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Random Ramblings
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It's not every day that African countries make huge language policy decisions, but today the BBC Africa news is reporting that the Rwandan parliament has decided that all education will be taught in English instead of French. It'll be interesting to see how this works out in practice. AIM has a number of people teaching theology in Rwanda at university level, I can't see that they will be switching to English until students are coming in with adequate English.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 10 October 2008 )
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I'm typing this in Apple's Safari web browser, which has recently become available for Windows. Apple of course claim that it's the fastest and the best browser. Initial impressions were favourable but now things are not looking quite so good:
- Safari wants me to use the American spelling for 'favorable' and I can't find out how to tell it I want to use a British English spellchecker. Cultural imperialism - grrr!
- I wanted this and the previous paragraphs to have bullet points and I wanted to put in a link to the Safari download page, but most of the buttons in Joomla's web based text editor seem to be non-functional (i.e. the javascript isn't working correctly even though it isn't disabled) so I suppose I'll have to re-edit this in Firefox before publishing it.
Well I suppose I'll keep Safari installed so I can check how Mac users see websites I work on, but then again, I see a lot of Mac user's running Firefox, now I know some of the reasons why.
One of the distinctive features of ICCM this year was the increased number of people using Macs. I can see some of the attractions - Mac software looks nice and apparently build quality of the hardware is quite high, but prices of hardware and software are still high too. Yes I could run Windows in a virtual machine, but I don't see myself rushing out to buy an MacBook quite yet.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 16 June 2008 )
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So far today at ICCM, I haven't yet seen much with the wow factor which needed blogging, but we had some excitement last night as the Tornado sirens went off and all 150 or so of us had to crowd into a room below ground level for a couple of hours. As it happens no Tornadoes came through the campus but others in Indiana haven't been so fortunate over the last week.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 10 June 2008 )
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I was preaching on the Spirit of Truth this morning from Luke 16:5-15. I drew attention to the new BBC mini series The Passion which begins on BBC 1 (or as it now seems to be called BBC one) tonight at 8pm. I was questioning what weight the BBC would give to the historical truth as recorded by the eyewitness accounts of the gospel writers versus the concerns of political correctness and entertainment value. At this point I had the wonderful experience of someone actually speaking up and contributing from the congregation - oh that it would happen more - pointing out that today the Sunday Telegraph are giving away free copies of Luke's gospel with every paper. Wow - whatever next! Let's pray that the Spirit of Truth will speak to many as they read the Word of God and lead them into the light of the truth!
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 16 March 2008 )
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Apologies for the long gap between blog entries. Just a quick scribble to let you all know we are moving on Friday (8th February). We are moving ourselves with a hired van and help of friends from church and work so we hope it won't take too long and that nothing and no-one gets damaged.
The new house has fewer rooms but they are bigger, so hopefully there is scope for a soon to be family of seven to live without any further loss of sanity. Paul is looking forward to not having to coax certain teenagers into the car every morning because they will be much closer and able to walk.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 06 February 2008 )
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Here's a problem for those who dismiss prophetic books like Jeremiah as having been written long after the events they describe - from today's Times :
The British Museum yesterday hailed a discovery within a modest clay tablet in
its collection as a breakthrough for biblical archaeology – dramatic proof
of the accuracy of the Old Testament.
The cuneiform inscription in a tablet dating from 595BC has been deciphered
for the first time – revealing a reference to an official at the court of
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, that proves the historical existence of a
figure mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah.
read more...
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 12 July 2007 )
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Social networking sites up to this point seemed to be either full of Brazilians (Orkut), people trying to get headhunted for a new job (LinkedIn) or 13 year old girls with awful camera phone pictures and a talent for writing with non-alphabetic symbols (Bebo/MySpace). You may have gladly let those pass you by, but if you haven't joined Facebook already then perhaps it's time to jump on to its massive wave. For me at least Facebook seems to be somewhat less of a place for meeting new people than restoring a loose link with friends I had almost lost touch with. The statistics on FB are phenomenal - these are from Trendcatching last month:
- 25m users, growing 3% per week, which is 100,000 new users per
day (up from 7.5m users in July 2006), projected to reach 50m by end of
2007
- The fastest growing demographic is the 25 and over age group
- 1% of all time spent on the internet is facebook
- 50% of registered users come back to the site every day.
- 60 billion page views per month, 50 pages per user every day
- 6th most trafficked site in the U.S
- 1 bn photos hosted on the site, 6m uploaded each deay, 70k photos
served per second, making facebook the biggest photo sharing site on
the web
- 1-2 m people are on facebook simultaneously at any one time
- $100m per year advertising deal with Microsoft
- Internal valuation of $8bn, based on projected revenues of $1bn p.a. by 2015
If you have already jumped on, let's reconnect .
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Last Updated ( Monday, 18 June 2007 )
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One of the presentations here at ICCM was on the mission mapping project based at www.worldmap.org
. Hidden a little more deeply in the site is an interactve map which
can have various layers switched on and zoomed in and out like Google
Earth. For example start here,
tick the box for the Bible Translation Status layer and zoom in to Côte
d'Ivoire. The data you see is in the maps contributed by many different
mission organisations. Organisations with accounts can store lots and
lots of data and make public or share with other organisations as
appropriate.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 18 June 2007 )
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