Yesterday I had my first meeting with the Archdeacon since becoming one of the church reps for St Luke’s. It was a very promising meeting and the archdeacon said that he wants to have a lively evangelical church community at St Luke’s that will reach out to the people of Somerstown and to students - which would be a good thing. They are planning to follow a similar process to that of appointing an Incumbent - but for a “Priest in Charge”, which means we will have quite a say in the process and the opportunity to interview the prospective vicars.

We had this over a week ago, and it’s took me a long time to get round to posting it, so I’m too late for the round up anyway! We’ve not had Shiraz before, and weren’t that keen on it. The wine was a bottle of Wolf Blass Eaglehawk 2003, and had a slightly blackberry like smoky aroma. It was a too sharp for our tastes really, as we generally prefer something a bit smoother.

I’ve been thinking of putting a list of the firefox extensions I use on my blog for a while, and then Dean listed the extensions he finds useful and asked what anyone else was using - so I decided I should post it! So here is my list of firefox extensions: All in one gestures Extension that helps you to navigate the web just using the mouse - includes mouse gestures and extra wheel navigation Web Developer Extension

We had a really good bible study last night on 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18: Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord's own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep.

On the plane over Des met a guy who’d recently brought property here, who could recommend an estate agent for us to contact. So in the morning he gave them a ring, and their colleagues took us for a drive round 3 of the properties for sale, and a few others that had been sold and done up, so we could see some of the things that had been achieved. The properties gradually got better throughout the day as in the amount of work that needed doing on them but they all had potential.

I fly today at 5 o’clock to Varna, and then I’ve got no idea where I’ll be staying (?). I’m looking forward to it, but I’m not really sure what to expect there. I’ve set up my phone so I can use it there, but vodaphone charge £1.69 per minute for calls in Bulgaria, so I might get a sim card out there. A few useful links I might need:

The other day we were looking at buying a wireless PCMCIA card for Laura’s laptop, so that she can use it at the university and at home with out new Belkin Wireless Router, which has been working well with my work Thinkpad since we got it set up. I liked the idea of getting a Belkin network card so that it is the same as the router, but according to the information I found online it doesn’t support WPA - apart from an addition to the manual on the Belkin site that tells you how to configure WPA with the card.

While sorting out all my various documents on our different computers today, I found some old webpages that I’d made back in 1999 after going interrailing around Europe with a bit of an account of some of the places we visited. So I’ve included them now on this site under the travel section at the side - I might try and add a few more bits that I remember from the trip and some photos soon, but for now it’s just the text.

Well we ordered our [Ikea] [Fågelbo Sofa] on the 18th July, and received it initially when we expected - 2nd August, although instead of being in 2 parts and us just having to put it together like they told us would be the case, it was in three seperate packages and we had to put the backs on each part and join it together. After a while trying to understand the diagrams (no text on the instructions of course!

Well I’ve now been back at work at IBM Hursley for a week and I’m currently working in the DBDC team which will involve dealing with DB2 and database connectors installation and fixing problems. It will probably be mainly working with DB2 on the mainframe (OS/390), although the team is going to start to be more involved in DB2 on distributed platforms as well. It’s been quite strange going back to a different team, having to get all the userids sorted out again and starting to learn how to do things for my new role but the team I’m working with are great and have been really helpful.