I bought Matt Giles’ album earlier this week, and I have been listening to it a lot. This song is one of the reasons why, and you can listen to it on his MySpace page

Like most people who frequent the internet I use instant messaging to chat with a lot of my friends. The majority of IM users will tend to stick to one medium, be it MSN or AIM or Yahoo! or perhaps something else. I however have accounts on a number of different IM services so that I am more easily contactable, and so that I can easily chat with friends who only use a specific IM service. Obviously it would be silly to run three or four different programs which all do the same thing, so I have a piece of software called Trillian which combines all of the major IM protocols into one piece of software.

The trouble is, trillian can be quite annoying sometimes. The current version isn’t really being developed any more, and the new version costs money. As a result, I have embarked upon a search for a new multi-protocol IM program to use. I hadn’t realised there were quite so many, and after a bit of browsing around (mostly on wikipedia) I have downloaded five which all fit the criteria I set. Those criteria are as follows:

• Must support the big four (that is MSN, AIM, Yahoo! and ICQ).
• Must be for windows (this might seem silly, but there are some really good alternatives which are for Linux or Mac only)
• Must be free
• Must not do too much other crazy stuff (one program included a remote PC access tool for some bizarre reason)

So by those criteria I have selected these 5 programs to try out:

• Miranda IM - The most extensive of the five in terms of functionality, although it is still in version 0.7.7 (whatever that means)
• Pidgin - A cross platform offering which I have used before on linux
• Digsby - Includes tools to monitor social networking websites such as facebook and myspace
• Instantbird - A very young open source development, lacking in features but has potential
• Sim-IM - A very basic program, may be a little too spartan for my tastes

A review of each of the five will follow after I have taken the time to test them all out fully.

On the 16th of May 2006 a man named Ze Frank who ran a popular daily video blog challenged his viewers to do something global. His challenge was to turn the Earth into a sandwich by placing two slices of bread on the ground at precisely opposite sides of the Earth.

At the time I was amused by the idea and excited by the challenge of uniting people from opposite sides of the planet by something really rather pointless and fun. It didn’t take very long for the challenge to be completed, using fancy internet tools like Google Earth and neat GPS thingies a couple of British guys took a detour on the way to Portugal to hit up Spain and complete the sandwich. The scary thing is that the managed to do it by April 12th, it took less than a month to turn the whole earth into a tasty sandwich!

Anyway, the reason I mention this is because of todays XKCD comic which contains a neat algorithm based on the DOW opening value for determining a specific location. The way it works is that the world is split into 1 degree square blocks (known as graticules), and within this block the algorithm uses the DOW opening value to determine the precise latitude and longitude of the location. The result is that every location is precisely 1 degree away from the next location, the result is that at the location within your graticule is always going to be within 100 miles or so (usually much closer).

Why is this interesting in any way? Well that I suppose is up to you. If for some reason you feel like going on an adventure, but don’t know where to go, then something like this makes the decision easy for you. Assuming todays location is reachable then why not go there and have a picnic or something. Even more exciting is the fact that Randall (xkcd author) has determined that 4pm on Saturday should be the standard meet up time, and so in theory if the location is reachable and there are enough xkcd readers in your location, heading there on a Saturday afternoon will result in meeting other random people who read xkcd.

As an aside, this comic also lead me to discover the game GeoDashing, which is a similar idea except that it’s implementation is that at the beginning on the month a few thousand random points are created globally, and then “players” are challenged to visit as many of those points as possible in the month to earn points.

I’m pretty sure internet based real world entertainment (usually in the form of random adventures) is on the increase. At some point in the future I will probably embark on one of these adventures myself.

Today is my birthday, and I have thus far receieved 1 card (thanks Grandparents!), a whole heap of facebook messages, a singular text message (thanks Mim!), and an exciting package from UCCF.

Sadly the package from UCCF was not a birthday present, but I was still rather pleased to receive it. The package contained a short letter outlining what the package contained (very useful), an outline of 10 Bible studies in Corinthians for me to have a look at, a CD full of Relay goodness which includes a heap of reading material, Terry Virgo’s talk on grace which was given at Word Alive and a few forms to fill in, and finally three books for me to read before Relay begins.

