Open letter to idiot driver

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To the idiot in the car on Limestone Ave yesterday morning who bumped into Tegan and knocked her off her bike:

  1. Bicycles have the same rights on the road as do cars under Australian road rules
  2. If you ignore a cyclist signalling to change lanes and you also change lanes behind them, that’s your fault – don’t get angry at them
  3. If you hit someone and don’t stop – that’s actually a criminal offence, commonly known as ‘hit and run’ – it potentially carries a significant financial penalty and gaol time
  4. Everyone else around at the time thought you were in the wrong and an idiot

And to any of our friends or family who are reading, it’s not as serious as it sounds – someone clipped the rear wheel of Tegan’s bike while she was riding to work yesterday morning, knocking her up on to the median strip and off the bike. She’s basically ok though – neck and shoulder muscles are a bit strained and copped a bit of a scrape on the arm, but otherwise ok. She was pretty shaken up at the time though – her hands didn’t stop shaking for some hours afterwards.

Christmas and New Year

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Another Christmas and New Year period has come and gone and now we’re back at work and eagerly anticipating and hanging out for another holiday (although with a new blog design implemented, in keeping with the ‘New Year’).

Christmas is always a bit of an odd time of the year. I have long held the view that Christmas is over-commercialised and not even a particularly significant Christian celebration – although my view on that one changed a bit this year. In the past I was of the opinion that Jesus’ death and resurrection were the focus of the early Christians, as demonstrated throughout the New Testament, and that a celebration of Jesus’ birth never really gets much of a mention. Never mind the evidence that Jesus’ wasn’t actually born on 25 December and that Christmas seems to have been put on that date as a continuation of earlier pagan festivals. I always appreciated the family aspect of Christmas – spending wonderful time with extended family more than at any other time of the year – but thought it was all a bit overdone. This year, I still think it’s overdone, but have a renewed appreciation of the wonder and significance of the incarnation – what an amazing thing it is that the God of everything would willingly choose to enter into our world, take on human flesh and frailty and experience in the body the life of a human, before finally giving it up in a painful, undeserved death – and all that because he loved us. Amazing.

Tegan and I hosted family Christmas for the first time ever in our new house. My immediate family came down to stay on the weekend before Christmas and we had our traditional Christmas Eve gathering with just the five of us. On Christmas Day we went to church, were Tegan was always leading the singing, and then we hosted the feast for the extended family on my Mum’s side. We had such a great day! It was one of the best Christmas gatherings I can remember – the food was great, everyone got along really, really well, we didn’t overdo the presents too much (instituting a “secret santa” style gift giving arrangement), and it was just a good relaxing day: food, drink, cricket in the park – all good.

Two days later we also hosted a Christmas gathering for Tegan’s family in Canberra, so we had ten at lunch that day (a little easier than the thirteen on Christmas day). This was also a good day in all the same kind of ways. The rest of the week was pretty quiet after that (well, the bit of the week that was left) although we also had a quiet but fun gathering of friends for a BBQ and games (including backyard croquet) on New Years Eve. And then it was back to work on 2 January.

So far, this year has involved:

  • Larissa coming to stay with us for a week
  • Our good friend Lisa staying with us for a couple of days before she moves overseas
  • A couple of BBQs and social evenings, with much Singstar! and Guitar Hero (particularly since I got Guitar Hero 2 for Christmas, now giving us two guitar controllers and allowing great multiplayer action)
  • Tegan being involved in wedding preparations for her sister, Bec, and cousin, Bess, both of whom are getting married this year and at both of whose weddings Tegan will be a bridesmaid (bridesmatron?)
  • Work, unfortunately, although with a decision not to move to Melbourne for a different job

We’re also taking three weeks leave after Australia Day, most of which will be doing nothing kind of time, except that we’re going to Adelaide for a few days to go to the Big Day Out.

Casino Royale

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We loved it.

