Today I had a business meeting with a guy who runs a business in Highwoods, which was very interesting. He’s a Christian, and is looking for someone to help his business with web design clients. If all goes well, hopefully he’ll be outsourcing some of his clients to me, which would be a great extra source of income! And income is probably going to be rather important over the next year or so - weddings don’t come cheap! I’ll still have the freelance business of course, but it’s reassuring that there’s the chance of a more continuous stream of business coming my way in future. I shall have to discipline myself more, I think, and actually do some work…

Speaking of knuckling down to work, I made some chocolate crispies this afternoon. I’ve been meaning to for a while now, but only just got round to actually doing it. Only a small batch, nine in all, but I shall be doing a larger batch for when I go to Spring Harvest. So if people want a chocolate crispie, they’re in my fridge. Help yourself. But remember - first come, first served. Don’t come crying to me if tomorrow the cupboard is bare…

I also figured out just how much music material I have for the CD we’re planning on recording at my church. For those who I haven’t told already, I’m forming a band at church with the aim of recording a CD of original Christian songs written by myself and some others at church. We probably won’t be able to get together until after Easter, but people have agreed to be part of it, so hopefully it’ll go ahead. The recording part will be interesting, particularly deciding whether to record each person one at a time, giving us complete control over everything, or whether to pump everyone through a mixer first and get the levels right, so that we only have to record it once. I suspect we’ll end up doing a mixture of the two. Some songs would work better as “live” worship songs, whereas others are more solo-oriented so may well benefit from being done in stages. Either way, I’ve got about 45 minutes worth of songs that I’ve written, which is promising. We probably won’t use all of them (some are better than others!!), but at least it’s a start.

And the sun is out again today. Very pleasant. Feels almost BBQ weather… or maybe not, the wind is still quite chilly!!

I really haven’t got much work done recently, far too many distractions. Just today I’ve written a new tune to the old hymn “Breathe on my breath of God”. Seems to be a common theme at the moment, recomposing the old into the new, having done a similar thing with “How great thou art” last week. The thinking behind it has been two-fold: part of it is a conscious decision to try and make the fantastic words of some of the hymns more accessible to a modern audience by giving them a more modern accompaniment. Many people today seem to find it easier to connect with modern Christian songs as opposed to older hymns, and I suspect this is largely to do with the way the music lifts the soul in a way that is more applicable to today. Sure, the old hymns can be stirring and rousing and powerful both in their words and their music, but most people are not surrounded by that style of music, so it is often harder to tune in to it musically. By taking the words of an old hymn and giving them a new tune, I am aiming to help people connect more easily with the words whilst being lifted musically at the same time. The other reason I’ve been doing this recently is because it’s a nice rewarding distraction from whatever else I’m supposed to be doing! Mostly it’s a case of getting bored with what I’m supposed to be doing, flicking through my music book and finding something that shouts at me “I need a new tune! Write me one!!!” How can I say no to that?

There have been other distractions too. Wading through a mountain of congratulatory e-mails, putting important dates in my diary, sorting out parties, phoning relatives, that kind of thing.

I should be more busy the next few days though. Tomorrow I’m trekking off to the outskirts of Bedford to talk web sites with a client. Then on Thursday I’m having another business meeting, and Friday meeting up with yet another client. So that should keep me out of mischeif! I shall have to look at my Mini at some point too, I fancy the mixture might be slightly off - while the new exhaust has made a vast improvement on the performance, the acceleration is still a little uneven in places. I shall have to check the spark plugs at some point, see what that tells me, and maybe replace the air filter too. Oh, and in case anyone is interested and still hasn’t checked, I’ve got some more recent photos of Neddy on my PhotoLounge.

