Quote

He who has God and everything has no more than he who God alone. – C. S. Lewis

Flying Around

For my birthday, my wife bought me a flight in a vintage bi-plane. And this is it. A 1930’s ish Tiger Moth. It is carefully and lovingly maintained at Duxford Airport, which is part of the Duxford Imperial War Museum. The flight was for 20 minuets and was amazing. We (the pilot and me) flew over the Cambridgeshire countryside, and although the weather was overcast, it didn’t matter.

The plane James flew!

Take off and landing of Tiger Moth videoed by Jules with a camera borrowed from our friend Guy (thank you)

The landing of the Tiger Moth

During the flight I had the opportunity to fly the aircraft, which I took and flew the Tiger Moth over the Cambridgeshire countryside, we climbed and dived, and turned to the right and then to the left, and then I was left to do my own thing, so I climbed a little and turned to the right and had a look at the ground, then on to level flying before heading back to the runway for the landing. Such fun. The best birthday present.

Moving again

In the near future we will be looking for a new place to live, in Melbourne, Australia. Yippy!

Today we booked our flights to Australia.

We fly on the 21st September to Singapore, stay there for a few days and then onto Melbourne on the 25th to arrive on the 26th at 6.10am. We are so excited. All our hard work waiting and now its actually happening. Amazing.

Hoping and praying there will be a church plant there for when we arrive!

The economy – Lending

The Chancellor yesterday said that the way to get the economy going again is to get lending going again. It was lending that brought about this wonderful recession. The way to get the economy going again is to get people to spend. The only way to get people to spend when they will not borrow is to give them money to spend. How do you do that? Cut taxes, income tax not VAT, reduce duty on essencial goods, like fuel, which would reduce to cost of food (because it is moved around by lorries) and the such like. The other thing to do is to increase intrest rates. This would increase earnings for savers and give those savers the confidence to spend.

The economy cannot get back to how it was a year ago because the financial industry will not let it. The financial bubble has burst (or gone bust!) and, beleive it or not, it is next to impossible to re-inflate a burst balloon, not matter how much you spend on it.

The government had guarenteed to £50000 in each account, therefor it might of been cheaper to have paid out for the lost accounts and let the banks go bust. The vulture invester captitalist would swoop in and buy up anything left over and we’d be left with a lean banking system that could then concentrate on serving its customers instead of itself and its shareholders.

Peoples values must change. When capitalism is allowed to take such a hold because regulations are relaxed ‘to allow freedom to make more money’, then saturation of the market and the never ending presure to make more and more profit each and every day, month and year by the share holders, and when that doesn’t happen, confidence falls, shares are sold and companies fall. It is possible, and this nearly happened in the UK, that a company whose shares are on the stock exchange, can employ thousands of people, have a turnover of thousand or millions, have a captial base of thousands, and for all intents and purposes a boyant and stable company. But if the shareholders loose confidence in the company and sell their shares, the company can go bust. Extraordinary! I ask, is this the right structure for businesses to run under?

Without people to buy the product of the business there would be no business, no matter how many sharholdrs there are. A business is in business to make money, yes, but also to serve its customers, not rob them to give "bonuses " to the share holders. And whats with the "got to make more this week otherwise we’ll look bad"syndrome, and a syndrome it is. if the business makes a profit, it is good. I was amazed when people were disapointed when a high street shop amounced it’s profits had dropped by so many percent and everyone was up in arms, yet, yet it profits were still in the millons of pounds! Shame on you!

And out of this, who suffers? Joe Public

When the snow came…

Clarence the snowman

Boy and girls went out to play…
and built a snowman…

Posting to a blog

I’ve been blogging (albeit on irregular intervals) for a while, here and on blogspot and sometimes on LiveJournal. I moved here because I consider wordpress to be better for several reasons. It is open source, a good reason, and it is standards compliant. I have installed wordpress on my server and it is easy to use and modify because it is standards compliant and well written. Another reason is that I do a fair amount of writing ‘off-line’ and have found that there are off-line blogging clients which work better with wordpress than with blogspot. Blogspot seem to change their system every so often which creates hassles for the clients and their developers (good ol’ Google!). So, on to the clients. I used to have a mac, a G4 iBook. A good machine but I gave it away to a friend as I collecting to many laptops and my wife suggested I ‘loose’ some. Also I found being ‘locked’ into a system was too restrictive. On the mac I used Ecto, which was and is a great blogging client. But, it only runs on mac, although there was a windows version which I think isn’t being developed anymore. As I don’t use a mac anymaore, and I don’t like using windows (too full of bugs to be paying money for), I use linux (as you might of guessed from my previous post) and finding a blogging client to work on linux is difficult. There are some good ones that work on windows which wont work on Linux even with wine (www.winehq.com) but linux does have a few, most of which are fairly simple. There are two that I came across that work and have some good features and both require java. One is petrus-blogger. It is good but it seems a little unstable and for some reason wouldn’t work on my system with wordpress, no matter what I tried. The other is bleezer, which I am using now. It seems to work well, but doesn’t like it when I am off-line with wordpress because it can’t access the list of posts, but other than that it works well. It isn’t the prettiest to look at, as it seems with most java applications, but is functional. It has a full array of formatting options along the adding hyperlinks and posting images, although here it didn’t seem to work and I had to manually upload this screenshot.

