August 25, 2009 at 2:04 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve been reading Tim Ferriss’s blog at FourHourWorkWeek.com for quite a while – I am fascinated at the insights he brings to technique and learning. He also shares some cross-disciplinary thoughts there, which broaden my perspectives and help me to look at things from different directions. I’ve just read his post “How to respond to criticism – learning from Dr King” which is dominated by the “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail”, written by Dr King in response to criticism from Bishops and other church leaders in Alabama over the direct action that He and others were leading in Birmingham.
I love the style that Dr Martin Luther King uses to justify his action and the action of standing up to segregation – and I use the word “Justify” carefully. There are no excuses, just proofs that right is on his side, that his is the way of a follower of Jesus, passionate and logical all at once. There is a great passage where he talks about negative and positive peace and how white moderates seemed unwilling to push for justice:
…who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice… I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality.
That kind of peace transcends the atmosphere of the 1960s and should be the aim of us all. Peace where violence is suppressed is not really peace, just a lull in fighting, a truce. Peace come where there is reconciliation, where the pain of the victim is recognised and dealt with.
I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action.
There is injustice in the world and yet I am often blind to it and deaf to those groans. What “strong, persistent and determined action” will our generation witness?
A comment left by “Michael” also got me thinking.
It’s too bad the modern school system doesn’t put more emphasis on this concept and instead children are left with the media (movies) to discover how to deal with conflict.
The kind of outcome sought by Dr King was “redemptive” – not in the kind of way we see redemption in the movies, where the bigger gun wins, or the little man beats the unjust system by hitting it hard in a weak spot or through the arduous quest of a hero. It was not the redemption through violence that we see in every blockbuster but of normal people standing up for truth, breaking the violent system from the inside, without becoming the enemy they challenged.
Should we be surprised if our kids fight to solve problems when they lap up the propaganda of a culture built on fighting and the victory that comes from being stronger? Our culture responds to inequality by exercising power, whether political or economic or military. We are oppressors and have no intention of giving up what we see as a right without a fight.
Like thermodynamics, inequality cannot last forever, and we have to decide how it will end. We can pray for leaders like MLK that will stand against injustice armed only with truth. We can recognise that our entire culture promotes inequality through our very richness and see Hollywood propaganda for what it is – supporting the western way of life and violence to sustain it. We can be like the few moderates that fully supported Dr King in standing against injustice and use the exact same arguments of truth, justice and creativity.
August 14, 2009 at 2:03 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I pushed out a new verson of Twitter Tools Supr Links a couple of days ago, so I thought I should let you know what it now does. I’ve fixed a few bugs before without pushing the release properly, because I didn’t realise that I had to change the “stable version” in the readme - got caught up with fixing the problems and forgot to update the information!
First of all, I fixed a problem with authenticating login details – even if you put in a correct username and API key,supr links said they were invalid because when it tried to check the link I was feeding it, the link was invalid, not your details! I’ve fixed some links to the settings section of Su.pr (not called “account”!) and now ‘ve made it possible to use this plugin if you have short URLs on your own domain. Now I don’t use this on jonrogers.co.uk – I like the su.pr name and it’s shortness, but I want to give you the choice. Thanks to Alex for pointing out the bug! The problem is with the way that supr returns the query for a shortened link on your domain. If you own “yourdomain.com” and you want to shorten the link “yourdomain.com/link”, the json return gives a short URL of something like “http://su.pr/yourdomain.com/FdJK” which is invalid, even if you’ve given a valid URL (unlike this example) and if the URL redirection on yourdomain.com is perfectly working. The correct link would be “http://youdomain.com/FdJK” – so why does supr add in it’s own site to make it an invalid link? Oh well, time to fix it!
There were a few options of how to do it. I could look for a link that was too long and replace the “su.pr/” with “” (blank). I also noticed that there was a field called “hash”. When you use su.pr as do, to make a link like “htpp://su.pr/ASDFg”, the hash is the bit after “su.pr/”. when it’s a link on “yourdomain.com” it becomes “yourdomain.com/FdJK”. So in fact it’s easiest to just add “http://” to the start of the hash if it’s longer than 6 characters and use that instead. It seems that su.pr are a little lazy in the way they make the links for your own domain and just add “http://su.pr/” to the start of the hash whatever the situation. I am sure that this workaround will be unnecessary when they sort it out for developers, but as for now, it works properly for you!