Right, I think I’m going to make me a cup of tea now, giggle some more, and enjoy the feeling of having no one on the phone yet still being engaged…

I don’t think I’ve talked about this before, if I am repeating myself then do forgive me, but this really does deserve some space on the web. It just amazes me sometimes how brilliantly flawed predictive text is. Although the algorithms have improved over the years (my phone now does predictive word completion too), it still isn’t fool-proof. Here is an example:

“Hiya! sorry not go, b good room”

That should have read “Hiya! sorry not in, b home soon”. The right keys would have been pressed, but the writer was in too much of a hurry, or too oblivious to the misinterpretation, that the wrong words end up being sent. Another one I was sent recently said “go if thanks” - I’ll leave you to work out what that was supposed to mean…

I propose an improvement to be grammar and syntax to be taught to mobile phones, so that it can go back over words and see if they make sense. Hopefully that way such mistakes as above would stop happening quite so often. I doubt it would ever be completely fool-proof, because fools are so ingenious. But if phones can surf the internet and manage a diary, I’m sure we must be able to teach them the basics of the English language!

My computer gave me a message the other day. It said “your hard disk is getting full”. Grrr. It was to be expected, I suppose, what with having what would be considered today as a pathetic amount of hard disk space on my Mac. The computer came with two hard disks installed, both 10Gb in size, and both are now rather full. So I’m moving some files around now, moving my music and photos onto my PC. It means that the PC is acting even more like a server, serving not only the internet but also a lot of my own personal files. Unless I’m planning on doing any hefty file moving, I don’t think it should cause any problems, my Mac seems perfectly happy accessing everything across the network. I’m not sure I’d want to do the same the other way round, Windows still isn’t as network-friendly as it would like to make out!

I spent most of this morning on campus, watching an exam. Ellie was taking part in a short play that she and her group had written, which was going to be examined, and I was supporting in the audience. It was actually very good, very entertaining, yet making a very clear point. There were four groups performing today, of which I saw three. I think I understood Ellie’s play more than either of the others I saw, possibly because Ellie had already explained to me what the play was about and what it was supposed to be achieving. I won’t attempt to explain it here, it was kinda complicated and I probably wouldn’t do it justice, but it was generally about censorship, and took a dig at the whole anonymous marking policy the university is trying to bring in, which obviously doesn’t work in drama! They illustrated it by starting their play with paper bags over their heads, showing that you really can’t act if you’re anonymous! It was very clever, and I was very impressed, I know Ellie has put in a lot of hard work and it’s paid off!

Yes, this is the same blog, it’s just different. I was beginning to feel that my old site design was looking rather tired, so I’ve done this revitalised design, taking into account some of the latest web design trends, and generally making everything a lot cleaner. Do let me know what you think of it, I’d be interested to hear your suggestions!

Right, with that done, I suppose I ought to get back to doing some real work…

First off, you may notice some slight changes to the appearance on my blog. I’ve tweaked the fonts a little, so that it’s using a sans serif font rather than one with serifs. There are also some subtle changes to kerning and line spacing, though unless you surf web sites with a ruler you’re unlikely to have noticed them… I think the whole site needs a bit of freshening up soon, but I’m not feeling particularly creative at the moment, so it’ll have to wait for now.

Thinking back to the last few days, it’s all been quite busy. On Saturday I went paintballing with some friends from CU, to a place in Billericay. We had to meet at the Chaplaincy at 7:45am in order to get everyone to the paintball centre by 9:15am, so it was an early start for all of us. The drive down was no problem (thoroughly enjoyed the sound of the new exhaust!), though we did get a little lost going through one of the small villages on the way. Chris J got lost in the village, which was something of a concern for us because he was supposed to be our group leader (who put him in charge???), but we all got in eventually and got kitted out with protective suits, helmets and paintball canisters. There were loads of people there, it was a far bigger place than I had expected, there must have been almost 100 people there in total! There were 6 games during the day, 3 before lunch and 3 in the afternoon, each game consisting of 2 rounds so that each team could have a go in each direction. In our first game one team defended a castle and the other had to try to take it over. There was a similar game where the teams had to take over their opponents’ base camp, and another where we had to fight for ownership of four huts. There were also two general shoot-until-everyone’s-dead games, one with barrels to hide behind and one with odd bits of metal wall. The last game incorporated a bridge, with the aim of retrieving an oil can from the middle of the bridge and getting it back to your side of the bridge without being shot. It was a lot of fun, though quite painful, and kept you frantically watching over your shoulder! Most annoying were the two times I got shot in the mouth - the helmet stopped the paintball, but not the paint, so I got a mouthful of the green stuff. Of course, moving at that speed it was still hard enough to leave me with a bruised lip, which wasn’t too pleasant. I also got shot in both legs, and I still have large bruises to show for it! However, the most disturbing part was that night when I was trying to get to sleep, and found myself flinching uncontrollably at imaginary paintballs…

