I used to love Jesus

I was once a Christian; I believed in God and I believed that God had sent his son Jesus as a sacrifice to pay for the sins of the whole of humanity. I was exposed to Christian teaching at school and my mother was a Christian, so she took us to Church with her most Sundays. The teaching didn't mean much to me until I was about fifteen and going to the Church Youth Club. I remember talking ("testifying") about it later as a step of faith - I stepped towards God and He took me in - but now I think it was a more gradual process and actually more to do with the fellowship I found with other people at the Church; my steps were towards my peers who were already Christians.

It was when I started university in London that I found myself in an environment that didn't encourage my faith as much as the rural town I'd grown up in; I was expected to think independently on my course (an Art degree with plenty of time to philosophise for myself) and my Christian faith didn't stand up so well once I started to analyse it from a different point of view. My faith had not been tested much before then and in retrospect there was a good chance that it might not stand up under pressure. I met other Christians at university and went to and enjoyed church with them; I particularly remember a black Pentecostal church that was lively and featured impassioned sermons by snappily dressed preachers. I said I think what drew me originally was the fellowship. That wasn't backed up by a deep faith, or at least under serious examination it didn't last very long, perhaps indeed because I hadn't seriously examined it before.

I came to understand that I didn't know what my faith was based on, and that's when it fell apart. Modern Christianity puts a lot of emphasis on the believer's personal faith; this is, I imagine very different from hundreds of years ago when people believed what they were told, or even today among those the Bible calls "the meek". I felt a responsibility to have my own experience of Jesus and when I realised I didn't feel that, there was nothing to fall back on. I asked myself what my faith was grounded in and couldn't come up with anything concrete. I asked my friends and the answers seemed to be circular, based on nothing fixed. It may be that I was applying the wrong kind of tests to my faith; believers don't expect to convince non-believers using reasoned argument, so why should they lose their faith after a bit of the same? However, I didn't have any other means of investigation and once I'd stepped outside, I didn't think about going back in.

I must admit I haven't often since had the same exhilirating sense of trust and affection that I got from my fellow Christians; it can be very uplifting to submerse yourself in a group as supportive as they were. I remember feeling free to be very open with them and feeling able to encourage them in turn, so being without faith can be a cold kind of freedom, but I believe in it.

Links

Hilarious sacking; BBSpot reports Yahoo categoriser loses his job for coding when he should have been categorising porn.
A doctor writes: "Blogging may be somewhat like golf -- it only becomes interesting when you start doing it yourself". Yes! That's what I think!
Great french ad (video link)

Losing a Finger

I was twelve (about that anyway) when I lost part of my right hand middle finger. A friend had just got home from hospital and I was going out with a bag of bananas to visit her. My parents' house had a big heavy front door at that time and if you left the back door and the middle door open, you created a through draft that could blow a door shut. I had the bag of bananas in one hand, so I pulled the door shut by putting my hand around the end and pulling. That's OK, you just pull your hand out before the door shuts, right? Well not in this case, because the other doors were open, so the door slammed shut, just catching the tip of my finger and leaving a piece on the inside. I don't remember making a lot of noise, though I guess I did, anyway, I ran down the road to my mother, who was chatting to a neighbour, and waved my hand in front of her, shouting "Look!"

The next thing I remember is sitting in our next door neighbour's car with my hand in a handkercief and it felt very cold. My brother had been in the house and heard the door slam, so he went to the door and found the tip of my finger on the inside, so he brought it out to Mum and me. I've never asked him to describe exactly what it was like (note to self).

I don't remember much else of that day, except that when the nurse stitched me up it really hurt. They told me there was a one in two chance that it would be OK, but nothing else.

I had to wear a sling for a bit and I was off school for a couple of weeks. During that time I practised writing left-handed, but I must be very right-handed because I was useless. The bandage smelled a bit funny and when I went back they told me it had infected further down my finger, so they had to cut off just below the top knuckle. That was the one time I've been in hospital overnight (except when my daughter was born; I mean I stayed by my partner's bed and that's another story). I remember just before the operation a nurse telling me I had nice eyelashes, afterwards a pakistani doctor came to see me and wasn't very impressed with my french and there was a teenager in a private room who had crashed his motorcycle. He had some music, Led Zeppelin I think, must have been on a tape recorder. I thought he was very cool.

