Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

• Corrie Tenboome - The Hiding Place, Dutch underground, helping the escape of many Jews, members of the resistance to escape - his angels helped her.
• Do we believe in the ministry of Angels ? what does God's word say of them. Several beings here, speaking Gabriel, refers to Michael; and 2 demonic beings: the Prince of Persia, Prince of Greece. Should not be suprised if this speaks about Angels; Ch 3: The blazing firey furnace - the 4th man in the furnance an Angel - who was sent. Again Ch 6: the Angel shut the lion's mouth.
• Lots of Angels associated with the 1st advent of Christ, the gospel accounts mention Gabriel, (only mentioned elsewhere in the bible by name in Ch 8,9), announcing to Zecharia & Mary; Angels appear to Joseph and the Shephards.
• Some argue, since Pentacost & the spirit, there's 18:00 ** not that much for angels to do. Rev 2:.. Angel with a golden censor - offering our prayers in a priestly sense. Each church in Asia Minor had an Angel caring for it in some way.
• Problem is not the age of the spirit, but the spirit of the age - crass materialism; since Kepler's 3 laws of planetary motion - not much pysical for the angels to do (pushing the planets).
• Jesus repeatedly referred to Angels & recieved their ministry - in Gesthemeny eg. an Angel strengthened him. God - an ultimate cause, driven philosophically to acknowledge his necessity - everything else is a contigent creature; with no way to predict their features; everything depends on God ultimately. One of the things God seems to love is diversity; ** 25:00
• In Daniel 10: the veil is briefly pulled back, and we see the rich variety that exists - not all angels the same: cut from the same cookie-cutter. Clearly Gabriel in vs. 18 - similar speech as Ch. 9, etc. Michael Gabriel - God is Strong, ** Michael - Cherubim: 89 times, Seraphim - also, structually in many ways; Archangles in the NT twice, Elders, living creatures, horses & chariots, living beings etc. apparently in some hierarchical structure.
• The bible affirms the supernatural wisdom of Angels, they're brilliant - making Einstein look like a begginner; the highest complement to compare vs. them 2 Sam 14: an exaggeration for David. Superhuman / supernatural power - 1 Angel wipes out **29 70k from Dan to Bersheeba in 7 days, 2 Kings 19:, 1 Angel wipes out all the 1st born of Egypt in a single night.
• When Angels appear you can tell who they are: they say do not be afraid to the terrified people. The text also suggests a radical bifurcation in the host; good and evil. The elect angels & the fallen angels. Jude 6, 2 Peter 2:4.
• The Prince of Persia who resists the angel Gabriel, wicked enough to stand against God's purpose, and powerful enough to detain Gabriel. Some kind of territorial responsibility, up to Satan - the Price of this World, cf. Eph 2. The Evil spirits & the Holy Spirits. Here, of Persia and Greece; but Michael who protects Israel, and those of Revalation protecting various churches.
• Just a reflection of the spiritual war, raging in the heavenly realms - soon I will return to fight against the Prince of Persia. Rev. 12 - the heavenly consequences of the crucifiction of our savior - vs. 7, there was war in **34 heaven, Michael and his angels fought against Satan - hurled to the earth. Jesus on the cross, not a physical battle of brute force, not visible. **35:10
• Two equal and opposite errors we can fall into: C.S.Lewis.
• If there is a spiritual war raging; what is our role ? Some Christians eg. Frank Perettie, or perhaps Peter Wagner Breaking Strongholds in your City - strategic level spiritual warfare; confront, bind & cast down these demons. The bible no-where suggests that Christians need to know what particular nefarious plot daemons are about.
• Daniel is praying for 3 weeks, and only later is it revealed that his prayers were not unanswered - but there was a spiritual war; his prayer was already effective although he didn't know the names or intentions of them. He doesn't bind any daemons, mention the Prince of Persia before and after.
• Why does the bible tell us about this: Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat - why would God tell us this ? to make your day ? in fact he has told us this. 1 Peter 8 Satan walks around like a lion, seeking **39 someone to devour - but I pray for you ...
• Pray so that you will not fall into temptation how do we fight ? - give ourselves in prayer, imitate Christ, take up that cross of self denial and service & follow Christ. If we pray as Jesus did - not my will, but yours be done - not trying to work out daemons names.
• Put on the full armour of God - there is a mastermind behind the sin you struggle with, and the cultural sins with which you struggle. ** 41

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• The concluding vision & revalation of the book, two more chapters yet to come but this the 4th vision of the 2nd half. The 3rd year of Cyrus - a tremendous year of disappointment for the people of Israel.
• Despite what's happening on the temporal horizon & the ebb & flow of even the spiritual conflict; God is still in control & his kingdom will triumph.
• A book for spiritual expatriates: how to live as a counter-culture in the midst of a society that is often indifferent & sometimes outright hostile. True not just of living in Babylon, but of whichever country we live in today: But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ ( Phil 3). What to do - engage with that culture; rolling up our sleeves, even if a pagan society as of Babylon, Jeremiah 29: ...seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile - even a city of the oppressor - Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.
• The 3rd year; of Cyrus - echos how Ch. 1 begins, In the 1st year - Cyrus issued an edict allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem; but the reality in the 1st chapters of Ezra - only a tiny trickle returned; and they returned to privation & destitution & the implacable enmity of their neighbours. The effort to re-build the feeble new temple was stopped in it's tracks.
• Ch. 1: Daniel remained in Babylon until the 1st year of Cyrus, this text - in the 3rd year, further into captivity - no-longer in Babylon, on the banks of the Tigris; Daniel is again fasting (another parallel with Ch 1.)
• People think of great moral stands in terms of standing against what someone else is doing: against their pollution of the invironment, their racism, the way they disregard the sanctity of life - or whatever. In reality the greatest moral stand that Daniel exemplifies is quite private: the moral stand he makes as a young man - to make sure that God takes 1st place in his life: seek first his kingdom and his righteousness & all these things will be given to you as well - Daniel was incorruptible, because he kept God first and formost in his thinking.
• The problem behind the problem - the glory of God - the outward, physical manifestation of God's presence with his people. On Mt. Sinai - the Glory of God that descended on the mount; a personal manifestation of God, in a way that highlights the transcendence of his holyness. Later ( Ex 40) - the glory of God, filled the tabernacle.
• The 'Glory' equivalent to the idol in the pagan temples - in the pagan's inner sanctums, a mute stone or precious metal statue. But in Israel - God's own presence particularly localised in the sanctuary - enthroned between the cherubim with the ark as his footstool. There in their midst.
• Ezekil 10: sees the Glory of God leaving the temple, ( Ez 43): promises the Glory will return. The temple in Jerusalem was empty - looked like it remained empty. Malachai - promises that it will come: The Lord you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The temple remained empty until Roman times.
• Daniel is crushed in the text, because God's promise seems to have been thwarted. Ch. 9: an instant reply, Cyrus issues the decree - an Angel is dispatched in swift flight. Ch 10 - prayer & ... nothing.
• Gabriel - set off as soon as he started praying, but was detained 21days (3 weeks) - apparently by a demonic force. A promise here - Do you know why I have come to you ? - soon, the Greeks will come - things will go from bad to worse but first I will tell you what is written in the Book of Truth.
• Despite apparent evidence to the contrary, there is a plan, in God's book - all our days are written in it. Daniel's experience of God builds through the text - initially just dreams, visions, and then a parousia.
• 10:5 a man dressed in linen... - features of the vision sounds like an angel, but has already met several & those didn't have an effect like this. Enoch (1BC) recognises this as God, cf. Ezekiel 1 a figure like that of a man same vocabulary as used here & no-where else; looked like glowing metal ... brilliant light surrounded him: This was the apperance of the likeness of the Glory of the LORD.

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• These 8 verses; among the most challenging anywhere in the bible, however a wonderful reward from weighing the alternative views. Wonderful bible believing Christians, sound, excellent scholars that have a slightly different view; 2 presented last-time, the preferred this time. Hoping to persuade of the correctness of the Traditional view.
• 2 pay-offs; 1) realise why in 1AD there was such intense Messianic expectation, why everyone was looking for him then. 2) According to Daniel's time-frame, we're living in the very last moments of redemptive history; before the return of Christ.
• First view 'Critical' - take a critical posture of the traditional view that Daniel was actually written by Daniel; the critical view(s) hold that the last week(7) took place in connection with the events surrounding Hannuka - a literal period beginning 171BC. Secondly - an alternative view the 'Dispensational, perhaps the most popular nowadays - a very recent view, the 70th week - hasn't happened yet - a literal 7 year period of time at the end of the church age; preceeded by 'the rapture'.
• The traditional view held by most people throught church history - this particular variation by Henksteburg, E.J. Young, & Meredith Klein. The 70 weeks start with 538BC, the Maedo-Persian King issued his decree allowing the Jews to leave Babylon & captivity - to return & re-build the temple etc. The re-building not completed until ~400BC - the end of the 1st 7 weeks of years;
• The next date ~4BC the date when Jesus was born, the next date ~70AD the destruction of Jerusalem; the end of the last week - the ushering in of God's eternal Kingdom. All traditionalists, hold that the cross & resurrection are a part of the 70th week.
• The whole purpose of the 70 weeks are: vs. 24: Seventy 'sevens' are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy. - fulfilled in Christ.
• Don't have to be a math wiz to see it doesn't add up. Way too long from 30AD to 2004+ for the last week - ie. the weeks are symbolic. Not to be suprised by that, because no-where does he ever say 'years', nor 'weeks of years'. He deliberately does not do it, so we will know it is a symbolic stretch of time. Later on in Daniel 10, how he was fasting for 3 weeks: Hebrew: weeks of days, when he refers to literal years he always says 'years'; Daniel 9:1, in the 1st year of Darius - Hebrew 'year', I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures, according to the word of the LORD given to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years. - again literal years. However in Daniel 9:24 he does not mis-lead us by putting in the unit of time.
• Should this suprise us ? not from the background, Jeremiah 25 & 29, predicted a literal 70 year period of Babylonian captivity, Daniel lived it. Jeremiah makes it clear that the reason for the punishment was to overcome 2 sins:
  • 1) the sin of idolatory - & once they came back after this time - they're not condemned again for worhsiping Baal, Kemosh, whatever - they don't commit it again (of the crass kind), of course guilty as we are of the more spiritual kinds: greed eg.
  • 2) failure to observe the sabbath - the reason for 70 years; everything about them had to rest every 7 years. How do you command the crops to rest 1 day in 7 ? save it up; every 7th year let the land go fallow & let all your slaves go free - the sabbatical year. But they didn't do it for 490 years. You who think slavery is such a good idea - will go into slavery yourselves. 2nd Chronicles 36; so - 70 years owed to God. Sure enough it worked - God's punishment brought them back; they became hyper-obedient & later even condemned the Savior for healing on the Sabbath.
• How many years will it take to cure us of all our sins ? 70 7's. 4 wonderful advantages of this view.
  • The starting point is good, vs 25. From the issuing of the decree to restore and re-build Jerusalem - Gabriel, in swift flight, rushed to tell Daniel the good news about his prayer; (Dispensationalists: 'a word is going to go out 100 years from now'), the traditional view starts from the very moment Daniel is praying; 2 amazing things happened in 538 BC, In the 1st year of Darius (vs. 1) a) Daniel prayed, and in the same year / the same day Darius issues a decree that will let God's people go back to Jerusalem. 2 Chron 36: in the first ... moved the heart of this pagan king, Isaiah 44: Cyrus - decreed the re-building of Jerusalem as well as the temple. Our text says - there is a causal connection between these - while I was still in Prayer: As soon as you began to pray - 'a word went forth',
  • Occam's razor: A simpler explanation of vs. 25-27: vs. 25 'the anointed one, the ruler', '...' Critical view: 25: Joshua, 26: Onius 3rd, 26: ruler: Antiochus, Dispensational view: 25: Jesus, 26: Jesus's death, 26:b) Titus the general, 27: 'he': the Antichrist (not mentioned anywhere). The Traditional view: they are all a simple reference to Jesus. Jesus warned his disciples that the Jerusalem would be destroyed because of their rebellion, Christ using the unwitting agent of the Roman armies.
  • The promises of vs. 24 finally fulfilled; Critical view: Hannuka - no bringing in of everlasting righteousness etc. Dispensational approach better: 7 year period of the great tribulation, the coming of Christ, 1000year reign, then some Gog/Magog rebellion, then judgement etc. lots more 'prophecy to be sealed up' etc. The Traditional view - the end of the 70 weeks is when Christ comes & brings his promises to completion.
  • Only in the traditional view do we see the parallels between vs. 26/27 - A) cut/off - making a covenant, for many, B) the army of the ruler - sent his army; in the middle of that seven put an end to sacrifice and offering; C) Matthew 24; quotes this, fulfilled when Jerusalem destroyed - when running to the hills is a good idea in 70 AD, not a good idea at the end of time. [ we know that indeed, the Christians ran to the local city of Tella & escaped the destruction when the Romans had surrounded Jerusalem ].
• A dangerous chapter to read unless you want to become a Christian. Daniel insists that the Messiah will die before the destruction of the temple: 70AD, the temple never was re-built. Daniel in 2 & 7 says he won't come until the Roman empire 27BC: you have a 100 year window - in which to find the messiah: have you looked ? from 27BC to 70AD, the Messiah of the OT scriptural promise - had to come.
• No-wonder when you take comparitive religion - or Christianity in a secular university - you're all told that in Jesus' day - there were so many 'messiahs' running around; so many people chasing after them, it's no wonder there was still another one - Jesus. (supposed to discredit Christianity), in fact it confirms it. Daniel was so specific, that at Qum'ran - they were looking for the messiah, expecting it any day. Yes - there were false messiahs running around; some that looked like pretty good candidates: John the Baptist might have been the Christ but said No I am not. Others were more happy to accept the flattery: Theudas - promised he would divide the Jordan river as proof: de-capitated by the Romans before he could. Judas the Gallilean (Acts 5) - led a band of people in revolt - followers scattered; or an Egyptian prophet, 30k followers, said he would command the walls of Jerusalem to fall; the Romans were impatient & just - wiped them all out; Menahem took Masda etc. etc.
• Someone in that 100 year window was the true Messiah; all those pretenders are dead, their bodies reduced to dust - no-one even remembers their names. But one, was born that altered the calendar; whose resurrection was so momentus that the week was re-arranged around it - the beginning of a new creation; reared in povety & obscurity - never wrote a book, but not a library in the US that could contain all the books that have been written about that man: Jesus of Nazareth.
• The one of whom Peter said: You are the Christ, the son of the living God; when charged by the high priest - tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God: Yes, it is as you say.
• A last advantage - the last 2000 years; squished into the last 1/2 of the last week; how can 2000 years get represented by 3 1/2 whatevers ? Exactly the point of the New Testament, we're living on borrowed time; history at it's climax, and it has been about to end for all this time: Dear Children - this is the last hour, ... this is how we know it is the last hour - nothing else needs to happen for Jesus to come later today. No temples need to be built, nothing political, nothing - The night is nearly over, the day is almost here, so let us put aside the deeds of darkness, and put on the armour of light.

• H. sick in the night; poor creature. Mail suckage, and some idle fixes to ooo-build. Eviscerated yet-another annoying startup-dialog re-write in OO.o - this time a wizard incorporating some migration code; did a silent, unconditional migration instead.
• Dug at a number of scattered irritations - cws tools still not working as smoothly as possible; re-synced buildcond02 to m65, fiddled with EIS.
• Getting a numb right leg just sitting down - that's pretty silly; I wonder why. More work polishing the XIM behavior, shrinking the behavioral delta between OO.o and other apps.

• Up early; dealt with H. updated my PeopleSoft address details, look forward to seeing if that automagically fixes my pay-slip mailing address.
• More NTL persuasion to try and convince them that I'm no longer using their internet service - so they shouldn't be billing me; only 4 calls - 2 to a helpful number that dis-connects you after keeping you waiting for a while; John promises some E-mailing action.
• Started enjoying Federico's new gtk+ some more. Amazed to see puff-pieces about 'GYUM' - we re-wrote red-carpet, and it didn't look as good - amazing indeed; what the world needs is yet more duplicated, incompatible functionality.
• Up-loaded my slides from Linux Bangalore on The World of OpenOffice.org - rather an Indian focused 'new features' list, but...
• Tried to unwind the ooo-build gcc3.4 patch set problems from the Gentoo guys, unclear what, if anything remains to be done; should get them using the cvs version really.
• Ron came around & sketched various pictures of tables etc. Continued merging up a large number of annoyingly trivial prj/build.lst changes to conditionalize large chunks of OO.o system dependency.
• Spent the evening trying to order Christmas presents etc. amazing how little we buy through the year, vs. at Christmas time.

• Up very early; chewed mail. Reviewed Shilpa's QPro import filter patch. Did some s/ximian/novell/ sedding on various web pages / E-mail click-throughs.
• Finished the XIM fixing/ filed it up-stream variously, still not feeling 100%. Did a new minor ooo-build release, Petr kindly building it; started to re-hash the fix for HEAD.
• Started poking at an m64 build; lengthy but fun staff meeting, the foundation results came in - missed the board again which is great - but for the first time, by getting too few votes; clearly more verbose statements on this and that required next time. Just over a 50% turn-out, although fewer voters than in previous years; 211, 191, 183.
• Left m64 building.

• Up rather early; rather unsure of myself. Chewed mail in bed while J. slept. Encouraged to see that Nicel finishing svx wrt. symbol visibility coincides with others knobbling the next 10 worst libraries; what that means: ~100k out of 180k relocations removed from startup; ie. a substantial startup time improvement.
• Gave H. breakfast / home-made advent calendar opening, prayers etc. J. arrived. J. got an unexpexted tax rebate big enough to buy the rocking chair we've been hearing about for some months now; God is good.
• Set about doing some work. Amused by (yet)another Nigerian spam with the title 'In Sincerity' (all caps). Found a nice crasher bug in a gtk-filesel / tree-view back-port; hmm.
• Dug into the XIM problems, again, still _extremely_ unclear to me what this is supposed to do; annoyingly unintuitive. Apparently most GtkIMs never bother to emit a preedit_end signal at all, instead just sending a preedit_changed of ''; unfortunately, OO.o badly needs an 'preedit ended' event to function at all well. Came up with a suitable patch in the end; poked Dan for testing / a 2nd opinion.
• Knocked off earlyish, J. off out so must look after H. played with her for a while; tried to encourage her to eat her omelet dinner - with no success. J. home for pasta, bed early.

• Up regularly through the night; horrible stomach trouble, continuing through the morning; lay in bed & checked E-mail.
• No lunch, slept much of the afternoon; Janine around in the evening; Nick might have to disappear to Japan for 3 months which sounds sad.
• Cleaned up my 60k/process fontconfig memory saving patch & sent it to Keith, lots more wins possible in there. Listened to a couple of Gordon talks on Acts; most interesting.
• Bed very early.

• Up earlyish, breakfast with the girls; so lovely to be home again. Off to NCC; Daniel speaking - went rather well.
• Home, lunch, fixed the bathroom light pull finally, typically not much above to screw the fitting into; urgh & no easy access either.
• Gordon sermon on Daniel 9 - "The End of the World".
  • A slightly more literal translation. Clearly, the 8 most difficult / controversial verses in the book of Daniel; among the most problematic verses in the entire bible.
  • John Gammy / Herman Bellcamp's - most useful commentaries so far; just a blank on the passage - say nothing, but don't say they will say nothing. Thought it was a publishers error. James MtGommery, gives best stab at enterpreting it, but says: 'a dismal swamp of ... trackless wilderness of assumptions & theories'.
  • Can't just skip it - God thought it was useful, beneficial, have to stick it. Also a key to many passages in Revalation wrt. the return of Christ. With a proper understanding of it, a powerful argument for the claims of Christ emerges; and finally some significant political implications - advisors to the President of the US, wonderful Christians, well intentioned etc. but enterpretation of vs. 26 colours their advice wrt. the city of Jerusalem.
  • Daniel's outline of 70x7s or 70 weeks; seeing the unfolding of redemptive history as a plan of weeks; (weeks of years), instead of decades they thought of sabattical sevens of years. One period of 7, another of 62, and a final climatic week.
  • The dozen views out there - organised under 3 approaches; all determined by the understanding of when the last week takes place.
    • The 'Critical' view, most common - majority, favoured interperation; the last week is a period of 7 years that took place at the time of Hannuka 171 BC - 164 BC, momentus time for the Jewish people up to Judas Macabees. On this - 1st 7 weeks, 587BC, King Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem, fitting plan, to re-build Jerusalem 49BC, (5 years later), Cyrus raised up to restore / re-build Jerusalem. The Messiah/ruler (annointed one) in this case, not Jesus as you might think; in this case Joshua - an important priest; featured in Haggai / Zecharia - 1st priest that served in the new temple; analgous to Aaron. 62 weeks to 605BC, from Daniel's abduction to 171 BC, when Antiochus Epiphanies comes to power; mid-way through that week, he built on top of that alter, an alter to Zeus & sacrificed a pig on it; went into the holy of holies, desecrating the temple. 3 1/2 years later 164BC, God's people overthrew Antiochus; came in & cleansed the temple of it's defilement etc. Hannuka == Dedication. Some marvelous advantages to this enterpretation: the numbers come out remarkably well. These terms, abomination / desolation - used elsewhere of this period in Daniel. Problem - odd clock, goes forward / back rather erratically. Vs. 7:24 tells what the weeks are about: ... to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and anoint the most holy. - Yes the Jews threw out a tyrant, but doesn't seem to measure up to it.
    • Next view - enormously popular not in commentaries, but in books & on the radio: the Dispensational view; ~150 years old, become very popular, support from footnotes of Schofeld reference bible (excellent), Hal Lindsay's 'The Late Great Planet Earth' assumes this translation; ditto 'Left Behind' series, 40million copies rely on this. The good news - God has used the books to ignite a desire for the return of Christ, that the Bible can be trusted etc. Don't want to say anything that diminishes that. Worth understanding where the views come from. Most start with 445BC, Xerxes gave permission to re-build Jerusalem; 7 weeks of years later; (49 years), then (62+7) weeks of years; but this overshoots - one approach, use Lunar years instead of actual years, that rather too short. If you have 'prophetic years' 360days each; gives you 32AD - very close to the time of Jesus' death on the cross. All dispensationalists hold that the last week - the 70th is at the end of the church age, again a literal 7 year period; at the end the period of the 'great tribulation', that means - has to be a temple in Jerusalem to have sacrifice and offering. Wonderful advantages of the view weeks of years, quite literally, it points to the coming of Jesus, the 70x7s fulfilled, or substantially accomplished. The disadvantages of the view - the clock; an interesting one; quartz crystal accuracy; 445BC - 30AD, but then the clock stops & it has stopped for nearl 2000 years, (a great parenthisis), Jesus died on the Cross, rose again, poured out his spirit on the Church, then 2k years of Church history, in this great stoppage period. A terrible problem for this view; no-one reading this before 150years ago ever saw that gap. No reason to think this should be 360day years (or other ways to adjust it); furthermore - why did Gabriel rush ? (in swift flight). 538BC, a 100 year message. A further mis-understanding in the cast of characters; vs 25. Messiah, the ruler the Christ; but vs 26 though 'the ruler' is Titus, vs. 9 'he' is the Anti-Christ - amazing.
    • The 3rd view - the 'traditional' view, which is ~the best - next week.
  • The good news - Daniel's prayer - a powerful pennitential prayer; the problem not that he's living in Babylon - but living in sin; not that he needs radical transportation back to Jerusalem, but radical transformation inside.
  • To finish transgession, to put and end to sin, to atone for wickedness - Romans 3: God presented him as a sacrifice of attonement; to bring in everlasting righteousness - we inherit righteousness in Christ; and he will anoint the holy of holies - Mallachi said he would suddenly come to his temple; but it was never filled, but we are built up into his temple, giving his spirit to people instead.

• A protracted & tedious night of travelling; slept rather well on the plane suprisingly. Poked at cleaning up a fontconfig memory saving.
• Back home via LHR, Waterloo, Kings Cross & Cambridge; lovely to see my delightful wife & daughter who can now say 'Da-ddy' instead of just 'da-da', along with several other wonderful things.
• Bed early, pole-axed.

• Up early; packed, paid, bus to the office. Had a chat / de-brief with Neeti, Andi Kleen arrived complete with AMD64 laptop; nice.
• Poked at E-mail; AMD64 talk from Andi, then lunch, talked to the team, individually; refresher on CORBA memory allocation for yesterday's (still confused) group.
• Team photo, got an Indian shirt as a present (lovely), taxi to the airport - starting my exciting 24hours of travel; found power there thankfully.

• Up early, bus to the office; breakfast, did some frenzied hacking on my talk, slides to follow.
• ~2 hour bus trip with several guys from the team a few miles across Bangalore, some crazy midday traffic & egg-lorry action. Arrived, caught the end of a KDE roadmap talk.
• Spoke, got a hefty number of signed JCAs handed in, and a good deal of interest in hacking on things, encouraging.
• Back to the office to give a duplicate Bonobo/CORBA/ D-BUS talk to the evolution guys who managed to miss the last one.
• Chatted to the team, poked at E-mail, etc. Out for dinner in the evening with Raul, Jayant, Shreyas, Jessica & a whole host of others, including Mohan Kumar, interesting man. Back to bed late.

• Up early; somewhat better slept - blankets are key it appears, nasty chesty cough though; shower & bus to the office, breakfast.
• Dug at the E-mail; started poking at OO.o 2.0 - preparing for tomorrows talk - filed a number of bugs as I went along. Lunch. Found / fixed the stupid buglet in the packaging script I was writing; phew, very much looking forward to a stable base to work from.
• Meeting with the QA team, encouraging to see what they've been up to, hopefully we can get more involved with the OO.o qa project. Shreyas got the pending ooo-build patch porting queue down to 10 patches; nice & Shilpa found the QPro import filter formula re-calculation bug: a good day. Left a new package build running.
• Off to Jessica's house in the Novell bus; discovered she's a Christian too - and that my objections link can be confusing to the casual observer. Enjoyed a pleasant time with her, & family, Shreyas & Kingsley. Josh kindly dropped me back to Koramangala.

• Up early; finished packing / up-loaded the split-up m63 source archive, updated cws deadlines. Nicel hit a nice problem with the visibility attribute work, where the SV_FOO macro-generated list/array etc. base-classes need expansion with visibility markup.
• Raul made a nice fix for the serious RTL bugs with the gtk+ plugin, committed it variously. Lunch. Feeling very tired indeed, walking up the 2 flights of stairs for lunch a real effort, head fuzzy.
• Slogged away at OO.o package build issues; javaldx again, not working, strace makes it work & it then continues to work. After some time, realised that in fact it's mounting /proc that makes it work, not strace - doh. It looks like the jre simply barfs if various things are not there: /proc/self/stat, /proc/meminfo etc. etc.
• irc.freenode.net completely hosed - seemingly the entire Bangalore office kicked off - for no good reason; no way of interacting with people. Back, to bed early.

• Up early; bus into the office. Discovered I had to give some general talk instead of Bonobo/D-BUS training, wondered what to say.
• Still getting a wonderful:

  [Java framework] The JRE specified by the bootstrap variable UNO_JAVA_JFW_JREHOME
    or  UNO_JAVA_JFW_ENV_JREHOME could not be recognized. Check the values and make sure
  that you use a plug-in library that can recognize that JRE.

  error on install (apparently only the 2nd time though). Spent some time digging into the 'jvmfwk' module to ascertain it's source; no joy. 'javaldx' seemed to provoke the same error, started stracing that - some serious crack-smoking happening in there; lots of, writing of individual numbers as strings via syscalls. Frighteningly without any changes, after stracing it, it suddenly started working - missing EINTR handling in osl_readFile ? vs. jvmfwk/plugins/sunmajor/pluginlib/util.c (readLine) ? nasty.
• Started an m63 checkout. Lunch, birthday meeting for Harish & Subodh, lots of probing questions, and both were made to sing a song. Ontoa meeting with / talk from Brian Behlendorf - good to see him again & catch up on the collab.net side of the www.oo.o story. pointed me at some caching/commit-back cvs mirroring tool that sounded interesting, couldn't find it later.
• Mail chewage, snacks, chased an 'sc' nasty.

