I’m not a big fan of the use of the word “impact” to describe how we want to influence or change things. “We want to have a big impact in society!” “How can we impact the world?” “What impact will this have on our business plan?”
Impact has quite an violent or harsh physical overtone. Hitting, kicking, punching etc. Which fits in well with the western / violent / masculine language dominant in our current culture - but it’s not a metaphor that reflects the kind of long term beauty and change we want to see.
Recently I heard “impact” described as a positive thing - in that it was how musical notes were created. As in a bell, cymbals, drums, but also guitars, woodwind instruments…
Except - that’s not how woodwind instruments work. Nor guitars.
You don’t “hit” the strings on a guitar, and the note on a woodwind instrument doesn’t change by the air “hitting” the holes that you cover.
A guitar works by introducing tension, and then releasing it.
A flute works by the air being split by the block, and creating a column of air inside the body of the flute, which you then change the length of by opening and shutting holes.
A clarinet works by setting up a vibration in the reed by pushing air past it and tensioning it in exactly the right way, and then by changing the length of the tube (with the keys), it changes the speed the vibration can happen at.
The big insight to me here is that it’s not just an external force “impacting” the instrument, but an interaction of multiple forces. Interaction and engagement, not just slap and walk away.
And that’s kind of important to me… the idea that to make real change, and make things of beauty that last (like a sustained note, not just a crash of cymbal), it requires giving of breath (life), and constant engagement with the system that you’re changing. When you play clarinet, you don’t give a constant air pressure and tension in your mouth all the time - you modulate that depending on the result you’re getting. You need the feedback loop.
This year the Creative Writing Passion-Group on board were asked to make a series of brief reinterpretations of the Advent story for every day at lunch-time on board.
Here’s my two contributions:
Daniel (Part 1)
Phone Rings You have reached the extension of Meshack, Permanent Secretary for the office of Internal Affairs, Babylon. I’m afraid I’m unable to take your call, but if you leave a message and contact information, one of my scheduling staff will return your call. BEEP
Daniel: Mishack, this is Belteshazzar, if you could contact me please that would be great. I’ve had a bit of an odd, er, experience I’d like to talk about with you. Shalom, Click
Phone Rings You have reached the extension of Meshack, Permanent Secretary for the office of Internal Affairs, Babylon. I’m afraid I’m unable to take your call, but if you leave a message and contact information, one of my scheduling staff will return your call. BEEP
Daniel: Oh for goodness sake Mishael - answer your blasted phone! It’s me again, Daniel. Look, the dreams have been getting stranger. I swear I’ve not touched a drop of the King’s wine. So there were these beasts, coming out of the sea, all mixed up - a leopard with four wings, a lion, a bear, hideous. This wasn’t some stupid nightmare. Nightmares are way more mundane.
I can remember so vividly, like I was actually there - I’m not going to tell you every detail now… it all ended, somehow with me seeing into the thoneroom in heaven itself! And there, a “son of man”, like, how you described the fourth man in the furnace? The same! And he shows up in the throneroom, and was greeted royally, and then gets made ruler of the whole planet! An eternal kingdom, full of every kind of people, diverse and spectacular, immense and unlike anything we’ve ever seen, Mishael.
So I went and asked one of the court guards what on earth was going on - and he told me it’s all about the future, the beasts are kings who are coming, and eventually the Most High will judge the last kingdom, destroy it, and hand it all over to an eternal kingdom of His people.
Look - I honestly don’t know what it all means, brother. Or why on earth I had this dream. I thought these dreams from the Lord were supposed to be meaningful? How can I make SMART goals or an Action Plan from something like this?!
It’s terrifying, seeing the horrors of so far in the future - I know the Lord will send this Son of Man in the end - but it’s such a long way off - why tell me now? I wrote it all down - maybe you could come by to read through it. Perhaps someone else will find it encouraging. Call me. Click
Daniel (Part 2)
Featuring the Prophet Daniel (played by me) and his Life Coach (played by Dan Potter).
So this is Part 3 of my seminar / workshop on Story Telling that I did with the Logos Hope On-Board events Team. Here’s Part 1, and Part 2.
There’s an interesting alternative theory called, “The Hero’s Journey” (or “Monomyth”). There’s books written about this, some really cool ideas. A very approachable version is by Dan Harmon, the creator of Community. Ant Webb was the guy who introduced me to both Community, and the Hero’s Journey. We’ve been discussing it and used it as part of Matt’s Blog.
The Hero’s Journey theory says good stories are circular. You end up back where you started. They’re a journey from home, from comfort, from the concious, down into the subconscious, uncomfortable far away place, and back eventually home again. Of course, changes happen along the way.
