Team Weir with Jane outside the Potting Shed

On Saturday my good friend Andrew Weir came to visit with his lovely wife Jenny and 9 weeks old daughter Beth.

I first met Andrew back in wheneveritwas (1999?) when I was invited to play bass guitar for the Powerpoint Edinburgh band. The band then was: Andrew (guitar and vocals), Rik Brown (lead guitar), me (bass) and Brian Allen (drums). What a powerhouse of modern Christian worship music that was!

Thankfully we’ve stayed in touch ever since, and Andrew rejoined the Powerpoint band a couple of years back this time on drums. Andrew is one of the best drummers I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing with. And he doesn’t play so loudly that I go deaf, which is always a bonus!

We had a lovely, relaxed day on Saturday sitting, chatting, eating a delicious toasted-wraps lunch (thanks Jane) and taking a leisurely stroll down to Anstruther harbour and back.

A fabulous day with fabulous friends.

Sunday

Jane with Grandma in the garden.

On Sunday afternoon Jane and I took a stroll down to her parents house where we gathered in the garden for a joint birthday celebration: Jane’s maternal grandma and brother-in-law Martin.

Martin, Peter and Skye in the garden.

There were sandwiches a-plenty (corned beef and tomato ketchup anyone?!), ginger bread and spotty mugs.

As you can see from the above photograph even Frank, the rabbit from Donnie Darko, turned up to say hello!

In truly Scottish style we stayed outside in the garden for as long as we possibly could, squeezing every last therm of heat from the sun as it disappeared behind a foggy, grey sky.

More than once on our five minutes walk home did we exclaim: “It’s not warm!”

All in all, a lovely, relaxed and warm (if not in temperature) weekend.

So there I was, playing with my food at lunch and I appear to have accidentally created the next Turner Prize.

For those who might not know about the Turner Prize:

The Turner Prize is a contemporary art award that was set up in 1984 to celebrate new developments in contemporary art.

The prize is awarded each year to: ‘a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the twelve months preceding’.

Explanation

My piece is entitled Gloucestershire Zeitgeist.

The piece of cheese (Gloucestershire with herbs) is fashioned (by biting into it) into the shape of a saddled horse; it represents nature.

The potato crisp (an original Pringle) represents a sail, capturing the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist. It reminds us of man’s creativity through technology. Not always a good thing.

Together they represent humanity’s mistreatment of nature: like attaching a sail to a horse, which is clearly wrong.

The blue plate represents my desire not to get cheese on the table.

This week I’ve been sorting out a pile of CDs that have been been slowly working its way up skywards, like a compact tower of Babel.

They’ve been mostly music CDs from the covers of Metal Hammer, Rock Sound and Terrorizer magazines, but there were also a couple of guitar tuition CDs and the odd DVD from a PC magazine.

Amongst them was this DVD from PC Plus, from May 2008 (Issue 268) advertising on the cover:

Disaster recovery kit

• Free-up locked systems
• Revive corrupt drives
• Restore deleted files
• Recover lost passwords

… and much more with this exhaustive PC first aid kit.

Which is great, but I just know that I’m not even going to think about checking out its contents until it’s much too late.

For example

Like the time that I manually (and foolishly) rebooted a PC in the middle of resizing a hard drive partition (see The Prodigal Hard Drive for details). I thought that partitioning software had hung … it hadn’t, it was doing its stuff, albeit with very little user-feedback.

I vowed then that I’d read up on how to repair file allocation tables (FAT) and master boot records (MBR) so that if it ever happened again I’d know what to do, rather than inviting an expert come in, remove my drive, have him scrape the final unusable remnants of data off it and charge me over a hundred quid for the privilege.

Of course I never have.

It just works

These days we seem to assume, perhaps too much, that things will just work. Apple make a big thing of this with the Mac (Get a Mac: it just works).

And we only reach for the instruction manual when things go awry. Or we swear a bit. Hit it with things. And then switch it off and switch it back on again.

Be prepared

For most of my adolescence and early adulthood I tried to be prepared for everything, every eventuality. I read everything: every manual that arrived with a product, DIY books, everything that struck me as useful for a just in case eventuality.

That behaviour came from having a father that was well one day and the following day collapsed miles from home in Nottingham with a brain haemorrhage. Well … I certainly didn’t expect that. No warning, no time to prepare or rehearse my responses.

And from that point on (I was 11 years old) I began my preparations. The Scouts got it right in my opinion: be prepared.