• Up early, Citicab to a church across town; turned out to be an outing day or something; headed back for the International Church in the Regency hotel - the hotel appears to have vanished.
• On to the Novell 'Open House' - large tent errected between the buildings, demos of NLD / OO.o / Mono / Evolution etc. inside.
• Shows from special needs children, a highly likeable children's fashion parade, an amusing skit from Shreyas & some lads, a game; and some music. Good fun - an excellent day for all the family.
• Out with Shreyas, Jayant & Partha to Purple Haze, on the back of Shreyas' motorbike - quite a ride through the traffic. Had a drink, on to a pleasant coffee place, and then to the 13th floor for an excellent dinner. Back to bed.

• Up disgracefully late; watched 'Anita and me', lunch while watching some comedy re-make of a martial-arts film / National Geographic anthropological investigation.
• To the office; pulled mail, checked the web. Nice to see Ashwanth's lotus123 work merged into HEAD. Got stuck into some work shrinking fontconfig's memory footprint, and forgot to go for dinner with Jayant.
• Abandoned the 'STABLE' build, and batched one for NLD instead; Abandoned the fontconfig work at 9pm - the file-format re-work starts to touch rather a lot of the code.

• Up early; bus to the office. Suprised by an insightful comment from the Sun UI team, fixed / improved my icon de-sensitisation patch.
• Gave an ad-hoc emacs training session; learned a good few things about emacs myself from various people, nice, some more bits on blogging etc. Back to tend the OO.o auto-build.
• Lunch with the lads, discussed politics & religion very amicably - an interestingly diverse place India. JV & Vasu popped over to say hello - great to see them again.
• Chatted to Nagashree who is keen to institute OO.o bug-days, which sounds great; caught up with Vasu - good man; OO.o RPMs still auto-building without problems yet.
• Mailed Frank Schönheit the evolution integration source as an archive instead of patches. More interesting & political discussion about apathy in general with Harish & co.
• Out for biscuits - the nearby shop owner (apparently) worshiping his shop with a flame on a tray: curious, apparently the same works for accounts, computers, etc. very different.
• Some vicious Java problem building on STABLE, not finding the JRE during install; nasty. Back, Pizza (dependably non-hot, food), got the end of 'Just Married', communication is key, bed.

• Up early; caught the bus today, good to see lots of familiar faces getting on-board. Breakfast with Harish & other team guys.
• Chewed E-mail, more lengthy question & answer sessions - "if it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger" - or something, hopefully transfered some useful information; some great questions.
• Out for a team-lunch to a pleasant place near the office, in a Novell bus, with Neeti - good food. Back, wandered around, roadmap meeting with Parag.
• Dug into some GNOME login hostname / reverse lookup hang. Encouraged to discover that a simple text mode login has the same problem.
• Helped Shilpa with some QPro work, disturbed by a hyper-active lizard, interesting, not quite as green as the SuSE thing though. Chewed more E-mail. Taxi back to the appartment, bed late.

• Up unbelievably early; watched TV for a while; lots of men and women singing at each other - as expected. Also, a diversity of televangelists with varying degrees of self-obsession and accuracy; some good stuff though.
• Into the office by rickshaw - overshot by even further this morning - not paying attention while reading the economist.
• Breakfast with Srini - who has been having the carpenters working on enlarging his kitchen & bedroom for the impending marriage;
• Meetings all day with the lads.
• Out in the evening to a new Mall with Raul, Shreyas and Jayant, bed early - forgetting to attend staff conference call.

• At some stage it became Tuesday. Did some research into targetting the cli_ure at Mono; couldn't find the mapping implementations.
• Dug instead at a number of older patches needing some forward-porting loving. Crazy taxi-ride to Novell's office - remembered I loved the feeling of India's rapid development.
• Saw Neeti & met the Indian guys on my team; had a long chat with Parag - good stuff; chewed mail & hacked up a short talk. Nice to see the 1st round of the Lotus 123 importer work nominated.
• Lunch; a lengthy set of meetings with the team. Raul & Shreyas kindly took me to the 'blue moon comforts' appartment place where I'm staying; typically Indian, pizza, slept.

• Up at the very crack of dawn; J. drove me to Royston, train to LHR, bought & took the anti-malarials (slightly tardily) Air Sri-Lanka flight (delayed) to Colombo.
• Pleasant air-port Colombo, not infested with flying, biting things - unlike Bombay, although similar in heat / humidity; pleasant classicalish music. Rather a long wait; two Bhuddhist book shops interesting. Very tired.

• Up early; looked after H. while J. snoozed. Got her up & packed off to Church, stayed / played with the rather unhappy H. (very coldy).
• Lunch, slugged much of the afternoon; packed, the bathroom light pull gave up the ghost just as getting into bed, left the ladies with a highly sub-optimal situation.

• Up late; worked on the house much of the day, bought / errected a new curtain rail for H.'s bedroom, got the lounge floor down again & loose boards screwed together & glued back up into a workable hatch.
• H. pretty ill & sad. Worked at last financial year's tax bits, until too late.

• Up early; breakfast, drove home; pulled mail & debugged a hang-on-login problem. Failed to configure gsd on my machine:

  ./autogen.sh: line 1: --print-ac-dir:
  command not found

  which really means: 'there was a fatal error some lines back - which owing to some oversight was not fatal'.
• Dunged out the laptop to make space for taking more useful things on the road; latest OO.o bits, Mono etc. Dinner, more machine maintenance.
• Created a buildcond01 CWS & committed the conditional build bits to it. to the

• Up early; continuing, mild discomfort in the point of the shoulder, annoying. Read mail. Wondered why the Homeless And Lonely Organisation (HALO) had just released their 2nd game. Invented the word enleveragerating - primarily for use in stifling process documentation; Another noun cruely verb'd.
• Did some tedious packaging type work. Phone call with Kelli, lunch, phone call with Skip Soldan; very productive chat with Tom Verbeek.
• Drove to Aldeburgh in the evening in rather bad conditions, to have dinnner & hear Bruce speak to the Festival Club about his career making beautiful musical boxes, watches & clocks. Good meal & interesting talk. Bed late.

• Up early; finished / sent off the 'why we should release more often' document; quite possibly missing a good few reasons but hopefully useful.
• Discovered that evolution-devel-server goes through an incompatible version change from 1.0 (evo 2.0) to 1.2 (evo 2.?) - thus screwing it's users nicely; wonderful.
• Transfered a good number of patches across to HEAD from our 1.3 work, looking nice, fixed a scad of installer problems.

• Up early; amused to glean the gyst of Sun's recent news: "Redhat is sooo evil - that we're copying their strategy" - interesting. Little mail of interest.
• Started re-packaging the m62 source, split up & massaging some slides for Bangalore. Tried to dig up my desktop-launch spec & work out whether it was published on the web-site, www.fd.o seemingly dead.
• Imported some gcc3.4 back-ports from Hanno (Gentoo) into the ooo-build-1-3 branch. Discovered Martin's great work making prettier OO.o release notes (eg. 1.1.3).
• Out for a run in the evening with Robert.
• Hacked up ooo-build HEAD to target only m62, committed, left the test build running. Watched the Christmas episode(s) of The Office - wonderful. Continued to marvel at the large hole I made in the floor to expand into a hatch for access to the under-floor space.

• Up early; installed Lotus SmartSuite millenium edition - 2.49UKP from e-bay; amazed by the consistently poor quality of the artwork.
• Fixed some Lotus 123 importing problems with recent Smart-Suite generated files, re-marked my cws for QA. Expanded build.pl to allow build.lst's to have line continuations, and negatable tests eg. !$(SYSTEM_LIBXML):libxml to allow us not to ship lots of existing code repeatedly.
• Knocked up a cwstools patch for Pavel, in exchange for some documentation updates; neat - trading in convenience.
• ESC meeting - rather verbose and inconclusive as normal - but plenty of things to do, IRC meetings suck badly.

• Up early; off to NCC - spoke.
• Back for lunch, with Daniel, Michelle & Myriam, good to see them, had a pleasant afternoon.
• Robert arrived (worryingly late) in the evening, had dinner & a laugh together, bed.

• Up early; got H. up, into town to buy various bits. Janine, Nick & George arrived laden with gifts for lunch, sadly Jill & co. couldn't come.
• Large, roast dinner, Nick left for a corf-ball match in London, chatted for the afternoon. Worked on preparation most of the afternoon & evening, bed late.

• Up early; mail reading, henious problems with OO.o cvs & cws tooling; the infamous 'lock.c:222: failed assertion' pain. Apparently this is intermittent collab.net - side breakage.
• Released & announced ooo-build-1.3.6 - a number of nice bug fixes - of course, a chunk of work is happening on HEAD now; should release that soon too.
• Some web admin tedium, LXR gone from bad to worse; asked Raul to untangle it. Dug at the TFL's lesson viewer / builder based on OO.o at globalcircle.org, web-page coming together well - and the Win32 build looking rather promising.
• Fixed / massaged misc. Gnome bugs that have been filling my inbox. Forward ported the evolution integration bits to OO.o 2.0 - compiles flawlessly; just the run-time that's problematic.

• Discovered I had sorted my inbox by name instead of date accidentally - explaining some odd effects. Becoming increasingly annoyed by the toilet - which, is small but amply sized; however due to a stream of literature piling up in there the door barely opens, something to do with hygine before/after I suspect.
• Savagely dropped the OO.o LXR database & started re-building it, some loss of service sadly.
• Tried to co-ordinate doing some work on the OO.o native installer with it's author - considerable success getting him to IRC; and none wrt. working together, sigh.
• Lunch, more re-working; amazingly got a call from a private investigator - trying to find John Trussel the previous owner - apparently he owes a lot of money to someone; most likely I need to contact the county court to clear the address' credit history.
• Slogged away at uber-tedious packaging problems, finally got it to work nicely; 'make install' lives again - at least partially. Nice to discover helpful, compentant new people you never met working on OO.o inside Novell - the joys of a big company.
• Finally did some reak hacking, forward ported some patches for various irritating problems / pruned a load of others - the end of forward-porting is at least slightly nearer.

• Up early; 3 hours of hand-to-hand combat with Win95 at NCC - good grief it's awful, have to work late or early tomorrow or something; just ghastly - flaking old H/W & an impossibly awful O/S & a lack of decisiveness.
• Got into the mail / hacking again, sucked into an E-mail trap / did some tedious product-management type stuff. Discovered my OO.o 'an internal error occured' type message on startup was down to having a root owned / non-writable ~/.OpenOffice-1.9 directory or somesuch; good.
• Re-discovered the gpaint package - source looks ropey; if only there was a good, simple xpaint-like (but functional), knock-down image editor.
• Dinner, back to the hacking. Spent some time re-working chunks of the OO.o installer - for some reason, people who approach RPM first from the OO.o perspective (as I did) insist on getting OO.o to generate the .spec file & package before realising that's a bad idea later.

• Up early; more mail swallowing, discovered a new, rich seam of verbiage. Tried to persuade someone that expressing one's life shouldn't result in something grey and bland.
• Interested to read in the IEE review from Jen-Hsuan Huang, President & CEO of nVidia: "It's all happening in real time", says Huang. "So we have perpatual re-evaluation. You need to have some sort of a plan or you won't get anything done but you have to keep on re-evaluating. You have to be rigorous, but you also have to rely on the judgement of managers and engineers. It is much more like surfing than anything. You make sure you have a plan but you adapt to the waves". Sounds like an amazingly realistic snapshot of the engineering endeavour - uncluttered by marketing guesses & bullet-points.
• Did some ooo-build cruft cleaning, worked on various things. Lunch. Reviewed Shilpa's QPro reading code - looking quite nice. Great to read that vq has finally binned ConvertDSW from the Win32 build process - wonderful.
• A re-build of e-d-s gave me my addressbook back: excellent indeed. Added the CWS RSS feed to ooo.ximian.com/planet, and shortly afterwards removed it again - broken date stamps - mailed those responsible to get it fixed.

• Up early; started pulling mail - 13,500 messages; got half-way through before the evolution composer crashed the whole thing, ensuring no doubt that I'll get 6900+ lovely duplicate messages to deal with: unbelievable.
• Loads of heebie-jeebie E-mail wrt. LWE - apparently not content with chopping half ones abstract off (again), and then scheduling in a very strange and unfriendly fashion, it is necessary for endless round-trips to the (new, paranoid) organiser to re-assure him that you will actually turn up - hard when one is on holiday.
• Poked at the Indians - seem to have been doing some good work, nice to see writerperfect01 get into the m60 milestone, and tune06 get into HEAD.
• Balbir Mathur of Trees For Life(TFL) arrived, talked over the vision behind his OO.o based Global Circle Of Knowledge project to provide free educational software, interesting stuff.
• Chewed through the mail mound, getting somewhere. Built evolution-data-server HEAD on 64bit finally, still no joy with reading previous addresses though, must add debug. Reviewed a number of patches - mostly good, batched a slew of builds of various things off.
• Dinner.
• Noticed the Gnome Foundation elections arrived without me noticing - badgered into standing; somewhat tired to get too excited about any of it; attempted to inject enough controversy to assure another safe corporate affiliation punting.
• Christian from TFL sent in a nice German translation of the OO.o hackers guide, lovely.

• Up late; off to NCC - played the violin, a Geach morning, Daniel & Michelle leading praise, Mike leading the service, and Al & Amanda describing their impending journey to Brazil to live & work with YWAM there. Back for lunch, did some research on Prophecy for next Sunday.
• Out for a run in the evening - for the first time in a very long time.
• Gordon sermon on Daniel 9 - "Lord, Teach Us to Pray". Notes to follow.

• Up early, fed H & played with her until people woke up. J. into town, David ventured into the wasp-ridden loft space to locate joists for drying-rack erection - with only minor incidents.
• Got the drying rack up & cleat in-place much to Julia's approbation, knocked off for lunch.
• Out to Caroline & Nigel's to collect spare / floating climbing frame/slide thing. Got it home & spent some time putting that up in the rain - tested H. on it - lots of laughs.
• Back inside for some warmth / rest / time together. Soup / home-made pizza for dinner, David set off home.
• J. tackled the un-claimed expenses mountain, and I dug around for tax information.

• Up late, breakfast, David arrived - finished moving the curtain rail downwards slightly, had lunch, showed David around.
• Myriam arrived, wired up a new fluorscent tube, David affixed it in the downstairs loft-space & we wired the switch into a passing lighting junction box.
• Chatted to Myriam, good to catch up with her work in Cambodia with the Hagar project. Dropped her home & off to clean Church with David's (kind) help; cleaned the toilets / kitchen etc.
• Back home, dinner - poked at getting better lighting in the roof loft-space & driven off by somewhat active wasps. Fumigated the place with domestic fly killer, bed.

• Up early, dealt with H. Off to NCC to poke at the computers - spent a long while trying to get SquidGuard to do it's censorship bit - got NLD running nicely on the thin-clients at least. Looks like we lost another HP printer in action to the serial banging mahem.
• Off to look at dish-washers - all seem badly constructed - nasty flaky looking rolling racks, picked up some food at Sainsbury's. Onto Tim & Caroline's new house, with the loft under construction seemingly. Good to see them & Sean & Abbie again, had a nice cup of tea & chat, back home. Dinner, bed.

• Up late, breakfast with everyone, S&A left to see Abbie's grandmother; Lunch, watched 'Shrek 2' while H. slept.
• Collected Martin & off to Alpha in the evening, good time but small meal; back with David & Martin. Caught the people from Cell-group, bed late.

• Up early, fed H. took her out to the market while J. slept. Into NCC to upgrade the server from Pink-Tie 9 to NLD and fixup a number of Win32 connectivity issues.
• Abbie & Sean came for dinner & stayed the night - lovely to see them after so long.

• Up late; put 1st coat of paint on the remaining walls of the dining room, out to Homebase - bought brass screws, shelving bits & pieces etc. back for lunch.
• Got the last external light back into place, silicone sealed a couple of holes; re-painted the front room, discovered & fixed some clueless attempt to screw a light fitting directly into the plaster; finished guarding the incoming phone line from small hands with conduit.
• Dinner, put H. to bed, started re-reading The long dark tea-time of the soul (RIP D.Adams). Starting to get into this holiday-thing, although rather a lot of work still to do.

• Up late; quick breakfast; off to Laceston to the CofE church there, missed the 1st 30minutes of the service accidentally - including the sermon.
• Back for braised beef dinner; packed everything headed home.
• Another Gordon sermon on Daniel 9 - "Supernatural Prayer". Notes to follow.

• Slept badly, stayed in in the morning, lunch. Out to Thorpness to see ducks in the afternoon, played with H. on the beach - playing chicken together with the sea, back, Have I got news for you, bed.

• Up early; played with H, breakfast. M&D left early - put H. to bed. Packed lunch, left H & went to Framlingham Castle, had an interesting audio tour.
• Lunch in the castle; wandered the town, got some passport photos for visa, had a cake in the market square. Managed to buy a Von Daniken book in the 2nd hand book-shop (I refuse to give royalty money to that charlatan, but a usefully inaccurate point of view to refer to) - a compendium of follies.
• Back, played with H. a little, out to the Parrot & Punch Bowl for a very pleasant dinner with Julia, nice to get out alone & have space to talk properly.

• Slept badly - too hot, up for breakfast; J. dealt with H. Stayed in while everyone else went to look around Aldeburgh, read the new Private Eye - some excellent cartoons.
• Lunch, into Bruce's garage to do some re-working on the exterior light fitting causing problems, extracted & turned up & hardened a bush to drill-out the sheared-off bolt. Re-tapped the holes, cut down & turned down the heads of some suitable bolts, made a new washer & re-assembled.
• Fine dinner in the evening, bed early.

• Up early, re-arranged the furniture in the dining room. Packed up & set off for Sutton Hoo. Lots of people, so out to a pub for a pleasant lunch.
• Back, for a guided tour in the extremely chill wind (with H. determined to add her insight to the tour-guide's and push her own pram around the hill-top-overlooking-water (Hoo)). Wandered over some likely looking mounds & saw in the museum, the treasures excavated from the tomb of (apparently) perhaps the first Angle/Saxon King of England. Interesting that the practice of interring the body (plus boat, plus gold familiars, plus 90x15ft, 40 oar boat etc.) ended abruptly with the rapid conversion of England to Christianity. Some fine artefacts there.
• Back to Bruce & Anne's with Mum & Dad, for tea, fish and chip dinner, bed late.

• Up early to deal with H.; Father up already. Father nailed the wall with his 1m drill, set too crawling in the space, discovered a load of wood-worm in the woodwork [ mental note: next house should have the full structural survey ].
• Got the external light wired up & working; lunch - nice soup. J. busy re-painting the dining room Almond White.
• Assisted J. in the afternoon, a little with a fleece roller - giving rather a good finish. M&D out to play with H. again while we worked. Interested by access to the under-floor space, seem to have ~18"-20" of space under there, but no obvious easy access. Silicone sealed several un-sealed windows, down-pipes etc.
• Fitted a new lock on the shed, wired up the fluorescent tube to a plug in the absence of any progress on the wiring. With that in-place could see the true scale & freshness of the wood-worm problem there. Never seen so much dust coming out of worm-holes in a piece of timber - scary.
• With the light - spent the late evening re-arranging the shed, such that everything fitted into it with Dad.

• Up late; cut through the external light wire - with a rather firm flash-bang from the insulated pliars, strangely as well as the fuse blowing, had some charring & failure in a junction box in the loft-space.
• Dug into the wiring in the loft-space in some detail; off to buy bits & bobs from Ridgeons & discovered a new Electrical wholesaler - selling ceiling lights at 5UKP for 4, vs Waitrose's 8UKP for 2 daylight robbery; bought 50m of 1mm^2 twin & earth - very cheap.
• J. painted H.'s room while Mum took H. out for some fun-packed playground action in town.
• Back, re-wired the external lighting at some length; M&D out to see her Cousin Robert Jefford. Fitted a new external porch light & tried unsuccessfully to drill through the wall to fit new external passage light to the new wiring [ drill failed with milimetres to go ].
• Chatted, bed early.

• Ron spoke in the morning, rather good - played Violin in the band. Back for lunch, replaced the duff bathroom ceiling-rose, missing a noggin to it screw-to though. Slept in the afternoon.
• Parents arrived in the afternoon, examined the various jobs needing doing around the house on the menu, tried to remove the external light & applied some oil to the (non-sheared-off) screw-heads.
• Dinner, chatted, bed.

• Up late; off to NCC for a band practice, played the vile-din. Fixed up NAT for the office network, finally on-line. Need some good censor-ware for the youth- drop-in centre though.
• Back home, lunch, out to Homebase, back & affixed a number of missing bits around the house. Played with H. showing some encouraging progress remembering the names & colours of concrete objects in books & pointing at them on demand. Put her to bed - now with a pillow: very grown-up.
• Put up another flaky B&Q 'chrome plated barrel lock' in the bathroom, words fail me to describe how pitifully made they are - from the razor-sharp burrs on the unfinished metal, to the screws with filled [ and carefully not-hardened) heads, that are almost completely sheared off after installation (with the best fitting screwdriver from a large selection). Staggering incompetance, and better - no country of manufacture on the packaging.

• Up early; wrote lots of notes / instructions / details up for my team: holiday for 2 weeks. Discovered the 'Bento' file structure documentation, and dug into that at some length for Lotus Word Pro support. Sadly, it seems not really that useful for the interesting part of the problem.
• Got the skeletal Quattro Pro importer working quite nicely for calc; labels importing at least, should make Shilpa's job rather easier. Dug into visas for India.
• Off for 2 weeks holiday.

• Finished the ESC barriers document. Added the cws64bit01 patches in a somewhat cleaned-up format to ooo-build, set a 64bit build off, fixed a number of bugs there.
• Off to NCC - spent 1/2 a day getting Win95 to recognise a (high quality 3 com network card); just staggeringly broken software - of course, Linux recognises it immediately, and works without problems.
• Back for lunch, reviewed a patch or two. Interesting call with Peter Woodward. Discovered hr was working in cvs to re-sync the 64bit changes to m57 anyway; hmm.
• Caught up in an interesting linker problem in evolution / the connector, sounds fun. Bed late.

• Up early; dug at the mail-heap, cleaned up a silly ooo-build patch. Chris Halls arrived, got some wires in place & had lunch.
• Talked a lot of the afternoon, chewed at misc. forward porting afterwards.

• Woken by screaming as normal - why does H. get so upset in the morning. Breakfast, some mail. The src680-m57 build looking nice, created a cws for Nicel's visibility work & resynched the lotus123import01 to m57.
• Bitten by cwsresync -l trying to grope loads of files & directories it was never asked to, before it will do the single pitiful remote database update one expects.
• Hacked up a skeleton for the Quattro Pro filter for Shilpa. Customer conference calling action, overlapping with ESC meeting.
• Wrote up notes in the evening, read the hitchiker's guide to the galaxy, struck again by how amusingly written it is. Put H. to bed, it seems she's starting to learn fear - which can't be a good thing. Scared of the squeak in the cot, she points at the offending corner and complains - poor dear. No trust at all that we'd never leave her anywhere dangerous - must be a spiritual lesson there somewhere.

• Up early; chewed mail. Out to NCC to try and fix up the ADSL connection - they seem to have a very complicated phone exchange system - no joy.
• Spent a while writing & re-writing the same trivial 'merge writerperfect filter' into a 'specification' necessary to appease the OO.o process fanatics.
• Got my Solaris machine into a booting state (somehow), sadly ssh still hosed on it, so rather painful, compiled libwpd cleanly with no trace of the mystery: C++, std::exception warnings that others report, perhaps Forte specific.
• Unwound the Sun greeter / gdm startup problem, hopefully that's nailed now. Submitted a talk for Linux Bangalore, looks like fun. Interested to see QEMU - a fun looking bochs/vmware replacement.
• Marked the lotus123 importer code as ready for QA. Home-made pizza for dinner, very nice, back to work after that until late - moved a number more patches to target HEAD, re-worked a few patches to target the m57 snapshot, sadly none redundant vs. m55.

• Up later, off to church, Andrew dedicated, spoke. Home for lunch, & out to Andrew's party - after refusing her lunch, H. discovered an appetite for junk party food.
• Home, H. to bed, spent a while installing some conduit / locks on bathroom doors. Appalled by the quality of the B&Q door-lock, it seems in addition to not hardeninig the screw heads, they chromed everything filling the philipps slots such that the correct screwdriver couldn't be inserted - almost garenteeing failure, and (cleverly) didn't remove the razor-sharp burrs on the product before chroming it, just really shoddy. Bed early.

• Up early, dealt with H. J. feeling awful all night, left her to sleep & played with H. back to bed when H. went to sleep.
• Walked into town with H. bought some groceries at the market, surge/protected extension lead, & DVD.
• Nick brought his old futon over for us, most kind - spent much of the evening splinting, glueing & screwing the futon back together - lovely beech thing, with some feeble screws - many sheared off just below the heads - requiring some filing / pliars action.
• Watched 'Just Married' on DVD, on our new futon in the office - then prepared talk for tomorrow.

• Up late, dispatched laptop for repair, switched to AMD64 as main machine after a re-arrange; lots of issues.
• Eventually got things working mostly, various things looking slightly flaky still unfortunately, dug at them. Managed to get a decent development environment setup eventually.
• Started to look at 64bit issues in OO.o.

• Up early; had another moment of despair with Sun today; another - "if I didn't really care about this & were not paid to be interested - I would have walked away at this point" moment. I suppose it's good that that hasn't happened for at least a week or two now - things are improving.
• Encouraged again by some great patches from Srini & Jayant, and some nice progress on the critial ODI bug set. Got the new 64bit box setup & firing on both cylinders, backed up the laptop to it.
• Improved the icon insensitisation patch - now looking nice, filed up-stream. Worked on more patch porting to HEAD - a number removed, filed some others.

• The economics of air-travel are rather odd; cheaper to fly via Sri Lanka (Colombo) to Bangalore than Bahrain. Poked at the Lotus Word Pro file format some more - still substantially defeating me.
• Alpha in the evening.

• Reviewed a number of patch E-mails; nice. Lengthy chat with Parag on the phone, good stuff - phoned ATP to get flights to Bangalore setup. More E-mail chewage.
• My first CWS got integrated - nice, created a new cws to add my misc. unix helper tools: linkoo & relocate.
• Discovered that big chunks of the UI in HEAD have been virtualised & split out into separate libraries, should help efficiency, startup-time etc. in the long run.
• Started downloading a 7Gb ISO - not funny; discovered a scad of test/build chroots lurking on my server: RH 7.3, 8.0, slec1, SUSE 8.0 - lots of space. Phone call with the ODI guys.

• Monday; lots of spam. Got the Nildram account details for the church; wonder if it's working there well in advance of the due date, as it was here.
• Popped into NCC to setup their ADSL system, again asked for Access-like functionality on Linux, certainly a mind-share gap there at least - and OO.o 2.0 filling the gap is 6 months away.
• Discovered that we have ~90k relocations to do on OO.o startup, of which only ~9k are actually useful. Spent a good while digging inside binutils trying to make a relocation squasher without much success.
• Relaxed in the afternoon by re-synching our patch-set to HEAD, which is much more fun. Got ooo-build to build & parallel install m55 in the normal way; with some more hard-core patch re-sync & hackage should be able to start testing in earnest.
• Stayed up late, massaging & pruning patches vs. HEAD, good to see lots of them are no longer necessary.