The full theory has all kinds of Freudian stuff to do with being forced out of the mothers arms by the call of the father, eventually defeating the father, and returning eventually as a mother or father all that… (Seriously, Freud had issues.) Also, there’s loads of details that are reasonably important, and do make the story more compelling, but also, with much added complexity. So lets go look at Dan Harmon’s Story Circle instead.
He takes the circle concept, and breaks it into 8 simple parts.
We start off at " You". This is where " you" the audience relate to the main character(s). Preferably, the character should be in a place of comfort, or at least, be connected to some kind of easy-to-relate-to “home” situation. This could be a sailor at sea on the bridge, or a little bear playing a balancing game, or Garion at Faldor’s farm, a new student enrolling at community college, etc. It’s a starting point that the audience can relate to, and feel comfortable understanding. They don’t have to dig deep emotionally to connect with the main character. It happens automatically. This is the concious, mental understanding area.
Next is the " need". Something isn’t right, or some how the stable situation will be pushed off-balance. This is pretty close to the “problem” concept from the 3-act play model. Note, we’re still basically in the stable conciousness.
So, since there’s a need, I guess we’d better " Go" do something about it. This is where the Hero decides to actually leave their safe familiar environment, and go out into the world to solve the problem. We finally dep art the concious, and head into the scary subconscious / unconscious. The go ing can often be the most emotional part of the story. Or at least, the most emotionally motivated or driven part. Once the Hero is actually off fighting dragons and saving maidens, they’re too busy actually doing stuff to be all soppy and emotional.
Now that we’ve actually left, comes the big difficult part of the story, the Seek ing, or Search ing. We may not exactly know what it is we’re looking for yet - but we’ll find out. Many different avenues can be explored, different people met, etc. This can be long, arduous, and challenging. The main character should be growing and changing here.
Since we’re only on the ship for a few more days (!), I thought I’d post a few photos.
It was a friend’s birthday, and so various people filled his office with balloons. David already loves coming to visit him (Tommy), and this visit was even more fun.
Prayer night on board. They’d decided for a “gather around the fire” kind of set up, the evening being led by the Africans on board, so I added a few lighting touches to make it feel even more campfireish.
This is the new lighting control system. We’ve got rid of the old, difficult-to-teach, increasingly flaky Zero88 LeapFrog Desk, and put in place a computer, with a USB->DMX interface. The software we’re using is free, called “QLC+". It’s got a few bugs, but is *incredibly* much more easy to teach people, and allows us to do cool things like play music from the software, with lighting cues at specific times in the music, make the moving-head lights bounce around in time, etc. Cool cool stuff.
David enjoys playing table tennis with us.
Muster drill today, David got all dressed up in his lifejacket, and looked stunningly cute, in a marine kind of way. He had fun, anyway.
This is a project I’ve wanted to do for a while. The equipment in this office is “AVC” (Audio-Visual Central), and the main hub for all the AV routing around the ship (sending video & audio to the dining room so people can listen to devotions while finishing breakfast, for instance. Or displaying big programs in the theatre in the Logos Lounge as well as an over-flow venue, or as a place for ship’s company to watch, etc. etc.).
Anyway, This whole wall of racking is quite a mess. This office used to be the IT office, and backs on to the server room. Things have changed now, and it’s the on-shore-events team who work here, so having 19 inch racking makes no sense. And they need more storage space, and the IT folks need more storage space too.
So I suggested (about 2 months ago) moving the AV equipment into the far left rack, and then turning the other 3 racks into cupboards facing both ways, with plenty of space for the IT guys in the server room, and plenty for the on-shore teams in this office. Nothing came of my suggestion, so I thought, “oh well, the carpenters are too busy. whatever”. But now they’ve got a couple of enthusiastic project workers on the job, and everyone’s quite excited about how much more space they’re going to get.
Although I’m wondering if I was mad to suggest this project, as it does mean quite a lot of moving cables and equipment around…. I hope I don’t break anything. I want to do this while I’m here though still, as none of the A/V team have any experience doing racks/patchpanels/routers/install type stuff.
So we’ve been here almost 2 weeks now. It seems to have passed extremely quickly. The AV team have been hard at work, cleaning, installing, cleaning, testing, cleaning, training, and cleaning. I’ll try and post some more photos of the new equipment and nerdy stuff like that soon. But for now - here’s a photo of the 3 new recruits down in the AV store room cleaning it out. There’s a couple of tank man-holes in the store room, so often during dry-dock deck teams go in through there to work in the tank, and so everything gets covered in dust and grime. It would be nice if they told us in advance so we could get stuff out of their way and protected… but more of that another time.
So. That proves we’re actually working, (or at least that I’m making other people work - which is basically the same thing) now for some more fun photos.
We’re all settling in. David is loving all the attention and stuff going on all the time. It’s lovely being able to eat with my family every day at basically every meal at the moment. Becky is finding it a bit odd, and lonely at the moment, as she didn’t really know many of the other mums, or what things there are to do. She misses cornerstone and the community there. Things are starting to pick up though.
