… and far quicker than I feel ready for! The last few days I’ve been thinking about what Christmas means for me, a Christian, a Dad, a Brit.
In reality Christmas has a variety of different meanings, and impacts life in many ways. I’ve decided to write a series of (probably 3, maybe more, but hopefully at least 3) blog articles about some of these aspects of Christmas in the coming two and a half weeks. Watch this space!
… well maybe just watching them. We recently went on holiday to Swanage in the south of the UK. It’s a great place to holiday with small children and is on the coast - always a good thing (especially for someone who always seems to live in places about as far away from the sea as you can get in the UK!) I love watching the sea – and managed to get this photo of a wave breaking which I thought I’d share with you.
Hope you like it!
Breaking Wave
Lloydaboutlife has now moved. I used to host the blog with the web host web-mania. These were quite cheap and worked well – the actual software I used to write and format the blog was wordpress. Wordpress actually provide the option of hosting your blog for free at wordpress.com - and they now have the option of using your own domain name (ie lloydaboutlife.com) on that blog as well.
Given the limited amount of time I have to devote to the blog, I’ve decided to move the blog to this free hosted service, while keeping the same lloydaboutlife.com name. The new free service has two big advantages.
To be honest, the second of these is the key advantage. One of the reasons I have done so little on the blog in recent months is that I was aware that I was using a quite out of date version of wordpress, and felt that I really should update this. This would have taken quite a bit of time and effort however, so I never got round to it – and also never got round to writing new posts! On the new hosting service, a lot of the worries and hassles are taken care of for me so I should be able to do more on it.
The move does have some downsides – I can’t customise the blog quite as much as I could before, so for example I can’t put my old polls onto the blog (although they’ve just provided a new polling feature which I’ll have to look at soon!), but overall it should be a big plus. You shouldn’t notice much difference – just a few minor formatting differences, and a few things missing that were there before. Do let me know if anything doesn’t work however. And if you want to do your own blog, why don’t you sign up at wordpress.com too!
Perhaps I should start a new blog giving photos of picturesque Spanish castles at night. We recently spent a week in Peñiscola, a couple of hours up the coast from Valencia. It was a great week, and has a beautful old castle, which looks great lit up at night. Here’s the photo!
So much for thinking that I’d have another post up within a week. Fortunately, news stories of mislaid data from UK government departments arrive about every week, so this is still a topical issue… As I mentioned in the last post, the UK tax revenue department lost two CDs containing confidential information relating to about 25 million UK residents. This is a lot of people, and many many families – including mine – were affected by it. As far as I’m aware, the CDs are still ‘lost’. There have been lots of other stories of people or companies losing confidential data since, but this is still the one that sticks most in my memory.
One of the reasons for this is that I’m an IT manager, responsible to some extent for my organisation’s data. What if some of our organization’s data were to be mislaid too! The thought sends shivers down my back, and is enough to make sure that this whole area is looked at long, hard and regularly. I can’t but ask, however, how such a colossal mistake could possibly be allowed to happen?
But wasn’t it just a mistake? We all make them. It’s just that this one had such huge consequences, and hence made the news. Was it the fault of the poor guy who put these CDs into an envelope and then into the internal post? No doubt a large part of the blame has to be directed towards those higher in authority – those who gave the orders and who were responsible for making sure that things were carried out properly. Whatever, it’s unlikely that it was done maliciously, or with any real awareness of how serious the consequences of such a stupid action might be. Can we really get so indignant about what happened?
Yet we (rightly I think) feel that we can’t just pass this by as another everyday mistake. The stakes were too important for such mistakes to be allowed. Yes, a junior official my not understand the potential ramifications of sending such data in such an insecure, and easily lost, way. And more senior ones may not undersand all the technical options for securing, reducing, or transmitting the data. But there were surely others around who did and do understand such things – they could and should have been asked, and the ‘mistake’ should have been avoided.
And this is a ‘mistake’ which all of us too easily fall into – thinking we know enough about what we should do, and being too proud / not bothered enough to ask. We are human and can’t be expected to know everything, or have the wisdom to always make the right decisions. But there are others around who know more about the things that we don’t understand, and we are all at fault when we don’t make the effort to find a better answer elsewhere.
“If you were really blind, you would be blameless, but since you claim to see everything so well, you’re accountable for every fault and failure” (The Message)
I read that it’s generally agree that if a blog hasn’t had a new post within the last 3 months, then it’s probably dead. Oh dear, I think my last posting was back in September, but I don’t intend to leave this blog dead quite yet (nor indeed for a long while). Particularly as I’m now getting more visitors than I did when I wrote regularly! It’s not even true to say that I’ve had nothing to say. There have been quite a few events in the news which I wanted to comment on, but I just haven’t had the time.
One of these was the loss before Christmas by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (UK tax raising organisation) of some CDs containing personal and confidential details of a large proportion of the UK population. This not only affected my family personally, but is interesting to me as an IT manager where one aspect of my role is to ensure that our organisation’s systems and personal data remain secure. My thoughts went slightly in a different direction, however, to the general (somewhat deserved) condemnation of the government’s incompetence. However it’s now late and I don’t want to write this all at this moment. So come back soon for (hopefully) some further reflections…
One of the points of a blog is to provide a chance to say whatever’s on your mind, regardless of whether or not anyone’s listening. You hope that someone will read it, and indeed my experience seems to be that plenty of people at the very least quickly scan through something I’ve written before moving on. However, being realistic you can’t expect that most blogs get a wide readership – as a blogger I can’t say that I have that much time free for reading other blogs.
