Filling in the gaps - part one

I needed to scan my visas, so while I was borrowing my friend’s scanner I took the opportunity to do something I’d been meaning to do for a while - scan some of the harder to find cover artwork that’s been missing from my iTunes library. I figure there must be others out there who have these CDs but are missing digital copies of the cover art, so I’m sharing them here for your benefit. That has to be fair use, right? This’ll be part one of a continuing series, but it'll be a while before there’s another one. I’ve started with some stars of Greenbelts past: four albums each by Coastal Dune and Why? They’re not terribly good scans, and the sleaves themselves have suffered some wear and tear, but they’re better than nothing. The Till We're Old cover isn’t square, so I’ve saved it as a PNG. Transparency appears to work in coverflow within iTunes, but not in coverflow on the iPhone. If you have better versions of any of these, leave a note in the comments.

Rising Sun

Past experience has taught me that I ought to write up my thoughts on Greenbelt as soon as possible, else I end up saying nothing at all.

There’s something somehow unique about Greenbelt. I just love it. Unexpected tragedy excepted, the end of Greenbelt is the saddest time of my year, in a way that even the end of Glastonbury can’t match. Greenbelters sometimes joke that it’s the third festival after Christmas and Easter, made all the more apt this year by the peculiar preponderance of carols. So, to misquote Wizzard, today I really do wish it could be Greenbelt every day.

That would, of course, be both foolish and impossible. Festivals exist to celebrate and inspire the lives we live for the rest of the year. So what were my highlights of this year?

First, Beth Rowley, who was simply stunning. And she played Greenbelt before she went massive, so it felt like one of our own coming home. Stephen Sizer never ceases to impress, with both his factual knowledge and his ability to cut through theological nonsense. He also pretty much saved my faith a few years back, by being the only writer able to offer a comprehensive biblical explanation for why my God is not a racist, so that was another point in his favour. Following her appeal last year for the church to rediscover the sin of usury, Ann Pettifor was this year calling for a Grand Jubilee cancelling all first world debt. Yes, that includes your mortgage. Her place in my mind as the greatest prophetic voice of our time is just about secured. Finally, Believe is a terrifyingly brutal yet thought provoking play in which Linda Marlowe portrays four women from the old testament and forces us to consider the impact of faith in today’s world. I needed a visit to the organic beer tent when it was over, but it’s probably a highlight not just of this Greenbelt, but of all eleven I’ve been to.

I guess part of what I love about Greenbelt is that, after all that time, I can barely walk around the site without bumping into someone I know. So my lowlight would be not having had the time to catch up with everyone I would have liked to, knowing I’d not even spoken to others, and also that some who should have been there weren’t.

Oh, and seeing my name in the programme was kind of nice too. It made me feel important, even if it wasn’t really deserved.

Radiohead on a Spectrum (and a printer, a scanner and some broken hard drives)

Chewing Pixels is fast becoming my number one place to discover the curious and the beautiful online. I don’t think I’ve shared any of his links outside of Facebook before (I do most of my blogging there now), but I’ve been too active on there of late, and this place has been looking rather neglected. Anyway, this time it’s the graduation project of one James Houston, until recently a student of Glasgow School of Art’s graphic design course. It’s a remix of Nude from Radiohead’s In Rainbows album, but he explains more at his Vimeo page.

Beyond this, I have had several posts in draft for a while —a sort of mini series of technological complaints— but I just can’t seem to find the time to finish them off. If I’m feeling energetic I’ll get them up over the next week and a half. I know this is supposed to be a blog about faith and prayer in Bradford. Maybe I’ll get back to that once I return from my travels. I the meantime, I’ll try and post some updates whenever I can find an Internet cafe.

Glastonbury '08

Dear Michael,

It’s now been nearly a week since I left your farm, so I thought I should write and thank you for another fantastic festival. To no-one’s surprise, you proved all the critics wrong. Tickets finally sold out, as we all knew they would. And those who said that Jay-Z would be bottled off stage clearly have no understanding of what Glastonbury’s all about.