• Church in the morning - John speaking.
• Open house in the afternoon, lots of cakes, house heaving with people, met some of the neighbours, good.
• Another Gordon sermon on Daniel 8 - "From Antiochus to Antichrist".
  • Daniel bi-lingual; an unusual language more useful for communicating opaquely. Ch. 8 refers to Ch. 7 - had a vision after the one that had already appeared to me. Ch. 7 panoramic, Ch 8. the close-up. The 2nd outline - concentricity; 2-7 ABCCBA outline in Aramaic, but another pattern ABA 8-12 in Hebrew.
  • Significance ? Aramaic - all the pagans could understand, the emphasis on God's judgement against the nations. Ch. 8 - end the emphasis on God's judgement against his own people, the terrible privations and sufferings God's people will have to suffer - in the private language of Hebrew.
  • Historical context - 3rd year Belshazars' reign, a significant time - Cyrus the Persian had overthrown his Median overlord. God had raised up this partnership to overthrow the Babylonian empire. He sees himself 200 miles to the East - transported to Iran, SuSA the center of power of the new kingdom.
  • Daniel 7 - many disagree over the detail. Daniel 8 - so transparent. vs. 20the two horned ram represents the Kings of Media & Persia, vs. 4 - What Cyrus did - attacks to the West & North and South.
  • Daniel - saw the Medo-Persian empire as a single entity, 1 beast - 2 horns. vs 21. the King of Greece - Alexander in 3 short years - took over the entire Persian empire, Egypt included, onto Afghanistan, into Pakistan. After his death, his empire disintigrated, 4 empires ruled by his generals.
  • Who is the little horn in Ch. 8 - virtual unanimity, that this one, who grows one of the 4 horns - is Antiochus Epiphanies. Christians somewhat ignorant of this - the background to Hanakkah (dedication) - the dedication of the temple after it was wrecked. Robert Anderson: Antiochus was the acne of Imperial pretension and the personal embodiment of all iniquity. The OT. equivalent of a Hitler, in his determination to obliterate Judaism.
  • Some similarities to the little horn in Ch 7, argued that Ch, 7's is the anti-christ; parallels but significant differences that outweigh them. Ch 7 comes from a beast with 10 horns, whereas in Ch 8, out of one of 4 horns. Ch 7. difference in source kingdom; Ch 8, when God judges the little horn - he just destroys it, and re-dedicates the temple in vs. 14 then the sanctuary will be restored. Ch 7. when the little horn is destroyed - the end of worldly kingdoms, very final.
  • Antiochus is if anything a pre-figurement of the anti-christ, a fore-shadowing of him. Similarly Nebuchadnezzar doesn't hesitate to destroy the temple, boast in his arrogance, and mandate idolatory. etc. They have a diabolical side.
  • When does it take place ? vs. 17 the vision concers the time of the end. don't jump to the conclusion that it is the end of the world - instead the end of God's wrath. God's wrath continued after the captivity, his people had not repented.
  • What did Antiochus do that was so bad ? murdered a brother to get to the throne; grew in power toward Israel (the beautiful land). Antiochus had been a hostage of Rome for many years - a desparate man, in desparate times, resorted to desparate measures.
  • The only way the Eastern provinces could withstand the Roman threat - ideolocial unity - dotted the land with gymnasiums to encourage Greek sport. Decided to push Hellenism more and more, outlawed all things Jewish.
  • Antiochus - decided the armies to go in for a sabbath day parade, the unarmed citizens turned out to watch, and at a signal, the soldiers turned on them & slaughtered 40k of them.
  • Built an alter to Zeus in the sanctuary of the temple and re-dedicated the temple to Zeus & sacrificed a pig on it. The bible outlawed - scriptures confiscated & burned, circumcison was outlawed, the sabbath was outlawed - instead the 25th of the month - his birthday was honoured.
  • He thought he was God, struck coins with Zeus on his throne - but with his face. 2nd Macabees - a remarkable story of a woman who refused to eat the mandatory pork & whose children were killed one by one in front of her.
  • Saul Saul, why persecuteth thou me. A spiritual loathing. Why did God allow this ? - Daniel never asks the question, becuase he knows the answer. Instead, the angels ask 'how long' (as does much of scripture).
  • How long ? a long time: 2300 evenings and mornings - 171-164 BC 6 1/2 years - the time from Antiochus instating a bogus high priest to him being overthrown.
  • The only way this could happen - is God's Spirit leaving his temple. What lesson from this very depressing book: This is God's doing. Divine intervention behind this - time for judgement to begin with the house of God.
  • What Sins provoked God's anger here - ones very familiar to us, not so much idolatory as complacency, compromise, indifference, accomodation (what we learn about as we read on in the books of the time: Haggai & Malachi), solvenlyness. Often there has to be deprivation before you value something, those who don't value their jobs - come late, leave early - until they're fired, those who don't value their health, until on a stretcher in hospital. Those who don't value their relationship to God, until they have so grieved the holy spirit that he's left town.
  • Israel had become even embarassed about their circumcision - the sign of the covenant, & devised a surgical proceedure to make it appear that they had not been circumcised. You are ashamed - fine, have a King that will outlaw it - and it became something worth dying for. Many Cavalier about baptism - forgetting many have died to be baptised.
  • They were slovenly and indifferent about the word of God, ignoring the prophets; so fine - Amos 8 says I will send a famine through the land ... a famine of hearing the words of the Lord - the scriptures will be taken from you.
  • There were those who thought worship was just tedious drudgery, couldn't wait for the sabbath to be over, gave their most sickly animals for sacrifice, tithing was an imposition. God gave them what they wanted; one who would take away the daily sacrifice so you couldn't worship God in this way at all.
  • Do not be decived - God cannot be mocked, a man reaps what he sows. A hard message - but one that ultimately brings comfort. Endure hardship as disipline, for God is treating you as his sons, for what son is not disciplined by his Father. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful - but later on it produces a harvest of righteousness & peace for those who have been trained by it.
  • At the end of this national nightmare, God's people yearned to be in the presence of God and to worship him, rejoiced at the priviledge of sacrifice when it was at last allowed again, devoured the scriptures giving attention to them when at last they could have them without persecution. May it not be said of us that in the last days the love of many grew cold, may we prize what has been given us, before it is removed.
• David phoned, arranged a date for him to come & stay - good.

• Up late; off to Aldeburgh for lunch with Bruce & Anne, Sue & Clive. Most pleasant lunch, got a large number of useful electrical & misc. bits from Bruce - nice 5foot fluorescent tube for the shed, various fittings etc.
• Went for a walk on the beach - rather windy / cold, back smartly. Drove home, put some more hooks up & the tube, bed early.

• Discovered Tim & Caroline have had a baby called Grace, Ruth - how lovely; S&A over to see it as well.
• Interested to notice that mailman recommends not mangling Reply-To: headers as all OO.o lists do; ( quite apart from the loosing of a handful of (unsubscribed) contributors / week due to replies never getting to them ). A good write-up here and a rather feeble counter-view here.
• Slugged away at the linker again - it seems the 1 second I'm loosing on dlopen is in the relocation processing, but it's supposed to be 'lazy'.
• After reading around it turns out that this is quite normal, and that only function calls can be lazily linked; nothing else can be. Started chewing through the .rel.dyn symbol list, looks like virtual methods are very expensive, though why we should have a reloc for the parent of each overridden virtual method, I have no idea.

• Up early; no interesting mail, helped srag with improving calc's filter friendliness.
• Fridrich of libwpd fame set up an evolution-win32 to try to pull together the people / pieces of this work.
• Nicel getting steaming into gcc visibility attribute markup to accelerate OO.o startup & run-time performance by reducing excessive symbol bloat.
• Velux blind arrived, set it up - a very black-out blind, ideal for the window above the screens; screwed it up. Up-loaded an m55 snapshot to base ooo-build on for the next while.
• Spent a lot of time instrumenting the dymanic linker to try and work out where my lost second is going.

• Up early; off to NCC to pick up misc. H/W. Chewed mail, chatted to the new QA team lead in Blr.
• Canceled my first cws merge - a conflict vs. Volker's very delayed set of fixes, no-where to go from the canceled' state, Martin fixed it for me. Removed conflict, re-nominated.
• Poked again at Sun's odd gdm / CORBA problem. Dug through sfx2 at very great length, eventually located a missing SFX_FILTER_STARONEFILTER flag (somehow) on my filter - thus making it go down some simply broken code-path - the famous 'make it work' flag needs some setting action.
• Finally discovered M-x set-variable tab-width 4 goodness, should go on an applied emacs training course at some stage I think.
• Picked up Martin in the evening & off to Alpha - more helpful this time, back late.

• Up early; poked at the linker again; started checking out a clean m55 snapshot to build on - prolly have to have a new ooo-build targetting HEAD & aim to shrink the patch-set fast / weekly.
• More mail chewage, churned through all the new bugs that have been filed, muxing / marking them up.
• Perhaps I was wrong about IBM - the lady phoned me back, and encouraged me to phone someone else to get the laptop dealt with.
• Re-wrote linkoo to link everything with a short list of excluded packages [ OO.o uses some evilness to extract exact paths of the actual loaded libraries from libc ], looking really good.
• Seemingly writing the OO.o filter 'cache' file involves a great scad of Java, and is really nasty to refresh / update & test new filter additions.
• Committed a number of bits into the new writerperfect01 notwithstanding the difficulty of testing it; getting some lovely generic I/O error now.
• Replaced the inlet relay fitting on the shower - apparently improves the flow rate - no more 'low pressure' moaning, still not altogether convincing though; even with the 10kW "dim the lights" heater in it. The manufacturer's cunning plan of putting a compression joint onto the nylon piece making the whole thing disposeable somewhat reprehensible.

• Poked at E-mail, tried to work out what was poking my disk every second or two, endlessly,

  for pid in [0-9]*; do (strace -o /tmp/$pid -f -p $pid &); done

  in proc, then after a while killall -9 strace; some hard-core refusal to kill the straces, somewhat disappointing; rebooted.
• J. ordered a new inlet filter for the shower.
• Dug into & fixed a crash-on-keypress bug in the m55 builds, it seems my zip file setup isn't up to the standard of other people's somehow.
• More linker hacking, squeezed nothing at all significiant out of it.

• Church in the morning, Tayer speaking, looked after H. in the creche intermittently.
• Sandy & Daniel, & Martin back for lunch; ordered the ADSL connection for the church.
• Disassembled the 'power' shower - which appears to have only a trickle of water coming from it; seems the inlet filter (concealed inside the incoming compression joint) has filled with crud & substantially corroded apart: not good.
• Another Gordon sermon on Daniel 7 - "The Son of Man"
  • Differing views ? had covered the view of just the empires that ruled over Israel, the majority view, 4 other commonly held interpretations - discussed when we get to Daniel 9. Also 5 other views of the Son of Man, besides the traditional understanding presented, not explicitely addressed.
  • Jesus takes many titles: the good shephard, the light of the world, Teacher & Lord while washing the disciples feet; uses lots. One title, he mostly avoids (apart from a dozen times or so): Messiah (or Christ (Greek)).
  • When Jesus came came to the region of Caesera Philipi - and asked: who do people say the Son of Man is ?, Simon Peter answered - you are the Christ, the son of the living God. - Matthew 16 Then he warned his disciples not to tell anyone he was the Christ.
  • Why the reticence ? an understandable reaction to the mis-appropriation of that title by crack-pots & despots. Many other 'Christs' at the time. Modern Germany an analogy; Gerhard Schroeder's responsibilities well captured by the term 'leader'; Fuhrer - but no-one uses this term, since Hitler hijacked it it's virtually useless in the language. So, with Jesus, instead of Christ - he uses the term 'Son of Man'.
  • No-one else in the New Testament refers to themselves as 'The Son of Man', in Mark 13 - false Christs & false prophets will appear ... men will see the Son of Man coming with power ie. the true Christ, the true prophet - one and the same as the Son of Man. Implicitly endorsing the view of him as the Christ.
  • In this text, not just any old son of any old man; but explicitely as per Daniel 7: '4 winds' (vs27), 'great clouds', 'great glory', (vs26). etc.
  • Standing at trial before the High Priest: tell us, if you are the Christ, the Son of God. 'It is as you say', but I say to all of you, you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the mighty one - a blasphemy to claim to be God worthy of death - unless he was right.
  • Similarly, Jesus mentions the Church only twice in the New Testament, instead he uses the term the 'Kingdom of God', again using Daniel 7 to define his ministry.
  • A good background: Genesis 1-3, to understand the text. In Aramaic, the phrase 'Son of Man', as in Hebrew means 'Son of Adam'. The 2nd Adam.
    • Creation - darkness in the beginning, life giving breath of God hovering over the waters etc. Daniel - begins with darkness at night, 4 winds of heaven, churning up the great sea.
    • A parody of creation ? originally the beasts come & God judges them as good. In this vision, the beasts come as terrifying hybrids, the lasts of the beasts: a RoboBeast: teeth of Iron, claws of Bronze.
    • Ancient of Days - the days of creation in view ? God pronounces judgement against the servant the evil one in both.
    • The crown - man in his own image. Adam whose name means 'humankind', and here the son of Adam very like God.
  • Very useful view of representation. Adam - the representative of humankind - the commands given to him apply to all of us, marriage etc. & also the curse; mortality etc. Things said to Adam are said to us implicitely. His failure with respect to obedience, imputed to us.
  • The same principle applies to the Son of Adam, in the latter verses, the Son of Adam the representative of the saints; (vs26) - the interpretation, power & greatness handed over to the saints, ie. Saints == holy ones, God transforming us in Christ to be his spiritual children, as we are children of Adam.
  • Also, the sufferings of the saints, waging war on them, how he oppresses them. If the saints are going to suffer like this, so will the Son of Man suffer. Mark 8:31 - He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. Peter tries to rebuke him.
  • Peter had read Daniel 7, but only focused on the triumph, the final judgement, but if the saints were to be oppressed - so must the Son of Man be; In all our afflictions he was afflicted
  • Explains Paul's understanding: So it is written: "The first man Adam became a living being"; the last Adam, a lifegiving spirit ... The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. ( 1 Cor 15). Many times, over & over the people of God called saints.
  • A second marvelous principle - authority: Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. ( Genesis 1). The Christian view of Ecology comes from here - not a license to slash & burn, rather trustees, vassals responsible to God. The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it., or serve it & guard it. Nevertheless given authority over all of nature.
  • Daniel 7 - nature run amok - beasts destroying us, enslaving us instead of serving us. Jesus - the Lord of nature, confronted by a furious sea, commanded the wind & waves: quiet, be still - and they were. What is true for the Son of Man will be true for those who belong to him: all the saints. Romans 8: The creation waits in eager expectation for the Sons of God to be revealed would love to be liberated from it's bondage to decay. One day it will delight to yield it's secrets to us under God.
  • As I looked, thrones were put in place; thousands upon thousands attended him; the angelic hosts are standing. Why more than 1 throne ? the Son of Man to be seated on that throne; Matthew 25 - When the Son of Man comes ... he will sit on his throne, Matthew 19 - the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne.
  • God created human beings like God. Daniel 7 - a higher theme; God becomes like man. Before me was one like a Son of Man - normally 'son of man' means just a human being, but like: not human in some sense. One of Jesus' most remarkable aspects.
  • Of the democratic convention; (as perhaps the Republican), reading the coverage these things were said of John Kerry, he is: A leader that knows how to listen, who knows the difference between right & wrong, Your cause is his cause, who is willing to lay down his life for his friends., A man called by destiny who will not let you down. - amazing. We desire leaders who are incarnations of God. Also true of Churches, pastors can be put on incredible pedestals. We intuit that the only one who can tell us what to do with our lives can be God.
  • Daniel 7 - the good news, not that a slightly better kingdom is coming; but that a qualitatively different kingdom is coming - the King is God, appearing in the likeness of a man. The 1st proof - 'likeness'.
  • 2nd proof - the clouds, coming with the clouds of heaven. Psalm 68, Psalm 104, Isaiah 19 - God comes with the clouds of Heaven.
  • 3rd proof - The Ancient of Days - described like a man, takes his seat - has clothing, hair (not bald), God described in anthropomorphic terms.
  • 4thly: the 4 beasts represent exaulted human beings - beasts representing the great Kings & Conquerors of the ancient world. What is categorically higher than a man, as man is of a beast ? - God.
  • 5thly - he recieves divine perogatives - all people worshiped him - the unconditional loyalty only God deserves - as pressed home by the rest of Daniel.
  • 6thly - an eternal & indestructible Kingdom.
  • Daniel 7: The basis of Jesus' claims to be God. Jewish teachers pre-Jesus struggled with this - how can you have 2 Gods in Daniel 7 ? The Rabbi Simeon Ba Johi, one of the early rabinnic authors - not 2 Gods, but just 2 manifestations of God, likewise Rabbi Ishmael two manifestations of God. Later trinitarian theology would talk of 2 centers of divine conciousness, in the persons of the Trinity.
  • The Jews of Jesus' day knew this was a claim to be God; worthy of death if it was not true.
  • When Jesus healed the man who was born blind, he said to him, as he says to us: Do you believe in the Son of Man ? "Who is he, sir?" the man asked. "Tell me so that I may believe in him.". Jesus said, "You have now seen him - looking through eyes that have been blind in fact, he is the one speaking with you.". Then the man said, "Lord, I believe," and he worshiped him.
  • The only fitting response to the Son of Man. How do you become a Christian ? not something to understand, or even to believe the daemons believe & tremble, it's something to do: to give your life to a new King. Give it to someone who knows what to do with it. Jesus didn't say: admire me, or agree with me, he said, repent, believe & follow me.

• Up late, into town with H. to get some fruit & veg. from the market. Back home, Bruce & Anne arrived bearing gifts, unloaded a fine chest of drawers, mattress, etc. & got them installed.
• Toured the house with Bruce, located the incoming main stop-cock, roofing problems, possibilities for the shed etc. Lunch, some gardening etc.
• Poked at the dynamic linker again; pretty odd that with two _dl_debug_printfs, as soon as the 2nd is called, the 1st never works subsequently.

• Up early; pushed mail about; dug at the IM issue, Finally appreciated gnome-terminal's nice i18n rendering support - whipping xterm's.
• Hammered away at oddnesses in the XIM / X / gdk / vcl event propagation / state tracking etc. improved the IM cursor location & brute-force-clobbered the problem in the end, at least it works passably.
• Committed a number of fixes to the cwstools using the cwstools; self QA'd the thing & nominated it - my first cws. An all-hands meeting with David Patrick - good stuff.
• Dinner, got the filing cabinet in place over the wall below & started filling it with pounds of paper; lots tidier in the office. Bed late.

• No interesting mail; added some more belt / braces safety stuff to the HEAD gtk+ vclplugin & mailed Philipp.
• Re-worked & committed up-stream the Lotus 123 format detection code & did some nice code clean-ups, the joy of working in CVS. Reviewed Ashwanth's nice research work on reading the Lotus formatting information.
• Started to dig into some evil X/GTK+/IM problem, a field I know absolutely nothing about. Great to be able to do rug in 'scim*'. After some considerable digging discovered a missing dep giving grief with that though.
• Some intense debugging action with Dr Mike Fabian of SUSE fame on the IM issue. Read through the code looking for the broken interaction; it's so nearly right must be something silly. Spammed Philipp with a proto fix.
• Pleasant dinner, errected several towel rails around the house, and traced a cable from the 'exterior light with no switch'. Bed late.

• Up early; sadly Bruce Perens acting in a rather unreasonable way here - while Sun sticks with it's nice, symmetric LGPL/SISSL licensing, surely no-one is going to take seriously any suggestion to fork / produce a non-JCA'd "open version" (what nonsense, and having eclectic copyright ownership is good for no-one really). Hard as working with Sun, undoubtedly is, it gets better monthly & they put a lot of work in. Also, the whole SEC filing seems reasonable; how can anyone say anything about 'OpenOffice.org' - no trademark, unclear what the term even means or includes etc. Storm in a tea-cup & an unhelpful one at that.
• Chewed mail. Worked on getting an ORBit2 fix into our packages; pruned accumulated duplicates from my TODO. Forced to change my Novell password - the only solution for my leaky memory: write it down. I can cope with remembering 1 unbreakable string, but 1 every few months is rather tough.
• Started unwinding the mail-pile, got down to under 200 in the inbox. Pleased to see NotZed's 'left-on-server-forever' fix in evo. got a one-off 2700 E-mail download / flush though.
• Wrote up some notes from the OOoCon conference. Fixed a really juicy PPD parsing crasher. Filed the 'linkoo' and 'relocate' tools up-stream, after adapting the former to HEAD, very useful tools for hackers.
• Out to Alpha in Ely in the evening, had rather a good time, back to bed.

• Up at 1am; odd, read the Economist, back to sleep. Up early; no interesting mail for once; added better perl module checking to HEAD office_config, it seems wizards does something odd too.
• Fixed / filed a number of bugs / issues in various bits of the HEAD build; created a cws and rammed a number of fixes into it. Lovely to see what used to be a horribly warning-riddled build now building almost clean.
• Substantially lost my voice - rather irritating, can't even hum to oneself as one types.
• Up-loaded slides from OOoCon ( www, tar).
• A batch of conference calls & a most positive call with Nat; good. Bought a copy of Corel Office on E-bay for $10 or so - apparently it even comes with Groupwise-client 4.1 included.

• Dragged from bed at 3am to get some important hacking done. Discovered a silly in ORBit2 in passing, fixed, committed. Thrunged through a number of nasty OO.o bugs; did a new autobuild & submitted - hopefully sufficiently early Monday morning looks like Friday to most normal people.
• Dug into the Linux linker. Still worried about my recent laptop overheat/death, phoned the IBM support people - got through immediately. Apparently they want to format my disk to run some Win32 diagnostic tools; it's great to have the service quality at parity with H/W quality. Backed up data, downloaded a bootable CD to thrash my FDD.
• Stayed up a long time for a staff meeting that failed to materialise. Committed the wordperfect artwork; good. Steak for dinner, bed early.

• Up early; off to church, spoke on Love keeps no record of wrongs - substantially Gordon-driven.
• Back for lunch. Attacked the garden hedge afterwards with this power-drill -> hedge-trimmer attachment thing; not wonderful but cut with encouragement.
• Peppered the wall with holes & errected various hooks in various places.

• Up lateish; played with H. J & H. went out & on return H. raced up-stairs to gaze into the loft where I work; (unfortunately I was downstairs).
• Played with H. etc. Tim & Rachel came over for lunch, really good to see them & catch up a little. Some real danger of becoming house-proud though, not good.
• Prepared talk in the evening for tomorrow, bed early.

• Up early; off to the convention centre; read the vcl27 branch diff to find some bug fix; amused to see my original comments about general evilness get watered down:

  -    // pl: evil ? don't be scared so easily :-)
  -	{ // Begin this unutterably evil; we need to pass a nice handle down
  +	{
   	    VCL_CUSTOM_ICON_FN *pCustomIcon = 0;
   		char *pSymbol = g_strdup_printf ("%s%d", VCL_CUSTOM_ICON_BASE, nIcon );
   		void *pAppHdl = dlopen( NULL, RTLD_LAZY );
  @@ -584,7 +562,7 @@
   		}
   		g_free( pSymbol );
   		dlclose( pAppHdl );
  -	} // End evilness
  +	}
  

• Looked at Intel's vtune. Had Dirk's keynote, then Matthias H's talk - an almost complete lack of disagreement with a 6month (or so) release schedule; good.
• Sadly missed Dan's layout session while talking to various others; out to lunch with Thorsten, good to catch up on the nice new UNO canvas / new presentation work etc.
• Talked through the rough Novell OO.o roadmap with Nicel in a spare moment, which was good - lots of good work to come there. On to the the OO.o / xforms talk which was rather encouraging - started to get a grip on xforms. Saw Oliver but only in passing.
• Bid 'bye to Caolan & on to the security / digital document signing session - fun. Left the marketing 'kuhl-aid' session early; too many revolutionary disruptive seismic paradigmatic shifts for my stomach: just keeping some of the plates in the air is hard enough for me, and Linspite of the message, running a curious distro.
• Off to the airport; some space to hack at last; worked on the vcl nasty. Arrived at Stanstead - broken luggage tracking amid a sea of people waiting for Ryan Air / Easy Jet's idle (or inadequate) baggage handlers. J. picked me up, so lovely to see her & H. again.

• Up early; call with Nat & Krishnan in the morning, rather delayed Taxi to the conference; OO.o & Software Freedom - by Simon Phipps; worrying to see 'Software Freedom' and Java on the same page, interesting to talk about Freedom and push Java at the same time. Worrying talk about moving the license to the GPL - a more foolish idea it's hard to come up with. Apparently "standards + open source + interop = freedom".
• French chap from the Ministry of Finance, 200k+ people [ amazing how beaurocrats measure success by number of employees ]. Didn't sign up for software assurance - officialy OO.o on every PC (since Dec 2002), banned people from buying later than MS Office 97 - 3000k people with it installed OO.o, only 200 that use it.
• Consultant to French Customs; 15k users, trained all new hires in OO.o; Phase 1: OO.o install on 16k workstations, MS formats by default. Phase 2: (Jan 2005) mandatory use of the OO.o file format. Few macros. CD so people can use OO.o at home; nice desk-calendar type flip-guide to OO.o for employee's desks.
• French Ministry of the Interior 170k people, 130k police-men; 2.6k locations.
• Talked to Simon Phipps, on to Mathias Bauer's talk; interesting component goodness. Then on to the What's new in OO.o 2.0 talk. Still not met Kendy.
• What's new in OO.o 2.0 - format paintbrush; instantiable auto-shapes, editable word-art; much better impress layout - LHS slide view, Master Pages etc.
• Met Jan at last, out for lunch with some of the lads; on to Caolan's talk; some interesting tools on his web page.
• Gave my talk; plugged a number of potential changes we need to make; Got 2 JCA signings, met Yukiharu of Japanese translation fame afterwards, helped get him started into the code. Went quite well.
• Some hacking / chatting to the lads; off to Martin H's talk afterwards - at some stage here lost all the Hambergians somewhere (which was sad).
• Off into town to the pub afterwards; Chatted to Joerg B on the train. Met Dirk H, understood & revised my original first impression; nice guy. Good to see Frank R. as well, albeit at a distance. Some interesting discussion; back to bed late.

• Up late; off into town to the University, phoned Stefan, discovered it was the wrong taxi - off in another expensive taxi back the way I had come - annoying.
• Arrived; met MartinK & dcbw - chatted things over; met Pavel Janik in the flesh for the 1st time; saw Martin H. Matthias H., Louish, rather a pathetic lunch.
• Met Nicel. Had a rather productive and friendly meeting, met Matthius Bauer. Chris turned up after a while.
• Out for dinner & a drink - Caolan turned up in the end; good to see him again; drunk too much on an empty stomach to be quite sensible; back to work on talk for tomorrow.

• Discovered that an extra day appears to have been prepended to the OO.o conference without me being aware of it whatsoever. Tried to move my flights; bother.
• Eat dinner during a conference call; J. drove me to the airport - sad to leave her & H. Flight to Berlin, rather tired. Taxi to the (new) hotel, bed.

• Up early; read E-mail, no answer for my autobuild platform breakage problem; ugh. Submitted a new package. Got some great LWP data from Tim, hacked up a parser that gets a great chunk of Jane Austin out of his sample .lwp file.
• Spent some time trying to book a hotel for OOoCon, to little avail; Dorint, Ibis booked up, the 'Best Western' difficult to contact directly (I refuse to use evil web travel booker proxies), hived the problem off to Novell's travel agent.
• Committed the evolution 'attachment' fix that had somehow managed not to get into CVS despite being approved; hmm.

• Up at 1am, someone trying to break into the house, remonstrated with them - apparently they live here; reminded the (presumably very drunk person) that their parents had moved, which got rid of them.
• Up early; seemed to have gained some shoes & dirty hand-prints inside a prised-open window; changed / fed / played with H. while J. slept in.
• Another Gordon sermon on Daniel 7 - "The coming of the Kingdom"
  • Largely a recap on the previous stuff, after his holiday - but some expansion of the dual-phase nature of the 4th Kingdom.
  • The 10 horned beast of the 4th Kingdom, a somewhat unfamiliar agrarian image - a pictuer of extreme power; 10 simultaneous client Kings eg. Herod in Judea, the Pharoe in Egypt etc. times when there were exactly 10, most likely symbolic. cf. Daniel being 10x cleverer than everyone else.
  • The Romans different from the Persians / Greeks - demanded not just tribute, but compelte submission to Roman law, and eventually their cult of Emperor worship; raw power.
  • Must watch Chariots of Fire again; cf. Isaiah 40.

• Up early; feeling exhausted & glandular, breakfast measured the house, put H. to bed, off to B&Q in Cambridge with J. while Mum unpacked the front room book boxes.
• Back later with misc. bits, to find a nicely arranged & tidy front-room, lovely. Lunch.
• Moped around the house, erected a nasty porcelain bathroom shelf for toothbrushes, and some coat-hooks [ hard to find coat-hooks strong enough to actually hang a coat-on it seems; plastic ones coated in something shiny seem de-rigueur currently ].
• Bed very early; tired.