Most people don't notice that I'm missing part of a middle finger and it doesn't affect me much. Occasionally I find that I can't lift as much as I should be able to because there's a bit of leverage missing and a few years ago it used to hurt in the Winter, even slightly opening up and my index finger has leant over slightly into the gap where my middle finger would have been. Later when I worked in a print shop several people assumed I'd got injured at work.

Games and a joke

Create your own comic strip here, try your archery skills here, and try this set of puzzles from Click Drag Type - the way they lead you into the puzzle is fab. This is a science lesson from Calvin's Dad (Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes)

Wish you didn't have so many web usernames and passwords?

I'll be away for two weeks so I may not be able to update the blog, although so far I think I'm the only one here (that means if you leave a comment you will probably be the first! Go ahead!).

Have you heard of The Long Bet? Setup to encourage long-term thinking, it challenges people to make predictions about major trends in the future, like the one that says that by 2029 no computer will have passed the Turing Test. Anyone else can then challenge that prediction and then a bet can be formulated. The Turing Test bet is $20,000 between Ray Kurzweil, inventor of optical character recognition and voice sysnthesis technologies and Mitchell Kapor he developed Lotus 123. The Turing Test was proposed by Alan Turing as a way to find whether a computer could think. The tester would interview two subjects, one of which would be a computer. If the tester could not tell which was the computer, the computer would pass the test.

I thought of a long bet - by the end of this decade more than 70% of secure websites will accept 3rd party authentication, so that the user will not have to sign up to many different secure sites, all with different usernames and passwords. But this bet is not much of a risk, especially after what I read this morning about BBAuth, a new web service from Yahoo.

Yahoo have come up with a method of allowing web applications to pass authentication to Yahoo's site. The apps don't see the username or password but they get a hashed username back that identifies the user. This means if a web app implements BBAuth, you will be able to sign up to the app using your Yahoo id, but the app doesn't see your username and password. You can already do this with Flickr but we may see lots of other implementations coming soon. Google released something similar called Authsub a while ago, but it didn't get the same buzz.

Cute kids' prayers and a woman with lightning coming out of her bum

Kids do better prayers than grown-ups. I ran into this on Slibe. Then here's a story about a woman in Australia who was hit by lightning in her mouth, the bolt travelled through her body and apparently exited via her backside Ouch. Here's a (video link) song by a guy who runs the dead troll website. Here's a link to his site which bypasses the wierd Flash intro you get if you feel you must check out the home page. If you go that way you need Flash 6.

Remembering Punk and My First Spam

I was 15 in 1976 when my rural North West town started to hear about Punk Rock. In fact I don't remember it as Punk Rock, but New Wave (was that later?). The first record that seemed different as I remember it was "Do Anything You Wanna Do" by Eddie and the Hot Rods. It had energy anyway. The first nw record I bought was a double A-side by the Stranglers called "London Lady / Get a Grip on Yourself". The stuff I listened to was The Jam, The Ramones, The Clash, Elvis Costello and The Damned. I wasn't really an angry punk, more a fun punk, but I thought The Clash were great - they talked about making their own clothes and they had a reggae track on their album. I listened to a lot of this stuff on John Peel's show some time around midnight, in bed with a transistor radio next to my ear so my brother in the top bunk wouldn't hear. Peel played that kind of music mixed with Ivor Cutler's stories called "Scenes From a Scottish Living Room". I remember one about a bird called Fremsley (if you've never heard Ivor Cutler, give the linked site above a go, it's worth a listen). The Peel Show was a strange and wonderful mixture.

It was sometime around then that I picked up a Disco 45. I'd not looked at one for a long time since I used to get them when I was around 10 (I wrote about that here. Disco 45 was an awful magazine, consisting of the lyrics of top 40 hits. I bought it every week). I'm not usually good at remembering dates, but I remember I did a project at school which consisted of copying the lyrics of songs from Disco 45. I don't know what the project was supposed to be - poetry? I was shocked when Mr. Brown thought my efforts were not that great! I did concede to myself that the the T-Rex hit "Deborah" was perhaps not the right choice - it went something like:

Dug and redug redug, dug and redug redug
naah naah naah naah naah naah naah
Deborah, you look like a Zeborah
naah naah naah naah naah naah naah
Dug and redug redug, dug and redug redug