The update should have already come automatically, but you can get it by searching for “supr” in the plugins section of WordPress admin or by going to Supr Links on the WordPress Plugins site.
August 10, 2009 at 6:30 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Or “Banksy Vs Bristol Museum”
Fur Coat
One of the best days of this summer has involved queuing for three hours in the sun. Seriously! I went with Peet to see the exhibition at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery that Banksy has put on. I took quite a few photos – you can see them on Flickr.
Why was it so good? Firstly I think the guy’s a genius. I love the sense of irony in all his art, I love that he uses so many different media so fluently to communicate his ideas, I think that it’s great that street art evolves to have a powerful message that no-one can ignore. It was phenomenal to see the popularity of the show – almost a month into the 12 weeks it will be open, midweek, and the queue is three hours to get in. Secondly, I love that it has re-claimed a space as “cool” that has become uncool and got full families, art critics and normal people exploring the exhibits with new excitement. I hope it really has made people think about visiting other museums or galleries and that there has been “stealth learning” going on – while looking for a rat or another work, that people, kids and adults would be interested by the artifacts around them. This is the trojan effect of the exhibition, the way it can slip in some good stuff where they thought it might be just cool graffiti! There were moments shared with strangers of slightly inappropriate laughter, and times when you found a hidden treasure that no-one else in the whole museum was aware of at that moment.
I enjoyed the ribbing of authority figures, the higlighting of inconsistencies, the boldness to take a strong stance on issues that are controversial. Jumping in on things from the fox hunting ban to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict takes some stones! But to do it with humor and to place little bits around the museum so that you really have to search them out gives a reward to the viewer and a sense of achievement of having found the piece. Does this make the message more subtle or stronger – I can’t make up my mind.
The Gleaners - an Agency Job - photo on Flickr
I loved so many of the pieces, but I’ll just comment on a couple. “The Gleaners” was controversial by depicting the lower classes, and women at that, at their normal work. Banksy updates this by taking a twist of how the “lower classes” might be seen today – taking a fag break, disillusioned, out of frame. The unexpectedness of the woman being “cut out” of the frame highlights her out-of-place-ness.
Flight to Egypt - Budget Version - photo on Flickr
The Flight to Egypt depicts Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus resting as they flee to Egypt. In Banksy’s twist, they see a billboard being erected with a price for a budget airline’s price for flying to Cairo. How easy it is to forget that the simplicity of travel is a new thing, that it’s a luxury that would be impossible to describe to our ancestors. The billboard is totally out of place in the pastoral scene, yet painted in such a way that it fits right in. How did Banksy do all of this – from animatronics to huge, skillfully painted painted canvasses? Is it the work of years, or is it the produce of a team. Are they in on Banksy and his work, or in the dark on anonymous commission?
Parliament - photo on Flickr
I liked the painting of “Parliament” so much that I now have a copy (thinks Peet!) to frame. Is depicting MPs as monkeys new? Not so much. But the scale of this painting is not to be underestimated – it really is huge. It makes us think a little bit about who leads us, but at the same time about what we ourselves are like – the same? Grabbing after bananas, hooting and booing at every word. Don’t forget that the chimps in the gallery are exactly the same as those on the floor – except they have “Journalist” on their calling card.
What would it mean to have Trojan Rats in other contexts? Things that were so cool, so street, so anti-establishment that everyone would seek them out and receive a payload that got a message that they may or may not have expected. What would it meant to look at other rejected public spaces and twist them in such a way as to reclaim them. Maybe it would upset some critics or mineralogists, but it might engage a whole new generation to ideas they had never engaged with before.
July 15, 2009 at 12:46 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve been working with kids at school to make music videos as part of our activity week. Most of them brought me CDs to rip the music track off, but a few hadn’t got it with them. So youtube to the rescue!
First of all, the “All-in-one video bookmarklet” from 1024k.de to download an flv or an mp4. flv is best if you want an actual mp3 for Windows Movie Maker, because most flv videos have the audio already stored as mp3.