I think my highlights this year were Jay-Z (obviously), The Verve, The Ting Tings and Vampire Weekend. The albums I’m most likely to buy next based on what I saw are Marry Me by St. Vincent and Youth Novels by Lykke Li. I would be getting The Langley Sisters’ album as well, but they don’t appear to have one yet. I’d not intended to see The Verve, but had a snap last minute change of heart on leaving Suzanne Vega’s gig in the Acoustic Tent. They turned out to be much better than I expected, though there was really no need for Richard Ashcroft to dis you like that. The same is true of the Ting Tings, who I'd expected to hate, ’cause I find that song really annoying.

Next year, I’d love it if you could book Sigur Rós to headline. In my opinion, they are the greatest band in the world right now, and they deserve a place on the world’s greatest stage. I still consider their performance on the Other Stage in 2003 to be the best gig I’ve ever been to, but I want to see them where those epic sounds really belong: in the dark, with the light of the top of the Pyramid pointing skyward above them.

I suppose I have to confess before I end that my actual highlight this year was Katie Melua. So, a special thanks for booking her. None of my friends would come and see her with me and, quite by accident, I ended up on the front row. I don’t think I’ve been on the front row of a gig since I was about 16. I felt well old. And probably looked like some kind of weird creepy stalker man. I’ve taken some abuse for saying I loved her set, and I guess I’ll take some more, but I don't care. I think I could literally listen to that girl sing the phone book.

Apple's offensive pricing strategy

So, yesterday was MacWorld Keynote day…

Seven days ago, Apple announced an imminent price reduction on the UK iTunes store, for the first time bringing about standardised music pricing throughout Europe. In their press release Apple threatened to reconsider its continuing relationship in the UK with any record label that does not lower its wholesale prices in the UK to the pan-European level within six months. Suddenly it was clear why Apple is unpopular with the record labels. Why only one major label has opened up their DRM free music to Apple. Here was a retailer genuinely working for the good of the British consumer, threatening to reshape the music industry for the benefit of the customer rather than the corporation.

Yesterday Steve Jobs stood on a stage in San Francisco, and announced a slew of cool new products. Time Capsule is a wireless bass station with a built in hard drive, designed for use with Leopard’s rather excellent Time Machine backup utility. This would be great, except that one month ago I bought an Apple wireless bass station with the intention of connecting an external drive for that exact purpose. But it’s OK, because Jobs says that Time Capsule is very aggressively priced as they want people backing up their content. Time Capsule costs $299 for the 500GB version, or $499 for 1TB. Bargain. And not that unfavourable when compared to the price a standalone drive for my existing Airport Extreme base station would have been.

Right now, one dollar equals just shy of 51 pence sterling. That should make the 1TB Time Capsule something in the region of £254. I’d probably lose out considerably ebaying my Airport Extreme so soon after buying it, but it’d be worth it for the hassle free wireless backups. In the UK however, Apple are advertising Time Capsule at £329—the best part of £80 more than it should be.

The same is true of their rather attractive new laptop, the MacBook Air. Steve Jobs advertised it at $1799, or £917. I’d expected a slight UK premium on that, maybe £999. An $1800 dollar laptop really should be sub £1000. Once again however, Apple are selling it at £1,199—over 30% more than in the US.

I guess, when it comes to the price of Apple’s own products, they won’t favour the British consumer until the courts compel them again.

Dispatches: Unholy War

Channel 4 have just screened an edition of their Dispatches documentary series investigating threats made against muslim converts to Christianity in the UK. More information is available on their Dispatches web site and, at the time of writing, the show is available for Windows users to watch online through their 4OD service.

There were several issues raised by this programme which I believe need an urgent and prayerful response. I’m not yet sure what that response should be in every case, so I’ll leave it to your discretion; but do please share any thoughts below or on the I promise to pray for the city of Bradford every day Facebook group.