• Up early, bought Lotus Word Pro 97 for $4 on e-bay, I wonder what it's original cost was. Committed the chunky re-factor of the evolution / OO.o connectivity piece.
• Tried to cancel the NTL broadband connection; thrice put-through to an engaged signal; wonderful. Same for customer service & fault complaints with a 15 minute delay: not so good.
• Tried to fill out the employee contentment survey thing - unfortunately what with it being a 10 page monster, carefully hosted at the end of a hyper-slow web-link, with a 2 minute time-out/log-you-out/ further-interaction/continuation-impossible I was unable to register my generally high level of contentment. I guess the results may get skewed in favour of the disaffected who can block-out an hour to watch the browser globe rotate.
• More daft reports from people who go hack a configure.in script to remove checks that are supposed to help them, and then wonder why the build fails when (unsuprisingly) it actually needs that software. Gentoo clearly needs a by-line: "Gentoo: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".
• Started a new auto-build of OO.o to run over the weekend. Mum arrived; sat around, had dinner, chatted, bed.

• Up early, detected, fixed a nasty ORBit2 deadlock that had locked-up my evolution overnight; filed a number of misc. desktop bugs; started looking into a few Win32 nasties.
• Laptop disk died temporarily - seems to have overheated; perhaps not enough fan action, most curious not done it before; worrying. Amused to find a Hitachi disk in the IBM Thinkpad - apparently Hitachi bought it off IBM.
• Did an ORBit2-2.10.5 release, kludged around a Win32 nasty; fixed & sent up-stream the G/W Send->Mail crasher on Win32, simple missing NULL pointer check.
• Installed colinux on the Win32 build box, so it's not a total waste of space while building.
• Out to an Alpha beacon supper in Ely Cathedral, rather good, back late.

• Up early; a pleasant, sunny day. Installed an NLD snapshot on the Win32 build machine - pleased to see ntfsresize in progress, good stuff.
• It seems autobuild lost Srini's changes to the quickstarter; bother - a real pain; reviewed some patches, looked at Jayant's SQL query -> sexpr reworking.
• Out to Barbara & Bill's in the evening for Cell group.

• Up early; pulled mail, phones on-line & number migrated - astonishing efficiency from BT. Hacked at the evo/OO.o piece.
• Dug at Win32 oddness, can't repeat here, can't repeat it in India - downloaded the official package, works fine; grief. Eventually the problem transpired to be BKAC, good.
• Customer conference call; re-factor starting to bed down nicely, amusing problems. Luis located & started attacking my OO.o / rc problem: wonderful.

• Breakfast, set off into Cambridge to CB2 to get a net connection - shut until midday - bother, back to hack at NCC with mother & baby group in full swing downstairs. Some extensive Evo / OO.o integration re-factoring, home for lunch.
• Into a local networking company to see if I could borrow some connectivity, looks hopeful. Off to CB2 in Cambridge for some E-mailage; 3700 messages.
• Responded to the most critical mails, checked in before realising the staff meeting was cancelled.
• Home, checked again on the ADSL situation, and by some miraculous answer to prayer - on-line with Nildram at 1Mbps downlink - some rather low up-link speed though; most odd.
• Fixed a silly wrt. broken OO.o installs + the quick-starter filling /tmp up rather quickly; found a nasty sorting performance problem with the file-sel in the process.
• Hannah starting to stand up in mid-floor and enjoy tottering a few steps, then looking very pleased with herself; lovely.

• Up early; breakfast, attacked the window to get the wiring through. Off to church - George's dedication, interesting but lengthy sermon from Mike.
• Home to meet the parents / let them into the house, had a quick tour, and out to Janene and Nick's - for their celebration lunch - some interesting people, lovely food etc.
• Back, more wiring, punched a phone point into the wall in the kitchen with Dad, wired it all up, looking good. Dinner with everyone, then they left, more unpacking, bed early.

• Up early; breakfast, spent some time re-arranging large bits of furniture, getting things into their right room etc.
• Dug around at the phone system; added a socket in the office, wired it into (what subsequently turned out to be) a confusing mess of existing wiring.
• Eventually decided to rip it all out and re-wire from scratch, moving the flakey incoming jn. box, and binning the old mess. H. somewhat unhappy / confused about the new house really. Pizza, bed late.

• Slept badly, a dream-loop with associated song - driving a truck-load of 3 types of thing from China - very odd.
• Up early, dug through the stuff in the loft; found some more boxes to fill with computer bits. Pulled mail, nice fix from Caolan.
• Off to pick up a chunky diesel van, drove for some hours down to Hove; filled it with furniture and extras from Undean's with Robert & Dad's help, had a lovely dinner, drove back with Thomas.
• Unpacked it all into the Trushel's home, into the front room, great to get rid of it. Home, mattress down from the roof for Tom, bed.

• Introduced H. to the new reality on the ground - by carefully breeding boxes, and giving them state subsidised incentives to move into the dining room, H' has been outnumbered and forced into the front room - toys and all, the injustice of it all.
• Finally nailed my bug; the back-ported vclplug ImplDrawAlpha can't cope with non-8bit alpha masks, whereas the old code could; 2 line fix, sent it up-stream for interest. Fired off a new ODI build. Did some more build testing on a release.
• Spent a while re-factoring chunks of the evo2 connector code and cleaning nasty bugs out at the same time; back-ported a nice NWF fix from Stefan. Up-loaded the ODI build. Backed up the laptop.
• Lots of packing in the evening, sorted out the tool cupboard - a dumping ground of some several years usage.

• Up early; lots of bugs getting fixed which is great; more work at various bugs & suboptimalities. Phoned Nildram again to once again attempt to get the post-code correct. Phoned BT to try to switch phone companies, keeping my number & move address in one atomic, transaction; hmm.
• Today: conference call day. Set off some builds of older ooo-builds to chop my evil nasty that should never have worked out.
• Packed lots of things into boxes; lugged them downstairs, emptied the filing cabinet, re-arranged all of H's known universe.

• Up early; pulled mail. Tried to transfer a large sum of money via Co-Op's electronic banking, failed; tried to do it on the phone - the miracle of telephone banking is that it requires a fax machine for serious transfers (apparently).
• Dug at an obscure Win32 transitions problem. Announced ooo-build-1.3.3 with a slew of bug fixes & build polish.
• Spent a long time trying to hack at an obscure Win32 problem; further irritated by the lack of printf output / logging - seemingly no good way to easily validate your development cycle. Added a tangled mess of AllocConsole, _open_osfhandle, spaghetti - hard to debug though, since it clearly doesn't work; is it ever even run ? - who can tell.
• Some packing action in the evening.

• Up earlyish; played with H. read the paper, cooked breakfast, off to Sue & Clive's to see their wedding pictures, back for the blessing in Church - missed much of that due to H. competing with the vicar.
• Drove home, J. with a vicious pain in the head; she went to hospital - no problem with the baby, apparently, no idea as to the problem - coedine & observation, home. Bathed H. put her to bed. Wondering how the packing is going to get finished; lots of prayer.

• Up earlyish, packed the car, 2:30 drive to nr. Princes Risborough for lunch with Clive & Sue, Bruce & Anne. Off to Georgina & Adrian's registra'd wedding - quite an eye opener; feeling pretty terrible. Some lovely dresses, good to see the extended family.
• Drinks afterwards; got through part of the dinner, bed before the speeches - too exhausted.

• Up early; feeling somewhat better - pulled mail, depressing, cheered by Raul pointing me at gcfl.net - good stuff.
• Processed mail all morning; dug over a number of interesting bugs. Hopefully the next OO.o build won't be so bad as to corrupt even ones children at a distance.
• Bed early.

• Up early; H. screaming well until 7.30am; feeling tired, glands up again. Updated my "rcd doesn't work" bug, which (as normal) looks like another "librpm corrupts memory for a living" type bug. Filed more evo. bugs.
• It seems the foolishly misguided dogma of Orthodox Secularism - the state religion of France, was today aggressively foisted onto a load of children. Coercing people to not conform to the high standard of modesty dictated by their religion is the thin end of a very nasty wedge. Still, in future, it will be a brilliant focus for the French's proclivity for striking - I look forward to seeing masses of students regardless of religious persusion wearing cut-out cardboard crosses, tea-towels, and frisbee's to school in due course - that is if the indoctrination hasn't taken root too firmly by then. The mere thought that one should have a higher alliegance to Msr Chirac than God is should be laughable.
• Nailed a nasty open 0 length files crasher, going slow today - ill. Fixed several build bugs, got the back-ported password-protected word documents to 1.1.3 thing working nicely. Got to know Fridrich of wpd fame a little better.
• Out to dinner with Martin from Church at his new flat; feeling pretty terrible - back to bed early.

• Up rather late; committed bits, closed bugs. It transpires that 1.3.2 prints everything but text very nicely; bother. Fixed the very stupid problem, missing a macro, that defines extra flags.
• Chased health insurance to cover the new mortgage, apparently Friends Provident have a large back-log; signed up for ADSL with Nildram; a slightly clueful company it seems.
• An amusing cell group, Dave came for the 1st time; great fellowship, feeling pretty awful; bed early.

• Up early; reviewed misc. bugs, filed a number of evolution bugs - amazing how they seem to spring out of the woodwork without notice. Lots more bug reading / re-arrangement.
• Hacked away at making the MS interop. warning dialogs less annoying; Nat's staff meeting. Ordered some new ADSL hardware; it looks like we're going to switch houses with the people we're buying from. Had some hard-core conference call love-ins.
• Poked at document encryption on the train; missing some bits it seems; should re-generate the diffs too. Tube to Barbican - walk through the concrete canopy to Simon's place. Good to see Matthew again & Stuart(s), some interesting things up at 3dlabs & Yahoo it seems. Missed the fast train back, got the last train instead - some very tired hacking on the train.

• Up early; Raul pointed me at some 'Drucker', looks interesting but rather put off by 'how will people remember you' - in fact, for the most part my guess is they will not. There is no rememberance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow - Ecclesiastes 1. Was impressed to see tens of wooden panels with lists of powerful, notable benefactors from a few hundred years ago at CH. and to notice that I'd never heard of any of them.
• Bug list fiddling; tried to understand the change tracking feature in some more depth to understand a bug report - with no success.
• Phone call from Chris Halls - who has it seems more moving pain than us by some orders of magnitude. Fixed a silly security bug (that according to Sun, is not a bug). Fixed a D&D problem with slide names, fixed a writerperfect patch naming silly.

• Up early; lots of preparation for lunch; got the tier of wedding cake out saved for today; Bruce & Anne arrived - set off for NCC variously; back shortly for milk.
• Lots of people from J's Mothers & Baby's group came to support us, a pleasant - albeit short service - dedicated Hannah - who was very well behaved indeed; good conversations afterwards.
• Back for a most pleasant lunch at home & champagne - unwrapped presents for H. a rather fine spinning top that plays a sequence of chords when it gets up to speed, and some lovely books.
• Slept much of the afternoon - thoroughly exhausted, H. rather ill after her MMR jab on Friday & unusually happy to lie around on one, falling asleep. Lots of Calpol dosing. Phoned the Brothers to organise the moving endeavour in 2 weeks. Bed.

• Up early; as several people have kindly pointed out, someone was rudely impersonating me at LWE.
• OO.o autobuilds appear to have failed without any error message overnight: curious. Win32 build completed successfully.
• Out to collect James & Kate - had a lovely time with them, a fine dinner, interesting conversation etc. Auntie Barbara & Colin arrived hungry after an unexpectedly long journey - out for a walk onto the training grounds.
• J. took J&K home, put H. to bed, checked the autobuild - managed to miss bumping 1 version to 1.1.3; fixed that and pushed my 1st autobuilt pair of OO.o packages.
• Parcels of spinache & peppers for dinner; chatted for a bit, bed.

• Up early; several brown-paper-bag bugs in 1.3.1 Spent a while fixing them. Wasted a large chunk of my time heading off innappropriate executive-level contacts by over-enthusiastic 'marketing' 'bizdev' etc. volenteers in the 'OO.o community'; talked it over with Stefan, Martin & Matthias briefly.
• Realised I'd missed a patch from the set for the ODI internal builds; started a re-build. Did a new ooo-build-1.3.2 release with build sillies fixed in them. Knocked up a better way to auto-generate the writerperfect code as a patch-set for OO.o. Started new Win32 & NLD builds.
• Lasagne dinner, bed very early - still habitually very tired.

• Up early; further irritated by yet more impotent, volenteer "Foo project lead" type executive level contact that I have to explain / deflect from wasting our time; grief.
• Spent much of the day trying to encourage people to rigorously think about what they are typing, before during and after. Did an ooo-build-1.3.1 release: (NEWS).
• Used auto-build to build a new gnome-mime-data package, only time will tell if it will have any effect. Bitten by / filed another evo & G/W authentication issue.

• Up; fixed an OO.o Win32 static library installation issue; more building action. Realised I'd not got around to uploading my slides from LWE (new slides towards the end) ( html, tar.gz.
• More Win32 build testing; lots of patch review, the Indian team churning out more work faster; good. Got mail from Guiseppe of Mandrake fame, hopefully moving towards ooo-build over there too.
• Merged up some OO.o VBA improvements from Luiz, bitshift operators & the foreach keyword.
• Today H. walked her first steps - wow; I still havn't seen her in action though.

• Up in the night, head-cold, dreaded itch etc. did some hacking / mail. Added waratah to the OO.o planet.
• Fixed innumerable libwpd sillies; got the iodetect format auto-detection working - it's looking really good now.
• Fixed a Win32 wpd build issues while in a rather echo-ridden conference call.
• Knocked off early; played with H. for some time; who now has her own 'baby' to much delight.

• Up very early; interesting article on C.K.Prahalad's new book: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Eradicating Poverty Through Profits in the Economist. Caught up with Nat.
• Poked at various bugs. Hacked away at the writerperfect / libwpd integration into OO.o with some nice success - it's finally dying in my dodgy stream / OLE2 wrapper. Got a direct bug-report from Chris Stone; hmm - sounds like a change-tracking tree view thing is required; urk.
• Today my HP 3820 died - apparently this is quite normal, there is a design-flaw on a certain cog. The 'repair your own printer' sites claim that the printer is a land-fill case anyway; bother. Bed early.

• Up early; dealt with H. while J. slept. H. with some vicious nappy-rash poor creature.
• Off to church, Cathy talking about tents; back for lunch. Kate & Matthew Robson arrived - good to see them & catch up on their honeymoon, etc.
• Out for a walk around some green things. Home, bed early - everyone in the house has a nasty cold.

• Woke up early, having had a very detailed dream that I had just told Nat I was leaving Novell to make a PCI based deep-memory logic analyser / scope HW & SW combination as Free S/W & H/W. Spent some time idly sketching out a design & reading up on the latest Altera offerings. Doesn't seem as trivial as initially envisaged sadly.
• Out after lunch to a place in the forest for a walk by a lake & some obligatory swinging / slides for H. afterwards. back home. Slugged generally.
• Out to Ken & Jane's for dinner in the evening, had a lovely time, back rather late; fixed the win32 build, barfing trying to build NAS in error. Bed.

• Up early; pulled mail - somewhat astonished to be getting new Ximian bugzilla E-mail from the 12th April; somewhat concerning. Helped NotZed debug it.
• Poked at the csv importing dialog, after some considerable cruft removal / hackage got it into good shape. Reviewed some patches, chewed over the gratuitous seek syscall spewage from OO.o with Matthias / Caolan, breaking kernel readahead.
• Set off a new Win32 OO.o build.

• Up early; apparently LWN thinks we've forked OO.o - but the truth is anything but; a branch is about the size of it; and hopefully it'll go away as OO.o improves in functionality and process post 2.0.
• Spent some time untangling a couple of ORBit2 deadlocks, did ORBit2-2.10.4, and ORBit2-2.11.2 releases. Poked at some evolution research; meat-balls for dinner.
• Simon phoned, hopefully can meet up with Matthew & co. shortly.

• Hard time sleeping; finished the merge-cell implementation, released a new ooo-icons with some fixes from Jimmac & the new icon, committed.
• Set off an LXR re-build, the existing snapshot was 6 months out of date. Spent the morning sorting out a vicious symbol font / bullet problem; fixed that, fixed a merge-cell build snafu.
• I guess it's GNOME's birthday again sometime around now; Did the first official release of the ooo-build-1.3.0 work (notes) (pkg)- it seems we're starting to ship some great improvements.

• Up early, fairly coldy; committed a fix for Ashwanth. Property letting agent around to examine the house; apparently the letting market is dropping.
• Posted a new round of the DESKTOP_LAUNCH spec. hopefully in a form that'll make it easy for people to adopt. Sent an evo. patch off for 'attachment' support. Re-instated the 'file-a-bug' toolbar icon for the internal OO.o deployment.
• Battled with WinCVS to try to get pass-phrasefull dsa key based ssh authentication going: useless; encouraged Christian to install cygwin instead.
• H. very unhappy, high temperature, high noise level - infra-drops at 5:40pm. Did some bug-management, worked at the merge-cells feature. Bangers & mash for dinner, bed early.

• Up early; nice to see that the latest Windows XP service pack, breaks a 3rd party vertical app in such a way that it hoses the (3rd party) server for everyone else; the joys of auto-update.
• More building of OO.o on Win32, fixing misc. build bugs. Hacked while listening to the COBE training modules and taking the tests - works well under NLD at least. Some real revelations in there: shorting your own stock is not allowed.
• Installed the latest Win32, G/W and tried debugging the File->Send crasher - no more joy. It seems Sivaiah fixed my G/W hang trace resulted in a fix; horay - if only we had Evo. snapshot builds for NLD.
• Discovered the Win32 'setofficelang.exe' helper, hacked that into my scripts. Dinner, pushed packages to the ODI people, bed.

• Up early, dealt with H. so J. could lie-in.
• Off to NCC, short session in the creche dealing with H. while others sang. Out to the Studlands housing estate green; played rounders & similar games with the kids. Picnic in the sun.
• Gordon sermon: The Kingdom of God his 2nd on | Daniel 7
  • One of Gordon's defining moments: one of his students, Jerry Feldman - spent his summer as a door-to-door salesman - selling a 'Filter Queen'. Came around to demonstrate, like Christmas - an unmarked box, a huge number of things coming out; assembling a complicated machine, designed to surgical standards, any allergies ? can spray insecticide, blow varnish, leaves in the garden, ... finally it's real category dropped into place: a vacuum cleaner, spent $400 - still can't believe it.
  • Biblical scholars try to make sense of all the detail of our faith, to allow us to see the coherence of the whole without doing violence to the luxurience of the parts. People look for a 'center' for theology; 'the Holiness of God': hence redemption, etc., 'a God that acts in history': hence lots of historical detail, others: 'Election': the theme of God's unmerited choice, understanding grace etc. president of Gordon Conwell - 'Promise': pulls together a lot, another friend Gregory Beale 'New Creation'.
  • Still remember the spine-tingling thrill as a young college student, hearing Meredith Klein - who said, all these are part of the picture; but the real centre, the integrative categorical framework is The Kingdom of God - packs a real punch.
  • Not comparitive religion, but comparitive Kingdoms; what is it that rules our life ? Daniel 7 may sound like a menagerie, or Zoo - but each represents a successive empire or Kingdom, 4 earthly Kingdoms.
  • Christianity: not a religion, but a relationship. Not a relationship with some buddy, or personal trainer, but with the King of the universive. The King who demands our unconditional surrender, unqualified trust & love, our undivided loyalty, our uncompromising obediance.
  • A key to so many texts: Isaiah 6: In the year King Usaiah died ... I saw the Lord, sitting on a throne ... and his train filled the Palace ... my eyes have seen the King. [ Temple == Palace; same word in Hebrew ]. God is not a philosophical premise, but the boss.
  • If we know about the ANE; Ancient Kings were often called Father; or Shepherds (Pastors); Judge - the other names for God fit together with this exciting overview. He is the King of Israel.
  • Suprising that Jesus hardly never used the word 'Church'; but this word can be used to identify a club, or an association. The last thing the King wants is for you to think this is a volentary club, with perhaps some dues you pay.
  • 1 Peter 2: A chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation - his (international) nation. Israel's Kings were not like the other nation's kings, vassel kings - obviously 2nd in command. Samuel It's not you they have rejected, but me ... they want a king like the nations (who will be answerable to no-one). God punishes his nation by giving them what they want; he gave them Saul as King - a grave disappointment (whose name means "You asked for it").
  • Then in David - we see what real Kingship is like: vassel Kingship, Deut. 17 - must have a copy of God's: is answerable to a higher authority, must read it every day; and not consider himself better than his brothers and turn from the law to the right or to the left. Humility - and the desparate need for God's help in ruling.
  • Temple, just means Palace - setup just like the palaces of the ancient Kings. So was the tabernacle, the movable palace setup from the time of Moses to Solomon. We have a painting on a great hall in Egypt of the battle of Pharoe Ramaseese II, at Kadesh, against his enemies.
  • Ramaseese II - on the move; when he moves, he can't be back home in his Palace - he has a moving palace; with the same architectural features, fabrics, orientation as the Tabernacle that God told Moses to construct. It's rectangular, the walls are made of tent material in sections, one opening only on the East. Inside, an enclosed area with two sections, the King resides in the 'holy of holies' in the innermost section, seated on a throne - surrounded by angel-like characters with wings; with his foot on a footstool.
  • The Bible must be plagerising ! why would God do it that way ? so - that he didn't have to explain everything; so his people would get it. They were being freed from living for the tyrrany of Pharoe to live for the only one who is worthy & deserving of their unqualified obedience.
  • Explains the office of Prophet - who spoke to the King, whereas the later Prophets wrote their message - not just to the King, but also to the people. The transition happens in the C 8th BC - just when contemporary kingdoms make the same shift. Gestures of prayer - lifting hands: in the worship of God; but in the ANE - this is how people approached the Kings: 'hands up', I give up, (no weapons), this gesture of self surrender.
  • That's what the tithe is all about; not some practical financial reason 1 Samuel 8 tells them You want a King - he will take 1/10th of your grain, ...a tenth of your flocks ...; every time you have a King; the people give a mandatory tribute of 10%. You can tell who is the King, because he gets 10%.
  • It explains why we have a book - the ANE religions didn't have a bible; Baal, Marduk, Chemosh - no bible. But in Kingdoms they had bibles: 'covenant documents'. The King structured his rule in an arrangement called a covenant. A triangular relationship in the sight of God. Example King Mercillus of the Hittites, & a vassal Dubiteshan:
    • Same form as the 1st parts of the bible: eg. 10 commandments Thus says my majesty Mercillus, the Great King, the King of the Hittites, hero beloved of the Storm God ... Great King ... - it starts by saying who the boss is; the 10 commandments: I am the Lord your God - starts with the King identifying himself.
    • Then a little historical section: how Mercillus helped Dubiteshan: who was a sickly little runt, with no political future, and how the Sovereign setup the vassel King on his throne. Why would he say that ?: 'You owe me'.
    • Commandment 1: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land off Egypt, out of the house of slavery - why say that ? it just happened 3 months ago, everyone knows that. You owe me - in the Old Testament - grace before law. They did not obey the commandments and so win God's favour so he would bring them out of Egypt, instead God showered his love graciously on his people who deserved nothing but judgement, who were no better than their neighbours, won them to himself; and then says to them: You owe me. I redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to set you free, not to run your own life; but so that you might live for me, who died for you.
    • Then follows the 10 commandments, as in Mercillus' covenant the detail follows.
    • The contracts written in duplicate copies; (2 tablets of stone) - each would place the copies under the feet of whatever God they worshiped. Of course in the Israel / God case - both copies under his feet - in the Ark of the covenant (also called the 'footstool of God') both copies there.
    • Israelites followed the ancient tradition of ratifying a covenant by sharing a meal; That's why many were offended by Jesus: this man welcomes sinners and eats with them !.
    • Moses read the covenant, to the people, and they responded We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey.
    • Jesus says virtually the same thing; this cup is the new covenant in my blood, drink this in rememberence of me - the early church called it a sacrament - Cisero define a sacramentum as an oath of loyalty taken by soldiers to the emperor. Tertullian said - we are called to the army of God when we respond to the words of the sacrament.
  • Daniel 7 reminds us that our hope is not resting in whomever happens to be sitting on the throne of Babylon at any given moment; but in a higher throne; of the Kingdom of God, the Ancient of Days. Daniel - knew that Babylon would fall soon; the dream in the reign of the last ruler of Babylon before its fall. They must have been excited for the future the 70 years exile nearly up; but God disabuses this optimism. Yes - a change of administration, yes Babylon will fall; but the Lion gives way to a bear, then a leopard - then an indescribably horrible animal. And, all through, war against the saints.
  • Jesus refers to this text over and over again, 100+ times refers to The Kingdom of God - 82 times he calls himself the Son of Man - from this text; he understands it, as do his contemporaries, as a reference to this text - a claim to be God.
  • The Kingdom perspective explains: Thy Kingdom come, Jesus did not come to get us out of a jam, why do you call me Lord, Lord and do not do what I say ?, if you love me, you will obey my commands.
  • There is no low-cost path of discipleship, because Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship. A relationship not with some buddy, a personal coach, or a friend (only) but with the King of the Universe, and he demands your unconditional surrender, and he alone is worthy of your unqualified trust and love, your undivided loyalty, your uncompromising obedience.
• Challenging stuff. Felt the new baby kicking her lovely Mother and through her, the Father (already). Bed.

• Up disgracefully late, still tired. Breakfast while H. slept - read the economist.
• Out into Cambridge - discovered the Wandelsbury ring in the Gog/Magogs & wandered around it. Humbling to see it's an Iron-age fort, with more modern bits (now lost) added in 1AD.
• Onto The Orchard at Granchester for a scone with jam & cream (& wasps) before heading home.
• Tea, S&H special features - particularly amusing spoof documentary. Bed early.

• Up early; 2nd attempt at getting an internal G/W release for testing - no joy again. Generated some OO.o / file encryption diffs for Srini.
• Took a look at sodipodi - it's been a little while since I read Lauris' code - all looking rather nice.
• ODI call, interesting feedback this week from a lot of people, lots of exciting new bugs.
• J. went swimming, while I sat on H. Watched Starsky & Hutch in the evening.

• Up early; mail chewage, dug into MSI files some more; discovered they are in fact OLE2 structured files (wow). Dug out the 1500 line perl script to turn the 1600 lines of .idt file into a msi file; concerning. Found some good docs on the PerlMSI stuff here - Perl (it seems) rocks even more than expected as a portable scripting tool.
• Off to see our soliciter and sign various contracts to be exchanged, it seems in 3 weeks we'll have a new house.
• More installer hacking, mail processing etc.

• Up lateish, lots of mail chewage, positive call with Parag. Tested the ODMA work, still a long way to go sadly.
• Dug at MSI files, and installing Win32 lang packages; looks really nasty - pwrt. automatic .msi creation. Got further in 10 minutes with nsis than in 30 minutes of MSDN reading / fiddling.
• Another request for a good way to detect what desktop is running; the canonical way is to use the end of the WINDOWMANAGER environment variable for 'gnome' or 'kde' it seems - pragmatic evilness in lieu of the standardised, functionally separated solution so reviled on xdg.

• Up early; off to Worthing, shifted a trailer load of furniture to fill my parents' front-room. Lunch with Bruce & Anne.
• Hyper-tedious paper-work early afternoon. Nice to see Mark's patch to work around a particularly ugly PPC gcc bug for ORBit2, that was one nasty problem.
• Missed another conference call; just awful, I wonder what mechanism would actually work to get me to them. J. drove us all home.
• Tackled an odd ORBit2 problem for JP, it seems (ultimately) that it's a valgrind bug - with an unaligned pointer array. Tended the win32 build, poked at Win32 language packaging. Fixed a really stupid bug disabling the fontconfig font discovery support in ooo-build, sorted Christine out for Brainshare. Bed late.

