I’ve been spending time doing more research in the Psalms of Solomon… It really is going to be quite hard work to write this dissertation but I’m sure I’ll manage; after all I do have enough time.

Went out to the pub last night as it was Tessa’s birthday. The Stauntons, Camilla, Ian Mac and Jim were there too. It was good to see Ian (my former youth-worker, now the Oxford diocese youth advisor) as I’ve not seen him since easter.

I’ve just put my diary up on this site and written a program to update it as it updates on my computer, so if you wonder what I’m doing when I’m in Cambridge, you can look! Nothing particularly exciting up at the moment though.

I’ve finished a few more panoramas today – these ones were from Shanghai. They’re up in the gallery. I will write a howto soon because I’ve discovered a lot particularly in the way of getting rid of half-cars and boats and avoiding obvious edges. I was also messing around with some of the effects plugins for the gimp and made a photo of Tom… Go and have a look 🙂

I’ve also written an article about some of my experiences in China.

A very scary story for divers in the Guardian today – killer dolphins have been released. Also found a story on the BBC about a typhoon hitting Hainan (Hainan was the island where we stayed for debriefing!).

In other news, I went to the dentists this morning for a checkup – he spent about 2 seconds looking at my teeth and then said ‘see you next year’… How easy it is to be a dentist!

Yesterday not much exicitment happened although Helen gave a very good talk on 1 Corinthians 7 all about sex, relationships and marriage. Went down the pub with the Emmaus group after church – was good to see all of those guys again.

Sorry for the lack of update in the past few days.. I”ve not been particularly busy so there’s really no excuse for that.

On Thursday I went to my church’s 20-30 year olds group called Emmaus. This was good fun but we had to get back reasonably quickly so we couldn’t stay to go down the pub afterwards 🙁 Oh well always lots of time after evening church today! We looked at Acts 3 and 4.

On Friday, myself and my mother drove to see my grandparents. The journey there took about 1h20, which is pretty much average. The grandparents were fine – my grandfather seemed much improved after all of his drugs for Alzheimer’s. I took my grandmother shopping whilst my mother and grandfather cleaned the house. I then spent quite a long time showing them pictures from China. We left about 2:40, just in time to hit all of the traffic on the M25, so we took some shortcuts through Guildford which turned out to be even more congested! Oops! In the event the journey home took almost 3 hours.

On the way home we passed (at very low speed) a church which had a really good advert for the alpha course. It was a picture which looked remarkably like the google frontpage. The text in the box was something like “The meaning of life”, and the links along the bottom were “Read the Bible”, “Come to the Alpha course” etc. The title at the top was simply “Searching?”. It’s a relief to see the church finally doing some decent advertising.. I’m sure everyone can think of many cheesy adverts outside churches and I’m sure it doesn’t do anything to help people find Jesus.

Saturday was spent mostly reading and I spent some time in the office fixing the computers there. I also bought the Top Gun soundtrack – what an amazing CD! I’ve been learning to play some of the songs on there on my guitar, particularly the theme tune (which is very easy) and some of the Kenny Loggins stuff.

I’ve spent today actually getting down to doing research. I’ve done my notes upto Pss14 now and I guess I”ll write the introduction to my dissertation in the next few days. I’ve learnt a lot by reading the Psalms of Solomon which I think helps to understand the New Testament (and the Old) better.

I had a play with kmymoney2 and it’s been vastly improved since I last used it. It can now download stock and share prices from the internet and update all that stuff automatically and I’ve also written some scripts to make it download my bank account statements from the bank websites and import them into it automatically.

Still not much remarkable happening but I’m sure that will start when I go back to uni in 10 days! Can’t wait to see everyone again, especially the ISEC peeps!

I’ve spent the past few days trying to avoid work when I really should be doing my dissertation. I’ve managed to do a few hours today but not as much as I really ought to do. Oh well!

I’ve read a few more books in the past few days, and yesterday I went to church in the evening and saw lots of the former youth group. We all went to the pub afterwards and had some fun there. I went to the surgery again today and yet again the plaster didn’t stick. She just shoved the tubey grip over it so quickly that it didn’t have a chance to fall off. I’ve also been trying to get my Barclays account to work on the internet and failed to apply for a nationwide account. Why can’t banks get ever get their websites to do even the simplest of tasks? It really isn’t hard and I could do it for very reasonable rates…