...and so on. I wrote down the whole thing concientiously and Mr Brown must have wondered if I was on drugs (he wasn't very hip man). Perhaps I could have chosen a better example by Marc Bolan (he and Micky Finn, who played the bongoes, were T-Rex), but anyway, that was when I loved Disco 45. The time I'm talking about now was about 5 years later, so I think I would have been slightly embarassed by it - it was very uncool. I don't know how I came across it but I was interested in the competition inside. Disco 45 was probably one of the opposites of Punk (there were several opposites of Punk and pappy Top 40 pop songs as a bunch were one). The editor said he wanted people to write in on a postcard what they thought about Punk and the winner would get an album (see how things have changed? I was excited at the prospect of winning an album!) I sent a letter and a few weeks later he phoned our house and asked to talk to me. He said I'd won and would it be OK for him to put my address in the magazine so that people could write to me (heh, see how things have changed? Put my address in a magazine?!)

So I started getting letters from girls who found my address in the next Disco 45. I never wondered why I didn't get any letters from boys, but then I did get one from a boy / man / bloke, I never worked out his age, but his letter certainly stood out and I've still got it. It was my first spam, before email was invented. I can't scan it because it's faded now, and I don't want to write it all down (as you'll see). Difficult to know what to leave out here, but all the square brackets and *** are mine (as if my skinhead penpal would use square brackets). Anyway, knock yourselves out:

TO THE F***** IDIOTIC C***, [my name] WHAT A SHIT NAME.
NOW LISTEN ERE MOUSH I
REALLY HATE PUNK ROCK
WE GO PUNK BASHING UP LONDON EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT AND IF
YOU COME DOWN TO THE ROXY AT COVENT GARDEN WHICH IS A
SPUNK POCKERS CLUB I'LL
[offers to modify my looks] LIKE WE
DONE LAST FRIDAY TO A
C*** WITH GREEN HAIR. WE
WEST HAM SKINHEADS AND
WE'RE F***** RULE EVERYONE
MATE ESPICIALLY PUNK
ROCKERS WHO WE REALLY
HATE. YOU ARE DIRTY, SMELLY
F****** C**** AND IT'S A
WELL KNOWN FACK THAT ALL
PUNK ROCKERS ARE QUEERS
AND YOU MUST BE WITH A
NAME LIKE THAT YOU F*****
SNOB C***. I'M GONNA DRIVE
UP TO [my home town] ONE DAY
AND WAIT FOR YOU AND
[various graphic details] THEN
WHEN YOUR DEAD I'LL PISS
ON YOU AND KICK SHIT
OUT OF YOU AND ANY OTHER
PUNK THAT WE SEE
SKINS RULE AND DON'T
YOU FORGET IT C***
I'LL DO 10 PUNKS TOMMOROW
REALLY BAD AND
I'LL BE THING OF YOU. BY THE
WAY ALL PUNK GIRLS ARE
F***** OLD SLAGS AS WELL.
6 OF US [you don't want to read this bit]
COS SHE WAS A PUNK SLUT
ANYWAY ONE DAY I'M
COMING UP YOUR PLACE
WITH THE BOYS. SO START
SHITTING YOURSELF MATE,
AND REMEMBER
SKINHEADS RULE OK
AND KILL ALL PUNKS
PAKIS AND TEDS
WEST HAM
YOU CAN'T HELP IT
IF YOU YOU SMELL

Two Good looking photo sites

I recently found these and they have consistently good images. Bluejake is based in New York and daily dose of imagery is in Toronto. I think they both have a warmth that you don't always see, they're always (the ones I've seen) in colour and they are both interested in daily life. That's good enough for me!