• Up early; some rain, pulled mail. With Siva's help got the groupwise calendar/contacts code setup vs. the new Novell server; nice. Filed a number of bugs.
• Started upgrading bits of my system; fallen behind the NLD cutting edge, filed an rcd crasher bug. Got a letter hand-signed by Jack Messmann - he'd also thoughtfully spent some time hand-dithering a rectangular background around it in light-grey.
• H. climbed the stairs today, a rather worrying development, then climbed them again while no-one was watching, mercifully safely.
• Nat's staff meeting, call with JP, call with an NGO wanting to contribute effectively to OO.o.

• Up late; off to NCC - John speaking on Spiderman 2 - Jesus, my hero etc. curious. Met a new couple from the base.
• Lunch at home; slept for a few hours; H. walking around pushing her brick-cart quite effectively. Unpleasantly hot.
• Out to a Barbeque for Martin's birthday at his parent's house, a pleasant evening, bed late.

• Up at 5.30am; breakfast etc. drove to Ely, train to Leeds for the UKUUG conference, chewed mail. Went to a KDE plugin talk; then my Gnome spiel, chatted to Dick.
• On to a Unicode talk, discovered the dirty truth about shell regexps and the locale, wrt [A-Z], seems to work in perl though. 'C-x C-m l' to set lang to utf-8. Gave my OO.o talk; lunch, chatted to Aaron from The Register, Steven Tweedie, got the low down on OcFS and the clustered FS summit from Alasdair.
• Left early for the multi-hour train journey home - to be with the ladies. Bed early.

• Lots of intense reading action on the plane. Very pleased with The Millenial Maze - the balance between pre and post as a historical barometer of societal optimism is most interesting.
• Slept mostly on the flight; train / tube / train home; lovely to see the little girl creatures. Back to work.
• Apparently (rumour has it) that the reason for the heinous collab.net slowness, making cvs virtually unusably slow for the community, causing it to take an hour+ to tag all of CVS, etc. is down to them choosing to have the repository on a remote NFS mount, introducing stacks of pointlessly wasteful network latency into the mix. Wow.
• Bed early.

• Up very early to suit Nat's breakfast with Holger; breakfast in bed - nice. Pulled mail, etc. chewed over the deluge of well-formed ODI bugs that have got filed in the last week.
• Committed the writerperfect code from the libwpd team, and the libwpd skeleton module to a cws Martin kindly created for me, hopefully the libwpd guys can take it forward from here nicely.
• Phoned the sweetheart, good to be coming home; set off for the air-port. Played with a huge Excel spreadsheet sent by a customer - interesting that it loads far, far faster as an Excel file, than an XML file - even though the XML is in fact compressed to 1/10th of the size [ amazing ]. After some stracing action, and debugging - discovered the code is doing an 'Application::Reschedule' per-cell, involving a chunk of locking, a poll, timeout calculations etc. Some easy wins here.

• Up too early, iritated again, for no readily discernable reason by US TV evangelists' over-plastic facade; watched Mougli. Breakfast, off to the conference centre; met Paul Nowak in the speakers room; explained the Novell story. Poked at my slides; managed to loose all the images (with 1.1.1), horrifying.
• Re-worked the talk substantially - no handouts necessary this year - a major relief. Gave a shortish talk, with a number of fairly new, insubstantial, but screenshot-worthy slides.
• Off to the show floor with Vikram from Real, had lunch with him; introduced John to Frank W, wandered over to the Qt booth for another productive chat with Matthias Ettrich, and met Sam - pointed him at the gcc visibility attribute work, and chewed over Qt4 themes.
• Out to the baseball game with Jeff Biehle, Luis, Erik in the evening, Giants vs. Red-someones AFAIR; suprisingly interesting for base-ball. Great that Novell gave away 1000 tickets, gave everyone $10 for food/drink, a Novell hat to wear etc. and sponsored ads on the score screen thing.
• Back to the hotel late; met up with Nat; back dumped stuff in Nat's room, up to the sky-bar to meet Chris Toshok, then to bed.

• Slept really badly; up at 3am; tired & ineffective but can't sleep. Breakfast with Nat, David Patrick turned up at the end.
• Off to register at the show; back to the hotel, pulled / pushed mail; chewed. Conference call, code reading, lots of ODI bug reading - a brace of excellent bug reports from Jason Ogden. Bed late.

• Up at 6.30am, feverish packing, mail pulling action. Train to Cambridge, then to Kings X, amused to find a guy working in the field of accessibility was pleased to see me working on OpenOffice.org - uses it in his office.
• Train to Gatwick - met an interesting Indian chap, who gave me some interesting (and perhaps inaccurate) insights into the Indian psyche. A well paid Indian can expect to have a servant of some sort to do his menial household tasks; at work a coffee attendant to bring him the drink of his choice - rather than essentially doing simpler things for himself. It seems, also, that in the floor-sweeping type of jobs, leading/management by example is not expected, and (I guess) distributing the tedious jobs instead of concentrating them, not a normal strategy. Also, apparently progression from, asistant to deputy to full manager typically brings other incremental privlieges up to the chauffer; interesting.
• 9 hour flight to Atlanta; unusually speedy customs clearance, got to the connecting flight.

• Up early; quick breakfast, played with H. out to the local Baptist church - hearts in the right place.
• Back early for the post-wedding lunch; good to see everyone again in a less formal setting.
• Packed everything up, drove back to Newmarket to collect shoes & wallet for US trip (tiredness axes competance in many unexpected ways). Bed late.

• Up early, looked after H. while the girls had their hair, toes etc. curled correctly, end result very attractive.
• Set off early for the Church, met M&D who took over the H. minding. Sue & co. arrived eventually looking lovely; a pleasant, albeit short service - read 1 Cor. 13.
• Back for the wedding breakfast; missed most of the speeches due to a screaming daughter. Lovely meal though, dancing, talked to some interesting people, bed late.

• Up at 5am, H. awoken early; J. dealt with her while I slept; up late.
• Finished removing the libgsf dependency from libwpd, so we can use native SvStream / SvStorage code for 'real portability(TM)' inside OO.o.
• Ran over the nice, extensive regression tests (using valgrind) good stuff (apart from the multiple valgrind failures in glibc). Sent patches off to Will et. al.
• Off to the pub in the evening to have a meal on Bruce: the night before the wedding, a pleasant dinner topped with Banoffee pie.
• Did some writerperfect hacking late into the night; sent more patches off; bed.

• Up lateish; mail swallowing, Win32 fixes; Misc. hacking, ODI call, more demand for dumbing down feature-lists; time for Christine to attend those calls instead.
• Drove to Clive's house - a mercifully clear M25 experience, house looking lovely in summer - lots of pretty flowers etc. Marquee erected for wedding action on Saturday. Talked over libwpd integration with Will, some hacking. Bed.

• Slept on the plane; lost lots of one day here, chewed mail in Amsterdam at a helpful WiFi place. Home at last with the lovely girls.
• A quick dinner, then cell group - good to see everyone after a long gap; then to bed.

• Up early; breakfast together, out to the office with Nat; more in-depth meetings. Lunch. Measured the gettimeofday count / second, and it's 1.4million or so on my machine - leading me to suspect Arjan's startup slowness anslysis.
• Off to the air-port, had a drink with some of the guys (turns out my flight was later than anticipated). Waited for the flight, flight cancelled - plane leaking fuel, direct to Amsterdam instead; interesting.
• Somewhat irritated by the democratic convention everywhere; the speeches seemingly of a nauseating stock form: Senator John Kerry who is [one of], bold, brave, heroic, generous, amazingly kind, totally caring, unutterably super-human - should be elected in place of that [one of], dishonest, ugly, fat, smelly, friendless, corrupt George Bush - and then America will instantly [one of] be a light to all mankind, be a vision of purity and grace, heal all international problems, give free candy to children. The refreshing tang of gritty, charitable realism, and achievable eexpectation setting makes one weep.
• Political marketing a fascinating subject, should get around to reading O'Shawnessy's thesis on the subject. I wonder if a post-modern "Kerry sucks less" type message might fly instead.

• Up early; another greasy breakfast, off to the office - sorted out encryption magic etc. pulled mail. Nat arrived eventually. More people, sub-style lunch with the crew.
• More talking, a little hacking; poked at the libwpd stuff; out for dinner - some fun guys. Out for a drink in the evening with Nat - encouraging, interesting, and most pleasant. Phoned J. so lovely to hear her. Bed late.

• Up early; breakfast - off to 1st Union Baptist church of Ottawa - I've clearly not grasped the tripple-speak necessary when consulting a hotel church-list to get somewhere alive; ~50 people, most needing to take Rico's sermon last week to heart.
• To the airport, bumped to a sooner flight to make my connection (thank God), taxi to the hotel; after consulting the Friedman entry list (and the several normal common mis-spellings) discovered that this is the wrong Radisson. Courtesy bussed to the right one by an Australian married to a US lady, who worked in a pub in Aldeburgh for ages; amusing.
• Dinner, out for drinks with some of the lads - amusing etc.

• Up early; slept badly; breakfast. Off to the convention centre; discussed package inter-dependency resolution with Mike Johnson for a while - no real success in communicating the toughness of the generalised problem; sounds like fun being had at Specifix, and some neat features.
• Off to a high-performance kernel talk; then Martin's NUMA talk - swapping processes to other processors rather than to disk. Chatted to Billy Biggs about misc. Eclipse problems - interesting to see Eclipse at last [ are there no depths to ones personal ignorance ? ].
• Out to lunch with Martin, Andrew, Stefan. Off to a talk on I/O scheduling with Andrew - interesting. Chatted to Keith P. afterwards, met Carl Worth (of cairo fame), chewed things over with Shaver - lots of interesting insights.
• On to Andrew Morten's talk - interesting and thoughtful. Talked to Gavriel at length, out for a quiet beer with him to understand the Transgaming past & present - interesting. People eventually arrived at the pub, for a lengthy free-drinks session - apparently Arjan put his perl script in bugzilla - beyond the claws of google. Discussed the oppressive (or otherwise) French anti-headscarf law, and the global shame of the French supported CAP with Daniel; then the evils of modern E-mail clients with Pierre & Andrew, bed late.

• Up early, breakfast, more work on talk; off to the conference center in town. Good to be back at OLS, some really great people here, talked to Matt Wilson. Out for lunch with Chris Blizzard, Val (from Sun), Daniel V, Alasdair K.
• Saw Shaver again, been a long time from the Zero-Knowledge days, hiring Mozilla hackers for Oracle; Tip from Richard Moore on the hidden Thinkpad Fn-F8 function to switch full-screen scaling on.
• Caught the end of Rob Love's talk - just enough to see the blocking/queueing async-ness question fudged; D/BUS really needs a convincing solution. Caught up with Rusty after a protracted gap.
• Did my talk; frightning to have so many clueful people in the audience - attempted to conceal my almost total lack of understanding. Slides here ( html, tar.gz), a whack of new ones there, saw Clahey at the end.
• Amazingly my cousin: Andrew showed up at the end, and his boss Martin Bligh [Mr. NUMA ] with whom I was at school (it turns out), neat. Out for drinks with the IBM / big-iron group, good guys.
• Back for misc. BOFs and discussion; Clahey showed me his new PPT viewer hack; Met Arjan and chewed over his symbol-visibility auto-generation script to save plt entry usage in gtk+ / C programs; and Linux startup performance profiling: interesting. Alan and co. convinced me that my next fast build machine, should be an AMD machine - due to general elegance and efficiency wins over Intel.
• Back to the hotel for room service, E-mail chewage and a fast/reliable net connection.

• Up early; H.'s birthday, some (parentally assisted) present opening, cake + candle etc. Started on mail, backed up the laptop, into Cambridge with J. train to LHR, plane to Montreal ~1 hour late, missed connection to Ottawa. Very eventually arrived, checked into the Marriott, continued to hack at talk for tomorrow - if only I knew something about something. Bed late.

• Up early; still no functioning E-mail, bugzilla, ooo.x.c unresponsive, bother. Got the VCL plug stuff running nicely on windows, along with some screwed-up artwork (interesting). Fixed a silly status bar crasher after some length reasoning with Ashwanth.
• Dug into odd bitmap rendering issues on Win32, with no success. Out for lunch with Julia (her birthday); back for the ODI/OO.o advocates conference call - seems to have got randomly moved.
• Dinner with J. opened lots of fine presents, she went out to a Church meeting. Tried to debug some evil Win32 code - with no easy way to generate debugging information [short of a full, gigantic, turgidly-slow re-build], and with no fprintf(stderr, "Foo\n"); possibilities - life seems full of unnecessary pain in windows world; the most basic, reliable and useful form of debugging: made difficult. Searched in the wonderful help - useless.
• Managed to fix the problem eventually, MSVC++ debugger is at least slightly nice (though over-mouseful). Re-started a build.
• J. back late, stayed up late.

• Up early, poked at an odd ORBit2 / PPC bug for Jeroen, fixed some build sillies in ooo-build HEAD. Booked / re-arranged another tranche of travel.
• Dug at the win32 work, Win XP somewhat unresponsive in comparison with NLD. Out to get presents for Julia's birthday - tomorrow.
• Evolution crashing as soon as you hit the calendar - making it hard to do timezone translation & work out what is going on when. Fixed a number of win32 sillies. Turns out my evo bug is down to having a missing calendar source referenced in gconf; hmm.
• Saw an eog hang while browsing photos to find one of H. for a dedication invite, a rather nasty ORBit2 deadlock it turns out; rather unfortunate. Bed late.

• Bad night's sleep, up late. Started to repair the 9.1 / NLD mess. Phone call from Dr. Silverstone - apparently it was glandular fever, and the liver is now back to normal: excellent.
• Fixed some OO.o bugs here and there, more road-map work while updating the system. Finally by 3pm got the system into some sort of shape, such that evolution could run, started to pull mail.
• Chewed mail, re-booted, everything broken - gconf schemas failed to install correctly (nice), so keyboard repeat broken, Alt not functioning - some more fun putting it all right.
• Julia spent ages filling out my expenses over what seems like an age, more money to pay the mortgage-to-be off with hopefully. At lunch discovered (what with the serious nappy related wear and tear on the washing machine) that a helpful soul was undertaking it's maintenance:
  
  notice - some huge 'real nappy' action.

• Up early, off to NCC - prayer and praise before Church in the park with bouncy-castle et. al. - torrential rain instead. Sad.
• Back for lunch, out for a walk in the sun in the afternoon, more rain. Watched some of 'The Office' 2nd series, amusing albeit uncouth.
• Sermon from Rico Tice, of All Souls; The Universal Jesus on John 13-14:
  • We often deny death because we don't want to admit we are out of control. Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death: the reason we deny death is we don't want to admit we're out of control., In Japan if you're dying by tradition the doctors do not tell them. In America by contrast, it's not supposed to happen - so the doctor gets sued. With death there is no choice, you're out of control.
  • Bible's metaphores for the briefness of life: a mist, chaff, water spilled into the sand, a dream of the night - forgotten at the breakfast table, flowers that wither, like a sigh - a puff of breath. Death so painful - not a drop returning to the ocean - something monstrous, traumatic.
  • This is the point we're at in John's gospel - the last words; after the last supper - it's sombre and desparate - he's already warned them he has to die, and that they will too; then Peter's disowning of him. A farewell, the final words to his friends:
  • Do not let your hearts be troubled - later that evening he will sweat blood; facing death - you get heart trouble; only the divine phisician can heal it: Trust in God, trust also in me. As you face my death, as you face terrible suffering: crucified upside down, covered in tar and lit, tied to wild animals an pulled apart etc. remember - I have a place for you: in my Father's house there are many rooms ... I am going there to prepare a place for you. Homelessness very destructive to the human psyche, not just some bricks, but acceptance, friendship, a meal prepared. Home - where you belong.
  • An elderly member of the Church going to hospital with a brain haemorrage a few years back; before entering hospital she wrote: I am in God's hands, and I am at peace, and I am quite resigned to whatever may happen to me, I feel I may be going home which will be very lovely. words of faith, in control as even her mind was disintegrating.
  • How can you be so sure ? - Jesus makes 4 promises:

    • 2. I am going there to prepare a place for you same in 3; Heaven will not be a strange place, but arriving in a place prepared for us, ready, made by loving hands. He has been to prepare a place for all belivers.

      Rico's first funeral of a relatively young person: Dr Stuart Spencer (39) died of lukemia, the week before he died, when Rico visited he said this: Rico, you may think the cross is precious to you, but you have no idea, think what it means to me knowing that within a week I will stand before God at the judgement, and the cross will mean that all my sin, and all I'm reminded of now at the end of my life will be forgiven and paid for by Christ. The Cross is incredibly precious to me.

    • 3. And if I go ... I will come back and take you to be with me - a contextual reference to Jesus' coming to be with his people at death. "Ok Rico - it's time, lets go".
    • ... take you to be with me that you also may be where I am - lots of questions about Heaven, (Rev 21), a place of perfection, companionship - but primarily a place of intimacy where we'll see him face-to-face. No more faith.

    • Doubting Thomas: we don't know where you're going, so how can we know the way ? Jesus answered I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him..

      Jesus says - you do know the way, it's me. Interesting - most of the time, Jesus tells his disciples, you think you know but you don't but here he says You think you don't know - but you do

  • You can't think of Heaven if you don't think of Jesus: he is the fore-runner, the escort, the destination, and the way. cf. vs 14:1 are your hearts still troubled ? though Death is terrible, it has lost it's sting.
  • It can be terrifying as we physically disintigrate; one woman said recently of Reagan's altzheimers - he would go to the park, and her children would play in front of him. Not remembering meeting the president was not nearly as sad, as not remembering being the president.
  • Have you rested on these promises for your death ? Laying flowers is not enough - the comfort of scripture, and Jesus' presence.
  • The guessing games about God, are over - revealed in Jesus - If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well.
  • No one comes to the Father, except through me - there are not many ways up a mountain, Jesus is the only mountain but so many ways to come to know and trust him. Humanity divided into those who trust in Jesus' death on the cross to open that way to the Father's house.

• Finally got home very early this morning, talked until late with the sweetheart, slept.
• Up late, doddered about a bit, J. slept - installed the latest NLD snapshot - no upgrade mode from 9.1, so installed over the top without formatting: bad move - system fairly hosed.
• Left H. with Claire & Chris Reed in the evening to go to Nickie & Simon's 25th wedding aniversary party & barn-dance - good fun, had a great time [ J. looking delectable in a pretty frock ]. Back early to collect H. bed.

• Up early, shower, breakfast with Jeff, Dirk and Naji. Checked-out, pulled mail; read slides. A bar lunch together with various other guys, had a laugh.
• Off to the meeting in Dirk's (nice) car; lots to talk about, of varying interest. Car to the airport. Pleased to see Chris Toshok committing patches for some some of my more painful evolution bugs, amazing to see the level ot traffic on the evo-patches list.
• Poked at remaining vclplug integration issues; nailed a couple. A pleasant couple nearby; "I did my best", "Well, it's not good enough obviously" what a shame; no hugs.

• Up in the night; checked the build, fixed a number of nasties, hooked up all the right configure pieces, everything getting back to normal. Back to bed.
• Up later, pulled mail, build completed nicely. Genene around for breakfast & bible study, off to Claire's house drove into Cambridge. Train to Kings X with Justin - Canadian fiance of an Inuit movie star, fresh from the Cambridge Film Festival; nice chap. On to the tube - met Shelly & son August from California, divorcee & Irish fiddler - no hacking done.
• Wireless hot-spot at Heathrow Terminal 1; good in theory, but costs money. Managed to skewer the new SalBitmap virtualisation, had to re-factor the splash screen rendering patch.
• Eventually arrived, no-one else around; had a pleasant dinner; managed to get the wavelan to work - but only in the lobby downstairs; pulled mail. Got dropped in it by Nat: what fun.

• Up early; burned some new ISOs to give them a whirl. Branched ooo-build so the VCL plug cleanups can continue on HEAD unencumbered. Started some nice cleanup.
• Out to the hospital for blood tests with J, on to The Star at Lidgate for lunch with Bruce & Anne; back. Finished the NLD install, filed a swathe of yast2 bugs.
• ODI meeting, people gagging for road-maps; quested for a PM for OO.o, happened upon Christine. Started hashing out a plan of attack beyond the immediate fire-fighting.
• Upgraded misc. packages on ooo.x.c for Arek's source / binary snapshot plan. Recieved an unfeasibly large/heavy and amusingly designed recognition award thing in an immense box - a nice thought.
• Dinner, tried to organis trucking things from Undean's house to ours at the weekend; long call with Federico. Re-worked lots of ooo-build patches so they all apply, started a test build.

• Up early; H. appears to have learned to point with just her index finger over-night; neat. Mail suckage.
• The unexpected honour of becoming a 'DE' arrived - my attempt to actually distinguish myself, confirmed my suspicion that no-one bothers to reads this stuff by appending my general disapprobation with fishy food.
• OO.o's KDE VCLPlug looking quite good, at least I get the KDE crash dialog when it dies on startup. Pruned 7 months off the diary - to shrink it down to an acceptable xup-load. Phone call with Andreas Jaeger & Chris Schlaeger - about SuSE 9.2 OO.o features, and chased the travel agent a bit.
• Finally got the KDE plug stuff working, with some cut & paste evilness necessary for input handling. Amazed to see dlopen'd libraries with static QWidget holders causing Qt to seg-fault on exit; hmm.
• Got some very helpful links from Caolan on C++ symbol visibility and improving performance with gcc and OO.o Did some quick readelf -S foo on libsvx, libsvt and it seems that they are approaching 50% symbol strings / tables - [ being 14MB and 6MB respectively ].
• Out to Emily's presentation on her time working in New York for Metro Ministries - impressive stuff. Said thanks and goodbye to Kevin & Carol.

• Up early; mail foo. More travel wrestling. Wrote some talk proposals for OOoCon. Got the mail under control. Hacked on the KDE NWF integration into VCLPlug - a little re-factoring necessary - but going ok.
• Double whammy of back-to-back conference calls; made good progress. More work on the KDE plug, compiles, few minor link problems to solve.
• Martin H. of OO.o / release engineering fame, started a blog, and cws-announce appeared simultaneously as a mailing list and RSS: wow. cf. Planet OO.o.
• Dr Silverstone phoned - no evidence of Hep. A-C, all tests clear, but liver antibodies halved in level but still extremely high - possibly glandular fever: more blood-tests scheduled.
• Dave & Vicki around for a nice roast dinner; interesting chap, with some heart-rending tales. Bed late.

• Up early, dealt with H. while J. lay in; out to Church, Ron speaking - interesting, albeit curtailed somewhat early. Bored Chris to death with Op-Amp basics for his course.
• Home for lunch, the girls: Claire, Anne & Yvonne arrived - chicken Ceaser salad & cheese-cake lunch. Sat around chatting happily most of the afternoon - sad to see them to so soon. Very interested in their accounts of the Glastonbury (Pilton Pop Festival) 'She-pee' system cf. here - not for prudes.
• Tea, showed Julia Wikipedia - It's a nice thing, it's got ponies in it.
• Gordon sermon on Daniel 7 - "The Son of Man - Reason to Belive in Jesus Christ".
  • Time is the enemy of the false prophet; predictions from 100 years ago; Charles Dual - a petition to President McKinley, his recommendation as office of patents everything that can be invented, has been invented. Harry Warner (of Warner Brother fame) - Why not add a sound track to the movies - Harry responded: Who in the world wants to hear actors talk. Erwin Fischer of Yale - October 16, 1929 Stocks have reached what looks like a permanantly high plateau, just weeks before the massive crash / great depression.
  • What are the foundations of your faith ? is it really so ? just a handful of pillar convictions;
    • The unshakable confidence - that nothing else is true, Meaningless, meaningless says the teacher, everything is meaningless.
    • The testimony of creation - the more I examine the universe and the details of it's architecture - the more evidence I find that the universem ust have known we are coming: the anthropic principle.
    • The incomperable work of Christ - the evidence for the resurrection - who paid for their eye-witness testimony with martyrdom.
    • Towering over it all - the testament of prophecy. Jesus' teaching too - Lazarus / the rich man separated by an unbreachable chasm; Luke 16: They have Moses and the Prophets - let them listen to them: it doesn't get any better. But if someone from the dead goes to them ? ... they will not be convinced - even if someone rises from the dead.
  • 456 old testament texts - predictive of the Christ and his work. Many scholars list 65 passages, as the most obvious & clear. Copies of Micah pre-dating Christ, Isaiah 53 - born to die - the Isaiah scroll from Quamran 700 years before Christ - there in the text; almost more vividly than the Gospels.
  • Sir Isaac Newton, after he finished his Principia age 28; what should he work on now ? turned to Biblical prophecy, 1.3 million words on prophecy - most on the book of Daniel. Some conclusions somewhat speculative, would hang the entire truth of Christianity on the book of Daniel. The passage breaks down into the vision, and the angel's interpretation.
  • The passage not utterly transparent, several sermons on it coming; but 3 hermenutical keys.
    • Daniel chapter 7 next to chapter 2, context is king, decisive; chapter 2 is crictical for understanding 7.
    • Partial parallel with chapter 8.
    • Internal logic, once we've worked out the beasts - we want to work out who that Son of Man is.
  • People often miss out by separating the book into two pieces - which can be unhelpful. Ch 1-6, Chapter 7 onwards not chronoligically arranged, ending in 4 visions. The best literature though has several outlines - beyond this simple separation. Begins with Hebrew, ends with Hebrew, but the center is Aramaic. The center is concentric, with an ABC CBA pattern. The key to Ch 7, is Chapter 2.
  • The interpretation - vs. 17 The 4 beasts are 4 kingdoms, followed by the eternal kingdom of God. Animals have been used as mascots / symbols for nations forever: the American Eagle, the Lion of Judah etc. The beasts are all predatory - seemingly the results of genetic engineering: Lions with wings, horrifying beasts - that destroy with voracious appetite. Each representing a kingdom, parallel with the layers of the statue in ch 2.
  • The first beast: A Lion with wings - in Babylon a transparent image: the coat of arms of the Babylonian empire; King of the beasts + the eagle. Also reflected in Jeremiah, comparing Nebuchadnezzar to a Lion, Ezekiel (17) describing Babylon as an Eagle. Confirm that it is Babylon by Ch 2: You oh king are the king of kings ... in your hands has he placed mankind and the beasts of the field, and the birds of the air ... You are that head of Gold. King of the beasts, and birds. The first beast is Babylon.
  • Now the rest makes sense; God judged Nebuchadnezzar by mental illness - expelled from human community - cf. Daniel 4 Let his mind be changed from that of a man and let him be given the mind of an animal, till seven times pass by for him. etc. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird. Then he was restored to a man. What Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream as an idol - super human in his eyes; Daniel the believer sees as a degraded beast.
  • The 2nd beast which looked like a bear. It was raised up on one of it's sides. An image for the Medo-Persian empire; where the Persians were more dominant than the Medes. Compare the parallel vision in chapter 8: another vision, zeroing in on the middle 2 empires: using other animals to make the point. This time the Medes & Persians depicted as a Ram - with two horns - one of the horns was longer than the other (dominance of the Persians over the Medes); 8:20 the two horned ram you saw - represents the Kings of Media and Persia.
  • The 3rd beast - a souped up leopard; 4 wings like those of a bird. The next great empire - Alexander the Great; pioneered blitzkrieg warfare, his Macedonain empire, ruled to Pakistan from Greece - an empire hardly equalled since. Again Ch 8. describes the same as a Goat - with one large horn - crossing the whole earth without touching the ground - defeated the ram of the Medes & Persians. Chapter 8 clearly identifies the shaggy goat as the king of Greece. Alexander the Great died at 33; his kingdom among his 4 generals into 4 parts. the 4 kingdoms that will emerge from his nation but will not have the same strength - lots of infighting.
  • The 4th beast - Rome; iron teeth - in Daniel 2 the legs. A picture of the ruthless brutality of the 4th kingdom, whose architecture we admire from a distance, but under whose rule we would not have wanted to live. It's efficiency made it's raw power more terrifying: 'Rome was made up of a bunch of thugs'. The 5th king - that follows; In Daniel 2 and 7 the 5th part, has two phases - legs iron and clay - mixed. A subsequent development adding clay with iron - not something radically new. Daniel 7 a 10 horned beast: Rome; and then the little horn.
  • The Kingdom of God, also appearing (Daniel 2:34-35) in 2 phases - a rock was cut out, but not by human hands (God's initiative) seemingly weak and unimpressive, rock: a despised material cf. gold. Phase 2 - it then strikes the statue on the feet of iron and clay, smashing it, and grows to be a huge mountain that filled the earth. The Kingdom represented in 2 phases - a despised first advent; then hitting this idol and wiping it out.
  • Same 2 stage business in Daniel 7 - the Saints given over to the persecution by the little horn; then all of a sudden the blasphemies of the little horn provoke final judgement.
  • Jesus uses the name The Son of Man 81 times - not a self deprecating name; Jesus' favorite sermon topic - The Kingdom of God referred to 100 times. cf. vs 13,14.
  • So may references to make it clear what Son of Man he is referring to: Matthew 24: at that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky ... They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky ... gather the elect from the four winds cf. 4 winds in Daniel 7:1, Coming with the clouds Daniel 7:13.
  • In claiming to be the Son of Man, claiming to be God, not just a man. Daniel 7:13 - one like a son of man - not just a human, Ezekiel was a son of man; but 'like' - he is; but represents something else. Another human-like figure in Daniel 7 - sitting in a chair in a throne, clothing, hair: God the father. Who is this one like the son of man - he too is God; riding on the clouds very distinctive: Psalm 68:4, Isaiah 19:1 and others.
  • When Judgement is rendered - what does the Ancient of Days give to the Son of Man - glory and soverign power; and all people worshiped him. In the book of Daniel - people would rather be burned alive than worship a man; Daniel would rather be thrown to the Lions, than bow the knee to Darius - you only worship God: the Son of Man - is God.
  • When Jesus told the High Priest he was the Son of Man, he tore his clothes and said - this is blasphemy, deserving of death. (Matthew 26) - blasphemy to those that did not accept his claim.
  • Many of us have taken classes at college - where we hear that in the Roman period Israel was crawling with Messiah pretenders; Jesus was just one of many. True, why ? because of Daniel - the Quamran community knew that the Messiah was coming soon, during the Roman period. Josephus writing later in the 1st Centuary - identifies Rome as the 4th kingdom - knew the Messiah would be coming, if he hadn't already. Ditto 2nd Ezras.
  • When they saw John the Baptist - and (waiting expectantly) thought it was him; asked him; he said no: I'm not the Christ but among you stands one, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. So - who fulfills the predicions of the Christ who would come during that empire ?
    • Thudus - claimed to be the messiah, duped a large number to follow him into the Jordan, promising the waters would part at his command. The Romans were not impressed, de-capitated him before he could perform his miracle.
    • Judas the Galillean - led his fellow Jews in a tax revolt, the Romans killed him.
    • An Egyptian prophet, gathered 30,000 followers at the mount of olives, and promised that the walls of Jerusalem would fall. The Romans slaughtered him.
    • Menachem sized Masada, and captured Jerusalem for a while, then was assasinated by his followers.
  • Never heard of these ? only one who was born at that time, to whom the scriptures point, who fulfilled the predictions of prophecy. Jn 5 These are the scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.
  • Some other explanation ? how could the predictions be so specific ? Must have been written after Jesus ? at the end of the 19th Century there were scholars that thought so, written 70AD - too detailed, no other way to explain it. The problem: we now have copies of Daniel, from Qumran, one 120BC, another from the 1st C BC.
  • Who is Jesus ? he is who he claims to be, the Son of Man who came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as the ransom for many.

