Legacy

Welcome and thankyou for joining me as I travel around South America. Presently I am in the hostel in Quito feeling a little dizzy from the altitude (Quito is about 2800m above sea level) and very tired after a very strange few days of travel. The journey started with a flight out of Sydney at 11 on Tuesday. We stopped in Auckland for an hour or so before flying to Santiago. I then went from the aeropuerto to a hotel in Santiago to burn up time during a 15 hour stop before my 3am flight to Quito via Panama. With so many hours of flights and only getting patchy sleep here and there on them has made the concept of time very transient. I feel a little like Edward Norton´s character in Fight Club. The other rather amusing feat is that my last 7 out of 8 meals have been airplane food. The other meal was at a small quaint cafe in Santiago opposite Plaza Brazil. As I walked too and from the Plaza I felt very different. Mostly ‘cause I was the only person wearing shorts in the chilly weather. Other than that I’ve discovered that knowing a little bit of Spanish helps a lot. I feel a little more relaxed knowing that I can kinda read signs and kinda talk to people (it’s more me talking and then not understanding what they say back). Anyhow, tonight I´m planning on sleeping and getting used to this altitude. Tomorrow I will probably explore a bit of Old Town and then join in the fiesta that starts there at 8pm. I will probably check out a bit more of Quito for a few more days before starting the trek down to Loja (via Riobamba and the Nariz del Diablo hopefully). There I will spend 3 weeks with the Bakon´s who are some missos associated with my old church. I hope things are going well back in sunny Australia. Feel free to drop me a line - I’d love to hear from you.

It’s been 4 days since our church group landed back in Australia after our short, 2 week, mission to South East Asia. We learnt lots of things, had lots of fun and came back exhausted. Some highlights were: Preaching in a church on a Sunday through a translator. I felt very privileged because I don’t think many Christians will ever have the chance to do what I did. The team of Christians we worked with while over there....

Today’s Lesson: In Safari (Apple’s browser), don’t hit refresh after you’ve almost finished typing up a big blog post before you’ve submitted it. The back button won’t save you. I think I’ll go to sleep now and start again tomorrow.

Pictured here is my 3 month old niece, Imogen, looking inquisitively at the camera in the cute way only babies can. Prior to her birth there was much speculation as to what her name would be. And as usual no one who guessed was right. I didn’t compete, but I wouldn’t have got it anyway. But I think Deb and Pete made the right choice with Imogen. Anyhow, all this talk about names got me thinking about how people go about deciding what to call their children. Often a family name may be adopted according to tradition, or one significant to either parent. The sound of the name, how it rolls off the tongue, may be important to some too. The ways the name can be changed, shortened and distorted should also be considered. Children at high school are ruthless, and adults aren’t much better, so it pays to ensure they won’t face needless ridicule, torment and possible psychological damage. Another factor that seems to be socially important is uniqueness. Probably because people think there are already enough Michaels, Andrews and Davids. But it’s getting to a ridiculous level now where people will deliberately misspell a name so that it’s different to the other people with the same name. The existence of the Internet seems to exacerbate this problem further. I’ve heard that people will choose names based on the availability of the internet domain name, or on how many results show up in Google (the fewer the better). Which is amusing since the usefulness of any domain will stay limited until they’re a teenager, by which time your carefully chosen name, with only 10 results in Google, will have been swamped by every other parent who thought the same as you. With this trend in mind, I have devised another criteria for choosing names: how easy the name is to type on a computer keyboard. With the proliferation of computers it would seem pertinent to pick a name that can be typed efficiently. With all the typing your child will have to do, think of all the hours they will save across the course of their lifetime by choosing a good, typable, name. Good names would avoid anything that slows down your typing. Things such as repeated letters, consecutive letters that require the same finger to press the key or having all the letters on one side of the keyboard. Some examples of bad names to type are Aaron, Lloyd, Edward, Jill, Phillip or Fredrick. Perhaps it will get to the stage where people’s names will be shortened and mangled on the internet just as the English language has. No longer will someone’s name be ‘Eugene’, but ‘Ujyn’; and ‘Michael’ would become ‘Mykl’. Either way I’m sure it’s going to get weirder.

Well it’s been a month since my last coffee and I don’t think I’ll go back to any sort of regular intake. I’m actually quite surprised at the difference it has made. My mind feels clearer even when I’m not 100%. My tiredness levels are no worse, and best of all I no longer suffer from the buzzy heights and groggy depths of the caffeine roller-coaster - my alertness now follows a much smoother gradient....