• Firstly, the main narrative of the show followed a Bradford family who converted to Christianity and faced five years of harassment, death threats and destruction of property before finally being forced to move away from the city. The family’s church in Manningham, which was shown but not named, had also suffered intimidation and vandalism as a result. According to the show, there are 3000 former Muslims in the UK who face such persecution.
• Secondly, the show made pointed references to the problem of bogus asylum seekers seeking to bolster their case by claiming a fraudulent conversion to Christianity.
• The middle third of show was given over to highlighting the dangers of American Evangelicals who come over to the UK and stir up trouble by deliberately targeting children, divorced women and other vulnerable Muslims for evangelisation. Chief among their organisations of concern was a group called Caleb, who’s UK base is in Bradford. The fact that Caleb Project Europe ceased to be two years ago seemed only to deepen the presenter’s suspicion, particularly given that several of the old Caleb team remained in the UK, working independently and continuing to rent the same office space. Caleb’s operations in Bradford were portrayed as shadowy and somewhat sinister. The presenter managed to elicit a condemnation from the Bishop of Rochester, who’d never heard of Caleb. No mention was made of whether they’d attempted to contact the Bishop of Bradford, or any of the many other reputable groups with whom Caleb have partnered.
• Finally—and this wasn’t mentioned in the documentary—there is another, entirely unrelated, Christian project in Bradford that goes by the name of Caleb, who run addiction recovery programmes. There’s a lot of potential for confusion here.

Find her. Save her.

A few years ago I played through Bioware’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It won stacks of awards, and was undeniably one of the best games of 2003. It was also the first time I’d played a proper RPG. The concept of levelling a character was entirely alien to me, and I didn’t do a very good job of it. By the time I reached the grand finale I’d spread my experience points so thinly that defeating the final boss was nigh on impossible.

The inventory, storytelling and character interaction, though, were familiar gameplay elements, reminiscent of the classic adventure games of my youth; Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango etc. I installed a copy of ScummVM and, through the likes of Adventure Gamers and Just Adventure, discovered that the adventure genre wasn’t nearly as dead as I’d been led to believe. I downloaded demos of The Longest Journey and Syberia. I scoured the shops in a vain effort to find these fabled saviours of narrative gaming. I discovered that the cancellation of Sam & Max: Freelance Police wasn’t the death knell I’d thought—that the exiles of LucasArts had gone their separate ways and founded many exciting new companies. I subscribed to Ragnar Tornquist’s blog. And then I got rid of my computer.

Last night, after years of anticipation, as the proud (and only slightly smug) owner of a shiny new MacBook Pro with a specially created Windows Vista Ultimate partition, I completed Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. It’s one of the best games I’ve played, and easily deserves to be listed alongside the greats mentioned above. I could give a list as long as you’d like of things that could be improved with the game, but none of them detract from the fact that it showcases some finest writing ever seen in a game, and for that alone you should play it.

Basically this whole post is a rather longwinded way of saying that you should buy this game. Now. It’s only a tenner off Steam. Go on. Find her, save her.

The Deathly Hallows (spoiler free)

I finally finished reading the Potter chronicles yesterday. Tycho of Penny Arcade describes the experience thus:

I finished the last Harry Potter yesterday, but I couldn't actually tell you what happened in it. It's been like that for several books now, starting with The Order of the Phoenix, where I grip the book with hunger and aggression and consume it without ever tasting the meal. I have a sense of being satisfied, but it is murky, and distant, the way an anaconda must feel one week after eating a jaguar. What is most important is that the wait, that long famine, has come to a close.

I had steered clear of reviews until now, but I think that's probably the most accurate one I'm likely to read. It's been like that for me since Goblet of Fire. I still couldn't tell you what happened at the end of that book. One of the things that most impresses me in Rowling's stories is the way things all tie to together. Unlike other people (George Lucas) who claim to have planned a saga, but clearly made it up as they went along, she appears to have actually been telling the truth. I feel I would get so much more from it if I could actually remember what happened in Half-Blood Prince.

Last night, all remained clear in my head, but it's fading fast. I guess at some point I'll just have to reread the whole lot…

Confirmed: DESO to close

Last Wednesday the Prime Minister's office formally announced plans to close the Defence Export Services Organisation. SPEAK have a press release, and also an example letter to send to Gordon Brown. Note that the Prime Ministerial statement says that the functions of DESO are to be reallocated to other departments, not ceased completely. It's important, therefore, to write and ask that this not just be a continuation of the status quo by another name. If not removed altogether, funding for arms promotion should, as a minimum step, be limited to an amount proportional to the share of UK exports they represent.