Now it’s downloaded, and since I’m on Ubuntu, I use ffmpeg to stream just the audio from the video – way faster than using the “nice gui” of vlc!
ffmpeg -i inputfile.flv -acodec copy output.mp3
It takes less than a second and gives a perfect mp3, dead easy.
July 1, 2009 at 10:46 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I managed to get an invitation to the new Stumble Upon beta URL shortening service, su.pr via @tferriss. It is basically like bit.ly or is.gd but with the added bonus of giving data on clicks advice on posting. So I want to integrate it with the blog posting system I have here with WordPress and Twitter Tools. Thankfully, it uses a very similar API call to the bit.ly service that has already been integrated into Twitter Tools, so I’ve modified the script and I’m putting it on here. I’m still testing, see this as very much alpha software, but it may help you!
June 19, 2009 at 7:37 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve had a nagging problem with opening my home folder from the launcher/dock that I use in Ubuntu 9.04 (“Jaunty”), gnome-do. It’s an awesome program that I really miss when I’m on windows at school, it gives so much power and so many shortcuts so easily.
Anyway, there’s this silly bug with it on Jaunty where if gnome-do runs at start up, it’s unable to open a file browser window. (the application is called nautilus, but you either already know that or you don’t need to) My understanding is that the problem is with the order things start in, but the good thing is that there’s a dead easy fix for the problem.
First up,you need to edit the shortcut file that opens your home folder: gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/nautilus-home.desktop
Go to line 6, and add a space and a period to the line, so it changes from: Exec=nautilus --no-desktop
to: Exec=nautilus --no-desktop .
(notice that tiny little dot at the end that makes all the difference!) Close it and save the file.
Hopefully this change will be done for October and the Karmic Koala, but for now my two installs will run happier and smoother with just one little dot as a difference!
I’ve been on a bit of an eBay trip in the last couple of days, so I thought I’d share how I’ve taken the photos for my auctions. Photos are really important on eBay – They’re the only way you’ll see the product before you part with your money, you have to gamble on the photo and auction text how much you want that item. Good photos will help smooth that part of the decision and hopefully get more bidders.
As I’m not trying to make my living, or selling a lot of one single thing, but rather clearing out a bunch of computer-related spares, I don’t have time for studio-quality snaps, but I’m taking care to make my photos as good as is practical in a few minutes.
Get rid of clutter. In this photo of the laptop there are (count them!) four different things to see – a table, a radiator (white), a wall (white) and a laptop. One too many for me, but it’ll do for the purposes. Guess what stands out?! That’s exactly what you’re looking for – a product that stands out at you as important.
Clean is good. Which would you rather buy: a dirty computer or a clean one? Why? Because something worthwhile is cared for and thus cleaned. It says a lot about how you value the item how you present it, and who’s going to value your old computer higher than you think they should?!
Light, light, light. Photography is all about capturing light. We’re almost programmed to like the light, so light photos and backgrounds are better. The graphics card photo turned out a little dark for me, but I didn’t discard it – I should have. Still, the light nicely picks out the card and emphasizes it. How can you get enough light in? Move away from the flash button…
Instead, pick a nice sunny day and find a location where you’ll get the most light. For me, that’s our dining room. The blinds distribute the light evenly, but don’t dim it too much, the walls are plain and I can move the furniture around!
If you still need more light, a little flash to fill in is OK, but maybe cover it with tissue to get a smoother light.
Don’t break anything! Seriously, it happens! To make sure I didn’t cause damage more costly that the items I’m selling, I put the motherboard on a cork mat. You can’t see it in the photo, but it stops the nasty sharp bits on the bottom from scratching a nice table!
Also, be careful with the item – you want rid of it, but in order to make money you need to take care of it for another few minutes.
Take as many as you need. Photos on eBay are cheap, photos on your computer are free. Take a few, edit them to boost the colours, pick one or two or three that show your item at it’s best. The more expensive the item, the more a few extra photos will be appreciated.
Good luck taking photos and selling online! I’ll update this post with some idea of how successful my selling was when it’s over, but do feel free to check out the auctions before!
