13T21:13:00.000+03:00

I was duty fireman today, so will be off tomorrow. I've been loading water, as well, but cannot leave the ship for 24 hours.

If there is a fire alarm go off, I'm fire-station supervisor, overseeing the investigators, calling if to page for the full fire control team to come, etc. Also I have to check any locations before any hotwork is allowed (welding, etc), isolate zones on the smoke detector panel before hotwork is allowed, etc etc.N ot very exciting unless an alarm goes off. Then it's quite mad. My first 3 times as duty fireman I had big false alarms.

2007-08-12T21:12:00.000+03:00

Quite a good day today.

Family service in the morning - I was doing a bit of puppets.

Taught more ropes stuff all afternoon. Was just marking taskbooks, and will have dinner (real dutch cheese!!!) and then go out for ice cream with the i-night crew.

2007-08-10T21:11:00.000+03:00

The THING I actually miss from Cyprus is a stable, normal, sane Linux box to work with. I am trying to find some documents about EDH training on the network, and to figure out some stuff for the lifeboats next week. There's one page of stuff I've seen the chief mate looking at, and it's good, but he's on break and now I can't find that page! Annoying.

But I just got a programme installed which makes this windows machine work almost like a Linux desktop. I can have 4 or 5 applications open, adn 8 or 9 windows, and get between each job just by pressing alt-1 or whatever. No silly alt-tabbing through 10 windows to see what I want. I don't like using the mouse.

The first day's training went well. I covered most of the ropework they needed to know. Knots, splicing, seizing, worming/parcelling/serving, stoppering at mooring. It's quite satisfying teaching, but complex too, and so much stuff to think about, and figure out how to get it to work. Tomorrow we will do purchases, bosun's chair and stage tomorrow, also care of rope....

2007-08-09T21:01:00.000+03:00

Life is good.

The e-day went very well.

I'm going to join AV on the voyage to Hong Kong in September!!

But I'm really tired.

Today:

9-12 i-night technical meeting, looking at the lights
12-3 sea watch
3-5.20 mooring and preparing water for the port

It's now 5.45.

Tomorrow I start teaching EDH (Effiicent Deck Hand), so I need to prepare all that. Should be interesting, but I don't have anything prepared yet.

2007-08-08T21:01:00.000+03:00

I'm sitting in the dining room at 7.30am writing this. It's dark outside still, with rain and occasional lightning as the wet season continues to build here in Mokpo, South Korea. The windows are fogged up by condensation and water, allowing me to see the port about as clearly as I currently see my current life and future on Doulos.

I know that what job I actually do is quite minor, really, and that I'm here to serve, and it's God's choice what He asks me to do, nevertheless, I'm finding it intensely frustrating, and hard to focus on what I have to do day to day, and know how to spend my time. I was told (again) yesterday that I will be told for sure by the end of the week...

Tomorrow morning I'm taking a team of 4 people who I've never spoken with together (one of whom I've never met!) to do a 90 minute kids programme. I was told on Sunday afternoon that I was in charge. I was also told I had 2 steppers (who are tour guides, and so don't really speak english) and one from the new preship, who I've never really spoken with. So I tried to arrange a meeting that night, and told them as best I could.

None of them showed up.

So I spoke with the one from the new preship, who was working at the book-ex, and so couldnt come to any meetings. I arranged a programme, and told her what I needed her to do.

I managed to find one of the steppers, but I don't really know what she will do. We arranged to meet this evening to sort out her Bible story, but she never showed again. and I still havent met the other stepper/volunteer.

So I phoned today the host, and she wants to take us for lunch. So I said it was 4 of us.Then this evening I saw the notice board for e-days, and we have someone else joining the team!! So I hope I can see them at breakfast tomorrow, and maybe we have to skip devotions or something to prepare.

I really hate just bulldozing over the others, especially the steppers and just making them translate or something, but then the ballance between "the show must go on" and also "Doulos is about people".