What shall we abolish next?

One week ago The Guardian reported that the Treasury plans to shut the Defence Export Services Organisation. This has been a long running SPEAK campaign, and I might have got a little over excited in my immediate response:

Dear Marsha Singh,

I am writing to express my unbridled joy at the news, as reported in this morning's Guardian, that the Treasury is planning to disband the Defence Export Services Organisation. This obviously corrupt and unnecessary government department has long been a blot on Labour's record of reforms and I know I represent many when I say I will be pleased to see it go.

I expect that this news will have come as a nasty shock to many involved in pushing so called "British" arms, and that an intense period of lobbying will now ensue. I would ask that you now write to Chief Secretary to the Treasury Andy Burnham and request he show the strongest resolve in following through on these plans. The fact that the arms industry continues to receive DESO's subsidies is clearly contrary to every principle of free trade; to say nothing of the obvious ethical questions, and the fact that no British civil industry is supported in such a way. I therefore ask that you also express to the Chief Secretary how important it is that closure should mean closure, and that the function of DESO not be passed elsewhere within government.

Obviously you don't all need to be quite that gushing, but I would urge you to write to your MP with similar requests, and also to sign the petition on the Downing Street web site.

Redesign

Regular visitors to sphericalbowl.co.uk¹ will have noticed that I’ve given the site a bit of a visual overhaul. Faced with the prospect of imminent redundancy, it seemed sensible that I should prepare a portfolio of sorts. There's still a bit of tweaking and tidying to be done, and I suspect I might have to revisit a couple of things I bodged since the last redesign, but so far everything’s holding together in most modern browsers. Something bizarre is happening in IE, which I guess should be the first priority. For the moment though, if you’re still using that browser, hitting refresh a few times seems to fix it—which is odd, given that the code is completely static.

¹ I realise regular visitors these days are probably the Googlebot and er… no one else

Oh! Web two point oh

So, I finally gave in. I’ve created a MySpace account. I’ve always avoided it before. I dislike the exclusivity of it all. It’s clearly the most heinous crime committed against all that’s decent in the world of web design for many a long year. It’s splattered indiscriminately with ads as if someone flicked the bristles of a paintbrush. There’s the ongoing all your content are belong to Murdoch issue. But most of all it’s the complete lack of RSS feeds that both irritates me and has been the reason for my eventual submission. And I resent that.

There’s a countless mass of social networking sites. I have friends who use quite a few of them. There are lots of blogging tools, all enabling people to publish their thoughts individually on fully customisable personal sites with comments, trackbacks and other forms of interactivity. And for every person I want to read that’s another visit I have to make to some other random site. If I want to stay up to date I have check them all. Every single day. MySpace is simply one amongst the miscellany. I am thus forever indebted to the person who first thought up syndication. These days the only site not in my Bloglines feeds that I begrudge to check regularly is the WoW Europe homepage.

And that brings us to the crux of my objection to MySpace. By not providing feeds in standard format News Corp effectively ensure that the only way you can keep track of multiple friends is with a MySpace subscription. And this is not just some technical oversight of a company behind the times. It’s a deliberate part of their business model, an attempt to monopolise the blogosphere. I don’t want to write on MySpace, I’m quite happy writing (occasionally) in the same place I have been for the last seven years. Signing up to MySpace feels like the first step on the slippery slope back to the bad old days.

Yet here I am. I’ve made my first post, posted simultaneously at sphericalbowl.co.uk. I don’t intend on using it actively. I just want to monitor my friends’ blogs without having to bookmark every single one. I might post on MySpace at the same time as updating my main site in future if I can be bothered. And I’m back to checking two sites a day rather than one.

Update: OK, so I've found MySpace's RSS feed. I could've sworn it wasn't there this morning…

Atom

I now have an Atom feed.

How do I get myself into these things? Last weekend I met up with a group of folk from my time on Transform. It was wonderful to see everyone. We had a great time chatting, eating, catching up and praying for one another. It transpires that Chris is going back to Mostar this summer. I knew he’d always planned to, but now he needs the funding. Without even thinking about it, somehow I’d opened my mouth and offered to walk the Yorkshire Three Peaks with him. I’m really unfit. This is a 25 mile trek that Wikipedia describes as gruelling. It seems there’s some kind of elite club you can get into if you do it in under 12 hours.

