The spice of life, and all that.
- Alan in Belfast has pointed out that the Moderator-Elect of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Stafford Carson, is blogging. A fellow who has managed to attract some controversy over the last couple of years, if he allows it to get a little personal then it should be interesting.
- Via Phil O'Kane's Twitter feed, how to spot an ATM card skimmer.
- Thoughtful writing, as ever, from Rands. Although it's not actually about bridges, the tale of bridges is powerful.
- It's lengthy, but Clay Shirky's Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable is both frightening and exciting.
- I'm not following it tightly, but I am keeping half an eye on Nick Page's Longest Week Timetable. (Via Maggi Dawn.)
- There's lots of interesting things going on in Ireland around mobile, often iPhone, development. I'm planning to be at the Belfast Dev Day. I've been coding various things since before I was a teenager, but developing for the iPhone is the first time I've been grinning with mad excitement since I made coloured blobs float around the screen of my old Amiga 1200.
- I remember standing in the back of a school concert while I was in Sixth Form, listening to a suspect cello solo. A friend described it as "a brilliant study in microtonality". He still talks like that. The memory was returned to me when I read Mig's post On Microtonaility.... (Incidentally, Mig's was one of the first blogs I discovered and got hooked into that was written by someone I didn't know in real life. He's brilliant.)
- And finally, Javagate. Full disclosure: I'm sitting in our kitchen, surrounded by the smell of Andrew's Old World Blend, and he's a good guy. Independently of knowing him, I fear for Lisburn's Farmers' Market — we went along on Saturday, and you can do a turn round every stall, buying from most of them, in under ten minutes. That's surely not enough to sustain interest in it.
It’s been an eventful few weeks in the House of Marramgrass, with even more eventful to come. Posting here will probably remain intermittent for a while, so trawl through the above to keep you going.
(PAW2009 14/52)
This one might make a reasonable desktop wallpaper, I suppose.
This photo-a-week lark highlights how quickly 2009 is going by — week fourteen, already. It’s now April. Months ago, 27th April as the due date for a baby seemed like a very long way away. Now, the nursery furniture was delivered at the weekend, and there are drawers full of very small vests, bibs and things. There’s a bag packed by the door, waiting for the trip to hospital. We’ve actually bought nappies.
Depending on who I listen to, this will either be the worst thing ever, or the best. Our lives will end, or they will start. We’ll never get to go anywhere, or small babies are nicely portable. Lately, I’ve been waking very early anyway.
We’ve seen some friends become parents lately, with more to come. They seem to be taking to it well, which is reassuring.
We’re currently having the name conversations. It’s a daunting responsibility, to assign the name that someone will bear for their lifetime. How do you apply a name to someone you haven’t met? Do you name for a memory, or for an aspiration? Or for something that sounds nice and hopefully won’t lead to too many playground jibes?
Are you happy with your name?
Matthew 21:1-11 (NIV):
As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, tell him that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.”
This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet: “Say to the Daughter of Zion, ‘See, your king comes to you, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’”
The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. They brought the donkey and the colt, placed their cloaks on them, and Jesus sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,
“Hosanna to the Son of David!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Hosanna in the highest!”
When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, “Who is this?”
The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.”
Cheering crowds, not the normal prophet’s welcome, because they expected something very different to what they would get. In a few days the crowd would be cheering in a less welcoming tone, and still he came.
(PAW2009 13/52)
When visitors ask me to name my favourite place in Northern Ireland, I usually say the beach at Downhill. I remember occasionally stopping there as a child; it was especially exciting because we took the car down onto the beach.
It was a great day yesterday — in Lisburn, at least — so we grabbed some sandwiches and loaded the dog into the back of the car to head for Downhill. On the way up, my wife remarked that we hadn’t been there since about six or seven weeks before we discovered she was pregnant.
The baby’s due in four weeks’ time.
