Wow! What a crazy few days. I’ve been suffering from a nasty head cold while struggling to get this blog up and running again. It was the website equivalent of pounding it with a defibrillator, willing it to stay alive. I’m pleased to say that the operation was successful and it looks like the patient will make a full recovery. The fine folks at Dreamhost have been invaluable and it’s great to have all the Wordpress features finally working as they should.
Youth work-wise, yesterday Pippa and I went to find out about running a Romance Academy locally. It’s a great programme for dealing with sexual attitudes of teenagers and we’re pretty excited about it. We just need to find enough time to make it happen - no small task!
Anyway, as the song goes: “Hello, hello, it’s good to be back!”
OK, so the blog is broken. All that spam has caused my hosting company to suspend the account, meaning I can’t access it via ftp.
In the meantime, I’ve moved hosts and set-up the blog again. I’m just waiting to import the past 4 years of posts to get it all back to normal! Currently, this is the only post on the entire blog! Strange huh?
I hope to get everything back to its usual state by Monday, but for now please be patient.
Just a quick post to apologise to those who’ve tried to email me over the past week. Apparently my mail account was deleted on my domain and everything was getting bounced back to senders. I’ve no idea what fantastic messages I missed, so feel free to resend anything interesting. 
Things are back to normal now.
Glubble is a great plugin for the Firefox web browser that gives totally FREE parental controls! There are essentially two criteria for using it:
- you must use Firefox for web browsing
- you must have children that use the internet
Aimed at primary aged children, Glubble changes the look of the browser to a simple kid-friendly interface when they log-in limiting their browsing to a variety of ‘glubbles’.
Glubbles are bundles of content from the web, either editorially selected and collected by our resident expert on child content and published in the library for you to choose from. Or they can be created by you directly.
When adults log-in, firefox works as normal giving control over the kid accounts. The great thing about this software is the interaction. Kids can send messages to other family members, request that adults allow certain sites, and search the web through Glubble’s filters.
Glubble won’t work for older children and teens who can navigate their way around a computer and launch another browser (IE anyone?) but is a great choice for allowing younger children on the web. All I need now are some kids…
There’s been a lot of activity recently in people mapping data from the Bible into visual representations.
Chris Harrison took the King James Version and produced some beautiful images based on the connections between the passages, before developing a social network representation and distribution of people and places like the image below.
The background is the entire text of the Bible. Floating above it are all of the biblical names. These are positioned according to their average position in the text and lines are rendered to show where the names occur. Font size is proportional to the number of occurrences in the text.
Also, in a similar vein Crossway Books have put together an interactive Social Map of the New Testament that shows the connections between each of the characters.
It’s great to see the Bible being presented in new and exciting ways that allow Christians to interact with the people and stories to see the connections. I’d love to see this kind of research developed into abstract art that illustrated the various scriptures!
ht: Happy Traveller and Think Christian
I’ve had a lot of problems with Spam on this blog recently due to some changes with plug-ins. For some reason or other my hosting server can’t contact to Akismet so I’m trying out some other options which ultimately seem less than good! Anyone got some helpful suggestions?
What all this means for you, dear reader, is that you may have to put up with slow page loading and odd comments with unhelpful links for a short while until I figure out a more permanent solution. Sorry!
Just before we went on holiday, Kirsty and I took advantage of an Apple Back-to-school promotion and bought a Macbook for her and a new iPod Nano for me. Then while on holiday, I picked up one of those Nike+ for iPod sensors in the hope that I might actually use it to start getting fit again. Having got home I put the sensor in my non-Nike shoes, plugged in the iPod and off I went.
So far this week, I’ve been out every day for a short run and really surprised myself by covering 2.3 miles on the second day and 2.4 on the third averaging about 20 minutes! My target is now to work up to a 5 mile run.
Apart from listening to music while running and having audible feedback about time and distance covered, what I really love about the Nike+ sensor is the website where you can view all your runs, track your progress, map where you’ve been and plenty more. I’m finding it a great incentive to try and better myself.
At the moment I’m sticking to going out after dark to try and avoid seeing anyone while I look like an asthmatic beetroot, but if I improve enough I may actually be comfortable in going out in daylight!
Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows was released on download earlier this week to great anticipation from fans. Their first release since 2003, In Rainbows is only available directly from the Radiohead website, but in a ground-breaking move, fans get to choose how much they pay for the music - anything from the 45p processing fee upwards! NME has an interesting article showing how much fans have decided to pay and the average seems to be around £5.
However since the release there’s been a huge backlash around the internet due to the compression of the download files. Each track is encoded in DRM Free 160kbps MP3 which is generally fine for listening to on MP3 players, but pretty poor for decent systems as it loses all the intricacies and detail of the music. It now appears that the low quality download is only a promotion for the full high-quality CD album to be released next year. This has angered a lot of fans who feel duped into buying this inferior version even though they set the price they paid:
First and foremost, all of Radiohead’s previous albums were already available as MP3s encoded at 320 kilobits per second…
Second, most took issue with when Radiohead chose to announce that In Rainbows would be available at 160 kbps — after the majority of their fans had already paid for the download.
I’ve yet to download it myself. The 160MP3 will be fine for my macbook, but not for my home stereo or headphones. I think I’ll probably pay a smaller amount for the download and if I really enjoy the album then I’ll but the full physical copy when released to appreciate the detail.
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