I’ve been involved in the Tamworth teachers’ strike today -- the big two unions, five secondary schools, of which QEMS was the only one to stay open. the NUT met at QEMS then went down to the Assemby Rooms in the town centre for some speeches and the TV crews. I’m sure you’ll see us on at least the local news tonight and in the Educational Supplements this week.
So why strike? The LA has put into place plans for an academy and a BSF proposal. QEMS was fighting for it’s life earlier this year and the latest proposal keeps it open, but closes all of the sixth-forms in all the schools to create a new academy run centre. How this is supposed to develop diversity of choice for students is beyond all of us! The loss of post-16 teaching for schools will totally change the character of the school and the nature of the job of teaching in it, as well as affecting the lives of the children we spend our lives working for. Striking is not an option that any teacher likes to take, but it feels like the last one left at this stage.
HOTS is an organisation of parents that have made a huge stand over this issue and are now putting up candidates for the local council election in June. Please vote for them if you can!
I came across Phyllis Tickle in a talk at Mars Hill, where she talked about the idea that she writes about in her book, The Great Emergence. I’ve embedded a video with her trail for the book (which I’ve not yet read, but I’ll summarise her points as I understand them.)
Basically, she takes the words of the American Bishop Mark Dyer: “Every 500 years, the church has a rummage sale” and builds a historical theory that this re-imagining cycle has happened and that we are in the transition period right now. Five hundred years ago was the Great Reformation, at the turn of the millennium was the Great Schism (Roman and Orthodox Churches parted their ways). Back another 500 years was the fall of Rome and the split of the Oriental churches from the rest of Christendom. Five hundred years back takes us the the great watershed of Jesus and the start of the Church. But it continues back too, the exile in Babylon ~500BC, the rise of the Davidic dynasty ~1000BC, etc.
Obviously other major events have taken place in the Church, but the basic idea is that the 500 year transitions are a chance for Christianity to recover lost things and find new direction from them. We are in one now that Phyllis Tickle calls the Great Emergence, referencing a growth of a new kind of Christian church, looser in allegiance to structures, using new technologies, re-evaluating and re-interpreting Jesus and his teachings and re-discovering older ideas almost lost to Protestantism from the Orthodox and Roman traditions. She hails Brian McLaren as a key figure in the Emergence and I love the things he’s doing.
This evening talking with the CReATE group, I made some connections with the talk at Sprin Harvest about Post-Christendom. Before the collapse of Rome, in fact in the eyes of many historians, a cause of the collapse of the Western Empire, was the conversion of the state to Christianity. Since then, the Church, in various forms, has been “in power” or tied into the structures of power in many countries, whether explicitly (e.g. the UK) or implicitly (e.g. the US). In the age of monarchy and empire, the head of state was “anointed” by the head of the church, and the head of the church was chosen with the blessing of the monarch. Laws would need the consent of both state and church, in fact it was hard to tell that there was a difference in objective for either. Now, as the 20th Century ends and the 21st really kicks in, that tie-in is fading and we cannot assume it will last. Multi-culturalism is one reason, and we’d be foolish to pretend that we can fight it. The only way we (the church) can change the world now is through our influence and actions, no through wielding power. We may well mourn it, but we cannot pretend it is not happening and part of our response should be to re-evaluate our theology of religion and dig out the elements that are shaped by power more than by Jesus. I’ll give one example and stop.
In terms of value, we would find it hard to disagree that all people are made in God’s image and of equal, infitite worth to him. But our practice of religion tells us to listen only to those who have joined our gang -- a great tactic if you want to enhance power, but not great for extending influence. Why should any others listen to us if we will not listen to them? Dialogue means both sharing and listening. And we might well be scared of it if we fear legitimising rival power groups, but not if we just want to spread the influence of the Kingdom of Jesus. We need to be prepared to listen, prepared to change our attitudes if we see Jesus and his Kingdom in the ideas of others. That’s emergent and post-Christendom.
April 20, 2009 at 9:58 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I discovered Prezi today (via lifehacker) – quite simply the Awesomest Presentations Ever. Capitalisation is necessary. Check out the presentation I knocked up for tomorrow’s twilight staff seminar that I’m leading.
