20 April 2025
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Jane and I were up early this morning for the sunrise / Son-rise Easter service, an annual event organised by local churches atop Beacon Hill. It was relatively clear and bright – much better for the event than the fog we had last year. Although it had clouded over by the time we got back home, it was also lovely that the sun came out later in the morning to greet us after the regular Easter morning service.
19 April 2025
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I took the double bass along to today’s session. As well as supporting other people’s songs, I led on The Weight, Make You Feel My Love and The Midnight Special. I had been thinking of breaking out Emmaretta by Deep Purple, which I have been working on this week, but decided it wasn’t quite ready for prime time. Maybe next time (which will probably be the 17th May one for me).
18 April 2025
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Having had hot cross buns for breakfast, lunch and after this afternoon’s Good Friday service at HBC (not HCB!), I could be said to have had rather too many of them. However, we got a bit carried away with making them so it could well be my diet for breakfast and lunch tomorrow as well! Good job we had a curry for dinner this evening to balance the diet a little.
17 April 2025
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This week, I was studying the book of Jude with some friends. It is one of the shortest books of the Bible, tucked in just before Revelation. If people know anything about it, that is most likely to be the doxology (song of praise) that closes the book (vv. 24-25). Much of the rest is dense with references to the Old Testament and to other writings that would have been relatively widely known among 1st century people with an interest in Jewish religion, such as the Book of Enoch and the Testament of Moses. That makes it relatively hard going although the book still has ample contemporary relevance.
The author is Jude, one of the half-brothers of Jesus. What impresses me is that he doesn’t capitalise on this. He makes reference to James, another half-brother of Jesus and a significant leader in the early Christian church but fails to mention his link to Jesus, despite his letter being as Christocentric as any other in the New Testament. Possibly he was aware of how he, James and the others (Joseph and Simon – see, for example, Mark 6:3) treated and spoke of Jesus before his resurrection. However, I think it is more likely that he has learned true humility.
Unlike (another) James and John, the disciples who once tried to get Jesus to promise them a place of particular honour, Jude seems content to be alongside us, as one of many brothers-by-adoption of the risen Lord. Jude’s brother James is the same – both of them refer to themselves as servants (Greek doulos – literally ‘slave’) of the Lord rather than trying to claim airs and graces on the basis of their parentage and upbringing.
May we be likewise, not trying to make ourselves seem important but pointing to Jesus, who is truly the crux of everything.
16 April 2025
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Compared the the average person in the UK, I’m pretty sure that I’ve had far fewer visits to the hair dressers or even haircuts in general. I recently found this photo from the late 1980s when I had my hair cut for the one of the first Comic Relief Red Nose days:
I’m the spotty (and short-haired) lad at the front. It wasn’t quite the last hair cut I had but not far off!
15 April 2025
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I think I first started using Vim while I was working as a web developer at Lewisham Hospital in the 2000s. I went to some sort of trade show and saw it used in a demo session. It wasn’t the focus of the demo but I saw how the interface could be useful for the text file editing that made up much of my daily work and I have continued using it since then, gradually building up a repertoire of helpful tricks.
One thing I don’t recall using before this week is scripts. You can take a series of commands you might frequently need to run, bundle them together with some optional logic to test the target material and control the flow of execution and then run them as a batch. I suppose that, in the past, I have normally used Vim on systems where I have access to other CLI tools like sed and awk, which would have been my first port of call for batch editing but I don’t have that on the machine I normally get to use at work at the moment. However, I do regularly copy in data from a spreadsheet which comes in a couple of different but consistent formats and which I have been working on by using a series of typed commands.
I now have a short script, consisting of a series of search and replace commands. A couple of useful tweaks were to define the range as between a couple of marks (I picked x and y, which I haven’t been using for any other purpose) and the e flag to suppress error messages when a string is not found. For example, to remove a string like ‘Tuesday 15 April 2025’, my command is 'x,'ys/^.*day \d\d .* \d\d\d\d//e. That works within the specified range of lines (x to y) and removes a string pattern than is flexible enough to also cope with ‘Monday 12 May 2025’ but without accidentally swallowing up any other information I am expecting to find. Once the whole script (stored in C:\Users\<myusername>) has run, I am left with a list of appointment times and names, which I can then prepend with the name of the service they have booked into and a shortened date format (eg. ‘Tue 15 Apr 2025’), giving me a clear text list to work from.
It probably took me no more than half an hour from starting my research to the finished script (and a lot of manually typing the same commands) and could save me up to five minutes of tidying each time I use it so I should get the return on investment quite quickly as well as having another Vim skill up my sleeve that I am sure I will find further uses for.
14 April 2025
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My latest bit of 3d design and printing was a pair of stands I created over the weekend to allow me to hold my Roland KC-150 amp at an angle. I use it as my onstage foldback at the Baptist church and I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get the speaker pointed at my head for maximum benefit.
No photos yet as I’m not sure I’m entirely settled on the design. However, for a first draft, it seemed to work well and held up for a couple of hours in my testing at home and for the three hours or so I had it set up at church. I will want to do some more testing but I may well stick with the first release while they work, since it took about five hours to print a pair of stands.
13 April 2025
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Spring is definitely sprung in the back garden, with the plum now past its blossom period and the pear and apples fully out.
12 April 2025
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Jane and I popped up to the allotment today and I planted out some cabbages that we’ve been growing in pots at home. With the weather forecast promising cooler, more overcast days, warmer nights and the chance of a bit of rain, I’m hoping that will be a good strategic decision to produce a good harvest later this year.
Meanwhile, it looks like the potting up I did on Wednesday has killed some of my tomato seedings and possibly wiped out my chilli peppers – probably a mixture of root disturbance and being a bit too generous on the watering. Whoops! Still, what experience has taught me (apart from the fact that the green on “green fingers” is mainly the blood of dead plants!) is not to give up hope too quickly. Many plants don’t like to be disturbed but will bounce back and benefit in the long run even if not everything about the episode was optimal.
11 April 2025
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The other day, I was given a bottle of a Swiss fizzy drink called Rivella. Apparently it is somehow derived from milk (whey plus lactic and other acids as well as sweeteners). I was intrigued to try it and would describe the taste as not unlike Refreshers, fizzy sweets available in the UK (doubtless also full of acids and sweeteners).
I didn’t fall in love with to the point that I’d hunt down more supplies (Rivella isn’t commonly available in the UK) but I’d happily drink it again if I wanted a sweet fizzy drink and it was available.