There have also been several parties over the past few days. My unofficial birthday party was on Thursday, and was just myself, Ellie, Anne-Marie and Esther. Then on Friday evening I had my official party, at which there were a lot more people. There was a good range of friends there, from oldies like Sarah and Jon and Berkeley, to relatively new friends like Sarah (no, the other Sarah). On Sunday I was actually kicked out of the house because of a girlie night, so I ended up at Alex’s eating pizza and watching a DVD of Peter Kay (not quite my cup of tea, but passed the time). Of course I did come back home and found that the girlie night was still in full swing, and ended up joining them for a bit (cautiously). To be honest, I think I laughed a lot more at the girlie night than I had at Alex’s!! I’m just glad they didn’t decide to paint my nails when they had the chance!

This morning I had a meeting about another web site I’m redesigning, and that went well. I’ve certainly got plenty to be getting on with now, in terms of creating some initial designs. I also did some research last night into the latest web trends, this year’s fashions in the web design world! It was quite interesting, seeing what was being predicted and what key things were working, design-wise. In particular, rounded corners are in at the moment, simple layouts are proving effective, gradient fills can be very effective in the right places, and various font effects are being used (like tight kerning and large blocks of text for effect). Some things were an interesting eye-opener, while with others it was a reassuring relief to know that I’ve been on the right lines so far!

This afternoon I was considering ringing somewhere like Kwikfit to get my exhaust fitted, simply because I’m fed up with having it sitting in the garage when it should be on the car! Just as I was about to phone them, I got a text message from a friend of mine who is also into Minis, inviting me round to fit it! A good bit of timing there! In the end I fitted it all myself, which was quite fun, though it was good having someone there who knew what he was doing. It would have been nicer to have got the car up higher, but we didn’t really have anything big and industrial on site, so I just had to make do with a couple of little ramps. Still, it was better than nothing, and after a lot of struggling I managed to get the old exhaust off. As it turns out, the old exhaust was so riddled with rust that there were at least four gaping holes in it! No wonder it had been making a lot of noise! After a little trouble getting the sealing paste out of the tube (it refused to come out of the hole in the top of the tube, but instead preferred to ease the bottom open!) I got the gasket nicely covered in gloop, and put the new RC40 exhaust on. It was actually all a lot easier than I expected, which was a nice surprise, and it seems to have fixed itself on pretty well, no leaks at all. It doesn’t look amazingly impressive, other than being shiny at the end, but it sounds so much nicer and has improved the performance slightly too. The acceleration is back to being smooth again now (the old blowing exhaust had been making the acceleration very lumpy and uneven), so all round a very satisfactory afternoon’s work!

I know I’ve said this many times before, but I WILL take some photos of Neddy at some point, just as soon as the sun comes out…

After spending this morning working on various things, I decided this afternoon to spend some time in the garage. After my friend Billy managed to get my old cassette/radio out of the car on Saturday, that just left me the task of removing the cradle that it had been sat in. You can see from previous photos how the original stereo sat in some housing underneath the dash rail. That plastic cradle was held in place by two bolts, so it should have been a simple job to undo them and remove the housing. Hah. When was working on this car ever straightforward? I think Neddy has a cruel sense of humour - any job that is *supposed* to take half an hour normally ends up taking at least three!

After a lot of fumbling around in spaces I couldn’t see, I eventually figured out that nuts I could feel on the underside of the top of the cradle were not actually bolts, but in fact square nuts welded to the metal of the cradle. Which meant that it was more like a screw, which would have been screwed in from the top rather than the bottom. So that meant getting underneath the lining of the glove compartment, which is no easy job when there’s a dashboard restricting access! A lot more fumbling around and I discovered that in fact it wasn’t a screw head at all, but a bolt. So out came my trusty socket set and a rachet, and after a lot of struggling against the stubborn cardboard lining I managed to undo the bolts! So it’s done at last, and looks much tidier. Hopefully my cello will fit more comfortably in the front seat now - it’s had to go in upside-down so far, which is hardly a natural position for a cello, and also makes it prone to falling on top of me when I go round a corner…. so hopefully that’s that sorted.