As it happens I have read two of the books before, they are Cross Examined by Mark Meynell, a really excellent book outlining just how amazing an event the Cross was. Cross Examined is a book I can easily recommend to any Christian, it’s a fairly easy read and it is filled with so much fantastic stuff which every Christian should be told about! I now have two copies, so I will no doubt be trying to give one of them away soon. The second book was Out of the Saltshaker by Rebecca Manley Pippert, a brilliant book all about evangelism. When I read it the first time I couldn’t help but get really excited about evangelism and I’m sure that I will thoroughly enjoy reading it again and reminding myself about just how fantastic it is that I have been given an opportunity to tell people about Jesus! The third and final book is called The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges, and it comes highly recommended by a few people. I’m really looking forward to digging into just how amazing God’s grace is and how it should effect my life as a Christian. I also know that I will be challenged by the book, and I hope and pray that those challenges will work themselves out in my life.

Now I have the joy of sifting through all of the bits and bobs on the CD and filling in some forms etc. Then tonight I might actually have some proper birthday fun!

Last night I had a really weird dream. I dreamt that I was Logan from Logan’s Run, this was weird in itself as I haven’t seen the film in a really long time and there was no particular reason for me to have been dreaming about it. It was made even stranger by the fact that during the dream there was a concert happening in the city and Tinyfolk were headlining. I think my hand thingy had turned red at this point so I was running away and had to miss it, which I was pretty gutted about.

Anyway, if you haven’t already you should definately watch Logan’s Run because it’s an excellent film. Apparently a remake is currently in production and imdb says it’s due for release in 2010. I have an awful feeling they are going to do terrible things to an excellent story, but I guess it could turn out OK.

As for Tinyfolk, you should listen to them now!

It’s the end of April, which means I have just short of 4 months before I being Relay. For those who aren’t aware, I am about to finish my Masters and next year I’m sticking around Leicester Uni and working (voluntarily) for UCCF on their year out called Relay. If you want to find out a little more about the year here is a brief overview of it from the UCCF website.

The first challenge of the year is that it is completely voluntary, which means I have to raise all the money I will need to survive a year on my own. UCCF recommends that Relay workers aim to raise between £4000 and £6000, and judging on my outgoings from the past four years at uni I am certainly targeting the upper end of that range. Thankfully I do have a bit of a headstart on this already as I have been working during the holidays, and will be working from July until Relay begins. In theory (although I haven’t sat down and created a budget for any of this time) this will leave me with around £1500 in the bank at the start of the year without any other peoples support. Of course that leaves me with a deficit of £4500 for the year, so this is still slightly scary!

One of the things I intend to set up before I begin Relay is a newsletter which I will e-mail out to people semi-regulary which will contain a general update on what I’ve been doing and some prayer points for anyone willing to support me in that way. Another rather important step I need to take quite soon is to get a general letter written up explaining what I’m up to next year to give to all those lovely people I know who I don’t have contact with over the internet. Technology is great and all, but it’s easy to neglect people because I rely on it so much!

The other important step I need to take is coming up with fundraising ideas. It would be rather pathetic of me to not do something exciting with myself in an effort to raise money, but I’m not feeling very imaginative at the moment so any wacky suggestions would be appreciated.

I stopped posting in my LJ almost 2 years ago now. I stopped because I got my website up and running again and wanted to use that for blogging so that I could have a little more flexibility in what I did with the blog.

Since then I have kept on visiting LJ for the sake of my friends page, which has been a great way to keep track of a select few people who I know on LJ, and it’s been neat for maintaining a steady flow of comic strips throughout my week.

I’ve found myself using LJ more and more recently to comment on other peoples blogs and generally have a bit of fun regarding a few comics, and I figured it would be nice for those people who mainly keep in touch with me through LJ to actually have something on my LJ to read!

As such, I’ve just set my blog up to crosspost everything to LJ when it is written. This has included backdated entries as well, so there is no longer a gaping hole in my LJ, it just carries on from when I transferred to my personal blog!