However since returning to work from study, I haven’t written much. Is this because I no longer have much to say. Perhaps it is! – at least in one sense. I’m now quite tired when I get back from work. After reading 20 books to my daughter, helping eat the family evening meal, washing up and all the other househould responsibilities, I find that time’s getting on and I don’t feel like thinking and reflecting on the lessons for life from today’s experiences. Rather I’m full of the outstanding tasks from work – How on earth does Microsoft licensing work? Will the air conditioning in the server room survive the weekend? Indeed I’d never realised before that there was so much scope for dreaming about software licensing issues in your sleep!
At college, one of the privileges was that we had to think about life, about what we were reading, about what was going on around us. Although work was still busy, thinking was a part of that work. Outside of my IT tasks however it’s hard to have such time to think, reflect and learn. This is a shame, as life is poorer without it. So perhaps we all need a blog to get us to stop and think – and an avid readership hanging no our next perceptive insight! What do you think?
Oh dear. I haven’t posted to this blog for ages. This isn’t because I’ve lost interest, merely that I’ve had a crazy last couple of months. In this time I’ve finished my course at Redcliffe and started a new job two days later, then worked away from home for two weeks, moved house, been away at a conference for two weeks etc. Now I’m beginning to settle into normal routine again, and every night this week I’ve thought I should write something on my blog – only when I’ve finished the urgent tasks for the evening, I’ve looked at my watch and it’s either been tomorrow or close to it, so I’ve thought maybe not tonight…
So now a short post, although I may write more again on this soon – especially if you have anything to comment on it yourself. In short the last couple of months have been full of change, and to be honest I don’t much like change. This may sound strange as only recently (ish) I was writing about variety and how much I like it. And surely change is quite similar to variety, only on a larger scale. This may be true, but there is a difference. Perhaps variety turns into change when it becomes overly stressful and makes life far too busy. What do you think?
All the same, although I don’t like change so much, I do suspect that it can be good for us. Particularly with an interesting, varied - and comfortable – life we can get too settled, and stop growing and learning. Change helps to unsettle us and I think sometimes that God brings change about in our lives to help us to learn and grow. And for me he always demonstrates that I can trust him to help me through the change. So change is perhaps so not enjoyable but good for us all the same.
As long as there’s not too much of it at one time.
I love variety. I did think of giving my blog a name with ‘variety’ in it, however the domains I searched for were all taken. Variety in work can help to keep it interesting and exciting. It also means there’s often something new to enjoy and learn about. And I’m not the only one who enjoys variety. My daughter does too, for example at tea time she likes the variety of drinking out of every cup that’s on the table! There’s another reason I like variety, but I’ll leave that for a later post.
My final college essays are now all written and handed in – hooray! This meant that we could all go out for a day trip on Saturday to the nearby town of Newent. There is a nice, small lake in the town. Just going round it, I was struck by the variety in the beauty of nature that we could see there. Nothing particular unusual or outstanding, but beautiful and tremendously varied all the same. The photos below are just a taste of what we could enjoy.
Our little daughter loves ducks at the moment, and there were many of them around of all sizes.
There were plenty of squirrels around too, but photographing them is more difficult. This one was up a tree, and needed a flash to make it light enough. This meant some bad animal eye glare which I’ve had to try and artificially touch up. Hope it looks OK all the same.
It’s impossible to capture all the beauty of moving water – I could watch it for ages. The portion of one photo below just illustrates an element of it, produced by a fountain in the middle of the lake.
When I was in Spain, the people in the church we were visiting discovered that I was both a Christian and a scientist. They seemed surprised at this, and I seemed a bit of a celebrity as a result! They asked me to ‘star’ in a couple of discussion evenings where we discussed all manner of topics related to science and faith, genetic engineering, counsciousness and ‘the soul’ etc.
In fact various people I’ve met seem to think that science and any sort of faith seem somewhat incompatible. I guess Richard Dawkins has promoted this sort of perspective. But actually it’s not true. In my time studying and researching science I met a very large number of Christians who were also scientists. In fact the ‘prestigious’ institutions where I studied, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, seemed to have more Christians than the less ‘prestigious’ universities. And a large proportion of these were scientists. Scientists, I think, tend to have more polarised views about religion, but they’re certainly not less likely to be Christians, instead the opposite seems to be true (in Britain at least, maybe not in other countries).
I think this topic is of considerable interest to lots of other people too. So I’m starting up a new section of lloydaboutlife on Science and Christianity. I’ve started it off with a few thoughts and articles, and links on these pages. However, I’d like this section to be really interactive. After all this is what blogging is in part meant to be about – an interactive online community sharing thoughts and ideas. So please make comments, and ask questions. I want to expand the section, but I’d like to write on topics which are of general interest, not just to me. To do this I need some feedback. And pleae do vote on my science and faith poll on the right hand side!