To make it worse, Creative Ministries are closed all Monday, and by the time I'd found out I was in charge and thought about ideas on Sunday, they had also finished. So I havent been able to get any drama music CDs, or props, or costumes, or anything. They dont "open" until 9am tomorrow! Which is the time we're being picked up. I'll try to speak to one of them tomorrow at breakfast.

The host's expectations sound quite high of us, and I am really unsure of how it will all go. We're totally unprepared, and I'm struggling with feeling inadequate and cynical.

Just 4 days ago we had another crazy programme, a "mini-international night" which a church told us to produce at a concert hall they had booked without checking if it was a good idea with us first. So I was roped in and after work went along, having just taught 6 people that afternoon our cultural Scottish dance to perform... When we got there, we discovered one of the costumes missing, and so I had to re- teach them the 3 couple version backstage while the show had already started! We were totally unprepared, but somehow they managed to remember their steps.

The audience was about 80 kids and a few adults, who were there before we arrived and watched us troop in to the theatre and even practice how we would come out to bow at the end. I was feeling quite flippant and cynical by the end. It was an okay show, but what was the point!?

THEN... As we sat in the bus about to head back, a lady climbed up and spoke to all of us: "Thank you all for what you told us. Because of you, I now have strength to believe in Jesus".

2007-08-05T20:46:00.000+03:00

Didn't do a lot of work today, really. Moved a bit of water, checked a few levels, sounded a few tanks, and finished off the Pusan i-night review DVD.

It was raining today, so not so busy. It's rainy season here, and rain does have a certain charm.

I'm probably doing AV for a programme on Tuesday. The AV head went today and talked in strong terms to Personnel, and said she sped things up a bit. She wants me full-time in AV so she can release me to make more programme videos, and media clips for our use on board.

Now I have an e-day to organise....

2007-08-04T20:41:00.000+03:00

Today has been quite good.

The new Waterman is away on overnight, and will be back Tuesday. The other Waterman is doing most of the work at the moment.

So I'm working to get non-essential but good things done, such as the Waterman's bible, and writing a proper Waterman entry to the Ship Board Operations Procedures Manual (basically ISO 9000 for ships). And I'm getting the keys updated from piles of paperwork to be integrated into the ship's main database, and hopefully making the new lifeboat's training videos with the Captain soon.

Maybe also working with IT to get a couple of databases done.

Oh, and I'm trying to actually get to the bottom of the whole water chlorination deal, and get a proper procedure written down, and perhaps (the Captain is backing) to get an inline automatic chlorination system added. I'm aiming to leave my mark on the Waterman job!

2007-08-02T20:25:00.000+03:00

Life is:

frustrating.
tiring.
confusing.
wearying.
long.
too short.
too fast.
too slow.
too bizarre.
too boring.
too random.
too inane.
etc. etc. ad nauseum.

I saw the personnel manager today. He asked me about jobs and extending and all that, but started from ground up, as if he knew nothing at all about what I would like to do. We had an 8 minute conversation, maybe, so I tried to explain the kinds of things, just answering his questions, rather than saying anything directly about our (and my dept. head's and others) past conversations as I was just so puzzled.

He told me that it's all very complicated, and that video isn't really a full time job, and that all the manning problems are causing so much confusion.

The new Waterman has started. He's learning fast. I taught him the sounding and basic rounds on day 1, then the other Waterman watched him do them on day 2. Today he wasn't workign with us, tomorrow he's on e-day, Saturday we will work together again, I guess. So I'll keep them updated about how he's doing, and hinting that I'm redundant...

So that's good. But I'm still feeling very frustrated, making me want to leave the ship, even though I still feel it's the right place. Every day people ask, 'So what's happening?' and all I can respond is, 'If you find out, let me know!' And that just makes them think I"m being funny or secretive or something.