Why? Because, unlike recent James Bond films, it was primarily a spy movie/thriller, more than an over-the-top action film, but had enough action and gadgets to make it distinctively a Bond film. There were no really corny puns. There were cool cars, but not too many. There were femma fatales, but les bed-hopping than in many Bond films. There was witty word-play by bond, but it wasn’t stupidly corny. And Daniel Craig is at least as good a Bond as Pierce Brosnan (even if his acting is a bit more wooden).

Overall, this was the best Bond movie I have seen since Sean Connery’s day, but not as good as Goldfinger or From Russia With Love.

And it had a free running chase scene – which is very cool.

Book Unsuggestions, or the things I may or may not like corresponding to current book ownership

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I obviously have an odd taste in books.

The Library Thing Unsuggester has been getting a few comments recently: I found Neil Gaiman’s comments on it really interesting, particularly the part about how if you like his books, the Unsuggester reckons you are unlikely to like Christian books.

So, I decided to try it, looking up a few of my favourite books, firstly with one my favourite fictional novels, Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. Ok, I only own about 10 books from the list of 72 books it suggested I wouldn’t like if I owned or had read Cryptonomicon, but there were many books there that are the kind of books I would like to read. Interestingly, almost all of the books in the list were Christian books, number one on the list being “When I Don’t Desire God : how to fight for joy” by John Piper. I haven’t read that particular one, but I have read Desiring God and several other books by Piper, and they’re great. On the other hand, I do believe that I wouldn’t be particularly interested in “This lullaby : a novel” by Sarah Dessen or “Girls in pants : the third summer of the Sisterhood” by Ann Brashares.

My experience of looking up a favourite fictional novel ended in results much like Neil Gaiman’s – i.e. recommendations against Christian books – so I decided to look up a Christian book and see what I found. I picked one of my favourite Christian books of all time, A Call to Spiritual Reformation, by Don Carson. The subsequent list returned of the top 75 books that I wouldn’t like included 22 books I have read, 14 more that I would like to read, and many more that I have no particular objection to, some of which are books that Tegan has read (e.g. Memoirs of a Geisha, or the Joy Luck Club). Also in the list are several of my favourite books – Cryptonomicon, Catch 22, Slaughterhouse 5, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Catcher in the Rye, Neuromancer, etc. And then there are others I tend to agree with, e.g. I was never planning to read “The time traveller’s wife” by Audrey Niffenegger, which came it on number 3 on this Unsuggestion list.

Some analysis: the list of Unsuggestions focused on books that were the most represented in collections on LibraryThing. For example, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” is the most owned books on LibraryThing (at the moment, 5,474 users have it listed in their collections), which was the highest ranked Harry Potter book on my “Call to Spiritual Reformation” Unsuggestion list at number 11. Also, the suggestion system becomes skewed when there are multiple versions of a single work out there; a book needs to be owned by 75 people before it can be used for an Unsuggestion. Unfortunately, there seem to be hundreds of versions of the Bible around, and only one has more than 75 owners. The Holy Bible Unsuggestion list fits with the results I noticed above, but I can’t put any reliability on it because the huge variety of version; different versions of the ESV, NIV or King James Bibles have less than 75 owners each so who knows – it might be that if you own a ESV Classic Reference Bible, Hardcover, Black Letter Text you might also own books by popular modern authors (like Neil Gaiman), but not if you own a NIV Life Application Study Bible. It’s a bit hard to tell when there are so few owners of each different version on LibraryThing.

Overall, my main conclusion is that people who won Christian books own other Christian books and are less likely than the whole population of LibraryThing users to own normal popular novels; but it’s probably really the other way round, that most people who own popular novels are unlikely to own Christian books, and that it’s the sheer volume of people who like Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson who are not Christians that skew the results. Still, it was an interesting exercise, even if completely irrelevant to me.

Travel photography – vote for me

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Want to help me get published? Vote for my image:

This JPG magazine looks really interesting – the concept is that people vote for photos they like, matching various themes. After going through an editorial process, they are published in a bimonthly magazine. Apparently it originated from a concept where people subscribed to be delivered an original photo once per month and it has evolved into a magazine. I think it looks great – becuase I’m so into photography of late, I’m seriously considering getting a subscription.