Playing with David is always fun - we’ve been leant loads of toys for him to play with, which is pretty cool. He’s always so active, and wanting to run around. He loves this walker, and spends plenty of time just coasting around the chairs too.
He’s such a happy baby most of the time. The two things he hates are sleeping, and ending a meal. No matter how much he’s eaten, he’s always sad when we stop feeding him and wipe his face. I wonder if he’ll be a chef one day…
Oh. And since some toys are magnetic, and we have a metal deck-head in our cabin (ceiling)…
I use WordPress at work, it’s the engine behind fr.om.org, transform.om.org and most of the other sites that we run for clients.
I’m in two minds as to whether I like it or not. Some things are great. For users (content authors, the people writing blog posts or static pages), it’s fine. Easy to understand and use. For writing plugins and templates, it’s… Well, kind of messy and ugly, but doable. For instance, rather than have 1 HTML template “base” file, with a block saying, “put posts here, and wrap each one in x,y,z”, you have a header.php which has only the start of all the HTML, and a footer.php which closes it all, and a content.php, a content-post.php, and so on, and you have to keep them all synced up. Also, since it’s designed for running on old PHP, it doesn’t use namespaces or other ways of keeping code clean, so all functions in all plugins and all templates are all global scope, so to avoid bumping in to each other, you have to name all your functions stuff like, “madprofs_teapot_plugin_get_resource() and similar. Then at the same time, Wordpress has multiple global functions of its own, some called things like, the_post(), others like wp_get_cached(), (so prefixed with wp_), and others in other styles. Messy.
Still, it gets the job done.
So when I wanted to update and clean up the brummie@sea blog, I thought I’d just stick with blogger. It works, it’s what I already had. But then, accidentally, while trying to update it, I lost the entire design, and putting it back together was this awful mess of Google-XML/HTML confusion, I thought, “you know, stuff it, I’ll just use WordPress.” So I span up a site on the server (in about 2 minutes), pointed the blogger importer at brummieatsea.blogspot.com, let it chug away for a few minutes, and here we are.
I’m just using a very simple built in design for now, (with my own background), but it seems to work. I now don’t have to worry about Google turning off blogger like they did with Reader and GoogleCode, and since I use Wordpress at work, I understand what’s going on pretty well.
That all said, we’re now on the ship, trying to settle in. We have a really nice cabin. Jet lag wasn’t fun, especially with the baby, but we’ll get through it. Yesterday Becky drank a big milky drink by accident - we thought it wasn’t cows milk but plant based, and last night and tonight David has been awful - screaming for ages and refusing to be comforted or to sleep lying down in his bed. So that does seem to confirm that maybe it is a lactose intolerance at the moment - hopefully he’s back to normal in a day or so.
Work so far is just cleaning the various venues. We’ve not even begun to start installing new equipment or doing anything really technical. We’ve got the lights out of their bags and air-blasted them all, cleaned many surfaces and TVs and vacuumed and dusted. It’s going alright. Still sooo much to do.
9 months ago our son was born, and he kind of took priority over writing. I’m sure you understand.
Anyway, the reason for this post is that once again, the brummie will soon be at sea! This time with Mrs. Brummie, and Baby Cumbrian. I don’t know if Becky will object to being Mrs. Brummie, as she’s actually from Yorkshire, but whatever.
So we’re heading out to the Logos Hope again for 3 months.
Becky and I were on board for 3 months just over 2 years ago, helping with the A/V and Events teams after the 6 months dry-dock in Subic Bay. This time, the ship has just come out of several months in dry-dock again, this time having the generators replaced.
I’ll be working with the A/V team again, doing training and helping getting everything back on track and working again. We’ve bought some new equipment, as most of what’s there now is from the original install 6+ years ago, and is in need of some serious overhaulage.
During the Subic Bay drydock 2 years ago, none of the A/V gear was packed away properly, which is part of why everything is in such bad condition now. At least now, since then, it’s become part of A/V culture to do a serious pack down at the start of every dry-dock. All of the lights on the truss get plastic bagged, all of the lighting dimmers get unplugged and tagged out, the desks get bagged and covered, etc.
In some ways, I’m extremely excited about going back again. For the last couple of years I’ve ended up doing more and more I.T. work here, making and maintaining websites for transform.om.org, fr.om.org, omnivision.om.org, omnitube.org, and video.om.org, as well as a few internal projects (including stuff-management and streetsign). It’s kind of interesting, some days, but also pretty frustrating too. I feel I’m more of a creative ideas person, rather than a server-maintenance guy, so the initial creation of websites or programming projects is kind of fun, the on-going maintenanace and bug-fixing drives me to despair (not to mention having to work in PHP with Wordpress…).