It's weird. usually, I can *feel* how the dynamics of the place are, and can fit in. But right now, I feel on a different wavelength, like I expect gravity to be normal, and all mass to attract each other, and apples to fall to the ground, and so on, and yet I'm living in a universe where in fact things don't do that, but almost. And there are no rules written down, but in fact it's something like things attract each other depending on how blue their colour is, and that's why apples fall towards the earth.

I feel like I'm in a computer programme I'm trying to debug, and everything ALMOST works,except that there is some wretched buffer overflow error, and extra 0s and 1s get dumped into random data structures.

Right now, I want to do video and AV stuff, and maybe study and get my deck officers ticket in a few years. It takes 2 years or so. 6 months study, and 9 months on a ship, and then a few months study, then an exam. I think.

My idea currently is do AV until either mid 2008, or maybe 2010, on Doulos, then perhaps
work with the company's TV/video group in the UK, and then either study as a deck officer, or go do AV on Logos Hope, or come work with dad, or all of the above, in some random order.

The AV team would like me to work with them.

But does the dept. head? I dunno.

Does personnel? I dunno.

Will it happen? I dunno.

This country is lovely, but so tiring. Such weird expectations.T hey expect us to bring revival , or something. The church here started with a revival in 1907 of that kind, out of nothing.

They want us to come and for revival to burn, and then seem disappointed slightly by seeing that we are, in fact, merely human. and God is using us in small ways., and all our human efort and life and all is not amounting to the huge dramatic stories they want.

2007-07-30T20:22:00.000+03:00

I was just doing video editing all today so far, pretty much. It's a project that the half-time video guy recorded 5 months ago, a backstage i-night video showing what goes into making i-night happen. But he never edited it, and doesn't have time to, for sure.

I'd like to record my own footage and make a better one., I need to record some interviews anyway. I finished the music track I chose, and it works quite well, but at the end, it feels like it's just the introduction to a whole big project. So I'll try recording interviews,and add footage from this current i-night of the actual dances and all that,and try and make a full documentry of inight. But this means its a bit of a bigger project.

2007-07-27T20:11:00.000+03:00

Life is tiring and frustrating.

The half e-days doing puppets with children were moderately rubbish. Unresponsive kids, then loud and random.

Then the water got messed up. The water people don't bring anything like what we ask. Like totally different amounts. We ask for 200, they bring 36, etc. so I've no idea how much we have on board. Their barge only comes with random amounts of water in it.

Also I spoke with Personnel about doing half video and half deck, after being told so many times by the video boss he wants me, and my boss OK-ed it, and personnel said it sounded fine.

But today My boss had a meeting with Personnel, and they have a videographer coming in the next preship. So it looks like they don't want me in video.

So I have no idea any more at all what is happening.

Very frustrating.

There's little stuff on top too. Like I got a key request, but the cabin number and key number on the request don't match, so I don't know which they really need, and then the personnel secretary was in meetings all afternoon, so I couldn't call her and ask which it really was. Just silly little stuff like that. Feels like the last straw when life is frustrating anyway.

Also, I'm SO tired.

Seawatch was so long and tiring, and then yesterday after prayer night I went by the keyshop, and found a water sample had gone positive, so I had to start doing re-tests on all the water until midnight. Then I was up this morning at 6am to get all the valves ready for when the water arrived while I was out.

2007-07-25T20:02:00.000+03:00

We will have a new waterman next week! I'll be speaking with Personnel tomorrow about doing half time video and deck training (teaching new people, teaching Efficient Deck Hand course to current deckies, doing lifeboats sometimes, etc.

This is OK with both the second mate, and the videographer's boss. So maybe I start in a week or two... Even better than AV, I think. I still get time outside, playing with ropes. And I'll still be doing AV for i-nights. If I do stay in deck, then I can apply for my AB ticket in February, since I'm still signed on under articles, still a deck rating, and still lifeboat 1 coxswain.

I can still hang out in AV, and mix video for them sometimes too.

I have three crazy days ahead.