Being hit by a car

By my early-teens I had my behaviour planned out for just about every major disaster that I could imagine. By my mid-teens I’d tested one of them out: being hit by a car.

I’d reckoned that if I couldn’t get out of the path of the oncoming vehicle I should jump moments before impact. My reasoning was that it seemed to me safer to go over the car than under it. It stood to reason, up until that point I’d had more experience jumping up and over things than supporting tonnes of moving steel on my delicate Scottish frame.

Problem

The main problem, however, with living like that is that it’s exhausting. It’s like being your own paranoid health and safety department. Invariably things happen that you’ve never anticipated, and you waste so much time planning how to behave in the most unlikely of situations that will never (hopefully) happen.

But if you do ever find yourself shackled and emprisoned in an iron ore mine on the moon you can only hope that I’m in the cell next door. And the guards haven’t confiscated my notebook. And my oxyacetylene torch.

Life happens

Thankfully I’m much more laid back these days.

Life happens. Things go wrong. You deal with it. And you grow in the dealing with it.

But I didn’t understand that as a kid. I saw problems as unwelcome interruptions distracting me from the real purpose of my life, like when you’re trying to get on with a piece of work and the phone keeps ringing. But they’re really just a natural part of life, and in the grand scheme of things I’ve lived such a sheltered and privileged life. Life is so much more exciting now (I’ve chilled out).

I’m not sure what I’ll do with the Disaster recovery kit DVD. I’ll probably file it away with my other PC cover discs. And bin it in a year’s time when I’m clearing stuff out.

I’ll probably promise to learn how to repair a master boot record then too. But I probably won’t. I’ll be too busy trying to unshackle my friend and escape from the moon.

Today I got the following email message from a viewer:

Question

Can you please confirm something for me. I have recently finished reading ‘Join me’ by the legend that is Mr. Wallace, after reading it I mentioned to a work colleague that I myself was going to start doing random acts of kindness each and every Friday, her reply to this was a negative one, and she insisted that Danny himself would no longer act in this way as it has been a long time since he wrote the book. I defended Danny in every way I could and told her I was going to e mail him to confirm he is indeed still ‘the leader’.

That evening I went onto the join me web site and clicked on the contact link, I sent an email explaining what had happened and asked for confirmation that random acts of kindness were still being carried out each and every Friday, and when I had received this confirmation I would then send my passport photo off to become a joinee.

This was over two weeks ago, and I very sadly have to announce that I have received no reply from the email, therefore I write to you in the hope that you can confirm to me that the karma army is still going strong and that Mr. Danny Wallace is alive and well and still doing his bit as the leader.

Answer

I had an answer for him. Oh yes indeed.

Dear Rich (or Richard),

Thank you for contacting us regarding our premium Join Me Validation Service.

Our records show that your trial membership for the premium service has recently expired. However, you will see from the terms and conditions that since you have raised a support call with 30 days of your trial membership expiring you still qualify for the enhanced standard service. My word, aren’t you a lucky man!

I can answer your question in just one word: hemispheres.

Of course, as an answer to your particular questions it’s utterly meaningless, and for that I can only apologise.

Gareth

p.s. Yes. Join Me is still going. People, kind people like you and me, are still doing random acts of kindness. Sometimes on a Friday. Other times at … well, other times. Not everyone synchronizes their watches with the time signal from Rugby as do you and I. Tut.

I’m sorry that King Danny of Lovely was unable to reply to your email. I suppose he was probably eating crisps at the time or something.

I think that about answers it.

Update

I was obviously in a weird mood when I wrote that yesterday.

Every week I get an email newsletter from The Alban Institute. Each issue contains a leading article, usually about some area of church leadership, followed by a few book reviews and adverts about upcoming US-based seminars and workshops.

It’s really interesting if you’re into that sort of thing. I usually have a cursory read through the article and then delete the email. It’s usually about stuff that doesn’t really concern me now that I’m no longer in a position of parish leadership. But today’s email grabbed me; enough to blog about it.

It was entitled “Eucharist as a Way of Life“.

Eucharistic actions

If you’ve ever watched an Anglican or Roman Catholic priest setting up an altar before Eucharist (Mass) and clearing up afterwards you’ll know that he or she goes through a set routine involving a number of items:

• Chalice (cup)
• Paten (plate)
• Ciborium (container for bread)
• Corporal (like a cloth place mat)
• Purificator (napkin)
• Pall (card that sits over the chalice to protect anything from falling into the cup)

When setting up the altar the corporal is unfolded and lined up with the edge of the altar. Onto this is placed the chalice and ciborium (if used). At this point the paten, which is resting on top of the chalice is removed and placed on the corporal. The purificator is placed to the right side of the chalice on top of the purificator.