Pay as You Drive and Pay as You Throw

I heard on the radio (Moneybox) about a new type of insurance policy called "Pay as You Drive". Insurance companies say you are more likely to have an accident if you drive between 11pm and 4am, so they will give you discounts if you don't drive in that period, but they propose to check this using a gps tracking system in your car. You pay for the device to be installed and then you pay per mile you drive - more if you drive at rush hour or in the wee small hours. They interviewed a woman that is already using it and she read out the information that the device reports - time, distance travelled, area. The insurance company interviewed said they would hand over the information to the Police if requested as part of a serious inquiry, but not in order to catch speeders. Here's an article on the BBC news site

That reminded me of something that came up while I was watching the tv program about local councils and waste disposal this week. Some councils have installed little recorder devices on rubbish bins so that they can report on what weight of rubbish has been collected from that bin and when. This will allow them to charge separately for waste collection based on the weight of your waste. I think they already do this in Ireland, which has a much better recycling record than the UK. Another BBC link about the devices
I'm sure there will be more uses found for this kind of technology, but personally it doesn't worry me much yet... maybe when database technology starts to get sophisticated enough so that "they" can put the disparate elements together. What was that film where the hero's walking down a futuristic thouroughfare and all the billboards are talking to him personally?

Simpsons Quiz, brill robot, way cool animation and a drawing

Simpsons Quiz - I'm not that big a fan, I only got to £1000 before I had to start repeating. Amazing Animation of cell activity; the studio were briefed by science professors aiming to find a different method of teaching students. Way cool robot (video link) - it moves so strangely! Pavement chalk drawing - wow!

Comics I read when I was young

When I was little I remember going to my nanna's house on Saturday mornings. She bought us comics and I was thinking about them today. The first I think she ever got me must have been Look and Learn; it makes me cringe now. Apart from the cringeing (aargh, so wholesome! It looks like a Watchtower!), I remember the smell. It had a similar kind of smell (must have been the paper / ink) to Jackie, which was also more appealing because it was a way into the world of girls, but come to think of it, I didn't see Jackie until a few years later when girls had it at school. My sister was too small to get Jackie when I had Look and Learn, I think she got Bunty instead. My brother got Victor, which was more of a strip comic. Victor had some good characters though; I remember "Alf Tupper, The Tough of The Track" Later I must have given up on Look and Learn because I started getting Shoot, a football comic (in that picture of a Shoot cover I think Martin Chivvers of Spurs is about to be taken out by Tommy Smith of Liverpool, the team I supported). At that point my brother was getting Beano or Whizzer I think. Later again I got Disco 45, a collection of the lyrics of pop songs at the time. I'll tell you about that another time.

landfills Filling up

I saw an interesting piece on tv the other night about new arrangements in some councils for waste collection, in response to stricter European Union regulations about how much of its total waste the UK should recycle. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, this country recycles only 18% of its waste, compared to Ireland 31%, Germany 58% and Holland 65%. http://www.ippr.org.uk/pressreleases/?id=2283 Local councils are saying they will have to charge for waste removal if they are going to avoid being fined by the EU http://www.lga.gov.uk/PressRelease.asp?id=-A783C9F1 Some councils are starting to take radical action, (e.g. collecting the rubbish once every 2 weeks instead of every week), but that is making people verrry mad, because they're starting to get rats, maggots and the stink of rotting rubbish. To be fair, the councils are under a lot of pressure to reduce the amount of waste they dump and they are collecting recycled waste every other week. In Ireland people are charged by weight for their rubbish and their record is much better, but there's a lot more fly tipping. The report said there's an estimated 9 years worth of space left in UK landfill sites.

Searching for "landfill" at the BBC site I found this wierd story about a fire that was burning underneath a landfill. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/guernsey/4851028.stm

Funny Clips

George Bush is not a favourite of mine. I know there are a lot of cheap shots around, but sometimes a little fun at the expense of the Man can lighten the heart. This is a funny clip from the Daily Show with Little Richard as "translator" for GW. (video link) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-rBc9jxG1U

Here's a funny Thai tv ad (video link) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4479130566581116930 Wonder how that coup's going?...
...apparently the most peaceful military coup in Thai history (well, according to the Thai Tourist Authority!) http://www.thailandhotdeal.com/issue_detail20/ It was strange hearing about that coup - we'd only been there on holiday a couple of years ago.

I Like Hearing Myself Talk

That's from an Oscar Wilde quote - "I like hearing myself talk. It's one of my greatest pleasures". Let's see whether I like what I write. I'm starting this thing more out of curiosity than confidence - let's see what happens. I work in computers, I live in London, I have a partner and a daughter. I like reading, listening to music and watching tv and films and browsing the web. I've always voted Labour but I'm disappointed with Tony's adventures in Iraq.