The next two days are half e-days when I'm doing a puppet thing for six-year-olds, and half water loading and other work. Then there's the i-night the day after.

2007-07-20T17:10:00.001+03:00

Last port (Pohang, South Korea), I went with a team to stay away from the ship for almost 2 weeks, living with local families, and working with them (doing programmes at schools, church meetings, etc, etc).

During a 2 year stay on Doulos, most people will go out for 3 teams like this. Some, like here, being very civilised, others (say in PNG or parts of North Africa), being much more out-back "jungle teams". I was staying on my own with a family of four, and every day going to work with my team from 9am until late at night. I really enjoyed living with a family, again. They were so hospitable to me, and looked after me so well, also, they were very relaxed and friendly.
I was introduced to the father like this:

"Daniel, This is Elder Shim. You will be staying at his house."

So I was a bit worried about how formal I would have to be. We'd been warned that Korean culture is very formal, and that on past visits of the ship, many westerners had caused problems, and had problems, due to the very low-context, low formal nature of the west, and also of the ship.

But I found it totally the opposite. Very easy to get along with, very friendly, very family. The parents sitting on my bed talking (even though I don't speak Korean, and they don't speak English!!), and the kids running around, doing a bit of puppetry with them.

It was one of the kids birthday while I was there, here is a photo.

As you can see, a nice cake (for breakfast!) and also much traditional Korean food. My hostess cooked amazing food every breakfast. I was so well fed. Lovely. Kimchi and rice for breakfast,
with rice and soup. Mmmmmmm.

One day she made kim-pap, kind of rolled seaweed paper with rice and crab and carrots and cucumber inside. I'd wondered how it was made. Now I know. They treated us so well, we went out for Korean barbecue 3 or 4 times, had much traditional food. So good. SOOO good! Anyway. A really good time. Really nice people.

Now I'm back on the ship, and have been for a week or two. Usual stressful running around, busy life.

I've been waterman for more than a year. Almost 13 months now. Amazing. It's gone so fast. And I still quite enjoy it. I'm also really tired of it, though. Firstly the long days, and always
thinking ahead and being on-call whenever I'm on board, but also it's not something I'm especially interested in, water tanks, locks, and all. I'm able to do it, and quite well, I think, and have learned a lot, and enjoyed it a lot. But I really want to change my job.

My first love work wise is still theatre and performance/art. I've been working with the videographer on board quite a bit, recently in my spare time, and also helping some with the AV/technical/sound/video people in our on board programmes team. I've applied for a couple of different jobs, on board, but at the moment it looks like I'll probably be staying in the deck department for a while.

I may be changing jobs within the department (maybe going to work on the lifeboats for a bit, do some maintenance there), or something else. The second waterman knows everything now, and it's time for him to take charge, and have someone for him to teach. Time for me to step down.

I have a kind of dilemma, in that I enjoy the practical work in the deck department, I enjoy many of the people. The chief mates, bosun, and many of my friends. I also know quite well the work, and can do it competently, and seriously. Many of the more experienced people in the
deck department are leaving in September, and many other people want to leave. So Deck needs people who are serious about work, and can work well and enjoy it.

On the second horn, I want to do something more creative. To spend my time making and exploring, which currently I just don't have time for. I really want to help the ship make quality videos and programmes and present a high standard to visitors and others. We're using video and multimedia presentations quite a lot, and I can see even more potential in it, and there is a need for creative people who know video and are technical enough.

A lot of the current team dynamics on Deck I find really hard as well right now. Many people not taking the jobs seriously, or getting angry, not caring about the work they do, etc. Many of us still acting like boys, not like men. So many things I find really hard to work and live with, that I'd really be happy to not have to worry about.

I feel as if there is not enough strength of experience and caring about the jobs and the people, so new people join, and when they do, they inherit the old habits and attitudes of the previous people, most of whom are already tired of the work and want to leave.

So.

