My response to trick or treat three years ago.

This is still not the USA and no-one should submit to demands for sweets made with menaces. Say no to Trick or Treat.

These days, I just put this note on the door.

• Went for light therapy this morning and stopped at Starbucks for brunch on my way home. Fuel gauge mistakenly indicated being in the reserve when I got back in the car - moment of confusion but it righted itself.
• Checked my mail when I got home and had an email from someone who'd obviously seen my blog entry about having bought some Converse All-Stars offering me a free pair of trainers in return for a review and a blog link. Not my thing but just weird to have had it.
• Picked up snail mail which included an Amazon package. This was odd as I didn't have any outstanding orders from Amazon. Anyway, I opened it all the same while being careful that no white powder fluttered out (it's a heightened terrorist threat situation after all). No white powder, but a DVD copy of Fahrenheit 9/11 dropped from its cardboard prison. It was apparently purchased from my Wishlist with a note saying "Every vicar should have one!" This is undoubtedly true and in fact I'd go so far as to say "Every home should have one!" It's one of my favourite documentaries and, of course, plays to my anti-American tendencies. Many thanks go to the kind person who made this purchase - you know who you are. I assume. Unless a member of your family nicked your credit card of course.

Seven days until voters go to the polls in the US (those that haven't voted early or by post of course) and I have to say that the electoral map at the moment just looks bonkers. [Link to the map as the polls have it today]

The GOP are having to campaign in Montana of all places (because they desperately need those three electoral college votes), North Carolina, Florida, Colorado, Indiana are trending Obama and North Dakota is a statistical tie right now. Even Georgia could conceivably send 15 electoral votes to Obama.

Other states that went for Bush and are possibly/likely to go for Obama include Ohio, Virgina, Nevada, Iowa and New Mexico with Missouri another statistical tie.

My fear right now is complacency on the part of Democrats causing lower turnout among their ranks narrowing the margin enough in some key swing states. There are just too many states that are close - if not knife-edged - for my liking and the 100+ Electoral College majority I've been saying for a long time that Obama will have may dissipate.

In the Senate, the likelihood is that the Democrats will wind up with 58 or 59 Senators. It is possible though that Mississippi and even Georgia may return Democratic Senators giving the Democrats the magic number of 60 even if AL Franken fails to take Minnesota. Again, I'm not holding my breath though.

Pidgin and the Gimp are now at their latest versions in GNOME:Community (that's 2.5.2 and 2.6.1 respectively).

Also, in OpenOffice.org:STABLE, version 3.0 is now available and it's sweet. Windows users can grab the corresponding build from Go-OO. It's not linked in but if you go to the main win32 download directory, there's a 3.0 sub-directory. Get the main GoOo-version.exe and your relevant langpack (in my case, en-GB). Note that en-US is no longer part of the main package.

The Windows version of OOo Impress is very cool when displaying a presentation dual-head. On the primary display (ie, not the one connected to a projector or big screen), you get a multi-function control interface. I've not been able to see if this is the case on Linux though as the binary NVIDIA driver and gnome-panel don't play nice in dual-head and nouveau is very broken on my card on 11.0. I've sent an email to the maintainer to see if the build service repo might get 11.0 added as well as 10.3 and Factory.

I've just completed and placed in an envelope a review of Evangelical Theology: An Introduction by Karl Barth. This is the first piece I've written for the MA and also the first thing I've written for college where I've gone over the upper word limit (for which I'll be penalised 2% but I couldn't edit it down any further really). Annoying that it's complete about 24 hours before the deadline but will arrive late because I have to post it. Electronic submission would be very helpful.

Was out for a brief walk in Alresford today and this caught my eye. One advantage of having a phone like the N95 is that it includes such a good camera for taking quick shots. Make of the juxtaposition of the arrow sign and the church what you will.

"Turn Away" 22 October 2008.