• Up several times in the night with the dreaded itch. For reasons that are extremely unclear to me, after a few days / hours of working my ssh-agent seems to forget my private key. Also, emacs grep mode starts to behave very erratically, sometimes wanting a passphrase, sometimes not; most annoying.
• Took a photograph of Raul's VCLPlug / gtk+ file-sel integration:
  
  
• Fixed some obscenely long filter descriptions by auto-chopping them, fixed image previews.
• Back to bed. Up later; into Cambridge to close a B&B ISA - aggregating all one's savings into one pot for impending mort-gage.
• Back for lunch; slept much of the afternoon, cooked / Martin around for dinner - nice home-made pizza & watched The Return of the King. Bed late.

• Up in the night, re-started some builds, back to bed. Up early; breakfast - left downstairs to the sound of rapid crawling, then banging on the closed door. Pulled mail. J. & H. popped by on their way out - H. obsessed by postcard from Sean featuring, a Penguin family; hmm.
• Positive conference call with various OO.o related people. Skimmed some of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, to get a grip of Raymond's position.
• Getting a number of evolution address book hangs - perhaps something odd with my setup. Nice soup for lunch; misc. medical tests all report normality; good.
• Spent a while merging Raul & Amit's gtk+ file selector work up; works nicely with the new VCLPlug code. Chased up the help desk to see why no bugs get escalated to me - perhaps OO.o is suddenly amazingly robust; hmm. Interesting to see the help-desk conversations logged in tickets.

• Up in the night - new evolution snapshots: great. Fixed some build sillies, left it building, back to bed.
• Up late, no breakfast - back-ported some CUPS fixes. Included a fixed e-iterator.h into the OO.o patch-set (omitting the use of the 'delete' operator) so we can build the OO.o integration against released e-d-s; ugh.
• Up-loaded slides from my Linuxtag talks:
  • Hacking OpenOffice.org: html, tar.gz
  • Gnome 2.6 and the Linux desktop: html tar.gz
• Out for an ultrasound scan in Cambridge - apparently a healthy looking liver (pretty odd looking for all that though). Finished the OLS paper at some length.
• Pork loins & honey & mustard sauce for dinner - yum; called someone about more travel; eventually located the 24-bitness problem causing all my icons to go multi-coloured and loose 1/3 of their size. Bed.

• Up lateish, vclplug build finished, fixed an annoying buglet - and suddenly something ~working; nice. Now to split out the Qt work into a plugin.
• Private Eye arrived; in view of England's recent [some sport] defeat - a cartoon of a woman visiting a counsellor; caption: Lie back and try not to think of England.; also Free Iraq - with every issue.
• More hacking, lunch, off to see Mario & Teresa; back for a conference call. Nice phone-call from Vance explaining the Remedy / Bugzilla thing - apparently just using Bugzilla works.
• Conference call at 8pm - constructive. Bed.

• Couldn't sleep - up at 2am, hacking bits back into vcl where necessary. Spent half an hour manually removing magic '$Revision' etc. headers from CVS files - these seem oh so clever, until you create a patch and check it into cvs. Got the patch down to only 70k lines.
• Poked at OLS / LaTeX.

• Up early; lots of mail. Great to see the calc row-limit exorcised in HEAD, lots of 64bit fixes, etc.
• Hammered on the vcl plugin back-porting project; wrote a set of notes; suffered from cvs diff being somewhat odd. Released ooo-build-1.1.61 with a lot of small fixes.
• Phone call with Najid, booked more flying. Reconciled the first 138 files, of ~200 in vcl (from my 100k line patch), before hitting stuff from psprint that needs work.
• Eventually got a set of psprint / vcl stuff compiling, and started on the interesting link errors. Hopefully tomorrow something nice will arrive.
• Dinner with the sweetheart, washed up - did some more serious research for OLS paper.

• Up early; to NCC; spoke on Love does not insist on its own way - loving people more clearly a priority. Good to be encouraged by Calais back briefly from mission in Ibiza, and John, and meet Dave & Vickie for the 1st time.
• Back, quick dinner, slept a couple of hours; J. luckily sleep too with the pregnancy. Up, off to Ron & Iris' to help swallow some strawberries / scones & cream left over from yesterday - lovely to see Ron's work-shop and emerging carved / turned creations.
• Back, bangers & mash; Gordon sermon on Daniel 6 - "Our advocate":
  • Disciples questions - motivated by a desire to understand. 1 exception - teach us on a subject of need: Lord - teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples - embarassing to ask ? Luke 11.
  • We need to be taught to pray too. Often the result of temptation is to destroy our prayer life; our communion with God.
  • The same lesson in chapter 6 as earlier: how to be in the world, but not of it. Darius appoints 120 satraps, with 3 administrators over them - one of them Daniel - plucked from retirement: age ~80. Much of the theocarcy of Israel's life inapplicable to today - a non-theocracy, under common grace. Daniel, very applicable though.
  • Extensive parallelism between Joseph and Daniel:
    • Both kidnapped from Israel to a foreign land, taken from their families as youths.
    • Both end up serving in the court of the royal family - Pharoah vs. the King.
    • Joseph kidnapped - under the authority of one of the King's Eunuch's, Daniel, Arioch - commander of King's guard.
    • Both are described as handsom - the bible doesn't often bother to note that.
    • Both given a new name.
    • Neither eat from the table of the King.
    • Both find favour in the eyes of Potiphar, the King.
    • The Pagan king is troubled by nightmares; and calls all the wise men in to enterpret his dreams - none of the wise men can pull it off - at last, the captive from Israel is called in; and starts by acknowledging that he cannot do it - but God will; very similar.
    • As a result of the successful interpretation, both rise to very prominent positions - indeed 2nd in command.
    • Both also, falsely charged of corruption - God rescued both from potential execution - both were uncompromisingly faithful to God, with integrity.
  • An example par-excellence of the fulfillment of the covenant with Abraham. God blesses Abraham so that: through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed. Joseph: God blesses him with kidnapping, exile, prison - but ultimately uses the circumstances for the saving of many lives. Same of Daniel. In Daniel 9: he read from
  • Jeremiah 29: This is what the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel says to those I carry into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ... seek the peace and prosperity of the city into which I carry you in exile - be a blessing. Not to operate as a counter-revolutionary and overthrow the goverment, but there as ambassadors, thrive, prosper, and be a channel for blessing - and especially pray.
  • Daniel - a spirit of excellence - trustworthy, and neither corrupt nor negligent. The satraps accountable to these 3 so The King may not suffer loss checks and balances to avoid corruption. The satraps hope was that Daniel with his access to power - would surely mis-use it; but they found nothing to discredit him. It was once said of Harry Truman - when he would send from the oval office a personal letter, wishing someone a happy birthday, he would re-imburse the general accounting office for the 3 cent stamp: Daniel in a nutshell.
  • The same challenge in the NT: 1 Thes 4., 1 Peter 2: Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.
  • Gordon's first summer job - with American Science and Engineering - a Physics major - at interview shown the landing radar / equipment for the moon landings; told all his friends. When he arrived - transfered to Biology - the company also working on high-school science, prividing them with gerbils. Worked for weeks, alone, in a massive room, filled with gerbil cages, with glass window for the supervisor to watch, cleaning out gerbil cages morning -> night. Read this passage - and got into contest with himself - shorter and shorter lunch-breaks; making those gerbils the fittest and cleanest anywhere, occasionally the supervisor would look up from the magazine he was reading and see him working. But one day, in came the supervisor of the supervisor - and noticed him cleaning cages like a crazy. Next day, he was transfered to more interesting physics expermients - and the supervisor was cleaning the cages. One of the rare cases where God allows judgement to occur in this life, and he was grateful - not commending the attitude of heart at the time - but commending dilligence and integrity.
  • "go the extra mile" - The palestine postal service - could impress people into service take a package 1 mile; (Matthew 5) 'you go 2' - over-obey. Daniel had such an attitude - from his relationship with God; where did that come from - the habit of prayer.
  • We worship a God of the miraculous - incomprehensibly powerful; prayer not an act of resignation; Jesus - sweat like drops of blood. Real prayer - not just accepting whatever is happening - it's rebellion against the status quo. Not auto-suggestion: going along to get along, but subverting the world-order: thy kingdom come, thy will be done - and so we plead with him. Gen 18: Is anything too hard for the Lord ? Jeremiah 32: nothing is too hard for you. James 4:2 You do not have, because you do not ask God.
  • A God that can stop the mouths of lions. Maybe there was something wrong with the lions - drugged, over-fed, toothless, old ? the text says once Daniel was rescued - the false accusers are devoured before they reached the floor - starving lions.
  • Darius says: He is the living God a phrase often used in connection with idolatory - somewhat amusing: Jeremiah 10 But the Lord is the true God; he is the living God.
  • Darius bequeathed to the world the idea of religious toleration - the nation that is now Iran - allowed all the captive peoples to return home and re-build their temples. So the law these administrators are coaxing him into signing - is against his practice. Possibly his practice was a result of having made this mistake ? a tragedy that the modern nation of Iran, that gave the world this freedom, now does not have it itself - conversion from Islam a captial offence.
  • The satraps thought Daniel couldn't go without prayer for 30 days; they badly mis-judged him - he couldn't go without for one day. What's with Daniel for his open prayer - prays 3 times a day, Psalm 55: the most intense prayer: morning, noon & night, cf. Jesus in the garden of Gesthemany - praying 3 times.
  • Why pray towards Jerusalem - publicly. 1 Kings 8: When the enemy takes them captive ... and if they have a change of heart and repent ... and if they turn back to you ... and pray to you, ... toward the temple I have built for your name ... uphold their cause, forgive them and cause their conquerors to show them mercy. Daniel is cashing in on that promise, cf. his prayer in Daniel 9 Oh my God, do not delay.
  • If we have the priviledge of affecting God, and man, and history, and current events - then let us pray: Pray in the spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers

• Up early; off to Aldeburgh. Chatted to Bruce & Anne, Sue & Clive arrived for lunch; and set too making their rings with Bruce: gold this time.
• J. cut my hair; slept for a couple of hours; pleasant tea, drove home. Worked on talk for tomorrow, bed late.

• Up lateish, dropped a sample in; pulled mail, misc. code massaging, call from Ultrasound dept. of Camb. Lea - prolongued Norwich Union phoning extracted some money; great. Filed a number of evo. month/view calendar bugs; started a re-build of the split-up NWF stuff need that done before re-hashing it.
• Massaged some papers for OOoCon / OLS, poked at some evo and OO.o integration bugs; did some misc testing. Great to see Petr doing yet more nice packaging / hacking work.

• Up early; off to Tesco to await pick-up truck, took the car to the garage to have it drained. Back for breakfast; shunted mail around.
• Talked with the lads on IRC; lots of exciting OO.o work / progress - Petr doing great stuff. Pleased to see the Mono 1.0 announcement - the culmination of so much hard work and great hacking effort.
• Got Ashwanth's preliminary .123 support committed; still some major refactoring of the old/ugly existing code required.
• Nice phone-call from Dr. Silverstone - apparently definately a hepititus; liver enzyme level expected to be ~40, was ~550; interesting, a sign of liver stress apparently; another appointment in a few hours.
• Interesting chat to the doctor & medical student, confident in some sort of Hepatitis, dispatched to ultrasound, stool, blood tests. The blood phials are (apparently) evacuated - which helps get the stuff out of ones arm; nice. Some impressive rain today too.
• Finished splitting up the 10,000 line VCL / native-widget back-port to 1.1.x - somewhat disappointed with it's lack of correlation to the HEAD work. Poked at g++ to try get it generating lists of private members. Installed latex to try to write an OLS paper well after the deadline.

• An unusual passage to hear preached; several controversies arising: between congregationalists and presbeterians. A 2nd controversy - how to interpret old testament prophecy, the church age and the return of Christ - this text particularly featured between the traditional reformed interpretation, and Hal Lindsay, Tim LeHay who have made 'dispensationalism' popular; his 12th volume 'left behind' series. 3rd controversy: how much of the old testament do we still have to obey; 613 laws: every one still applicable ? All these hinge around Acts 15.
  • Congregationalism: what is it ? why in the US, are there ~no congregational churches outside New-England and ~the converse inside. Comes from Acts 15, the settlement history, and their basic similarities. Had a hop-scotch missionary arrangement; until the kissing stopped and the argument starts. Both agree on the Westminster Confession of faith, so no difference in their faith; just on church government. All agree, that God is not encouraging the notion of an entirely autonomous local church; instead a great example of mutual inter-dependance.
  • The controversy appealed to the Church at Jerusalem - we hear about Apostles and Elders but in terms of their leadership, they seem to be the same. Peter - a fellow elder.
  • A formal meeting of the elders to consider the issue; a 'presbetary' vs. 'a synod'. Note - the total lack of prayer then a miraculous revalation; instead they weighed evidence, heard both sides of the argument, the scriptures; then vs. 7 there was much discussion. Lots of emphasis on what God had been doing, and had done. After hearing the evidence - the final standard of authority: the summary: the word of God. Amos 9:11,12, at the end significant authority: It seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us vs. 28.
  • Everyone agrees to this point; Presbyterians belive the presbetary have standing authority, over the other churches, including ones they don't necessarily attend, and can make decisions that are binding on the whole congregation. Congregationlists say this was invited authority - the reason it was being made in Jerusalem is because Antioch couldn't solve the problem, and it's only because the troublemakers had come from Jerusalem, then it was fitting for them to see if indeed it was true v24 we have heard that some went out from us without our authorisation and disturbed you. Also the letter was sent to only those churches that might have been confused - not all churches.
  • An example of Gordon's ex. congregational church in Gloster MA. from the records; one predecessor wanted to leave the church; the congregation agreed it was time for him to move on. In a decision of that magnitude they called a council of other sister church leaders / elders. When the churches met, they said: we don't think the pastor should leave. So the church: Lanesville Congregation Church accepted that counsel The way of a fool seems right to him, but a wise man listens to advice. So a reluctant church, kept a reluctant pastor for another set of years. The next year revival broke out - 1869, had more people converted than in the previous 5 years put together. We should often seek the counsel of other churches in matters.
• The second issue: Dispensationalism vs. the traditional 'reformed' or protestant understanding.
  • The Schofeld reference Bible perhaps the most effective tool for popularising this view of the timetable for Jesus' return, and how after his return there might be a period of tribulation, and after that a 1000 year reign, or millenium of Christ. That teaching behind Tim LaHey's and others' (12 volume) view etc. hinges on very few verses, one of them Acts 15.
  • Schofeld has this note, attached to James' speech: Dispensationally this is the most important passage in the New Testament. Gordon agrees, it's a good testing ground of the theory. In speaking of our dispenstaion brothers and sisters, not in a condemnatory way; most is great - the reality of Jesus' return ought to be an encouragement.
  • When James is quoting Amos - After this, I will return and rebuild David's fallen tent; they say 'After this' means the church age; this is Jesus speaking now: 'I will return', and will 're-build the fallen tent of David'. - 586BC was the last time a descendant of David sat on the throne. The next descendant of David who claimed to be King was whom: Jesus Christ. Herod claimed he was a descendant of David, but was an Edomite - at the very same time, Magi from the East came to ask where the real King was born. When crucified the superscription: This is the King of the Jews Jesus is David's greater son, the next King.
  • But according to the Schofeld reference bible he doens't get his Kingdom until the millenium; and only then will the gentiles come in along with the Jews.
  • But if that's what James meant - he must have been completely confused: he was saying it was a good thing to let the gentiles in; but if the prophecy he quotes doesn't apply until Jesus' return - it's irrelevant.
  • It so happens the vocabulary in I will return not found elsewhere; Amos 9: in the Hebrew, not 'returning', but 'restoring'. Reformed perspective - that happened when Jesus came. My Kingdom is not of this world - but it doesn't mean he doesn't have one; it's more escalated & expansive than David's. After Jesus' resurrection he says All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me we don't have to wait until Millenium times.
• The 3rd issue: which laws of the 613 apply:
  • Not so easy to tell. Today's question: Is it possible to be a faithful Jew, and a faithful Christian ? - of course it is. Ironically in Antioch, the opposite question, is it possible to be a Gentile and also a Christian.
  • The Judaisers, Unless you are circumcised you cannot be saved wisely rejected by the Elders; with 4 rules, omitting circumcision. The reason is about what circumcision means; not just 1 of 612 others; Was the commitment that symbolised commitment to the whole of the law Genesis 17: you are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you.
  • What is promised from that; why that particular part of the anatomy ? why not a tattoo or something ? the Abrahamic covenant has as it's quintessential promise - a miraculous seed of Abraham through whom the world would be blessed.
  • Everyone else but the Philistines practices circumcision, but used it as a rite of passsage for adolescent boys going through puberty. So - the joke is, that you would use a puberty rite for a bloke 100 years old (for Abraham).
  • Since Christ has come; Gal 3: The seed of Abraham is Jesus Christ - if it has come, we don't need a sign that points forward to him.
  • Then the 4 requirements, 3 dietary:
    • Abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from meat of strangled animals - very odd, such emphasis on food, unless you consider the context: not only the relationship to the law, but how can we get along.
    • How can we have table fellowship: Gal 2, upset over this very question. Gentiles, having just come out of their idolatorous background; abstain from food sacrificed to idols [ hard to come by nowadays ]. The issue pressing: no refrigerators, grocery stores, apart from the temples: the Markets adjunct buildings to the temple.
    • Abandoning food sacrificed to idols => not going near the temples. Like an ex. Alcholic agreeing not to have his business meetings in a bar. Paul talks in 1 Cor 8, 10 - and takes a more cautious approach.
    • Avoid blood: later Rabbinic judaism thought just get rid of the blood in the animal; in the ancient context - not allowed to eat meat with the 'life blood' in it, with it coursing through its veins. ie. you must slaughter animals before eating them. Might seem obvious, but not so - the bachaus cult at the time of Acts - they would sink their teeth into the quivering flesh of the animal, devouring it alive. Arnobius: To show yourself full of the divinity and majesty of the God, you demolish with gory mouths the intestines of goats, bleating for mercy.
    • For the Christian - this cannot be, and anti- idolatory theme. The law of love. Paul in Romans 14; I am fully convinced that no food is unclean in itself ie. you can eat a live goldfish - (give thanks first), But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean. If your brother is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love. - very broadly applicable.
    • Finally - the 4th item; from Sexual immorality. Is the moral law still effective - you bed. Works are not meritious, but they are mandatory. Not saved _by_ works, but _for_ them. It is by grace you have been saved.
    • 2 Categories of laws: those that are fulfilled in Christ; many of them are fulfilled because they pointed forward to him; he is the passover lamb that takes away from the sin of the world. The sacrificial system, the theocracy, the punishments that go with a theocracy, set aside My Kingdom is not of this world. But the Moral requirements not set aside - since God's moral character never changes.
    • The categories can be distinguished in various ways - some are more important: justice, mercy, faithfullness - that the Pharises were neglecting.
    • So why mention this problem: sexual immorality; because it was the problem: many understood that honouring parents, protecting innocent life etc. What made Christians stand out was their view of marriage; one scholar: It has been said that chastity was the only completely new virtue that Christianity brought into the world.
    • It ran right across the sexual hysteria and obsession of the time. In villa's the art decoration was like modern internet pornography; an assault on the home-owner against any sense of modesty. Connected with paganism particularly a problem; Revalation 2: the church of Purganum enticed Israel to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by committing sexual immorality; two go hand in hand.
    • The official worship encouraged it. Juvenal says: At what temple does a prostitute not sit - part of the religious experience. Even among the best of the moralists there was this dichotomy.
    • No wonder marriage was falling apart: Seneca: Women were married to be divorced, and divorced to be married in 2nd C. Only God has the right to tell you what to do with your body.
    • Flee sexual immorality - all X rated theatre, the temple, it was everywhere - living as a Christian was counter-cultural.
    • I can't give my wife very much; - many men might wish to bring a better salary, more affection - but one thing we can give: our fidelity. Not just outward behavior, but matters of the heart. You have heard it said, do not commit adultery, but I tell you anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
    • Job said I've made a covenant with my eyes, not to look lustfully at a woman. Saint Augustine - had lived a life of Roman immorality - had done it all; when he turned around, almost the next day: walking along the sidewalk, he meets one of his former girls, and she lights up, her makeup glistens with the joy of meeting him; he averts his glance - she cries out; Augustine - its I. He breaks out into a full run, crying out over his shoulder: yes, but it is not I. behold the old has gone, the new has come - therefore flee sexual immorality, all other sins a man commits are outside his body, do you not know your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.

• In contrast to many broad churches, it seems there is little room for discussion / differences of opinion; indeed - when faced with a tough applied Christian morality question; the quandry seems to be not knowing what the Church's position is, rather than any suggestion that this might be an area in which we may all legitimately and charitably differ / wrestle with applying our faith.
• The LDS apparently have a fixed view on the literal creation which is interesting. People would also tend not to choose / prefer a church whose style fitted their temperament but go to the nearest.
• The Brigham Young: As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become. is still in vogue / an accurate doctrinal statement.
• Seemed to be some feeling that the LDS were in some sense especially singled out as 'non-christian' by main-stream churches; whereas in fact this is not so: the Jehovah's Witnesses would be one obvious similar example. Similarly amazed at her level of support for George Bush - impressed with his political skill.
• Seemed to be a lack of awareness of other faiths, despite spending time teaching missionaries in Pakistan had only the sketchiest awareness of Muhammed's life and teaching, gained from a popular film.
• No well crafted polemic for Muslims; Islam bearing several superficial similarities; but having a firm Prophecy termination clause.
• Seemed to be a lack of awareness of the truth and exclusivity claims of other popular creeds; such as the JW's, the Roman Catholic church in a vague sense.