Do I try to move away from it all and start doing my preferred type of work as soon as I can? Or do I try to stay and be a positive influence, and try and encourage the new people to find interest and joy within their work? Maybe it's my home-educated mind-set, or maybe grace, or something else, that lets me work with this attitude.

Life is complex, sometimes.

2007-06-22T14:55:00.000+03:00

We've just arrived in Pohang, South Korea! These last few days have been very hectic for me, and kind of typify my whole life at present:

23:45 - 04:00am sea-watch.
07.30 - 08:30am study groups.
09:00 - 11:45am Korea country orientation. (basic history lessons, culture, language, etc)
11:45 - 16:00pm sea-watch
19:30 - 22:00pm a-team meeting
23:45 - 04:00am sea-watch...

And so on! Quite busy, as you can see. In my "free time" I've also been working on the ship's video edit suite editing 2 video projects. Tomorrow I'm going out with a group of people for ten days to work with a local church.

Here are two photos of me taken in Japan, where we've been for the past month:

2007-06-04T16:12:00.000+03:00

Greetings, Gentle reader, and welcome to the latest episode of brummie@sea.

Before we get much further, here is a photo of yours truly:

Taken in Fukuoka, Japan. Nice place. Very clean, efficient, tidy, quiet. Kind of reminded me of some of the more sane and modern parts of London (not that there are too many parts which combine both of those adjectives).

We're now actually in Kanazawa, which is further north.

I've been quite busy this port, as the second waterman has been on a team staying and working off the ship for the whole port. I was also learning a lot about the audio-visual stuff on board the ship, how to use Final Cut Pro, sound balancing, and so on. Fun stuff. We had some of the people from our company's technical/production side out for a week or so, and doing some training for us.

Since then I've been working on the ship's edit suite making a couple of video projects (a Taiwan report video, and a video about the work the ship did in Philippines to show in Korea).. Final Cut Pro is very very nice software.

Especially once you get rid of the silly one button mac mouse, and put a proper 2 button+scrollwheel on the beast.

I've also been working quite a lot on just refilling up the ship with water. We had to pretty much replace all our water with Japanese water, due to strange regulations here, and that was all a bit complex.

I stayed up quite late one night running around the ship with the I.T. guys, when they re-built the network system, rebooting and reconnecting the DHCP client sessions on every computer... We now have internet web access on every ship-computer (not personal laptops). That is really cool.

I am probably going to be changing jobs fairly soon, I don't know where yet. Possibly into I.T and Videographer, or something like that. Maybe working with the Audio-Visual team running the sound and stuff programmes on board. I've been working as a waterman for almost a year now. On Doulos that's a long time. I just looked in our logbook the other day, which I started us keeping. The first entries are from August last year. Amazing.

I applied for the job of Technical Administrator. It would be quite interesting, and a big challenge too. A more technical ship work, and I could learn a lot of administration skills that would be useful in whatever job I end up doing in the future.

Doing all the video and all that these last two weeks, and hanging around with the IT guys a bit, I know that that is where I enjoy working most. I love doing video editing, and IT configuring and installing and all that work is so much more satisfying than water stuff. I miss programming a lot.

I miss linux, actually. Now THAT's a geeky comment.

But whatever job I end up doing here, it'll be useful, and also a good change. I'm really tired of the waterman's job. It's a great job, you can learn sooo much. And it's very interesting, very much responsibility, very much independence. More independence than any other job on the ship, probably. Still. It's time for a change. I'm tired of the midnight phone calls, of thinking about the ship's water and list and draft 24/7. Of being "on call" whenever I'm on the ship. Of working alone, truely alone. Even working with the other waterman, I still miss being part of a team. I don't much enjoy being a leader. I prefer to be a team player. Able to relax with others who know as much or more than I do, and able to pass the ball around, rather than just holding it myself, or watch my partner/assistant run with it the whole time.

Anyway. It's late. Past 10. I need to sleep. goodnight.