Update: Just to be clear - this isn't about Alresford Church - that's just where I happened to be, for these purposes, it's a generic church building.

Aaron's news about Banshee on OS X is so damn cool it hurts. If and when I can afford to buy myself a Macbook [Pro], I'll be installing it for sure. It raises a couple of questions that people who may consider using might want answered:

• Does it talk to iPods on OS X?
• Might some nice person like to resurrect/restart the iTunes Music Store plugin?

I hear a lot of talk about how we might go about preaching during the credit crunch and I have to say it's starting to wind me up somewhat. Not that I don't think that the current financial climate isn't serious - it is and it has repercussions far beyond whether people in the still-wealthy west can make mortgage repayments. My fear is that it has a knock-on impact on levels of aid and assistance available to the less-developed world.

Anyway, all this discussion almost starts to sound like the gospel we preach is somehow different now the world appears to be coming apart at the seams. I would like to contend that it is all the more vital that the church and those who lead it preach the same message. God hasn't changed, the world has - a little. The fact is that capitalism is still as false a hope for the future as it always was (and as is socialism of course). As as follower of Jesus of Nazareth, I believe the same now as I did before this all happened - that the only hope for humanity and for individual humans is in him.

Just my two-pennoth. Your regular programming will now be resumed.

Just looking at the latest stats for usage of bursledonparish.org and I don't know what to make of the fact that the site at the top of the list for hits with about 13% of total hits so far this month (but 0KB in transferred data!) is 65.55.212.139 which a WHOIS search reveals belongs to Microsoft.

Paranoid? Me?

Recorded yesterday at St Paul's. 20 minutes long (26 minutes with reading and prayers). Available as Ogg Vorbis or MP3:

PDF of accompanying presentation.

I caught some of the second presidential "debate" via The Daily Show and what struck me was not McCain's derisory referral to Obama as "That One" nor his addled wanderings around the dais as Obama was speaking.

No, what amazed me was how almost life-like he looked.

Michelle Obama did a great job too. If you missed her, take a look.

We're well used to hearing about states that allegedly sponsor terrorism - indeed, we can name the usual suspects easily: Iran, North Korea, the USA, Israel (sorry, two of those just enact terrorism themselves directly).

Now it seems we can add a new name to the list. Icelandic bankers are apparently terrorists. Why else would our government have employed anti-terror legislation to freeze Icelandic assets in the the UK? Surely those lovely Nordic types (statistically the most beautiful nation on earth apparently) with the coolest named banks in the world (Landsbankinn anyone?) can't be that big a threat to global peace and security?

A cynic might suggest that this demonstrates that the laws in question are framed in such a way as to allow the government to do pretty well whatever it likes. Yesterday, in the Lords, Lord Onslow said roughly that.

In our worship, is variety the spice of life or does consistency build community? Where do we strike the balance between the two?

As a minister in the Church of England, I have a wide variety of authorised liturgy available to me to use while remaining within a consistent shape and pattern of worship. As a leader in the Church of God, I have a duty to help his people engage with him in corporate and collective worship by making it both familiar enough to connect with and sufficiently fresh as to not grow stale (see the connection between freshness and a lack of staleness).

It's never an easy balance to strike, especially as there is the added layer of working in a multimedia world with an increasingly media-literate population (and indeed, those of the emerging generations for whom a rich diet of media is expected) - the temptation to use cool new worship resources for the sake of it or to satisfy one's own taste is strong. Undoubtedly, employing a variety of media in worship can help keep worship fresh while maintaining consistency - I saw a fantastic way of presenting the Eucharistic prayer at college last week, an audio-visual presentation to accompany the president in place of simply projecting the words or the words with a static image (inevitably, normally, of bread and wine) onto the wall or screen.

There is a real air of permission-giving the Church of England, the sheer number of alt.worship groups is evidence of this. This may well be in part down to the fact that a lot of alt.worship is profoundly liturgical. Where our history is not only recognised but honoured, it is easier to give permission for the expression of worship to be changed, updated or adapted.

