It’s been a little while since I’ve blogged, but I’ve picked up quite a few new readers lately and thought it only fair to share a bit about me.

In case you hadn’t guessed, I’m Andrew Gribben and yes, I write all my own posts. I don’t have the luxury of having someone write for me. This causes two things to happen:

1. For someone who prides himself in proper spoken english, you’ll find far too many spelling and grammatical errors.
2. Posts come randomly, when I have time and when I have inspiration.
   This helpful Venn diagram explains my thought process.

Handy Grib Facts

• I live at the sea-side with, my beautiful wife Lila and daughter Tamar.
• I finally created a LinkedIn profile, which you’ll find here and my slightly less-than useful Google Profile is here.
• I’m responsible for http://jotterapp.com. If you don’t know what Jotter is, you will soon.

If you came here looking for my address, date of birth and phone number, they’re not here. I don’t give that sort of information out over the internet and nether should you!

If there is one thing I won’t tolerate in my class, it’s sectarianism. Pupils who ordinarily show the utmost respect for teachers, can suddenly get riled up, treating you like a traitor, should you dare challenge them on what can only be described as a sin. It’s a touchy subject and the possibility of angry letters and phone calls from parents always seem a possibility, so it’s important to tread carefully and appropriately.

Many humanists would have us believe that religion (of any sort) has been the cause of war and misery throughout time, they aren’t wrong. Christians shouldn’t be “religious” at least not in the way the Pharisees, of Jesus’, time were. We need to interpret everything we do and believe through the lens of scripture, as means of self diagnosis to see if what we are doing is right. However the pattern throughout history is of people claiming who outwardly claim faith but inwardly harbour sin which they use to twist and warp scripture to suit their purpose.

Current day examples include “Protestant” paramilitaries, who don’t know what the reformation was, or Christians who exclaim that immigrants should go back to their own countries and stop “stealing our homes and jobs.” Where’s their Christ-like nature; welcoming in strangers and those less fortunate?

The Bible must be taken as whole, not select random passages, not taken out of context, not adapted to fit our agenda or mindset. Just because a sin is traditional or cultural in its basis doesn’t make it OK; tradition and culture are not bigger or more relevant than scripture itself. Christians, not just in Northern Ireland, need to actually apply the Bible to their whole lives, not just choose parts of it as it suits.

What are your thoughts?

Expecting something else?

Yesterday was a somewhat productive day for me; with the school was closed due to weather I got all the network and computer upgrades finished off early.

With all my free time that evening I decided to try making a batch of frozen yogurt, or froyo; <tenuous geek ref> the codename for Google’s Android 2.2 operating system </>

So if you want to make a batch at home, don’t want fruit and haven’t got an ice cream maker, then follow these simple steps.

You Will Need

• 2 cups (500ml) natural yogurt
• 1/2 cup (125) water
• 1 cup (250ml) full fat milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup (200g) white sugar
• Blender
• Shallow metal dish or tin
• Plastic tub

Steps

1. Stick everything in the blender, and turn it on.
   Be sure to put the lid on the blender!
2. Blend for approx 5 minutes or until your wife complains about the level of noise.
3. Pour into the shallow metal tin and careful place into the freezer.
4. Wait two hours, remove from freezer and scrape, the now slushy mix, back into the blender.
5. Blend for another 5 minutes then pour into your plastic tub, cover and allow to freeze overnight.
6. Eat.

Psalm 100:5 – For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.

Happy New Year!

A few weeks ago I started my own project and corresponding Facebook group for what soon became known as the Open Bible Project. The goal being to produce a version of the Scriptures for various e-book readers which, within the constraints of the device, has a useable user interface and readable layout.

Many, many versions already exist around the web, but either have hideously formatted text or are far too unwieldy to fit into typical usage patterns for the Bible. Of course others have been working on this problem, Osnova has produced several Bibles and developed a jump to verse technique using the search function of the device. Type ge.1.10 and find and the reader will jump to the Genesis chapter 1 verse 10.