After the Eucharist everything is carefully cleared away. The remaining bread is consumed, crumbs are tapped into the chalice and any remaining wine is also consumed. Water is then poured (over the priests fingers to wash them) into the chalice (cup) and ciborium (bread container); some priests also pour water into the paten (plate) but I tend to just wipe it with the damp purificator after I’ve dried the chalice. That water is then also consumed and the vessels are dried with the purificator.

Then, without being too vulgar about it, the dishes are ’stacked up’: the damp purificator is scrunched up and placed into the chalice, the paten is rested on top, then the pall and the corporal is folded up and placed on top of that. The lid is replaced on the ciborium and in modern ceremonies everything is then passed off the altar to a side table called a credence table.

Connections

Before I was ordained I always used to wonder what was going on here. The Eucharist is supposed to be about a meal, a family meal, with the family (the congregation) gathered around the table with Jesus. But this just seemed to be so removed from real life.

Until I visited Pluscarden Abbey in Moray, and then it all made perfect sense.

I had the priviledge (and being male certainly helped) of eating in the refrectory with the Benedictine Monks at Pluscarden during my pre-ordination retreat in 1999 and it was while watching them during the meal that made me understand for the first time that what we do at the altar as priests during the Eucharist made perfect sense.

I watched the monks receive their dishes at the table and unfolding their large napkins they placed it on the table, beneath their bowl, and the rest they tucked into their robe. It was similar to what I do with the corporal (the large, white ‘place mat’). Food was eaten, fingers washed into their bowls, the bowls were washed out with water and wiped dry with the napkin.

As I sat there I was able to finally make the connection between the Eucharist and an ordinary, everyday meal. Sure, most of us don’t eat our meals that way anymore, but many years ago we would have. We would have gone to church and watched the priest do what each of us would have done each and every day in preparing a meal which we all share in, except from one cup and plate rather than one each, and that would have shaped our view of meals and of our life.

Four gestures

In his article Paul Galbreath writes

The four basic gestures — taking, blessing, breaking, and giving — at the center of the eucharistic prayer provide a shape or outline for Christian life.

As we consider the pattern of prayer at Table, these gestures provide a basis for Christian action at the Lord’s Table and at the other tables around which we gather. The shape of the prayer at table builds on the shape of the gospel as it provides a pattern for our lives.

He concludes the article by saying “regularly gathering around the table to participate in communion provides a template for Christian virtues and practices: living with thankful hearts, forgiving our neighbours, depending on God’s provision, welcoming strangers, practicing hospitality, sharing our belongings, recognizing Christ’s presence, caring for all of God’s creation, and giving up power.” That sounds like a good pattern to live by.

You can read the full article: Eucharist as a Way of Life on The Alban Institute website.

On Wednesday evening I sat down at my PC and tried to scan a document on my Epson Perfection 1670 Photo scanner.

Troubleshooting

I placed the document on the scanner’s glass, closed the lid and fired up the scanning software (Epson Scan).

Scanning …

Nothing.

I tried again. Again nothing. Every time I tried the scanner appeared to work okay but presented me with the same thing: an A4 sized blank document.

Switching it off and switching it back on again (that favourite of technical support) didn’t fix it. Reinstalling the software didn’t fix it.

Searching Google confirmed what I feared: a hardware error.

I suspect that since you can’t switch off the scanner, short of pulling out the power cable, it eventually burned itself out. Maybe it got zapped during a recent power cut and surge.

I don’t know. All I knew is that my scanner no longer worked.

New scanner

My new scanner arrived on Friday morning, the Epson Perfection V200 Photo.

This one works, it scans faster, but even better: it has an on/off button. It’s important to switch off your peripherals when you’re not using them.

I’ve spent much of today working on an XHTML/CSS code rewrite for the University of St Andrews website.

Based on feedback from staff and students, having used the site for the best part of the last year and the desire to make the code more robust and work in more browsers we’ve started again and rewritten the code from the scratch, throwing in a few design tweaks. And on the whole we’re really pleased with it.

Browsers

Our Google Analytics statistics reveal that the majority of visitors use newer browsers, the usual suspects:

• Internet Explorer 7
• Internet Explorer 6
• Mozilla Firefox 2.x
• Apple Safari 3.x
• Opera 9.x

But there are still quite a number of visitors who still use older browsers, such as IE5.01/Win, IE5.23/Mac, IE5.5/Win and older versions of Mozilla Firefox, Netscape and Opera.