I hope that in Bursledon, we are moving towards striking this balance well. Our Conversations service (which will soon see a tweaking of style) and our 1662 Communion (as well as the various other services we run) show that there are a number of points within the cloud where we reside. I use the word cloud rather than continuum or the more ecclesiastical candle because I don't think that worship shows a linear move from liturgical to experimental or catholic to evangelical but rather it's a cloud with three (or more) dimensions in which people move.

So, variety or consistency? It's a balance, we can have - and indeed need - both. We need to keep worship fresh while also remaining grounded. We move towards the future while honouring and being nourished by the past.

Until the people of the USA go to the polls and it's looking like it might be a landslide for Obama. People ask me (they really do) how I think it's going to go and for a long time (even back when the polls were showing a roughly tied electoral college) I've been predicting an Obama win in the region of 100 electoral college votes. The polls are now showing more than that - getting towards the region of a 200 point gap. With each debate being adjudged to have been won by the democrat candidate (both the presidential candidate and the VP candidate), the gap just seems to show a widening trend (see the trend here) and with enough states already polling outside the margin of error for Obama to give him the 270 votes he needs, it's his election to lose now.

Bush states polling for Obama currently include (electoral college votes and %age of 2004 vote that went to Bush in brackets in each case) FL (27, 52%); IA (7, 50%); MO (11, 53%); OH (20, 51%); VA (13, 54%).

The weekend before last, I was at the IME Residential which was led by Jonny Baker. A really interesting time thinking about creativity in a post-modern context. One of those times whose value was not in the new information imparted - for me there wasn't much - but in knowing that Jonny had been approved by the diocese to come and talk about this stuff (alt worship, creativity, grasping the culture of the day without being controlled by it...) which was totally speaking my language. Fantastic. Jonny, incidentally, is a member of Grace, an alternative worship community based at St Mary's, Ealing.

After that, I had a night at home before heading up to Nottingham to spend a week at college doing the Introduction to Theological Method, kicking off my MA. It was a fab week - my mind was really stretched which anyone who knows me knows I value enormously. I also managed to catch up with a few people and to go play in the £10 Hold'em tournament at the Circus Casino in Nottingham. I was doing well - above average stack with over half the field eliminated when with me in the BB, the button raised. I could tell he was trying to steal the blinds and after the SB folded, I checked my cards, seeing AhQd. I had him covered and so I pushed, which of course would put him all-in. Incredibly, after correctly naming my hand ("a strong Ace" he said), he made the call and flipped over 9c8s! The flop didn't help him but a 9 came on the turn. I didn't improve on the river and I was left crippled. We were playing 6-handed at that point and so the blinds got back round towards me very quickly and I was card-dead. Had a great night though.

Speaking of poker, the London leg of the fifth European Poker Tour happened last week. I was keeping up with the action via the PokerStars blog and this entry made me laugh.

As promised, version 2.6 of the GIMP is now in GNOME:Community

It only seems like yesterday that GIMP 2.4 was released - indeed, it's less than a year - but already, GIMP 2.6 has been released.

Stephen has very kindly packaged it for openSUSE 11.0. I'll update the package in GNOME:Community real soon.

Or in this case a wireless one.

Four years or so ago, I used wifi for the first time on the laptop I owned at the time (the beast, as it was known). I was sat at Northampton Services on the M1 at the time.

Well, I'm there again today and the wifi access is now free - gratis - it ain't cosing me a penny.

Kudos to BT and RoadChef for doing this because it means that I can have a coffee to perk myself up while listing to streamed radio and check Facebook without breaking the bank. The other reason I stopped was that it appeared that just about every motorway and 'A' road in the southern half of England has an accident and delays on them at the moment so I figured I'd give them a chance to clear or at least ease.

A lot to blog about from the last week or so - there isn't the time to do so here but I will soon.