Bleezer screenshot

It also seems stable so far.

For looking at these applications, it seems a shame that so much effort has gone into producing something useful, and then nothing, almost like,”Ok, I’ve made a product, see, it works, now I’m going to stop and do something else”, a bit like a “3-day wonder”. Its satisfied a need, scratched the itch, served a purpose, an now discarded with no thought given to those who’ve pick up the tool and now feel rejected and cast aside, floundering and not knowing where to go or what to do… There come a responsibility when producing a product that people come to rely upon. Is this software still under development or has it run its course? In most cases, most developers act responsibly but there are the odd few who put something really good together, release it into the wild and thats it, leaving it there hanging. Shame.

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Puppy Linux

There has been a bit of talk lately about Puppy Linux in the media, well, when I say media, I mean the media I read! So I thought I write my bit. I came across Puppy Linux quite a while back, I think it was in 2003, but it might of been 2004. Anyway, I found it interesting because it could do so much but packed into such a small package, a bit like DML, but more user friendly and more intuitive for those dragged up on windows. I also found that it didn’t quite work well enough on my hardware of the time, a Toshiba laptop. I also liked the idea of making your own custom version, a bit like "Pimp my Puppy", but never got round to doing it as I didn’t have the time. Another curious character of Puppy Linux was that it is developed in Australia. When I found this out, I understood some of its quirks! I have been to Australia and found they do things slightly different there, which is good. So Puppy Linux is different. Now with version 4.1 I have found it to be really useful. With mounting of drives and partitions and a partitioning tools along with anti-virus tools makes this distro a must have in my "help" box of cd’s. I’ve already helped out a couple of colleagues at work with it and I’m sure a few more will be helped out in the near future. Running Puppy Linux is a breeze from boot up through to desktop going through a keyboard config (which is straight forward) and a display config ( which I wish did an auto test before moving on) which isn’t as straight forward for someone without any knowledge of computers. Then comes setting up the internet connection. Again, for me quite straight forward, but for someone with limited knowledge of computers, they could become stuck… for a while. The wizard is good though and does explain everything well. (If only I’d read before trying!). Once up to desktop, everything is to hand and Puppy Linux zipps along at a good pace. I have a P3 700 Mhz machine with 192 Meg ram and this with Puppy will give a Core duo 1.6GHz with 1 Gig ram a rum for it money with debian Linux, and blows it out of the water with windoze. Personally, if you have an old PC or laptop that you’d like to get going and use or give away, Puppy is a way of doing this with a touch of style.

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The Friday Letter – XP, Vista or Linux or Mac

My father-in-law is staying with us for a while. He decided to buy a laptop. After looking around he went for a Toshiba P300. A good big 17 inch laptop. It came with Vista, but he wanted XP on it. Why? Two reasons, firstly because he was going to run some heavy software and didn’t want Vista getting in the way, and secondly, familiarity. He knows XP and is happy with it.

One day, he might see the light and move over to Linux! The Mac didn’t have a look-in for several reasons. Its expensive for what it is. The Mac ties you into its brand, more so than Microsoft. And its unfamiliar. And the same with Linux for him is that it is unknown territory.

One thing that amazed me was when starting the machine (the P300) and booting into Vista, it had to reboot 8 times before we reached the usable desktop. Overall it took four and a half hours to back up Vista and then install XP and the extra standard applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, Openoffice3, AVG antivirus and Zonealarm firewall.