• The message of Palm Sunday about God's concern not for the immediate circumstances, as how we deal with them: That true peace comes only from cleaning our hearts.
• God does care about our circumstances: Isaiah 63: In all their distress, he too was distressed, and the angel of his presence saved them. In his love and mercy he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them. But the circumstances are not the real problem; our sinful reaction to them is. As difficult as our background, pressures etc. are, none of it is as tough as how we respond in a way that is pleasing to God.
• The outward circumstances of Jesus' disciples were horrific - subjugation to a foreign occupying army, and were all getting worse. The Romans whose literature we admire, whose laws we have inherited, whose art and architeture was amazing. The Romans were percieved as thugs whose brutality knew no limit; and as embodying a culture that was decadent, idolatorous and pernicious. The Jews of Jesus' day at a cross-roads: what to do about it ?
• In the minds of many - the obvious path was political; a King / General that would ride into the city and deliver it. The alternative view, that that Jesus was presenting: Israel & every single one of us must change our loyalty to Christ, but also recognise that his kingdom is not of this world - and offers a a different, inner peace that passes all understanding.
• What is our greatest and most urgent problem ? the job you just lost ? the doctor's diagnosis so discouraging ? rejection by your parents ? - or something inward ?
• Israel's sufferings were grevious; severe and would soon become horrendous. In just 40 years, the city would be destroyed, plundered then levelled. 100k Jews would be taken captive and reduced to servitude. 1million would be put to death. Forseeing this, Jesus wept as he approached it.
• More mundanely - the economic situation was oppressive, reducing many to destitution and servitude; adding the taxes up, comes to 30-40% of the average citizen, in terms of the nominal (minimum) tax to pay [ mostly subsistence famers ]. The taxation was not to fund local libraries, hospitals and public welfare, but to fund the armies of the oppressing power, to enrich Rome, to help our enemies.
• The authorities would franchise taxation - privatising it; they would sell the right to raise taxes to the higest bidder. The real tax well in excess of 30-40%.
• Pontious Pilate - Philo claims was inflexible and relentless; he had the power over life and death in all Israel. Pilate had 5 cohorts of calvary and a ~limitness number of soldiers from Syria. His ability to use them is well documented. Pilate plundered the temple, had the priestly robes in his authority - they would be lent out by him. He plundered the temple to use the money to make a 25 mile aquaduct for Jerusalem. The citizenry were outraged & demonstrated in 10s of thousands; he ordered his soldiers to go into the crowd with concealed weapons; and then at a signal slaughter them.
• Pilate insisted in bringing in Roman military standards to Jerusalem - done by night. The Jews followed him, begging him to respect their customs, and remove these images violating the 2nd commandments. When they were threatened they simultanously lay down exposing their necks so they could be killed: we would rather die than submit to your idolatory. Pilate eventually relented.
• It's not difficult to believe that Christians are marginalised in today's culture. But what is the solution ? we are indeed called to be leaven in our society - but is that the real problem ? If we only knew what would bring you peace - to each heart.
• The background of Hannukah, Passover and riding on a colt; 1st Passover:
  • Why were all these people going there ? why was Jesus going there. Nearly passover - one of the 3 ceremonies when everyone had to go to Jerusalem, 500k inhabitents -> 3 million at Passover.
  • The real message of passover - mostly lost, People assumed Egypt => Rome, just a liberation theology tract; favouring the oppressed. What better parallel ?
  • The Romans viewed the celebration of passover very suspiciously, and created a massive fortress right outside & above the temple.
  • The real lesson of passover is not about liberation - but the 10th plague, when the Angel of destruction went over Egypt and without regard to status and wiped out every 1st born Ex. 12:29 From the first born of the Pharoh, who sat on the throne, to the first-born of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon, and the first-born of the live-stock as well.
  • Why did the Israelites survive ? - not because they deserved any different fate to it's neighbours, but only because God saw the blood and did not permit the destroyer to enter. It is only the blood that allows God to protect us from the wrath of God.
  • Passover points not to political liberation, but to our need of a redemption that we do not deserve.
• Hannukah - not a lot in scripture about it, Jesus once celebrated it.
  • Another political liberation ? 200 years ago the Greeks were oppressing the Jews - Antiocus Epiphanies - 'an epiphany - an appearance of Zeus'. Tried to eradicate the Jewish customs: he banned circumcision, outlawed the Sabbath: lazy to take 1 day off in 7; replaced it with a monthly celebration of his birthday - with the required eating of pig flesh.
  • What did God do about all this ? apparently used the guerilla warfware of Judas Macabeeus to liberate Jerusalem. Judas cleansed the temple where Antiocus had been into the holy of holies and sacrificed a pig. Then his brother entered the city on a donkey - and liberated it. This is why they welcomed him in the same way: 'liberate the city !'
  • The OT background, shows that individuals wanted to lay claim to a city, they would normally ride in on a pack-animal. David vs. Adnoija - thwarted him by making Solomon ride in on David's own mule; not a stallion (a usuper?), but a peaceful thing - the rightful owner; cf. Zechariah 9. A pilgrimage festival - everyone walks into Jerusalem; even the lame - if at all possible, people who had ridden all the way would dismount and walk, or even crawl rather than ride. One who on that day rode: because he was the rightful king of Israel.
  • And they layed down their cloaks - the shirts of their backs: everything belongs to you. Jesus goes - like a bee-line, and cleanses the temple: the shocker - what does he cleanse it of ? not like Judas of Greek idols. Jesus cleanses it not of Roman idols or insignia, but the symbols of Israel's self-righteousness. My house will be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers.
• Jeremiah's Den of robbers - people thinking that by going through the motions, God would be fine.
  • The Jews of Jeremiah's time had bought into the gospel of 'cheap grace' with a vengance: You can continue in your life of sin, as long as you go through some religious motions:
  • 'Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, "We are safe"-safe to do all these detestable things? Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you? But I have been watching! declares the LORD. - Jeremiah 7.
  • Jesus rebuked their false security.
• Our real problem - the tyrany of sin; I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin ... but if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed John 8:34-36
• People feel at peace often from ignorance of the danger they are in. Their biggest problem is they're offending a holy God, their most severe spiritual need is, that they do not know thier spiritual need.
• Park Street Church should be called Sinners Anonymous - if you don't think you need a new King in the throne of your heart - you've come to the wrong place.
• The sin you most hate has to be in your own heart; otherwise it's your own self-serving bias and self delusion. eg. merit based pay: a recepie for serious discontent: 86% of workers think they do better work than the average co-worker; only 1% admit their work is below average. The corner office it's worse: 90% of business managers report they're better than the average manager. [ more on the 98 SATS questions ], We can say with the Psalmist Who can discern his errors, oh forgive my hidden faults.
• Jesus wept and said, if you only you had known what would bring you peace. What is it ? the peace of Christ, that is first and foremost peace with God. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. Christ's blood brings reconcilliation with God; welcome him in, and he starts the rennovation from the inside out.
• Peace I leave with you - my peace I give you; I do not give as the world gives - Jesus making his way to the cross, rejected by his own, betrayed by his friend, beaten the finally killed. Jesus is the model of peace: that's the peaceful life, that he has for you and me. Because Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you.

• Einstein: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler - a wise dictum for scientific but also theological truth. Much about the universe is perplexing / complex.
• Election: a paradoxical truth, one of the great mysteries of Christian faith; When the gentiles heard this, they were glad - and all who were appointed for eternal life believed appointed => destined or ordained.
• Context: just sent out by the Holy Spirit to Cyprus on their 1st missionary journey. Three strategies: started at home, Cyprus: Barnabus' home, then on to near Paul's home. Also, an urban mission. Hellenization was a city-founding wave, cities: show-pieces of Greek culture, the Church piggy-backs on this. Finally to the Jew first, then to the Gentile.
• Despite the Jews being entrusted with the oracles of God, the vast majority didn't accept Christ; this text seems to answer the question: why ? : A spiritual blindness.
• God chose our fathers, he blessed them, he showed them miracles of deliverance - then ? he endured their conduct for 40 years in the desert
• vs. 19 Then God overthrew 7 nations in Canan, gave them the promised land, again miraculously; then he gave them judges, excellent leaders - vs 21, the people then asked for a King - rejecting God as their king, ('Saul's name renders: 'You asked for it'.)
• Then David as king, and Jesus as his greater Son, - Israel's response ? even before him came John the Baptist - warning that he was to come etc. They did not recognise Jesus, yet in condemning him to death - they fulfilled the prophecy read every Sabbath - Ironic. Israel only a parade example though of the human condition.
• St Augustine - My sin was all the more incurable because I did not see it; the self-serving bias. Unless God un-stops this built-in blindness to our sin, we cannot believe in our need for a saviour. The paradox of election; man's responsibility; Acts 6:37 Whoever comes to me, I will not drive away but prefaced with All that the Father gives to me, will come to me - a paradox.
• An analogy with Physics; wave/particle duality. (pdf) John Archibald Wheeler - delayed choice experiment; when you know which way the photon goes - there is no interference, as if: an experiment later in time has affected the situation beforehand. Several equally enigmatic explanations: Wheeler: we choose what shall have happened after it has already happened, it has not really happened, it is not a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon; Nils Bohr: those who are not shocked by Quantum mechanics - cannot possibly have understood it Richard Feynmen - I think we can safely say that no-one understands quantum mechanics. Something entirely puzzling about this.
• Jefferson Davis says perhaps election could be compared with this - Photon detector - like faith, conversion, repentance the experiment that tells you on what path you've been on all along. Suddenly this is all that is relevant, a wonderful comfort; that your name was written in the Lamb's book of life before the foundation of the world
• As Calvin said I do not send men off to the secret election of God, to await with gaping mouths salvation there. I bid them make their way directly to Christ, in whom salvation is offered us. Whoever does not walk in the plain path of faith can make nothing of the election of God, but a labyrinth of destruction
• When you come to Christ - it will have been the case that you were chosen in him before the creation of the world; in love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons.... (Eph 1) a wonderful encouragement when we look back on our lives.
• The God who acomplishes everything according to his sovereign plan doesn't mess up. We can say with Joseph inspite of the crazy twists and turns of his life, included a prison sentance - God sent me ahead of you this was his plan, for the saving of many lives.
• This is a comfort What is your only comfort in life and death ? - the Heidelberg catechism: That I belong body and soul in life and in death, not to myself but to my faithful saviour Jesus Christ. Who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for my sins, and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil. That he protects me so well, that without the will of my Father in heaven, not a hair can fall from my head. Indeed that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation, therefore by his Holy Spirit he also assures me of eternal life, and he makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready, from now on to live for him.

• All men are like grass and their glory like the flowers of the field ...
• King Belshazzar gave a party for 1000 of his friends; focus shift - 23 years ahead, who is this man ? 5 times Nebuchadnezzar called his father, once he is the son. Standard proceedure in 19th Centuary to just write it off as so much imaginary invention - that Belshazzar was deemed to be some entirely fictional character, 'entirely the result of some figment of the Jewish writer's imagination'. Then in 1854, a british counsel digging in ruins in southern Iraq on behalf of the Birish museum, stumbled upon the ancient city of Ur - and found 3 small clay cylinders; soon thereafter translated now Akadian was begginning to be understood - and sure enough, there was the explicit mention of Belshazzar as the oldest son of the king Nabonitus, and the crown prince.
• All of a sudden with at least some egg on their face: Another problem - the details all off; the son of Nabonitus - the last king of the Babylonian empire; before it falls - before Cyrus the Persian (also known as Darius the Mede) came and took it over. Was Belshazzar King as Daniel insists, or was his father ? assumed to be further evidence of a massive historical blunder, until 1924 a Persian verse account of the reign of Nabonitus was discovered: The King Nabonitus left Babylon to spend the last 10 years of his reign in an Oasis in Arabia - and left in his place to reign as Regent his Son - Belshazzar; entrusted the kingship to him. This explains another puzzle in the chapter: the greatest honour he can give to Daniel is you will be made the 3rd highest ruler in the Kingdom - why 3rd ? because he himself was the 2nd.
• Was Belshazzar the son of Nebuchadnezzar ? Nabonitus married the daughter of Nebuchadnezzar as a bid for legitimacy - so he is the grandson; and as is typical in Aramaic / Hebrew a grandson is called a Son. Similarly the 'Queen' is the daughter of Nebuchadnezzar - not present when it says Belshazzar had all his wives present.
• Chapters are not in chronological order; but a chiasm; chapter 1 & 7 mirror each other - overthrow of kingdoms, chapter 3 & 6 correspond - threats of martrdom. Chapters 4 & 5 correspond to each other - the lesson God taught Nebuchadnezzar is brought to bear on Belshazzar. The parallels underscore the reprehensible character of Belshazzar.
• What's the banquet all about ? tons of historical evidence for such banquets - but only a few reasons for it: celebrating a victory, or a time of national emergency; [ a parody of the communion meal ] - an opportunity for everyone to re-swear allegiance to the King, and kingdom, bolstering and fortifying the people in their confidence against the threat pressing in on them.
• In the discovered cuniform tablets - we read, already Cyrus had achieved a decisive victory against Belshazzar's army in Opus (Baghdad) - until virtually the same day the massive city on the Euphrates fell to the advancing armies of the Persians.
• The drinking party - an attempt to drown your sorrows in 'Baghdad Bob' style; the speeches: how well things are going; we have killed most of the infidels and I think we will finish off the rest soon etc. Righteous people can be confident - but the wicked have to pretend as best they can
• People often say - if only God could reveal himself clearly - that would be the answer to all my problems; if only I could see him. What punctured Belshazzar's baloon: the uninvinted apperance of God's hand. When he saw it - he might have said - 'I always wondered if there was a God, how nice to know, what an encouragement' - but instead; his face turns pale - 'together his legs gave-way': the knots of his loins were loosed - he lost control of his bodily functions.
• Written in Aramaic script - but could be read in many ways - only constonants; the names of several weights - a list of weights. Really does fit with the things which Babylonias were obsessed; 1000 years before Pythagorus, had worked out his theorem - pleased by weights / lexical lists etc. this is why the text is so filled with somewhat tedious lists: enchanters, astrologers, diviners, wise man or insight, intelligence, wisdom or horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipes, ....
• Indeed - the Israelites learned this love of counting, and preseve the text by categorising nouns / verbs / etc. in the marginal notes. Counting every verse having the word 'and' in it more than 4 times. In the Pentatuch - figured out what the middle verse / word was; what the middle letter was: lev 11, vs 42; 'w' in hebrew word for belly - not a meaningful word or letter - but used to verify the copy for perfection; CRCs for beginners. They had numbered the 26 verses that include the whole alphabet. Thus scriptures preserved so excellently.
• The Queen mother summons Daniel from retirement at (approximately) the age of 81; You can keep your gifts for yourself, and give your rewards to someone else; what's the problem ? Daniel interprets the situation before the writing; the sacrilege and affront to God. The presence of the treasure from the temple - was proof of God's holiness, not his weakness: God was judging his own people, for the same kind of sacrilege that Belshazzar was guilty of now.
• Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin
  • Mene - God has numbered the days of your life. Americans on average overestimate their life span by (typically) 10 years. Teach us to number our days aright, so we might gain a heart of wisdom (Psalm 90:1).
  • Tekel - weighed - our lives will be examined, and judged - not just according to what we have done, but what we have left undone, and not what we have done, but the motives.
  • Peres - divided, given to the Medes and the Persians; God said to to rich fool: you fool, this very night your life will be demanded of you, then who will get what you have prepared for yourself. Belshazzar, thinking himself in the impregnable fortress of Babylon, 2 walls, 25 feet wide, 40 feet inbetween the walls - 360 watch-towers, 90 feet high etc. surrounded by an impassable moat - the mighty river Euphrates went around and through the city. They boasted that it could withstand a 70 year siege - since they could grow the crops they wanted in the city.
• Cyrus diverted the river - up-stream. And the armies were already making their way down a shallow river bed - into the city, and took Belshazzar's life that very night.
• What do we take from it ? God views us as he viewed Belshazzar unimpressed by his achievements. A famous preacher's series of diagnostic questions; he would ask instead of 'are you a christian?':
• Imagine that in the next second, we'd be killed, and be translated from this life into the presence of God; standing before the holy God; and were he to say to us: what right do you have to enter my heaven ? - people would respond in one of a couple of ways;
  • I attend Park-Street church, sing in the choir, teach the christian formation class; I don't mean to boast - but we took the parents in when they were sick and ailing until their dying day. Seems like you want God to be fair ? - the well earned wages - unfortunately the wages of sin is death.
  • Many people have a clear concience, because they have a bad memory; but if we claim to be without sin, we decieve ourselves and the truth is not in us
• Jesus in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, I thank you God, that I'm not like other men, robbers, evildoers, adulterers - or even like this tax collector ... But the tax collector stood at a distance, and would not even look up to heaven, and said "God, have mercy on me a sinner", and this man went home justified before God.
• Belshazzar still had moments left, that instead of heaping accolades on Daniel, could have been spent instead saying God have mercy on me a sinner - he did not.

• Pride / self conciet vs. humility. The utmost evil is pride; pride leads to every other vice, it is the complete anti-God state of mind. Pride is why Satan fell. cf. C.S.Lewis' Mere Christianity
• Nebuchadnezzar in his 25 year span, as a general / King etc. built an empire larger than the Assyrians had in 300 years; re-built Babylon into a giant city, with massive walls, temples, etc. Plenty to be proud of.
• Meticulous records for first 11 years of his reign but not the latter period; but proclamations there start in exactly the same way.
• Nebuchadnezzar talks about miraculous signs and wonders; then we get a dream, Nebuchadnezzar looses his mind; then on his repentance his restoration. How God miraculously humbled this egotist; moving him from his self centered arrogance to humility. The biggest miracle: how he can change a human on the inside, and turn him around.
• What's wrong with a little self respect though ? is the cure not worse than the disease ? for a fat head - loosing it ? worth having a better sense of what pride is: not merely self respect, having a positive opinon of your worth; rather having an inflated opinion of it.
• Scripture doesn't want us to have a good or bad self concept, but an accurate one. Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgement, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you - Romans 12:3.
• People are not proud of being rich, clever, good looking - but are proud that they are richer, more clever, better looking etc. intrinsically competitive; hence the poisoning of relationship with each others, & ultimately God, who is better in every way. A proud man always looks down on others, which makes it hard to look up and see God.
• Scripture singles out leaders as being particularly prone to this temptation; Matthew 20: You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them ... Not so with you. Instead whoever wants to become great among you, must be your servant ...: Jesus - washing others' feet.
• Pride makes us ungrateful; Deut 8: you may say to yourself "My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me", but remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth. If we are so filled with thoughts of ourselves, we can't worship God.
• Makes us incorrigable, so we can't recieve criticism. If you go to committee are the only insightful comments you rember your own ? cf. Prov 18:2.
• Don't imagine that God can change us without cost. True biblical wisdom isn't self hatred: His dream starts with a vision of his genine dignity and worth: a giant, strong, stable, abundant, beautiful tree. Kings are often trees cf. Ezek 17. Many extant examples of this iconography from the ANE.
• The gracious warning: you will be cut down to size. A hyper obvious intepretation: The other wise men cowards ? Daniel brings the message home - firmly cf. 4:27 be pleased to accept my advice, renounce these sins by doing what is right
• We sometimes talk about the use of a sick-bed to bring people to repentance; but less often about mental illness. Getting through to the learning center often requires terrible pain, and chastening. Even for Jesus: Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.
• Nebuchadnezzar's syndrome has been written about extensively, but however we look at it, early Christians looked at this passage to realise that not all mental illness is simply the result of daemon possession.
• Post renaissance; C 14-17th, the consensus was that when people acted in bizarre ways - it must be daemon possession.
• In Psychological Medicine, Vol 14; Crowle and Bocroft(?), an exhaustive study of medical records before the middle ages: it was not so. Based on this text and Matthew's account of Jesus' healing ministry. pwrt Ch 4, that most mental illness is not the result of daemon possession; in fact most of the cases: 57 descriptions of mental illness from that earlier period were attributed to organic causes, or environmental factors, or sin. Organic, 'humors', poor diet, sinful patterns of work, response to grief etc. demonias, lunatics and the paralytics (Matthew 4).
• Is the cure worse than the disease ? Not Nebuchadnezzar's view; he praises glorifies and exaults God because everything he does is right, all his ways are just, and those who walk in pride he is able to humble.

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• Remarkable proliferation of listing in the text; a hallmark of it's authenticity, many such surviving texts contain long lists, something the Babylonians were fond of.
• Chuck Colson recounts a remarkable anecdote: 1940s, 350k soldiers of Europe sent to Belgium, the expeditionary force pushed back by a brilliant pincer movement; to Dunkirk, the Germans suddenly halted; They sent a 3 word message - and if not
  • hard to know what is more suprising - the unimaginable valour & courage; or that most of Britain immediately understood the obscure allusion to this text. Just as Shadrack, Mishak and Abednego were willing to sacrifice their lives, rather than bow the knee to the ravages of a deified state, they were willing to give their lives rather than surrender to Hitler.
  • If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. And if not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.
  • The British army's valour - standing up to the tyranny of Hitler's army. And if not - galvanised the nation, to perform what subsequent historians called the miracle of Dunkirk.
• 400 years of spiritual and moral decline in Israel after David; God, already had promised to exile them and punishment for this - cf. Deut 28.
• The furnace mentioned 10 times in the chapter - the big stick to catch the few non-conformists. Pagan religion often becomes more and more coercive as it becomes less and less convincing. Persecution of Christians ever more severe in Rome, until the 4th century: killing people in their thousands because they refused to offer sacrifices to the Emperor who increasingly claimed to be lord and God.
• At the end Nebuchadnezzar does not convert: he says Praise be to the God of S., M. & A. - this other God, not his, hasn't surrendered his will [ cf. lapse in the next chapter ]. He fails to do the one thing idolators must do to come to God: destroy the idol. Huge amount of gold in the Idol (probably purified by the same furnaces).
• Moses, destroyed the golden calves, and burned them in the fire; ground to a powder as fine as dust; then threw the dust into a stream that flowed down the mountain. A clean break from idolatory. Ephesus - similarly burning their scrolls.
• This is perhaps why it is a precious but unusual thing to find people in the later decades of life coming to God - too much gold added to their idol, too much to tear down.
• But you say - Nebuchadnezzar couldn't know that history - but in his dream - the rock not cut by human hand breaks the idol, making it like chaff on a threshing floor ... wind swept them away....
• If your idolatory is shopping - time for some plastic surgery: cut up the credit card. If it's drink - get rid of the wine-of-the-month club subscriptiion, don't keep it just-in-case. If it's the TV that's contolling your life, take it to the dump; just unplugging isn't enough.
• What about Christianity - isn't it coercive ?
  • Religious conviction often been seen as an excuse to cram it down others' throat; but should be shared with gentleness and respect. In history, many have done irreperable harm to the good name of Christ by getting this wrong; in ways repugnant to the savior whose kingdom is not of this world.
  • The fear of the Lord - the beginning of wisdom, it's true - when God appears to a man/woman - you can tell who he is: the one saying do not be afraid. Scripture uses fear in two opposite senses: dread (to be afraid of), or to hold in awe / reverence:
    • Moses when God appeared in a pillar of fire: Do not be afraid, God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning. same Hebrew word; two opposite senses.
    • Wordly fear: God might to something to upset us; Godly fear: we might do something to upset God. The motive of Godly fear - is (strangely) love; the more we love God, the more afraid we might do something to offend the savior who paid for us.
    • Psalm 130: If you, O LORD , kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared. - impossible if fear means dread; instead, means to hold in awe.
  • The threat of Hell - an escalation of the Nebuchadnezzar method ? the threat of hell is directed in scripture most not against the wicked, but the complacent & self-righteous. Our savior insists on the reality of ultimate judgement; that we are infinitely valuable, and although this life is not fair, the next life is.
  • Hell is no deterent to people with no faith; if you don't believe in God, you don't belive in his justice; in this life God lets us get away with murder - Rom 2 God's kindness is to lead you to repentance (not his threats of eternal Hell).
  • Gordon, wanted to meet with a man who had walked out on his wife & children for another woman; a man of seemingly great insight. After appealing to him, he replied: what would be the point of my taking your time - I havn't forgotten those marriage sermons, I just decided to ignore them. I've always said that the trouble with Christianity is, that it's not scary enough. If I were sure that leaving my wife would put me in eternal fire, I wouldn't do it, but I don't believe that, and none of the christians that have admonished me, believe it either. - after all don't we all believe in mercy, forgiveness, grace.
  • The difference between Daemons and the redeemed, they know God's commandments forward and backwards, the difference is - they don't care - but have forgotten what makes sin, sin - an afront against the holiness of God, and the terrible price of it's forgiveness. No claim that the redeemed never mess up - a lot of times we do; but we never give up repenting, returning to Christ, hating their sin.
• We do not need to defend ourselves against you in this manner - no excuse, no justification, Peter & the apostles We must obey God, rather than men. They do express however a model faith; faith, not presumption. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king; and if not .... Answering Nebuchadnezzar's taunt Then what God can save you?
• God never promises immunity from trial, hardship, or furnaces, The same prayer of Job though he slay me, yet will I hope in him. The same prayer of Jesus in Gesthemany Father, everything is possible for you, take this cup from me, yet not as I will, but what you will. Let God, be God, but not any other.
• God's promise is not to save us from the fire, but to save us in it - yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, your rod and your staff comfort me - it is often in the deepest darkness that God is most near.
• The furnace that refined the gold idol, is refining their faith. God's aim is not a trouble free life, but a more Christ-like one; he'll be in the furnace with us.
• The idols that tempt us are not so crude; the idolatory of success - will do anything to persue it. Some's idol is popularity, or getting that boyfriend/girlfriend, those who allow power or material prosperity to run their lives. The love of money is the root of all evil. Health can become an idol, all happiness depends on getting well - life is useless without getting rid of this chronic problem or disability.
• Rev. Christo Kulichev pastor of the congregational church in Sofia Bulgaria, 1985 - preached the gospel and would not co-operate with the communist authorities, 8 months in prison, 3 years in exile. I prefer to be in prison with Jesus, than to be free without him. Even if I were with with my family, and back in my pulpit there would be no satisfaction if I was outside God's will. The prison becomes a palace, when I am there with Christ.
• Do you prefer to be in the furnace with the Angel of God, than be in fields of green pasture without him ?

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• Jesus knew that people would have a profound existantial crisis, as to whether we should confess him in front of others (Mark 8): What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father's glory with the holy angels..
• All the miracles in this text - eclipsed by one, even the King of the super-power changing his mind and worshiping God. The miracle of Shadrack, Mishak and Abednego's refusal to conform to others.
• King Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold 90 feet high, 9 feet wide, and set it up on the plain of Dura.. Why ? in the Pagan mind-set, they offer incense to Daniel (2:46) - in order to offer it to his God. Similarly to an image of the King's to him.
• How is it possible to have a divinely inspired dream, whose lesson is the brevity and futility of the work of our hands; and it's ultimately destruction, then do this ? Some speculate many years have passed from the last chapter; but commitments and loyalties are very transient. The text implies the opposite.
• Nebuchadnezzar seems to have learned something from his dream - the wrong lesson, an odd long, skinny image - probably not a statue of a body; the 10x1 ratio makes it likely it's an obelisk. Almost identical objects in Egypt. On the sides of an obelisk depicted panels of the Gods and King, a beautiful and impressive object. Depictions of Gods giving to the King emblems of victory and authority. A reminder of the right to rule, a deification of the social order.
• Demands everyone shows it respect; Nebuchadnezzar fixates on the gold in his dream - and tries to 'fix' the problem; this image, gold top to bottom; no feet of clay. Nebuchadnezzar has an idea for holding the society together under him: civic religion. Everyone will get together and bow down to this vague image - make it what you want; but bow down, make it a symbol of your aliegence / conformity.
• The 3 didn't give in - astonishing, given their background & what they had to loose - they are mayors / governors, having come from being captives. The whole pomp and circumstance - easily rationalise going along with it: "what good will we be dead ?; Nebuchadnezzar is not asking us to disbelieve in our God, or believe in his God, but offer him respect; like pledging aliegance to the flag."
• Why is the obelisk 90 feet high ? impress the world with the power / prestige; who in their right mind would not bow down ? then get the movers and shakers - to the dedication; all the cool people are on board.
• God has a strategy in the composition of a healthy church; God puts social misfits there, in positions of authority to shame the world's order. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. Cults choose to target the football starts, the cheerleaders so the lemmings follow. God chooses the weakest, and most foolish; (1Cor1).
• Everyone agrees, everyone is doing it - why arn't you !? Calvin: the most dangerous folly of all is to confuse consent with reason - Moses (Exodus): do not follow the crowd in doing wrong.
• We all acknowledge in self reflection, the incredible power of music to impact / motivate us. Feeling goose-bumps watching the olympics and hearing our national anthem honouring a winner. The music - not there as window-dressing; this music has another purpose - to make you feel like a party pooper if you don't go along. Hitler's Nuremberg rallies - the music to whip the crowd up.
• Then the big stick - over and over again, in case you are one of the rare individuals that will rebel and be non-conforming. It's so well known, you might think this is all flannel from a children's story in Sunday school; but these were not the last ovens to be used against faithful Jews who refused to bow the knee against the claims of a deified state.
• Martin Buber: Every nation is inclined to make an idol of it's own inner spirit. Israel's calling was to erect a throne to God, rather than to itself. That is why every nation is bound to desire to get rid of us at the time that it is in the act of setting itself up as the absolute. It wants to marginalize and muzzle the voice of the faithful, rule it out of court - inadmissable, not allowed to be expressed in the public square.
• Every day in a position somewhat similar - we have to take a stand; the 3 don't act like Gideon (in Israel) to try to destroy the idol / get at their neighbours - but instead are trying to preserve themselves from idolatory. Their faithfulness at the risk of their lives; ours - often at the risk of our status.
• We are not to be ashamed of Christ; I tell you, whoever acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man will also acknowledge him before the angels of God. But he who disowns me before men will be disowned before the angels of God. Luke 12:8-9.

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• The message Nebuchadnezzar's worst nightmare is going to come true; all his work will ultimately be destroyed. It's true that not all dreams are true cf. Ecclesiasties; but God does use dreams - clearly measure dreams vs. the word of God - nevertheless God speaks in dreams; Jacob's Ladder, Joseph's dreams, Mary's husband - warned twice, Joel's prophecy ... your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.
• The statue - is really an idol, he was used to bowing down to worship physcial representation; the essence of idolatory isn't worshiping an image - but rather worshiping the creature not the creator. Their land is full of idols, they bow down to things their hands have made - do you worship the work of your hands ? idolatory. Col 3 greed is idolatory.
• An enormous dazzling idol; what God is saying is: as bad as your literal idolatory is - far worse, is your worship of your life's work - this kingdom of Babylon; all of it is destined for the junk-heap. In Chapter 4 - we see him strutting around, admiring the city he helped to build, the massive fortifications, the hanging gardens etc. is not this the great Babylon I have built by my mighty power ... for the glory of my majesty - this is the justification for my existance.
• God's message for Nebuchadnezzar's - Daniel starts with You oh King are the King of Kings, the God of heaven has given you ... - not are a jerk, not simply sycophantic adulation, but acknowledging the true dignity of the King, ... you are that head of gold - acknowledging the truth - honouring the King, but 3 times over reminding the King that it all comes from God.
• The future - progressive decline from Gold to Iron, things go from bad to worse - not an endless cycle, but through divine intervention - the best is yet to come. The English expression feet of clay - a reminder of the intrinsic weakness of human structures.
• Idols are to be pulverised - Moses & the golden calf etc.
• Nebuchadnezzar allowed to see the terrible loss that would be sustained if he continued to give himself over to such futility, 'Nabu bless his offspring' ?
• Daniel - overhearing the nighmare of your enemies; we hear Pilate's wife's nightmare, Gideon 300 vs 35,000 got courage from the Mideanites nightmare.
• We get to hear the nightmares of our opponents; Betrand Russell - responding to his Daughter who converted to Christ, I believe that when I die I shall rot ... there is darkness without and darkness within.
• Why does Daniel accept a promotion in such a loosing line of work ? yes - the kingdoms of the world are doomed for the ash heap; but - what you do for Christ stands forever. He commits himself to a life of integrity and faithfulness, in the government of Babylon.