I love the ship’s work, I love doing events (especially the school visits and other kids events and actual theatre type events), and am quite excited about not having to do I.T. stuff here for a while.
It’s really strange to think that when we get back from the Logos Hope in 3 months time, it’ll be 10 years since I started this blog, when I first went to Doulos for 3 months….
Anyway, time for dinner, and I need to go play with our son. I’ll try and post something a lot more regularly this time. Writing is theraputic, and I suspect I’m going to need it…
I have ended up maintaining a few websites which we are hosting on a machine off in Germany somewhere.
I want to get everything automated, so I have less work to do if something goes wrong.
I’m using ansible, which is wonderful, and have a nice set of playbooks I’ve written which take a raw CentOS install, and install everything, (php-fpm, nginx, etc…) set up the virtualhosts, install wordpress & joomla and all that for the sites that need it, etc.
Until today, I’ve been using a virtualbox on my local computer to test on, and it works great. I haven’t bothered with vagrant, as I tried it for a couple of days, and it crashed my whole computer twice, so I gave up. With virtualbox, it’s almost as simple. I have a virtualmachine which I can spin up, install stuff on, and then when I want to go back to a fresh machine, it’s a matter of turning it off, and clicking ‘restore snapshot’ to the snapshot I made when it was clean installed.
It’s practically instant, and just works.
However, running a virtualmachine on my primary work computer all the time does make everything else somewhat sluggish. So I’ve scrouged an old computer that wasn’t doing anything, and am now using that instead.
In order to get snapshots and restore points going well, here’s how I did it:
Install CentOS, leaving a bunch of free space on the LVM primary group.
Make a snapshot when it’s first installed
Restore (merge to) that snapshot whenever I want it back to original settings.
Reboot
To make & restore the snapshots, I’ve written the commands as scripts so I don’t have to remember the lg-whatever stuff. (vg_localtest is the name of the volume group I set up for the HD when I installed):
It works great so far. One improvement I’m making, since I one time forgot to make a snapshot, and so couldn’t restore to a blank slate without re-installing the whole thing (which, admittedly, only takes half an hour or so):
I’m adding ‘snapshot_make’ into a boot script, and then modifying it to remove itself from the bootscript once it’s made the snapshot. That way as soon as the machine reboots into it’s original snapshot, it will automatically re-create the snapshot.
For the last few months, some friends and I have been working in our spare time on a 12 part video series, “Matthew’s Blog” - a video blog from the point of view of the Apostle Matthew (although he doesn’t know it yet).
He starts off as a young, arrogant tax officer, which is where we meet him in the first Episode:
I hope you enjoy! Please join us as it leads up to the climax at Easter this year on facebook.com/matthewsblog !
We finally got the last projects out of that monstrosity ‘Final Cut Server’, but one project at the end was a nightmare to export, and we weren’t sure which files from the end actually were in a different version of the project that we already had.
We essentially needed to merge two different versions of projects directories, making sure not to lose any files, and we didn’t want to lose the organization of the files.
Here’s a quick python script I wipped up to make it quicker.
With the 4000 odd files in the project, it took under a second to run, and it turned out we only had about 20 files which hadn’t already been merged. Much simpler to sort out.
The script took about 10 minutes to write and test. This is why you should learn to program. Hacking stuff like this up is easy, and saves *so* much time.
(Yes, you probably could do this with a couple of lines of perl or BASH, but what the heck.)
#!/usr/bin/env pythonfromsubprocessimport Popen, PIPE
fromosimport stat
fromos.pathimport basename, abspath
defrun(*command):
found = Popen(command, stdout=PIPE)
return found.communicate()[0]
deffiles_in(dirname):
return [x for x in run('find', abspath(dirname), '-type','f', '-print0').split(chr(0)) if x]
if__name__=='__main__':
fromsysimport argv
try:
sourcedir = files_in(argv[1])
destdir = files_in(argv[2])
exceptIndexError:
print'Usage:'print argv[0], ' 'print'Where you want to check if files in are also in 'print'(but perhaps with a different relative path)' exit(1)
print'---------------------------------------------------'print'{0} files in {1}'.format(len(sourcedir), abspath(argv[1]))
print'{0} files in {1}'.format(len(destdir), abspath(argv[2]))
print'---------------------------------------------------' destnames = {}
for destfile in destdir:
destnames[basename(destfile)] = {'size': stat(destfile).st_size,
'path': destfile }
for newfile in sourcedir:
base = basename(newfile)
if base notin destnames:
print newfile, 'is NOT in the new dir'else:
destfile = destnames[base]
if stat(newfile).st_size != destfile['size']:
print'{0}({1}) differs from {2}({3})'.format(
newfile, stat(newfile).st_size,
destfile['path'], destfile['size'])