For me it is a different story. I came across Linux a few years back with a tripple cd pack on a magazine of Red Hat 7.3 and haven’t looked back. I can even run Linux in a window on XP from a USB stick. I now have a Lenovo R61 laptop. I do have XP on it but only because I am doing some studying and some of the software provided only runs on MS XP. I also have Linux on it. It is running Debian Lenny, which was so easy to install and get going. I had a full system up and running with the hour. Try that with XP or even Vista. I also have SimplyMepis8, which again was a dream to set up, and soon I’m going to try Puppy Linux. This is one I tried a while ago and just couldn’t get to grips with but now I feel it would be the best to get to know before I move on to LFS sometime next year. Why Linux? And why Debian Linux? I have tried a multitude of different distros (versions or flavours of Linux), Mandrake (now Mandriva), Fedora, Suse, Gentoo, Ubuntu (based on Debian) Slackware to name a few. There are a number that are based on one of the above like zenwalk and stax based on slackware and ubuntu and mepis based on debian which I have tried. I have come to enjoy using debian and mepis because they are stable as a rock and easy to install and straight forward to understand, and Mepis you can try without even installing. I haven’t had one crash. But obviously, where I have been tinkering with the system, normally on a test install, it has crashed a few times, but it is difficult to get it to crash. It is also secure. It runs smoother than windows, it runs quicker, it is more responsive, it is more configurable, and I can do everything that I want and need to do using it. One other thing I like about Linux is that it is free, and so is the software that you can use on it. And contrary to the MS advertising bandwagon, linux is easy to install and use. I think what holds people back is the unfamilularity with it, but if people would just give it a go, they would be so surprised as it is far more intuitive than MS. I am happy with my laptop running Deian Linux and confident in its ability to do what I want it to do, and that is to just work to allow me to do my work

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Feelng Better

Over the last week, I have felt so tired. And I don’t even know why. Its not as if I’d been working any harder or longer, just that each day felt longer than the next and I was beginning to wonder when it would end. It ended yesterday. On the way home in the car, the traffic was overloaded, everyone and their dog, son, daughter or friend was on the road. Because of this I took the opportunity to review my situation and to ask God for help. I explained to God that I was fed up with being tired and weary, tired of being tired.God answered by lifting my spirit and I started to feel better. During the evening I didn’t feel to tired. I even felt a little happy and cracked a few jokes with my wife. This morning I didn’t struggle to get out of bed. I thank God for this happy disposition I have now.
Psalm 17:6 says I call upon you, for you will answer me, O God; incline your ear to me; hear my words.
and psalm 18:2-3 says  The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.3 I call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised, and I am saved from my enemies.
God is a caring and loving God.

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The Friday Letter (On Sunday)- Capitalism at it’s best

Another week gone, several billion dollars, pounds, and what-have-you lost on the stock market. Banks have gone, bust or merged or nationalized. The news making big about the “credit crunch”. Politicians have been making points and knocking their opponents. Rescue packages costing millions of pounds. What a rola-coaster!
So, where does this leave us?
When I first asked myself this question, I really had to think about what the news was actually reporting. My bank, rather mutual building society, was, and is, doing well. I rent my home so house prices dropping hasn’t really had an effect, and it would only have an effect if I had a home to sell. The only part of this credit crunch that is having an effect is the value of the pound in the high street. The spending power of the pound is now less because prices have gone up. You could say the “in real terms” (as the politicians would say) I have had a pay cut!
As the credit crunch continues I have heard that business credit has been withdrawn and peoples credit card limit has been reduced or even withdrawn all  together.
Where did this all come from? A lot of people are blaming irresponsible lending by dodgy companies (mainly in the USA). Lending large amounts of money to people and companies who didn’t have a good credit rating or in the long term would have trouble repaying. But there is also irresponsible borrowing. People borrowing hoping that they would be able to repay, not working out fully if they could but just hoping. Bad move. I know of someone who explained to me his view, “If they are so irresponsible enough to lend me money, then that’s their problem”. He owes so much and paying back at such a slow rate that repayment in full would be completed when he reaches 160! In this case, I think both are irresponsible, and I would be surprised if this is the only case.

I heard a quote from a stock market trader say that black Monday used to come along once a decade, now they come along more often than a London bus!

On Wednesday, the British Government came up with a plan to “jump start” the financial market, to get banks lending to banks so they can lend to us. Will this work. I think it will for the moment, right up to the point when the money runs out. And then we’ll be back where we are now. I was listening to a radio show yesterday where the presenter was chatting to a girl of 11 years old. She received £20 a month. When asked what happens when shes spent it all, she replyed that she had to wait until next month, when it gone it gone and there is no more. Why cant banks, businesses, governments run their house properly. I was taught as a boy at school that unless you have the money you cant have it, you have to save for it. Recently of course, with “instant” everything, instant borrowing and lending, everyone wants everything now. Greed and impatience has created a system that had no foundation and was inevitably going to collapse.

Although this is called the Friday Letter, and now is Sunday it is a bit late, but I was hoping for something special to happen over the last few days to make it worth the wait… well… the sermon this morning at church by Adrian Warnock is it.
Adrian excelled himself this morning with a sermon worth listening to. One part which struck me is where he questioned to foundations of the banks. Are they build on rock or sand. Time will tell, I just hope that Mr Brown and Mr Darling know what they are doing. Then moving on to is Your life built on rocks or sand? How do you live your life? Which criteria do you follow, who’s teaching to you read, who is your role model? Mine? Thats simple, Jesus. I may not get it right all the time, but I try.

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