My desire was to ensure that the new code works as perfectly as I can get it in the newer browsers (our base-line browsers), and it would be a real bonus if I could get it to work in IE5.01 and IE5.5, as well as some of the other browsers.

IE5.01 jumping bug

Well, this afternoon I managed to get it working perfectly in IE5.5 and almost in IE5.01 apart from one really annoying bug.

Whenever I hovered over the left-hand navigation the website would jump down the page! (See screenshot below.) And the more I moved my mouse over the navigation the more it would leap on down the screen until there was nothing there but white space.

I spent about an hour pouring over CSS books and websites trying to identify which IE bug this was, and how to fix it. Then just as I was about to give up I found the answer on the A List Apart website, in an article called Drop-Down Menus, Horizontal Style.

It said

Anyone using IE5.01 on Windows will notice that the menu jumps around when you hover over some of its items. The problem is easily fixed by modifying our previous hacks as follows:

/* Fix IE. Hide from IE Mac \*/
* html ul li { float: left; height: 1%; }
* html ul li a { height: 1%; }
/* End */


So I tried it, and lo and behold it worked! There was much rejoicing and leaping around the office.

Was it all worth it?

Within the last month the University has had 318,282 visits to the website. 189,328 visitors used IE7, 155 used IE5.01. That represents just 0.04% of all visitors using the old and outdated web browser.

Was it really worth spending 90 minutes trying to find this obscure patch for a browser that hardly anyone uses? It was certainly fun trying to track it down, and it satisfied my intellectual curiosity, I went home on a high feeling that I’d done something worthwhile and productive today. So in that respect yes.

Our desire is to make the site as accessible as possible. As I said, we see this as real bonus that we can get the new code working in IE5, but those visitors still using IE5 won’t see it as a bonus, I imagine they’ll be delighted that we took the time to ensure that they can still view the site as we’d designed it. Maybe one of them will come to study with us, as a student, and go on to bigger and better things. Who knows.

Sure, it would be great if they upgraded their browser. Perhaps they can’t. Perhaps they’re still on dial-up accessing from a poorer area of the world. Who am I to judge?

In my interview I said that I was interested in the pastoral care of Web users. Today was one of those days where I could put that into practice.

Update

I’ve been playing around with the code since writing this post, and have discovered that if you have a sub-list within the main navigation list then this hack doesn’t work. Darn!

However, I’ve also discovered that it’s the background-color element with the hover rule that breaks it in IE5.01/Win.

It would appear that serving up an IE5-only conditional comment that pulls in an IE5-only style sheet that overrides the background-color, such as:

background-color: transparent !important;

does the trick. Changing the text colour works too, but almost everything else I’ve tried, such as font-weight, text-transform or border also breaks it, it would appear. Simplicity on a:hover within IE5/Win would appear to be the key it seems.

It’s been a crazy week since I got back from Birmingham that I’m only now getting around to writing about it. But what a superb weekend, packed with great friends, good food and much laughter.

Jane and I drove down on Friday, arriving in the city of a thousand trades in a little over seven hours, to be greeted almost at the door by a couple of friends sitting in the bar.

Gimme credit!

Checking-in took a little longer than anticipated. When I handed over my credit card it flagged up a warning which required the hotelier to call the bank for an authorization code. “I’m so sorry about this,” he apologised.

“That’s okay,” I said. “That happens every now and again, just to make sure that it really is me spending £300 about 350 miles from home. I’m quite glad they’re paranoid.”

It turned out to be more than that.

Seemingly my credit card number had been compromised on an online store (not sure which) and was being used to make fraudulent payments. First £1.00 to Oxfam, then £10 to O2 pay as you go, and £30 to Vodaphone pay as you talk. It would appear that this is what they do: make small payments that could easily get overlooked. Were it not for the fact that my cautious bank look out for exactly this sort of thing.

So within twenty minutes of arriving at the hotel I was now sans credit card: it had been cancelled. It’s now cut up into little pieces and I’m awaiting a replacement card.

Rehearsals

Rehearsals began on Saturday morning at 11:00 … ish. They were conducted by Matthew Owens (aka Smiggins) and went really well. Warm ups were hilarious and I wish I’d taken more video footage of it. It would certainly rival any so-called celebrity fitness video for entertainment value.

