Random Murmurings

That's me! (Pity about the morality...)

Your result for The Which Discworld Character Am I Test...

Mustrum Ridcully

You scored 90 intelligence, 47 morality, and 68 physical strengenth!

As Archchancellor of the Unseen University, you are the most sensiblely pig-headed wizard on campus. And what is perhaps more remarkable than being able to summon fireballs whenever you want them, you're even usually right. You have Rincewind's luck without any of his pathetic everyman-ness. After all, you *are* Archchancellor.

Take The Which Discworld Character Am I Test at HelloQuizzy

My life is complete...

I recently discovered a Z-code interpreter for iPhone - Frotz - and my life is complete! Z-code is the way of coding those text based interactive adventure games which were the basis for my love of computers in the early 80's. There are any number of Z-code adventures which can be played on any Z-code interpreter, including several versions of the classic Will Crowther Colossal Cave/Adventure. But in particular Z-code was used by the company Infocom to produce some classic games of all time.

As well as the popular Zork series, my personal favourites included a quirky 'Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy' game as well as the hilarious comedic outing 'Leather Goddess of Phobos'. If you have original versions of these games you can use the original Z-code data file for an interpreter like Frotz (which has been ported to many platforms). If you don't own the original games, then for the enterprising there may be other sources (*cough* *cough* *torrents*) for the z-code files. Once you've obtained the files, you need to put them on a server somewhere, then Frotz iPhone can browse to the appropriate URL and can download the z-code files.

Anyway I'm going to stop blogging now and get down to it! Ahhhhhh, memories...

"You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it, which you can't.

It is pitch black."

A couple of really interesting posts...

... by nakedpastor (and the second one). I really resonate with some of the feelings in this post (although I'm actually pretty happy in my own non-parish job at the moment). More than just a personal thing though, this kind of feeling about the institutional church is something I'm picking up more and more from friends and colleagues from my own and other denominations.

I feel like something is going to come together in my mind soon and I'm looking forward to the aha! moment.

Entourage and iPhone

I have been having a very annoying issue where messages sent from my iPhone (via my work Exchange server) show up as goobledygook in Entourage, though they are fine on the phone and indeed fine if I go into Windows Outlook. Apparently this is a long standing bug in Activesync for Exchange server 2003 (but not 2007). Anyway, short of persuading IT to upgrade to exchange server 2007 (yeah right, they're going to do that for a mac user they don't want to support anyway!) there doesn't appear to be a good workaround but I did find an Applescript that will let you look at the message and then save it to the desktop and then you can drag it back into Entourage and delete the original. Clunky but better than nothing. The script is found here. If I ever have time I might look at further automating the process of saving, re-adding and deleting via mods to the AppleScript or automator.

From my iPhone

Well, I held out a week and a half...

White, 16gb, Telstra for anyone interested :-)

DO IT NOW!!!

Run, don't walk to watch Dr Horrible's Sing-along Blog.

NOW!

MobileMe and Safari 4 Developer Preview

Apple's replacement for .Mac - MobileMe has (after a slightly rocky start) now launched and it looks pretty cool. It consists of a number of very polished webapps to do Calendering, Contacts, Email and Photo galleries, but more importantly it uses push technology to make sure that all your information stays up to date on any Macs you use, your iPhone etc. Linked with ActiveSync support, push mail makes MobileMe very cool for business people on the go.

Unfortunately, when I logged in to MobileMe, I found that a lot of the Ajax-y goodness wasn't working for me. In particular many of the icons weren't responding to mouse-clicks (though a right/control-click could be used ok and the desired option could be opened in a new Tab or Window - marginally workable but very annoying). Everything worked ok in Firefox so I eventually tracked the issue down (via a helpful Wikipedia article) to my use of Safari 4 Developer Preview. That left me with a real problem! You see Safari 4 has one killer feature I can't do without - full page zooming, rather than just changing font sizes. For an oldie like me who often needs a larger font size, the old zoom feature was a pain - only the text changed so the whole page layout and design was killed and overlapping boxes and controls often made readability a problem. But Safari 4 zooms the whole page, graphics and all to give an excellent result - layout intact and fonts large enough to read! If it came down to MobileMe vs Safari 4 I knew which would win!

Luckily a quick visit to the Apple Developer Connection revealed a version of Safari 4 Developers Preview with a date from a few days ago and I (correctly) surmised that this might solve the problem. So now things have settled down in the Cullen household, full page zooming intact, new MobileMe apps to check out, and continued lust for the iPhone 3G unabated...

P.S. I'm writing this in MarsEdit, having previously written it (or a nearly similar post) in ecto 3beta only to have it disappear when I tried to change from rich text to HTML mode. Sadly this isn't the first (or even second or third) time this has happened but it was the last time. Ecto development seems to have stalled and I'm leaving.

P.P.S. I then updated the Wikipedia article ;-)

10 Little Pieces of Advice to Take or Leave

I loved this list of advice from nakedpastor :

1. Lead leaderlessly. That is, lead in a non-leading kind of way. Serve. Step out of the leadership position continually. Perpetually. Create the vacuum for others to lead and serve.
2. Don’t go anywhere. No goal. No destiny. No vision. Keep it real and keep it present. You either serve the vision or you serve the people.
3. Don’t ever think of the “church” as some kind of entity ASIDE from the real flesh and blood people that constitute it. The church isn’t the entity, even though it wants to be and constantly endeavors to be.
4. Allow worship and expression of all sorts to be indigenous. Never think of worship as instruction. It is God-ward, not human-ward.
5. If prayer is always in the form of a song and never said or read, so be it.
6. Allow freedom of expression, even if it’s going to be weird, uncomfortable, and questionable. Judge it afterwards. Yes, when done with mutual respect, we do get used to this honest and authentic form of dialog and learning.
7. Let sinners play too.
8. Question everything.
9. Never be overly impressed with another person. No one is good but God alone.
10. Don’t be afraid to kill the mood. Always be honest and free, no matter how uncomfortable you might cause others to feel.

I especially liked number's 1, 6 and 8. As for 2, I agree that I'm over the vision thing, but I do think it's important to hold to 'values' and it may well be that some of those values are future-focussed. I also worry a bit about the 'serve the people' line since I think that's what too many churches do and become big clubs for members. Of course if you take the broadest possible approach to 'the people' then that's better , although I still think our values need to include an orientation toward serving the 'non-people' parts of creation too.

Perhaps it will work...

Emboldened by the fact that my endorsement of Kevin 07 seemed to do the trick, let me nail my (non-American) colours to the mast concerning the upcoming Presidential election...

Make love not warcraft

The Australian iTunes store now has TV programs, so as a test I downloaded a copy of the South Park episode, "Make love not Warcraft". It's hilarious, especially for a player, although I was just a little concerned at the fact that the evil character looks just a little like moi (but with the baldness...).

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

My favourite sequence is:

Cartman: Ok, hit him with pyroblast, Kyle.

Kyle: Casting... there's an 8 second cast time.

Cartman: Aren't you specced to reduce cast time?

Kyle: No, I'm an arcane fire mage.

Cartman: (Disgusted) Christ...