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• If the 17th/18th centuries 'age of reason', this is the 'age of credulity' - Boston university sociologist Peter Berger; 33% of Americans believe in Astrology, 54% in psychics, 40% consulted a fortune teller, 1/3 believe the world has been visited by an alian, 38% believe in necromancy, national-science-foundation 43% check newspaper horoscopes from time to time. If the figures even approximately true, Americans would feel at home in down-town Babylon.
• The Babylonians virtually the inventors of the occult. GK Chesterton said 'when people stop beliving in God, they don't believe in nothing, but believe in anything'
• This chapter - shows the incredible superiority of God's wisdom over mantic wisdom.
• Nebuchadnezzar suffering from a recurrent nightmare dreams vs. the 1 dream interpreted. We can empathis Job complains 4:7, when I lie down how long will it be until I wake up. Why didn't he sign up with a 'sleep technician' - why demand something impossible backed by a gruesome death penalty.
• What could frighten a man like Nebuchadnezzar wealthy beyond imagining, whose word was everyone's command, what could drive him to morose fits of rage, and to impose this penalty on his closest advisors ?. He's recoiling at the horrible thought of loosing it all.
• Reinhnold Niever - describes the lust for power as being prompted by a concious realisation of the profound insecurity of our existance: Man is tempted by the basic insecurity of human existance - to make himself doubly secure. That is why he grasps after position, fame, power - but - the more he attains, the higher he climbs, ironically the more anxious and insecure he feels. knowing that at the hight of his attainments, it can only make his fall all the more terrible. This is what feeds the vicious cycle of distrust and brutality that is so often witnessed in petty tyrants and absolute dictators, this strange insecurity of those who outwardly you would think have no reason to be insecure. As you were lying there oh King, your mind turned to things to come - and the revealer of mysteries showed you what is going to happen.
• In the 2nd year of his reign all the fighting and empire building was over; in just 25 years, he had put together a kingdom, more expansive and powerful than anything witnessed to that time. Larger than the Assyrians that took 300 years to build. The realisation that it can all be lost so easily; indeed within 25 years of his death, it gave way to the Medo-Persian empire. Ecclesiastes tells us a dream comes when there are many cares.
• The magicians replied in Aramaic, Nebuchadnezzar established it as the language of the middle east. If you do not tell me what my dream was, and interpret it, I will have you cut into pieces and your houses turned into piles of rubble - the astrologers reply - Oh King - live for ever; but he wants those who claim to know the end from the beginning; you should have no problem seeing what is veiled in the human conciousness. So then, tell me the dream, and then I will know you can interpret it for me
• Instead of telling the astrologyer when you were born and letting him tell you how sensitive, wonderful, brilliant etc. you are, instead - tell him all about you, and get him to tell you exactly when you were born.
• Despite all their degrees, the ability to read Sumerian, for the ancient rites; in the end the false prophets are masters of deception, and fakery - they can't do it.
• Marcus Aurelius' - struggle with the prophet Alexander, he had him provide an omen for a major battle against the Germans; he came up with an elaborate procedure throwing 2 live lions in the Danube with very expensive spices. The 2 lions promptly swam across the Danube where the Germans beat them to death; they then lost resoudingly - their greatest loss in a single battle: 20k men. Alexander's explanation - the oracle hadn't specified which side would have the resounding victory.
• Cicero - it amazes him that one Auger could meet another on the street without bursting out into uncontrollable laughter.
• Isaiah - I am the LORD, who has made all things ... who who foils the signs of false prophets and makes fools of diviners, who overthrows the learning of the wise and turns it into nonsense, who carries out the words of his servants and fulfills the predictions of his messengers
• What does it imply about Satan and the demonic realm ? what about the spirits they consulted. Surely a golden opportunity for them. But, despite the propoganda - Satan is not what he seems to be; he is not God, only an angel and a fallen one at that. Goodness is itself; badness is only spoiled goodness.
• Satan has creaturely limitations, much as you and I, he can do that which is superhuman, but not that which is supernatural. Can a daemon open the eyes of the blind ? - he can blind you; close the eyes of the seeing - but so can you or I. Destruction is simple, it's construction that's difficult.
• Does the enemy of our souls know everything ? - certainly crafty beyond any, but: These are things into which even Angels long to look - they don't know everything. Yet of God the psalmist says O Lord, you have swearched me and you know me, you know when I sit down and when I rise, you percieve my thoughts from afar ... before a word is on my tongue you know it completely - Jesus could read men's thoughts and hearts.
• The magicians had it right up to a point - What the king asks is too difficult, no-one could reveal it to the King, except the gods - but - and they do not live among men - wrong; Daniel drops to his knees; prayer his first instinct not a last resort. He receives the answer in a vision of the night a dream. The King can't sleep, but Daniel under the thread of death sleeps.
• Daniel intervenes fast to save the lives of his religious opponents; defends pluralism, to win them over.

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• Daniel very different book of the OT - not life within the theocracy of Israel, with the King answerable to God, and his messangers the prophets; instead living as a minority in an ambivalent or hostile culture.
• The 2nd lesson, God's involvement in circumstances; each time; vs. 2 - the Lord gave Jehoakim king of Judah into Nebuchadnezzar's hands vs 9. - God gave Daniel favour and compassion in the sight of the official vs. 15 - to these four men God gave knowledge and undersatnding; 3 gifts, each astonishing.
• The opening verse; people claim there are several errors in verse 1:
  • Nebuchadnezzar was not (quite) King then, but only crown prince - leading general; totally pedantic, prolethic references: eg. writing a modern history "in 1975 President Bush earned his MBA at Harvard" - "he wasn't a president then!?". Not misleading, not an error.
  • Secondly, it's claimed he didn't get their or besiege the city - not enough detail in the documents; the word translated besieged often means opposed, cf. elsewhere.
  • Thirdly - a blatant contradiction ? this huge error celebrated since the French revolution - took place in the 3rd year of Jehoiachim but in Jeremiha 25 / 36 we read the fourth year. Mid 1960s the D.J.Wiseman keeper of antiquities professer of Assyriology, in his research discovered the answer. Used inclusive reconing; ie. reigned 2 monthe in 2003 counted as your first year; Jeremiah writing from Judah - inclusive reconing - counted the 4th year. Daniel forcibly enrolled in the University of Babyolon, you have the accessional (partial) year + 3 years. So - ultimately when you look at it and do your homework - it's a great proof of the veracity of scripture & it's transmission. If written later & made up, - it would agree.
• The big point - the disaster that year; Lamentations, Jeremiah lamenting over the ruins of Jerusalem; Nebuchadnezzar beseigned it - people reduced to canibalism inside; he broke down the walls, entered the city, levelled it and the temple.
• If you were to describe it - how would you; Historians: Nebuchadnezzar outnumbered them 1000 to 1; but faithful Israelites know it's not numbers that count. Not an accident - it's God's doing. God gave Jerusalem into his hands.
• How could Jehoiachim not see the crisis and repent in time ? he can save by few or many; his father was Josiah, one of only 2 (of 41) that were faithful from beginning to end, 2 Kings: neither before nor after him was there a king like him who turned to the Lord like him - with all his heart - a privileged upbringing; Jeremiah - his teacher, the inspired prophet. I the Lord have spoken to you again and again, but you have not listened. Jehoiachim wilfully shut his eyes, dug his heels in and refused to repent.
• God gave Daniel favour - doesn't often give us favour; Jesus: if the world hates you - it hated me first. the candour of the officer - scared of death; civil and constructive.
• God intervenes by giving Daniel wisdom. To think that God let Daniel get an A+ in this harmful literature, filled with diviniation, sorcery - an A+ in comparitive religion; to win them he had to fully understand them. Augustine: Wherever Christians find truth - it is the Lord's - he even plants truth in the hearts of our enemies.
• Starting a quarrel is like breaching a dam, stop the discussion before an argument breaks out. He finds common ground with a guard that doesn't share his point of view; no stridency, proposes an empirical test - treat us the way you think best. The anti-atkins diet; Daniel on the carbs get pleasingly fat, the others on the protein diet waste away. 10 days not long enough - 10: just a substantial amount of time. Similarity '10 times better' - just substantially better.
• Solomon - warns strenuously against prostitution in Proverbs; But in 2 kings 3, proof of his wisdom allowed 2 prostitutes the dignity of their case being heard in a maternity dispute. It takes great wisdom to distinguish moral vs. civil law. But in fact Christianity should not try to legislate morality, we don't campaign against the greatest sin: idolatory - people can worship money around us with impunity.

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• Two major themes in the book; faith under pressure, and God's sovereignty. Also, for spiritual expatriots, only in this place/time to be ambassadors.
• Daniel prospered in Babylonian government, working for the tyrant responsible for the decimation of Israel, destruction of the temple etc. Daniel goes along, but has a line beyond which he will not pass.
• 605BC God visits his judgement on the southern kingdom, he brought to Jerusalem, to defeat Jeohiachim. Daniel's life spans the 70 year exile.
• The Babylonians had a great idea - not enough to just defeat your enemy, or capture their bodies - you want to win their hearts and souls; The way to pull off this conversion - is to crop the leadership and go after the young people; deport the children of the elite, bring them to Babylon, enroll them in the university and go to work turning their minds.
• They had 4 ingredients to convert them into faithful Babylonians.

  • Deportation - isolation; very strict requirements; young, handsome, no defects, extremely able etc. the very best. Separated, given foster parents.

    Based on later Persian analogies, 14 years old when separated, never again would he see his parents; never mentioned in the book. The whole support system, family, friends, faith etc. to make him maximally vulnerable to Babylonian re-programming.

    Daniel 1000 miles to the East coming to Babylon ('Gateway to God'), coming to an amazing city. Meant to be a paradise of God, the university something like a seminary. The river ran around the city, and through it allowing fast transport.

    A triple wall fortification, the outer wall; 25ft thick - 2 chariots could pass easily on the road at it's top.

    Entering the city, a 75ft wide road; through the Ishcarr gate adorned with blue enamel bricks and gold. Imagine how this must have looked to someone coming from Jerusalem; architecturally breathtaking.

    Inside the city - the 7 stage ziggurat; reaching an elevation of 300ft - a sky-scraper of the ancient world. at the top a 'helipad' where 'Marduk' was supposed to land and come down the steps to bless the people.

    Of course the hanging gardens, built for Nebuchadnezzar homesick Median wife - a marvel of the ancient world

    Most Jews were swept off their feet by the obvious material superiority of the Babylonians: like a plasma TV: I want it! whatever the price.

    Fewer than 10% of the jews in captivity wanted to come back later; in spiritual terms the antithesis of Jerusalem.

    Nebuchadnezzar carried off the instruments from the temple to the temple of his God (Shinar) - reminiscent of the tower of Babel; their self aggrandising idolatory. Daniel going back where Abraham came from. The same fate awaits this Babylon as met the old one. Yes - God did come down to that tower - but not to bless.

    The first step - to isolate him from kith & kin, in a controlled environment, and wowing him with high culture.

  • Massive re-education; deliberate indoctrination. Ashpanaz was to teach them The language and literature of Babylonians - language an important way to impose culture on other people; eg. the USSR mandatory to learn Russian, William the Conqueror's French in England.

    The point of the language - access to the literature; before there was TV, and movies - there was literature before mass culture was formed / re-inforced by these it was by literature.

    At the university a curriculum, 30k extant cuniform texts survive from the Babylonian period; you can read it, tons of texts, formulas for divination, sorcery, interpreting unusual flight patterns of birds, astronomical tests, mathematical texts, scientific texts etc.

    Impress parocial people - wow these people know so much more than my mum & dad - they must be right about everything.

  • New names - Daniel -> Belthehasar. On any understanding names are precious to us, people become attached to them. Not something to do with convenience / punctuation - a neferious purpose afoot. Daniel - 'God is my judge' Beltheshazar - incorporates the name of a godess May she preserve the king Mishael - 'who is what God is' Azariah - 'God helps' goes to Abednego - 'servant of Nabu' a God of Babylon. Getting rid of faith confessions in the public square. Similar to Jaques Chiraq's headscarve prohibition; secularism can't abide the profession of real faith.

    If his job was to be a pain in the neck; he could have chaffed at his new name, and pretended not to hear it, and be obnoxious in some way; there was a degree of accomodation. But there is a line beyond which he will not pass - he doesn't call himself that. 9 times when he refers to himself, he uses the name Daniel; Gabriel the angel uses his real name too.

    There is an accomodating spirit - call me what you want; but my name is Daniel.

  • The menu - prescribed food, from the King's table. He resolved not to defile himself with the royal food & wine.

    • One suggestion is that he was a vegetarian/teetotaller unlikely, it was necessary for the orthodox to eat the passover lamb. Also, Chapter 10 out from the thumb of the king he eat meat and wine.
    • Keeping a kosha diet ? true, Babylon relished eating pork, and horse meat - unclean. But, no-where in the bible is wine called unclean; wine of any kind acceptable in theory.

    • A better solution: nothing to do with the nutritative value - but who was providing it. The King assigned them a daily amount of food and wine from the King's table - vs. 8 the royal food and wine.

      Eating it was feasting at the King's table. Communion - the Lord's supper - eating at his table; his feast. In Biblical world concepts; when you eat with a person at a solemn meal - you make a covenant with them. If you then are disloyal it's an offence against them. cf 11:26.

      Jesus makes the same point - king David had Ahitopel turn against him - Even my close friend, whom I trusted, he who shared my bread, has lifted up his heel against me. The covenant nature of sharing a meal; and it's forshadowing of Judas.

      Daniel drew the line here, at this sign of unqualified submission to the King. Not important where he drew it, but that he did. The stand he takes, is known only to the guard, his 3 buddies and to God. But, 3 times a day, he would be reminded of his refusal; he'd be reminded who his real King is, and who is the real Lord of his life; true to his name: Daniel, he knows who his judge is.

      When David stopped eating at Saul's table (1Sam20) - he saw it as an act of revolt worthy of the death penalty. Ashpanaz doesn't share Daniel's faith, but in his approach to his superiors, he has an absence of stridency; is honest, will not defile himself, God had given him favour in the eyes of Ashpanaz - says try it irenic dealing, choosing his battles well.

      Not afraid of getting contaminated by the literature; in order to use it to convert those whose intent was to convert him. To turn the tables on his opponents in this wonderful battle of truth.

• His stand is not against the other students, condemning them for their racism against Israelites, against sexual immorality, whatever. His stand is ultimately against denying the sovereignty of God.
• Nebuchadnezzar later gives expression to the faith he learned from Daniel; he commends the gospel by his faithful service, and earnestness. he served the King better because he served God first. Even as Paul exhorts slaves to serve their master as if they were serving Jesus themselves. So essential to adorn the gospel by the integrity of our lives.

• Hit www.openoffice.org - log in again, again.
• Work out what module the bug is to be filed under cat CVS/Repository - and try to correlate name with a list of 60+ different names to calculate bugzilla component.
• Create a new bug - select the right version from the drop-down, enter a description of the bug, cws etc. and (preferably) patch.
• Submit the bug, set the right target, close the bug.
• Now commit the patch.

• Gordon uncomfortable @ the Christmas sermon: expected to decry the consumerism so rampant at Christmas; even the The Wall St. Journal's recent suggestion that Christmas should be split into a religious festival 'Xmass', and a secular occasion 'X-cessmas' where people spend money they do not have to buy things they do not need.
• Many challenges associated with giving & receiving gifts; reciprocity - gratitude / equivalence ? The receiving problem; expressing gratitude for some gifts a challenge, also discerning any hidden meaning [ the pallette of deoderant present ? ].
• The gift of Christ: the trivialised pictures of Angels - cookies, tree-decorations, Hollywood paints them too small.
• The shephards were equivalent of bar-room bouncers; arms like your thighs, some limp angel choir won't do. Many of the Bible's angels are massive; they express in their manifestation some of their invincible power; the 7 thunders; legs like firy pillars, face like the Sun, legs straddle the sea. Satan is 'only' a fallen angel. Smart, brilliant, comprehend the ineffable.
• Visiting giant sequoia in a national park; massive towering evergreens - took loads of photos, drove on, and then glimpsed even more massive trees. Realised had taken all the film of the Ponderosa Pine - 200ft; The Sequoia - 300ft, 35ft diameter, God planted the Poderosa so you could appreciate the Sequoia.
• Simlarly Angels allow us to see the size of God; more awesome than all who surround him. The shephards presumably assumed it was the end of time:
• Only 2 Angels destroyed all of Sodom & Gemorah. All the 1st born in Egypt in a single night. The Angel of the Lord killing 185k Assyrian attackers in a single night etc.
• But, their message Don't be afraid, good news of great joy - today .. a Savior has been born to you what did they go and see ? - 'only' a baby ? perhaps he could only 'coo' at them.
• Why waste time doing that ? - Christianity not about some lofty imparted teaching about things we can to do ingratiate ourselves with God; but instead that God himself has come down, to live a perfect life of obedience, which God can impute to us. Jesus - salvation personified.

• Pop Psychology - sensory defensive disorder (SDD), not recognised by the American Psychiatric association - you can tell if you have it by a simple servey:
  • Are you bothered by tags/labels in your clothes ?
  • Are you annoyed by sounds that don't seem to bother other people ?
  • Does it bother you to walk barefoot on grass/sand ?
  • Are you bothered by bright lights or garish colors, or objects you think are too close to your face ?
  • Do you avoid parties, even at Christmas, if you think there will be a lot of people, because the noise bothers you - and people stand close to you ?
• 3 answers out of 5 == SDD case, a candidate for Sharon Heller (PhD in developmental psychnology). ~15% are supposed to suffer from it. The cover of her book could trigger an episode though.
• Whatever the future of SDD, an analogy in the Spiritual realm. An assault from stacks of unread mail, bills to pay, a TODO list that grows indefinately. In the face of this, we can feel like a tightly wound spring. What is the remedy ?
• The Price of Peace, - the inner peace that Christ brings. The hostility between Jew and Gentile in the NT period, amazing - that Christ would reconcile them, and meet with them.
• Frank Snowden - an authority on racial prejudice in the ancient world 'Blacks in Antiquity' - makes this remarkable assertion: Christianity swept racial barriers aside; in the early Church blacks found real equality. 'Simeon called Niger' & others in scripture; rich, poor, black, white - 3 black Africans that became Pope; nothing new - that Christ brings peace where formerly there was alienation.
• Christ has also come to bring a sword; - such counter cultural values create a threatened response - the sword in the other's hand.
• Live and let live - just a license for bystander apathy. Instead we are called to love people in action - racial equality, questioning the ethics of pre-emptive war, fighting for the weak and vulnerable etc.
• The peace - not that of forgotten sin, not that of an untroubled concience, but a cleansed one. Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.
• Peace I give to you, my Peace I leave with you, I do not give as the world gives... an unshakable confidence that he did all things well. Glory to God in the highest and on the earth, peace and goodwill towards men.
• Should get ahead some more, so not doing Christmas sermons by Easter.

• Don't get over excited by literary conventions, if a girl writes, Yours faithfully - not necessarily yours. Thus we have to understand the norm to grasp the ending of 1 Cor.
• Hammering home the point - do everything in love - writing to a divided and factionalized church.
• The convention in Paul's day - Graeco-Roman letters for a span of 400 years around here, frozen in literary conventions; thousands of examples very similar. Either abrupt endings, or greetings from loved ones with the author, directed to loved ones with the recipients - typically family members or very close friends. Also, often a personal thing - since many letters written by scribes - like a signature. Close - wishing health / well-being etc. fare-well.
• The churches in the province of Asia send you greetings - used to a life-long friend or two; Paul has a huge family of God in mind; and at the time was in Ephesus the hub of the province of Asia.
• Aquilla and Priscilla greet you warmly in the Lord - they came from Corinth with Paul to Ephesus - in the literary mould - but warm and deep; and so does the church that meets in their house - a 'Church' is not a building but people in relationship with Jesus.
• Re-inforcing the points he's made over and over again - he insists that Christians recognise they belong to a world-wide fellowship; I believe in the holy catholic church - catholic in it's true sense: true/universal.
• I Paul write this greeting in my own hand similarly in other letters.
• Going on, he deviates from the prosper/fare- well/good-luck formula The grace of the Lord Jesus be to you: grace - Gods Riches At Christ's Expense.
• Lots of sten rebukes / painful corrections in 1 Cor. the last word is: My love to all of you in Christ Jesus - ends with love, the motivation for it all.
• So - the two problems:
  • Too little love ? If anyone does not love the Lord - a curse be on him. Come O Lord - seems strange. cf. 1 Cor. 4 When we are cursed we bless. Paul, James condemn cursing. Translation problem: the word is anathema - talking about people who call themselves Christians but do not love Christ - as earlier in the letter.
  • Too much love ? Greet one another with a holy kiss - plain Greek; the history of interpretation of this text is amazing.
    • C 2nd: Justin Martyr a ritualized act - part of the official liturgy between prayer and the Lord's supper. The passage no-where suggests ritualisation.
    • C 3rd: segregate the sexes for kissing.
    • C 4th: segregate the clergy from leity kissing each other.
    • Later - got rid of the facial kiss - kissing the hand.
    • C 13th - moving to objects - minister would kiss a tablet and they would pass it around the pews.
    • The Armenian church - just bowing instead.
    • Nowadays - kissing was perhaps a peace sign - shaking hands often used instead.
  • Kissing is not and was not normal behavior for people who are not family members / in love. 5 times in the new testament people are told to kiss each other. In our text 2nd Cor 13:12, Rom 16:16, 1 Thes 5:5, 1 Peter 5:14 Greet one another with a kiss of love.
  • Keeps saying a Holy kiss - Tertulian: very hard for women whose husbands had not converted; church talking about love and kissing each other - rumours about orgies - the world's gutter minds; can not concieve of love without carnality.
  • Christians are for committed relationships with people, of the same sex even; where women and men love each other and are, affectionate. The world hears love and thinks sex.
  • The bible gives lots of examples of kissing - almost all in the context of family: never just casual or meaningless / prefunctory. Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss - it's possible to be manipulative / hypocritical with this.
  • Jacob kisses his grandsons - and embraced them on his death-bed. Joseph kisses Jacob as he dies. Kissing after reconcilliation, Jacob/Esau - brothers wanting to kill the other; Easu ran to him and kissed him, wept. The parable of the prodigal son - his Father saw him and was filled with compassion ... ran to him, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
  • The world needs more such love, dying for touch, community and fellowship that's palpable. Dr Rene Spitz 20 years ago wrote about orphanages, where little children: well fed, cared for, were dying regularly from an unknown wasting disease (marasmus). Dr Henry Chapin discovered that the children needed to be held - so they would hire other people - who would hold the babies, stroke them etc. Death from the wasting disease dropped to almost zero.
  • Touch deprevation; Harlow's Infant chimpanzees experiments - fascinating. We're more than monkeys - but not less; we need touch.
• When the world thinks it needs more sex, the bible says it needs more love.
• If you have children - you need to love them / hug them - Gordon's children much bigger then him; difficult but worthwhile.
• In the family of God, shake hands in a way that communicates your deep concern, when you hug do so in a way that shows God's love; kiss where acceptable with care and affection. We love because he first loved us.

no device index

/etc/sysconfig/displaymanager

ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted

• SuSE install had re-sized (great) the original XP FAT32 partition making it un-bootable; later removed the IBM rescue partition since it was chewing a great chunk of disk.
• Booted from a Win98 CD (no floppy in the machine), fdisk \mbr - failed to resurrect booting.
• Attempted to install Win98 over the Windows XP install - mixed results; ended up with an unbelievably broken NTFS partition and a knackered Explorer.
• Gave up; re-partitioned the disk using fdisk (big mistake), set about a fresh / formatted Win98 install. Fdisk decided to allocate more than 100% of the disk, most of it over the top of my Linux partition.
• Downloaded misc. ISOs from Novell, but no CD writer to burn them to anything; had to buy a 'personal' edition copy of SuSE 9 from the LinuxEmporium - what a stupid state of affairs.

lppasswd -g sys -a root

Of the objections to the colon and the semicolon listed above, there is only one that I am prepared to concede: that semicolons are dangerously habit-forming. Many writers hooked on semicolons become an embarrassment to their families and friends. Their agents gently remind them, "George Orwell managed without, you know. And look what happened to Marcel Proust: carry on like this and you're only one step away from a cork-lined room!" But the writers rock back and forth on their office chairs, softly tapping the semicolon key and emitting low whimpers. I hear there are now Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation - but for many it may be too late.

• The context is a chapter on the resurrection, the Corinthianss deny the consequences of the bodily resurrection - 3 things to shock them to their senses.

  • If there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptised for the dead - one of the most difficult passages in the new testament; 40 alternative hypotheses. Mention one: that of the Mormons, also present in C 3rd,4th Gnostics - proxy / vicarious baptism, or baptising dead bodies. Early church viewed the positions as unconvincing & no-where authorized. Unlikely to be a random un-commented ad-hominem. The theif on the cross wasn't baptised before death, confessed sins, and his faith - today you will be with me in paradise, on the other side of the moment of death - no sign of baptism. In the immediate context it doesn't advance the argument.

    One explanation with a higher degree of plausability; People who are baptised under the earging of those who are about to die, so they might be re-united. Last words are accorded a great weight, no motives etc. we know such appeals were made by those about to be martyred.

    eg. 2 Maccabees 7 - apocryphal - a mother and 7 children face martyrdom having watched her first 6 sons be tortured to death she says to the last: Do not be afraid of this executioner, but be worthy of your brothers and accept death, so that in the time of mercy I may receive you again with them. It seems clear that people would urge their friends and relations to be reconciled to God and baptised as they were being put to death.

    An alternative variant is that, the dead person appealing - is none other than Paul, shortly after in vs. 31 I die every day. ie. if there is no resurrection you would be fools to be baptised at Paul's entreaty.

  • The apostles are fools to live such self sacrificial lives. When Paul talks of his sufferings he links them with the resurrection.

  • If there is no resurrection: let us eat and drink tomorrow we die - an allusion to the Epicurian motto ? the Epicurians not intending a life of abandoned drunkenness, but an incentive to the good life - fine dining, excellent cuisine, music, art, theatre etc. - enjoy your friendship etc.: refined hedonism.

    Jesus tells the parable of the man building a barn to store all his good things up ( Luke12) with Eat, drink and be merry - but God said to him You fool ! this very night your life will be demanded of you. People who live for the moment, live for far too little. God wants us to have deeper, more lasting fulfillment. We are far too easily pleased with drink, food, sex etc., God has joy everlasting at his right hand.

• The crowning point: the Corinthians have been sold a contemporary bill of goods that "matter doesn't matter" Do not be misled, bad company corrupts good character. Conformity is more pernicious than you think. Candid camera, funniest are the conformity to social pressure - the elevator piece, every victim turning to face with the hired crowd. The Christian however is invited to go the other way.
• The truism has been mis-applied by Christians; it does not allow people to judge others more effectively, instead to challenge us to examine ourselves, to see how we've bought into our own culture. Nor does it seem an invitation to sign up for a Monastry - we are called to be good company, to be a friend of sinners like Jesus was. Paul says to avoid bad company ( 1Cor5) you'd have to leave this world.
• The flip-side is good company promotes good character - good to have cross-cultural friendships for a good critique. C.S.Lewis said to read an old book between each new one to get a different perspective. The effect of the outstanding example in Earnest Gordon's experience in To End all Wars [ must read the book ].
• Summary - the resurrection is real, and a bright future to look forward to as we pack-up in old age. Gordon's encouragement as his retina gives up.