I am sitting here writing this blog post as Rove McManus interviews Andrew Denton about his recent recent (2006) visit to the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Texas. The thought has just dawned on me that never in my adult lifetime has there been an easier time to speak openly about religion. What makes it strange is that it isn’t the usual religious content you find on a light comedy/variety show on a Sunday evening - the quick one liners poking fun at a recent religious faux pas. Instead it is a serious look at a big Christian centric event (well as serious as variety shows get) and it feels slightly misplaced because there aren’t the usual array of jokes being fired off. There has been an obvious change, and I think the catalyst for this has, in part, been due to the increasing concern about terrorism, its relationship to Islam and fundamentalism. I think its also related to a deep desire people have to feel a sense of meaning with their lives or to have some spiritual experience. Whatever the case we can no longer claim that people are unwilling to talk about what they believe in. As a Christian there are more opportunities than ever for me to be sharing what I believe. If Rove can talk about it, then I have no excuse.

While I was having a conversation with Steve our youth minister after church tonight, Sam and one of his friends came by us wrestling over a hat. Steve said “here’s trouble”, then asked what they were fighting over. Sam said that his friend wouldn’t give his hat back. His friend said that Sam wouldn’t give his hat back. At this point my brain scrolled through the list of things to say. I couldn’t take a side, because I didn’t know who’s hat it was. I didn’t want to participate in their boyish tussle either. And then somehow it clicked. I’d seen this problem solved before. So I said “I know I’ll cut the hat in half and give one half to each of you”. Sam quickly replied “yeah, do it” - oblivious to what he’d just walked into. Steve picking up on it instantly said “well we know its not your hat Sam” and he promptly let go as Steve and I lost it. I could barely believe he fell for it. I didn’t think a Solomon style comment would ever have worked. The irony was that Pippett had started the sermon earlier tonight talking about learning lessons from other people’s mistakes.

The digital age, with its intanets, computamigies and webs is now truly apart of our lives and we seem to be dealing alright with it. We do our homework on computers, we talk to friends on our mobile phones, and we cook our bread in computerised toasters. But despite our hard work digital doesn’t really fit with humans. I think this comes down to two facts: the digital age is inherently discrete (mathematically) in its representation of things - it doesn’t deal very well with fuzzy areas. e.g. when describing the weather at what temperature does it go from being ‘warm’ to being ‘cold’? it depends on software to be written thoroughly, with every possible exceptional circumstance taken into account, or failing nicely when something goes wrong - something rarely acheived. Every crash, or lost Word document is proof that this is the case Because there is this disharmony between man and machine, there exist points where things can go wrong. As the digital machines are pushed to fit into a human world, all the exceptional circumstances that we happily tolerate need to be precisely defined and programmed into the machines. But there are many exceptions, and programmers really aren’t that smart, so quite often these exceptions aren’t handled correctly everywhere. These bugs usually sit dormant, waiting for an unsuspecting person to come along and enter the piece of information that causes the beast to fail. These exceptions are fairly common. For example some years have more days than other years, some months have more days than others. Midnight in Greenwich, England is not the same time as Midnight in Sydney, Australia. Some postcodes have letters in them. Entering a zero into a form can often mean the same thing as entering nothing. They are everywhere. For the mischievous amongst us this disharmony can be exploited. One simple thing to do is to only ever subscribe to a service on the 31st day of any month that has one. The good companies will process your bill sensibly, the bad companies might behave like the monthly recurring events in iCal where they don’t appear at all in months with fewer than 31 days. You could also have fun at work and after having a meeting on the 31st of May say that you’ll have another exactly a month from today. The challenge is to find the everyday exceptions and start messing around with them. Test the boundary values. Try and break systems by feeding them seemingly normal data they cannot cope with. Stuff around a bit and break it. In the end the machines that deal with your mischief may cope as well as humans do, but every now and then you’ll hit the jackpot and make someone a little red faced.

Yesterday was great. A public holiday on a Wednesday nicely splits the working week into two easy to manage halves. It makes Monday feel like Thursday, Thursday feel like Monday, Tuesday feel like Friday and Friday feel like, well, Friday. Taking it easy and hanging with some friends was an excellent plan too. Everyone I’ve spoken to hasn’t had a bad thing to say about the Wednesday holiday. But I noticed a problem - and its all about petrol. Well the price of petrol. If you’re an Australian driver then you’ve probably noticed that the best time to buy petrol is on a Tuesday. For some reason thats probably related to the schedule of petrol tankers, the day of the week, and when people usually get paid, petrol is cheapest on that day. Monday is usually okay. Wednesday and Thursday are pretty bad. Another time you don’t buy petrol is the day school holidays start. Actually buying petrol near holidays is generally a bad idea - including public holidays. And yesterday was no exception. On Tuesday night driving home from work the price was at about AU$1.25 per litre, which was about the same as it had been over the weekend before it. On Wednesday morning when I drove past it had actually dropped to about AU$1.20 (ooh 5c). Come Wednesday evening it had jumped dramatically to AU$1.34. So there wasn’t the usual Tuesday night dip in prices that one has come to expect. Disappointing. I eventually remembered ;)