There was a bit of talk yesterday at work regarding what we could do this morning for april fools. In the end noone bothered, although it has been mentioned a few times in passing.

What did happen a little while ago though, was that during our lunch break Andy was browsing YouTube, and was subject to their April fools prank. The prank was that all of the videos on the front page were fake and led to a single video of Rick Astley’s never gonne give you up. In short, I image thousands of people today have been Rick Rolled. I rather enjoyed the confusion on Andy’s face, but I refrained from explaining to him what had just happened. I suspect my geekiness would not go down too well in the office…

Update:
Since posting this, I read a few webcomics, and none other than Bunny managed to get me. As a result of this, I have also just discovered that XKCD also rick rolled me a little while ago and I didn’t even realise it! I <3 the internet!

I’ve been a little slack in writing recently, and I really ought to have kept up with the magical case entries. I shall endeavour to do some more of them in the near future.

As for right now, I’m back working at AVS during the Easter break which is great. Work has been a little slow recently but I’m assured it will pick up in the next week or so, although next week when the conference work is a little heavier I’m actually going to be away in Wales for New Word Alive, which is very exciting! I shall be spending the week in a caravan with 5 other guys from Leicester and getting some excellent teaching from the likes of Terry Virgo, Don Carson and John Piper.

In my last entry I talked about my new guitar, and I’ve been spending a bit of time learning to play worship music with it. It’s rather odd having to learn to play music in a completely different style, having learnt to play classical piano I’m quite good at sight reading and tend to rely on having music in front of me when I’m playing anything. Playing the guitar for worship is very different! I have a few chords and that’s about it, working out exactly where the chord changes come and how the strumming should sound is entirely up to me, and it is rather tricky sometimes. I have a lot to thank my Mum for though, she gave me a couple of really useful pointers which have made things much easier.

In other news, Jon has come back to Leicester so I’m not on my own in the house anymore which is nice. I also managed to muster up enough energy and motivation to actually cook some proper food last night too, so I have a tub of lovely stuff in the fridge ready to eat up, yum! I really need to get back into the habit of cooking regularly. I really enjoy cooking and eating, and even more so when I have friends round, so if you want some munch then drop by my house one evening!

One last note; on Saturday my dear friends Mark and Susanna are getting married! I’m very excited, and will almost certainly write something about it at the weekend when I get home.

Term ended last week and since then I was supposed to do 4 days of work, unfortunately I wasn’t very well during the week so I missed two days. Thankfully I’m feeling much better now having had a few days to rest and recover.

Yesterday I went to see my Grandparents in Melton, we sat in their lounge for the afternoon chatting about all sorts of things which is always rather good fun! We had lunch and tea there before heading up to Nottingham for about 6pm. Today we went to the farmers market in the morning and I bought Chris his birthday present (only a month late!), which consisted of a tea egg and two types of tea, some russian caravan and some green tea which looked interesting. We also picked up some blue cheese, some fair trade olive oil, a selection of fancy olives and 6 duck eggs. The farmers market in West Bridgford is very posh!

After the market I went into town with my Mum and we spent a little while looking at guitars. Initially I wasn’t planning on buying one at easter, this was just a chance to go and try some out and get some idea of prices and all that jazz. What happened though was we went to a shop called The Music Inn and there was a very helpful guy in there who told me a little about the guitars they had and pointed me to some good ones to try. I played a couple and we decided that one of them was really good, but the guy told us to sit down, relax, and play lots of them and generally take our time. We spent probably half an hour just messing around on all sorts of guitars from all price ranges (I even played on one worth over £1000) and decided that the one I had liked initially was the best. It was so good in fact that I bought it, so now I own a really nice guitar! Because I love big willy so much, and he has named his guitar Jade, I feel I must also give me guitar an appropriately obvious name, and so I shall refer to it as Faith from now on. It even has it’s name emblazoned on the head so I won’t forget!

Now I can finally give Jon his guitar back, and I suppose I ought to start learning to play some sensible music instead of just messing around like I normally do.