UPDATE 3am 24 hours my butt!!!! Done - yep, version 2.0 of my own hand made blogger is now online and so this will be the last post using the jolly people at blogger.com. May I just say congratulations to ME for getting it all to work - I LOVE php and sql, it works just the way you think it will - as long as you get those damm single quotes in the right place - or nowhere. But it works now. I will chnage this page to use my new bloggbjd when I work out how to get the time to show AUS time [when I post] and not GMT.

Up to version 1.9 already :) and I rekon I am happy enough with it - it will sit on 1.9.x for now and when version 2.x [which will include the count of the number of comments] is ready then I will move across to the new bloggbjd. Hopefully that will be some time in the next 24 hours.

Version 1.0 of bloggbjd is now up and running and can be viewed here. I am pretty happy with this - it works and took nowhere near as much pain as I expected.
       

and you will be genuinely excited to know that you can view the glorious creation of said self-made-blogg by watching /cam2 - I know you will be barely able to contain your excitement so why not make a comment :)

Have started on the "make my own blogg" project - I find it a bit frustrating that since I rarely get to use php and work with a mysql database- I have to go back to the start again every time. I am finding that the lerning curve is a bit less steep but it is still a case of reinventing the wheel. Oh, sure, I can look at what I did before and that helps a lot. I also find that, as with most manuals, they are better termed referenece manuals - and often don't provide help so much as spring boards to help you work it out yourself. And some of the information is wrong, too recent [for the version of mySQL my server users] or makes no sense until after you have worked it all out yourself.

But, it is keeping my brain active which is what counts the most. I am also planning, in the new year, to bring home the schools shiney G4 web server and set up the php and mysql stuff on it and write some nifty apps which will do amazing things...

• allow kids to do queries
• present news about the network
• have a general news site which staff can add to, maybe use NUKE to run it - another learning curve

let's be honest I love that curve

oh yeah, hope you had a cool christmas day - I did - and at the risk of upsetting people, my mum did have the prize for coolest present with the combo thermometer, clock and humidty measurer thing, until preator gave me a WarDriver t-shirt - which pipped out mum cos it was a huge surprise, and secondly is a very cool piece of nerdware :)

Although my year has been one of change and challenge, in the end I know that God has all things under His control.

I hope that whatever has happened to you during the year that at this time you will be able to remember what Christmas is all about - the birth of Jesus, the man who was God, who entered this world to live amongst us and show us what God was like, to explain the way to be right with God, to show that love is all about sacrifice and to give up His life as payment on our behalf - to make the way back to God.

[What][How]

postcard image from ::out:there:design | words by bjd | 

Today is the last day of school and so I am now officially on holidays - from now until the end of Jan. I feel a bit, weird, at the moment - had a crappy day, sort of, I dunno what it is, but I don't feel the "last day of the year joy" I usually do.

I am having lunch with my Mum tomorrow - so I am looking forward to that - I will then head down to her place sometime in january for about a week - any longer and I start to go cold turkey on the internet - she has dial up, so I am still in touch, but it's just not the same :)

Maybe it is just really having nothing to do now, since I don't even have to think about planning for next years BB stuff. Hmm, maybe. Who knows, maybe it is just being tired after a very long year with a lot of changes and challenges - of course every year is like that, but I guess this year has also seen the end of such a large involvement in BB and church and so on. So next year will no doubt see more changes as I work out what I will do with all this free time I have. I must say that having stopped it is hard to get motivated to get back into things.

Today I heard that Baulkham Hills council had refused permission for a muslim house of prayer to be built in Annnangrove - I am sad, everyone deserves a chance to practice their religion - someone was quoted on radio as saying they were surprised at so called christians not being more charitable - I feel the same - apparently the anti-discrimination board is looking into it to see if anything discriminatory has gone on. The ABC news noted a number of reasons which seem reasonable, but which could still have been motivated by fear and racism.

Please note that I am not saying that Islam is the right way to be right with God - that only happens through faith in Jesus - but that doesn't mean that they can't build a place to practice their religion, as I wrote yesterday, christians need to be defending the right to build places of worship, so that we can build ours when and where we have a need. And as a higher moral reasons because all people should be allowed to practive their religion.

America is continuing to build a 21st Centurary version of the Maginot Line - while it was never taken by force it didn't stop the Germans invading and capturing France - and I am sure that the missile defence shield will probably mean that the US doesn't get hit by a nuclear missile - but it's downfall will not come in that direction anyway - terrorists don't use ICBM's or SCUD's - and the sociall fabric may well be unravelling.

Have I mentioned that I am playing Splinter Cell on the xbox? no, I don't remember either, well, I am. And I have been enjoying it, a bit too linear I find, but otherwise I like the sneaking around doing tricky stuff. The lighting and shadows are absolutely beautiful. So I just chip away at it, a little bit at a time, having a few goes at each section until I am happy with it then moving on. Sometimes having many a go just to try and work out how to do the section before moving on.

This is the last week of school for this year, and, as is often the case, I have been enjoying the less classes and more technical stuff than I normally get a chance to do. Our new OS X Servers are finally in place and I am just writing up the documentation and doing the planning for next year when we issue the new set of usernames and passwords and get the kids to move their files from one server the other. But it is very cool to be just focusing on the technology side and not having to worry too much about the teaching side.

Finally, for tonight, a deep and meaningful thought or two.....

christmas - a pagan ritual, christianised to become a celebration of the birth of Jesus, consumerised to become a reason to increase profits, now I read about some places in europe and especially Germany that wants to put the Christ back into Christmas and get rid of the consuming focus. Which is weird cos the country in the world that has In God We Trust on their money has basically made it an insult [and illegal] to wish someone a merry christmas [must be happy holiday] and in this country of Australia people are trying to do the same - now look, the bottom line is that as a country who was colonised by the English and then filled up with a mixed bag of immigration - people should feel comfortable celebrating christmas, and we should also get into the celebrations of other cultures too - I think a great marketing oppurtunity is being missed [oh and a chance of some true multiculturalism] by NOT giving due credit to other cultural celebrations, such as, well see, I don;t know any such as, cos people don't give them the attention they deserve. I agree that it is not right to ONLY celebrate christmas - but nor is it right to deny people the right TO celebrate christmas - the balance is redressed by giving attention to the celebrations of other cultures and religions, not denying anglo christians and anyone else the right to celebrate their culture.

A friend of mine the other day was saying how they were opposed to a mosque going up in their local area - I was disappointed cos their concerns were all based around terrorist fears that it would be a target - I was horrified - firstly a mosque is not a target [except of those stupid stupid people who blame all Muslims for the actions of a few] for terror cos it is muslim extremists carrying out the attacks, why would they terrorise their own kind; and secondly, people should be free to build places of worship of any kind [except perhaps ones that require human sacrifices or other illegal actions] in any area - I say this cos I feel that a day is coming soon when people will not want christian places of worship and christians need to start defending everyones rights to coporate worship otherwise one day we might loose our own.

The Challenges of Integrating the Unix and Mac OS Environments an interesting bit of technical news, a talk [from 2000] by one of the men who worked on Darwin, the Unix Core of the Mac OS X operating system.

An interesting weekend, with much in it to make me think. Our church ran Carols In The Park - it went well. And a vote of thanks and admiration to Dave, Rob and Pete who spent all day and night Sunday setting up, running and packing up the light and sound. It was a very very hot day and Rob had a very nasty cough.

It is not the doing of certain things that make someone a man - it is the qualities of a person which defines them as a man - faith, hope and love; standing consistantly for God; not letting times of failure become an excuse to not try again; gentleness; self control. I have a distance to travel yet.