So there we were, back in our places in the choir. I was transported back to Beaconsfield #1 in 1989, with the same rogue’s gallery on the back row, much banter and deep laughter. It was great, great to be back, great to be back singing. I love my NYC friends with all my heart.

I was initially a little disappointed with the music choice. There was a lot of new music, which is fine, and a few of us felt that we’d rather have had more of a “NYCGB Greatest Hits”. But we got to sing Shenandoah (arr. Erb), which we toured the world singing in 1992 which was great.

But, you know, at the end of the day it wasn’t about us. It was about celebrating NYCGB in all its fullness and looking ahead to the next 25 years (not back to the halcion days of 1987-1994!!) and that was certainly done with style. I’d sing a whole concert of nursery rhymes if it could be with NYC!

Anniversary dinner

In the evening we retired to the Copthorne Hotel for the anniversary dinner where there was more fun and laughter and a guest appearance by master magician Kockov from the former Soviet Republic of Monrokvia who entertained us with close card tricks and then a 20-30 minutes set, including a quick game of Russian roulette!

This is my favourite photo from the evening (above). As far as Mark (left) and Carl (right) were concerned I was taking a photograph of them. It was only after I’d taken it and was reviewing the picture that I noticed what Danny (foreground) was doing. That had me crying with laughter. Mark and Danny used to be choir administrators; Carl founded the National Youth Choir in 1983.

Concert

Sunday morning was a relaxed affair with rehearsals beginning in the Adrian Boult Hall around midday for an hour. We took lunch and reconvened in the Birmingham Symphony Hall around 14:15.

We made the mistake of eating in at All Bar One, a hop, skip and jump from the Symphony Hall. The food took an age to arrive, and when it did some of it wasn’t even cooked. As Danny pointed out, it should have been called All Bar Food!

The concert began at 19:00 and ended nearly four hours later at 22:45. A gala concert indeed. Perhaps a little late for some of the younger choir members, and indeed our choir members who were needing to drive home to get to work the following morning.

I left the post-concert party back at the hotel just as Big Robbie Patterson was demanding that the bar be reopened. Again. It was nearly 02:00.

All in all, an absolutely brilliant weekend, with some of the loveliest and funniest people that I know.

Photos
You can see all my photos from the 25th anniversary celebrations on Flickr.

I’m off now for a few days to Birmingham to take part in the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain’s 25th anniversary gala concert as part of the exNYCgb choir.

I’ll not be blogging, but you can follow my goings on at Twitter: www.twitter.com/garethjms.

I’ve got to a point working on my current Website design project where I’m needing to

1. test the code in a variety of browsers
2. keep track of which browsers still have issues with the code

Toolbar

So I took my own advice and created a new toolbar which I now have as part of my main toolbar, with links to the 15 web browsers I currently have installed, based on the Google Analytics stats for the website.:

1. Firefox 1.0.8
2. Firefox 1.5.0.10
3. Firefox 2.0.0.13
4. IE 5.01
5. IE 5.5
6. IE 6.0
7. IE 7.0
8. Opera 7.5
9. Opera 8.0
10. Opera 8.5
11. Opera 9.27
12. Netscape 7.2
13. Netscape 8.1
14. Netscape 9.0.0.6
15. Safari 3.1

The “Browsers” link with the folder icon (that you can see in the screenshot) is simply a shortcut which will immediately open the folder containing the links to all these browsers.

Even though this now takes up a fair chunk of the main toolbar I’m finding it invaluable for quickly opening whatever browser I need next without having to scrabble with Start menu … Programs … Internet … Browsers … etc. I can always remove the toolbar when I’m done with this part of the project.

Keeping track of issues

The next thing I need to do is keep track of which browsers I’ve tested the code in and whether there were any issues. So I’ve thrown together a spreadsheet to do that very thing. I have a rows for each of the files, and columns for the filename, whether it validates and whether it works as expected or not.

The key that I’m using is:

• A - OK
• B - Minor flaws
• C - Major flaws
• XXXX - Unusable

I’ve updated this key since I first blogged about it, as I needed to distinguish between minor and major flaws. I’m still using XXXX as it sticks out like a sore thumb.

I’m aiming to get everything marked as either A or B in the majority of browsers, certainly the A-Class browsers (Firefox 2, IE 6, IE 7, Opera 9 and Safari).

Needless to say, as tests go so far I’m having issues with Firefox 1.0, Netscape 7 and Netscape 8 (which both use the same rendering engine as Firefox 1.0), Internet Explorer 5.01 and Internet Explorer 5.5.

Oh well, on with the testing …