I’ve used a similar technique, by hiding a code for chapter using white coloured text (doesn’t show on the device but is still searchable) you can enter Gen.1, Matt.1 etc and the reader leaps to the correct chapter. As far as the reading experience goes, each verse flow into one another, with verse numbers showing in a smaller font.

Very soon I’ll have an Open Bible Project website up and running, hosting the scriptures and various reference books online. Each user of the website will be able to annotate, highlight and link text across books of the Bible and the reference library. This customised version of the Bible will be available (freely) as a download for use on your reader, bringing those highlights, notes and links with it.

We’ve got our Google Wave invites and while we figure out what it actually does and wait for what comes next, all we really have is another method to communicate with each other, that we actually have to login to and check. Unlike email, twitter and facebook which we are being prompted about regularly and are in the habit of checking, whole conversations could be going on in wave that we won’t realise until we decide to give it another go next month and see what the fuss is all about. But now thanks to the Prowl iPhone app, we can have push notifications coming from the desktop wave client wrapper, Waveboard

Here’s the steps you’ll need to get started.

• First off it’s really handy if you have a spare computer which you leave running, so you get notifications when you’re out.
• You’ll need Growl for this to work
• Prowl for iPhone and the Prowl plugin
• In the Growl system prefs make sure that the default notification is set to Prowl
• Visit http://www.getwaveboard.com and download the installer and let it do it’s thing (Mac Only)
• Install and run Waveboard. At the moment it’s a wrapper for the website but with a few nice features added; hotkeys, status bar icon etc

What should happen is when you get a new wave, or an existing wave is updated, Waveboard will send the notification to Growl which in turn will Push out the Prowl app on your trusty iPhone and look like this:

Waveboard also offer an iPhone app which can be launched from the Prowl notification, it’s £0.59 and is’nt much more than a wrapper, although I’m sure it will improve over time, but I decided to stick with Google’s webapp version. Just browse over to http://wave.google.com, accept the warning that your browser isn’t supported and you should see webapp version of Wave. At this point you can add it as a bookmark to the homescreen, giving you a nice Wave icon and remove those browser controls. It’s flakey but it quite useable.

I’m not sure what will come from Wave, it could be the next Gmail, or the next Orkut, either way it’ll be an interesting journey.

Sounds tasty right? Well as tasty as it may be it’s not the food and drink I want to talk about. That’s the title of my wife Lila’s blog (@mrsbeanandgone) which she started yesterday.

It’s only one post for now, but I’m sure when she finds time out from looking after our 7 week old daughter, we’ll be hearing more from her.

Check it out – Coffee and Chocolate Cake

Anyone visiting Belfast recently could hardly miss the construction going on along the banks of the Lagan. Rising above it all is the extremely tall and growing Obel Tower; here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

The Obel Tower is a building currently under construction in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Costing £85 million and measuring 80.5 metres (265 ft) in height, the tower when completed is set to dominate the Belfast skyline. It will overtake the current tallest skyscraper in Ireland, Windsor House (80 m), also in Belfast. Developed by the Karl Group, the Obel Tower is located on Donegall Quay on the River Lagan beside the Lagan Weir.

My brother, Mark, an architecture student at UUJ, recently got a look around inside, here are a few of his photos. Just look at how small the other buildings are and he wasn’t even at the top!

Anyone following my twitter feed (@grib) got a bit of a shock last night as they were bombarded by around 50 tweets, over a period of a few minutes. Sorry about that!

What happened was that I was trying to link a few social network sites together; I wanted photos posted to flickr to automatically create a blog post and then for the blog to send out a tweet. Sure you can do this with posterous, but any blog posts created have photos linked back to their site, not flickr.

Using RSS and the WP-O-Matic plugin I had planned for a new post to be created when new photos were added to flickr’s RSS feed. But… I forgot I had the other plugin turned on, TwitterTools which automatically sends out a tweet for each post and you can image what happened.

So for anyone following me in various clients including SMS (@wiseguyrussell), I humbly ask for your forgiveness and promise that next time I’m working without enough sleep, I’ll be more careful.