I did have a go at gluing the carpet back onto the passenger side footwell. Epoxy resin would have been the ideal choice, but I didn’t have any, so I tried superglue, since I had some of that already. Surprise surprise, it didn’t hold. Looks like I’ll have to invest in some epoxy after all! There’s a strange sense of achievement doing things to my Mini - it’s satisfying being able to do what I want with it. Sometimes I wonder if I’m spending too much time thinking about it though… I’ve found myself glued to eBay and various Mini parts web sites, deciding which bits to buy next! At least I have the reassurance that once I’ve bought these things I won’t have to buy them again. I know what I want Neddy to end up looking like, and once it’s there I shouldn’t have to worry too much. That’s the theory at least…

Having ordered my new set of headlights on Thursday afternoon, I was amazed when they arrived on Friday morning! That’s what I call a quick delivery!! However, the excitement was dampened slightly when I discovered that the lights aren’t actually road-legal. They look the business, but they won’t pass an MOT. So now I’m not quite as happy with Minispeed as I was to begin with - they said nothing on their web site about the lights being for off-road use only. After some more googling I stumbled across a link to some better crystal headlamps, as sold by MiniTrailers.com. I actually looked at this site before, and they clearly stated that their headlights were for off-road use only, so I didn’t pay them much attention. However, they’ve now brought out a new range which are more advanced, and which will pass the MOT. They’re still not E-marked, which means that they’re still not officially recognised, but they do measure up to the standards and will easily pass the MOT. You can see just from the pictures that they’re doing the job properly - the patterns on the back reflector actually look like they’re going to reflect the light in a particular pattern, rather than just generally in the forwards direction… So it looks like I’ll be sending my crystal lights back to Minispeed, or selling them on eBay, and buying another set from MiniTrailers. Ah well, we live and learn!

P.S. As requested, here’s a shout out to Luke.

Firstly, I have observed that I’ve had more comments following my Shine Jesus Shine post than any other, as far as I can recall! So many thanks to all of you who have downloaded the mp3 and left your opinions, especially those of you who said nice things about it!

I did make another Mini-related purchase today, which was quite fun. I found a nice set of crystal halogen headlights on the Minispeed web site, and figured it was about time I bought some. I noticed whilst driving along in the dark the other night that my headlights just don’t seem to light up the road enough. Sure, I can see enough of the road to not drive into anything, but it’s not exactly encouraging to be driving along checking every few minutes to make sure the lights are switched on! The crystal lenses are like what you’d find on any modern car, where the beam pattern is determined by the reflector at the back rather than the glass on the front. As such, the headlights look more sparkly, because you can see right to the back of the light bowl. Also, being a halogen bulb, it’s going to be significantly brighter, bringing Neddy’s lighting department into the 21st century!

Purchasing the lights was an interesting experience. According to the Colchester Mini Club web site, I can get a discount from Minispeed by saying I’m a member. Obviously there wasn’t anything on Minispeed’s web site where I could tell them that, so I decided to phone them up instead. The guy I spoke to didn’t really seem to know what was going on, but took my word for it that there was an agreement to offer discount! It did strike me afterwards that I could have claimed I was from an imaginary club and I would have got away with it… Still, I got it all sorted over the phone, so hopefully they’ll be arriving either on Saturday or Monday, depending on when they get in the post.

I’ve also found myself frequently on eBay just of late, scouring the listings for anything Mini-related that might be useful. So far I haven’t won anything, though I’ve got my eye on a few things. Of course, I really didn’t ought to spend too much money, I’m supposed to be saving up for a new set of wheels…

P.S. Berkeley complained last night that he was only mentioned in my blog twice. So here is another mention of him. Hello Berkeley.