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Beheading is good!

Breasts are bad!

Yet another reason why I'm not on Facebook.  

Real Fire

One of our criteria for a manse is it must have a real fire.

Missing Children

In the UK a child is reported missing every three minutes.  That's around 140,000 every year, and most of these are not mentioned in the press.  The UK Missing Kids website maintains a list of missing children, many of whom have been missing for decades.  There are nine children listed that went missing in 2007, and are still missing.  Can you name two of them?

Some of the UK's missing have run away, some have been taken abroad by parents, some are involved in human trafficking, some end up on the streets, and some end up dead.  Looking out for the missing  and helping those on the streets is something we need to be doing, because it's rare that any of them get publicity.  You only ever hear about the white ones.


 While some of the missing in the USA version of this video were found, at least one was murdered by  the child's mother.  The UK version of this video featured two of Peter Tobin's victims.

Don't have nightmares.

Placement Begiins

So I started my placement the other week at Lowry (North) church.  It wasn't my first choice of placement, but it was getting difficult finding places where I hadn't already lead worship, been on placement, or been at Mrs Gerbil's placement.  I had planned on avoiding Lowry (North) as the minister was my presbytery rep for my meetings with 121, however 121 had other ideas.

So, I met with Stephen, the minister, and he gave me the guided tour.  There's plenty to keep me busy, with the usual fayre of Board, Session and Guild.  A pretty good selection of youth groups, three schools, a couple of care homes, and a group of Methodists that are having their church renovated and will be using Lowry (North) for worship.  There's also a regular cafe that does a pretty reasonable bowl of soup, and once they learn that vegetables are the devil's excrement, and that side salad never belongs on a plate, then their plain cheese sandwiches will be prefect.

So I can see things I want to learn, things that will challenge me, and things I want to change. I am trying to get all the daytime things visited early on.  I am getting a bit bored with retirement, so I am looking for a bit of work.  Three job interviews are coming over the next 7 days.  We'll see what happens with them.

Dead Saints

A little bit freaky...

The short version.  Take a dead dude.  Excavate. Decorate.  Venerate.

The one that is second from the bottom, I was expecting it to come to life and say "Jack, I want you to draw me like one of your French girls..."

Normal blogging about placement etc begins again soon...

RIP Psion

This is the remains of my Psion Series 5.  For its day it was a very powerful pocket computer, and it would still give modern computers a run for their money. 

The keyboard wasn't much smaller than the netbook keyboard I'm using today, yet the clamshell design meant it folded down into a very neat package. You could easily touch type, which was a very useful thing, as it came complete with a full office package that was compatible with Microsoft Office, yet it ran on a tiny memory.  It could multi-task, and it even had a mobile browser.  Touch screen technology and a with a bit of persuasion it could even do handwriting recognition.  You think ebooks are new?  I was reading them in 1998 on this.  The majority of my HND was written through this machine.  Internet wasn't a problem, as it would connect to a dial up modem, or even wireless through my mobile phone.

This was a highly efficient design  Two AA batteries would last me a couple of days, even if I was using rechargeable batteries.  They made every byte of memory count.

But it does have its downside.  For Psion, the predecessor to the Series 5, the Series 3 family were very well built machines with a loyal following.  People were reluctant to switch over to a new device when the one they were using was still serving them well.  And for me, the end of my Psion was when the screen cable died.  The clever folding design had a weak point in that the ribbon cable between screen and motherboard would give way.  Out of warranty, this was an expensive repair, so after nearly four years of daily use, I had to retire my Psion. 

I managed to track down a replacement screen cable the other day, and I was going to attempt a fix, but I'm afraid this Psion is too far gone.  Deeper investigation revealed a couple of problems that I must have caused myself somewhere along the way.

It's just a shame that Psion is no longer in the palmtop computer market any more.  I am yet to find a machine that is as functional as the Psion. 

Rest in pieces Psion Series 5, you served me well.