We have good news to share! The good news that Jesus has died for sin so that we can be free to come to God and know him. The barrier is gone! Through the last few weeks of studying Acts in our homegroup, I’ve particularly been struck by one main thing - what Acts can teach us about sharing the gospel. Although this is because I prayed that God would teach me more about how to share the good news with others.

Mark at wordandspirit started a discussion on the nature of small groups, as to whether they are more appropriate for teaching or discussion. My personal view is that the discussions are very important - often without that people can’t manage to get their own grip on the concepts. At our homegroup we generally read the passage in either one whole chunk or smaller chunks that we can look at one at a time with the reading and then working through the passage and the ideas that come from it.

On Tuesday, we just started a new series in Home group, looking at the Book of Acts (based on John Stott’s Seeing the Spirit at work Bible study guide). As it was Shrove Tuesday we started off with pancakes (and wraps) before moving on to studying Acts 1. It was a really good study and through my preparation for the study and the study itself I came across some really interesting bits that I hadn’t thought about before:

Just a short note about two great new imaging toys I’ve found recently: Picasa Brilliant application which is now owned by google and has improved greatly since the first verison I tried - it now includes a search function and the star and label organisation system so you can highlight your favorite pictures and put them in virtual groups as well as in folders. It also now appears to have unlimited undo for any enhancements you make to the pictures - including the really easy to use rotating tool to sort out sloping pictures!

Last night on the way home from work coming through the roadworks on the M27, I pulled across into the fast lane, and suddenly the car started making funny noises coming from the front drivers side wheel. It gradually got louder, so I slowed down and pulled into a gap in the cones into the area coned off for the roadworks. I got out the car and realised that I had a flat tyre.

Following on from my list of firefox extensions, here’s my list of Thunderbird extensions: Minimize to Tray Changes the minimise in Thunderbird to send it to the system tray and still check your e-mail in the background. Contact Sidebar Adds a list of your contacts below the folder pane Message Faces Show Face headers in e-mails and news groups Quote Collapse Makes quotes in e-mail and news messages collapsable to save space Quote Colours

I can’t remember where I found it, so I thought I’d put this here so I don’t loose it! In user.js or about:config, find mail.addr_book.mapit_url.format and set it to: http://www.multimap.com/map/places.cgi?addr2= @A1&addr3=@CI&pc=@ZI&db=GB&client=public& cname=Great+Britain&advanced=true&mapsize=big Or for streetmap use: http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll? postcode2map?@ZI

Well yesterday we went out for a meal to celebrate Anne’s birthday which is on Tuesday, and we decided to have a New Year’s challenge. We had a few different ideas for challenges, (including my suggestion of collecting an object to represent each month throughout the coming year) but the challenge we’re doing is a good idea, and that is: To start of with £10 at the start of the year, and to try and increase it’s value by this time next year, when the person who has made the most money gets 10% of everyones total, and the rest goes to their chosen charity - if that makes sense.

I’ve now implemented Gravatars for the comments on this site. It was a bit tricky as this is coded using ASP (VBScript) - but I’ve managed to get it working using the code from http://www.frez.co.uk/freecode.htm#md5 - although interestingly the VBScript version wouldn’t work, so I have used the javascript version - a bit of a strange way to do it, but it seems to work. I didn’t realise before that you could mix languages in ASP, but it turns out you can by including one in the page using the <script runat=“server”… tag, and then it can be called from within the other code on the page even if it’s in a different programming language!

On Bonfire night before we went up to Portsdown hill to watch the fireworks, we filled up the car at the BP petrol station opposite All Saints church. The car was initially fine, then on Saturday it started making a loud squealing noise, which we thought was a problem with one of the belts. By Monday I’d planned to take the car to the garage, however the car wouldn’t start at all, so I assumed that the battery had been worn down, so borrowed a battery charger and left it charging.