We’re doing it on 1st July. I’m going to try and buy some walking boots tomorrow. You can sponsor me if you’d like.

What’s God’s Bradford Vision?

Besides not having written an proper updates for ages, while I was out of the country I also slipped somewhat behind with the side column showing what I've been reading. I don't imagine that you're all that bothered, but I feel that I should catch up, and this is easier than writing the piece on Bosnia that I promised.

Along with James Thwaites' Renegotiating the Church Contract, the first book I listed on my return, I also read Misha Glenny's The Fall of Yugoslavia, C.S. Lewis' Prince Caspian and of course the inevitable. I'm feeling somewhat inspired by C.S. Lewis just at the moment. I'd fallen away from my plan to reread the Narnia books, but spurred on by anticipation of the upcoming movie, I can tell you that Prince Caspian is in no way done justice by the old BBC adaptation. I've just started on The Screwtape Letters, which I've also read before, and Lewis's talent for insightful summaries of complex issues is breathtaking. I don't remember it being this good before…

Arg... So, yeah, I've pretty much missed my chance to not go a whole calendar month without posting. In my defence, I have spent half of this month out of the country on mission with Novi Most International. I've started trying to draft something on it today, but the computer's playing up and I can't be bothered right now. I'll tell you about it later.

It’s taken me a while to get round to posting this, so any of you that read 24-7prayer.com regularly will have seen it already. In an article posted at the end of last month Pete Grieg leaves a few comments on the global prayer movement. He mentions one young man considering becoming a monk so as to devote himself to undistracted prayer. As the end of Transform draws ever nearer and the uncertainty of my future becomes ever more noticeable, I can so relate. I suspect it’s not quite my calling, but I’m making a mental note to find out more about monastic communities when I have some time.

It seems like a scam and looks like a scam says Newsnight of freeipods.com. They’re right. It does. But they then go on to say that, surprisingly, it’s not. As do Wired News, and a whole bunch of other news sites. The Newsnight story (dated last September) says they don’t operate in the UK, but looking at their web site, they apparently started about a month ago. So I figured that it had to be worth a try. If you think so too, then I very much recommend reading the terms and conditions thoroughly, as there’s certainly some stuff in there that would have caught me out had I not. Once you’ve done that, I’d be appreciative if you could enter by way of my link, so I get credit toward that pink iPod mini I’ve been wanting...

I know it’s a bit late, but it’s time for my election reflection (that’s actually mainly a repost of a comment I made on Rachel’s blog weeks ago).

This year, for the first time, I gave serious consideration to not voting, or at least spoiling my ballot. I’ve been thinking a bit recently about issues surrounding power and the Christian use of it, and I started to wonder whether it was something I wanted any part in.

I’ve heard and read quite a bit in the last few months on church unity, church history and several issues which have caused church division. It’s very clear the church has spent far too long acting as a worldly power, and far too little time as an imitator of Christ. There are many issues that everyone knows are important to the Christian vote, most of which are helpfully(?) listed by the Christian Institute, together with details of how your MP has voted on them in the past. Whether you agree with their interpretation of “Christian morals” or not (and personally, on at least some of those issues, I certainly don’t), a question remains over whether they are issues on which we have the right to demand legislation.

Is Britain still a Christian nation? Was it ever? Is a Christian nation even possible? Would it be a good thing if it were? I’m increasingly of the opinion that the answer to all those questions is “no”. Christ was a powerful voice because he spoke with humility from a position of service, and because he lived what he taught. His ultimate victory came in total submission and with the impression of defeat. He preached uncompromising truth, but initially required only one thing: repentance.

In a country where only about 5% of the population now attend church, can we really expect the election to reflect Christian values? Should we even want it to? And what is the aim of seeking to enforce a Christian morality in the laws of our nation? Are we hoping that we will somehow make people pure, and thus achieve their salvation by obedience to law? Is that the gospel?