As I’ve written about previously, I’ve maintained a number of websites or blogs over the years. After some fiddling over the past few days I have finally copied/migrated posts from two previous blogs “adventures in suburbia” (2006-2008) and “inelegant sufficiency” (2010-2011) to this site. They have been set up with their own categories (Adventures in Suburbia and Inelegant Sufficiency) but their old tags or categories have been combined with the tags of the more recent content.
This blog began a little over two years ago. In that time it has been created/managed/manifested firstly by Hugo, then by Wordpress, then by HTMLy, and now back to Hugo.
I worked out that my first round with Hugo was 9 months (May 2017 to Feb 2018), then 7 months on Wordpress (Mar to Sep 2018) and 8 months in HTMLy (Oct 2018 to May 2019).
Why change? I have different thoughts about ease of use, aesthetics, flat file vs database and ease of access/update. I would prefer some flat file/text based system. I value ease of use. I want the blog to be pleasing to look at. I want the information I choose to be front and centre of the site. Each of those platforms has offered different measures of that criteria.
Over recent weeks I’ve been fiddling to install Debian running Openbox on a few computers. The reason is that I have three notebooks including a 32-bit machine that is probably 10+ years old, a 64-bit machine that would be around the same and even my everyday machine is closing in on 7 years.
I had been running Manjaro on these machines but Manjaro dropped official support for 32 bit machines a number of months ago. I wanted to opt for a new distro for all machines that offers 32 bit support, a solid pedigree and some stability. I opted for Debian.
[The following is the text of a sermon preached in our church on Sunday 19th May 2019]
God, or not God: Matthew 7:13-14
Banners and Standards
Have you seen movies where troops are led into battle by someone holding a flag?
Perhaps these movies are set during the times of the Roman Empire or during the American Civil War. The flags they bore were known as the standard. This person carrying the flag or the standard was the standard bearer.
A quick plug for a piece of software I’ve been using for the last couple of months to record our church’s finances. The package is Manager. It handles GST calculations and reports, seems OK for small, manual payrolls, is free, works on multiple platforms and seems to conform to standard accounting principles. It also has a very active forum and many guides have been written for common tasks.
Overall it will fit the bill for monitoring our church finances and produces a range of Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet reports. There is a cloud-based, multi-user system available, but since I’m the only person who needs the software, the single-user free version works for me.
[The following is the text of a sermon preached in our church on Sunday 7th April 2019]
Beyond DNA: Heart and Mind
DNA
Over the past month-or-so we’ve been speaking about DNA. Mark and Nigel haven’t been giving us science lessons. They have been talking about some of the things we do as followers of Jesus, as the church of God. They’ve been using the analogy of “spiritual DNA” to illustrate how we have a desire to see God’s best for ourselves, our families and our community. As Ecclesiastes says God “has placed eternity in our hearts.” And we want to share that hope and passion with the world.
In my continuing albeit sporadic pursuit of plain-text tools for completing tasks, I came across a tool called jrnl which is a command-line journaling program. It is written in Python and is cross platform.
I have installed it on both my home linux machine and work win 7 machine. It’s pretty minimalist but allows one line journals to be entered from a command line, or they can be edited in a standard text editor. The website, jrnl.sh provides access to the program and documentation.
Around 17 years ago I kept a daily journal. My memory told me I kept it for over twelve months writing every day and then let it diminish to zero.
Reality tells me that I kept for around 8 months on a daily basis, but that there are over 350 entries including a false start in 1999, another false start in 2000 but some consistency from late 2001 to near the end of 2002 and then sporadic entries for the next couple of years.
[The following is the text of a sermon preached in our church on Sunday 24th February 2019]
Legacy
This Is Your Life
Who remembers the television show “This Is Your Life”?
My first recollection of it is being hosted by Mike Willesee in the 1970s.
My deep research into this on Wikipedia informs me that it began in 1975 with Mike Willesee. Digby Wolfe hosted the second season in 1976, then Roger Climpson to 1980. It was rested for 15 years until the Mike Munro era until 2005, and finally Eddie McGuire hosted a very short season in 2011.
Late last year I saw a quick-and-easy paella being made on a TV show. Thinking it didn’t look too hard, I tried using the same recipe and came out with a tasty bunch of chicken and chorizo with cooked vegetables and half-cooked rice.
My second attempt was to ditch that recipe and opt for something from somewhere on the www. There are about as many paella recipes as there are grains of rice in Spain so it was a matter of choosing one and running with it. This second recipe was an improvement over the first but I can’t remember where I got the recipe.