Flat3D

Small groups…

Marky wrote about small groups on his blog recently (Voiced Thoughts in the Blogroll list on the right).  My own experience of small groups varies from church groups like the group Mark was writing about, but I think the period that small groups affected my life the most was while I was an undergraduate at university…

My experience of small groups at uni was a little more wide ranging than most perhaps.  I was living in Queen’s Elms in first year so I went to Halls Group that year, the next year I helped out leading the group, so I was in it a second year.  At first I went to an English dept small group because I had friends there and they were encouraging me to go along to a small group aside from the halls one…  But I switched over to the Engineering group in the Ashby a little later.  It was through the engineering group that I met Mark who spoke at my commissioning, Budgie who commented on the last post there and a whole bunch of other folk.  But there’s more!  Between second and third year in my degree it was required to take a year of professional experience.  This interupted small group attendance for most, but Ben (Later of SU Presidential fame) lead a small group for those on their year out working.  It was all guys, but we had an awesome year, heightened by the lack of CU attendance and department groups and so on due to work, meeting later than normal and discussing how things were relevant to working life rather than student life was probably one of the most benefitial years I had in small groups…  Then more recently, while I was at Union I attended a small group at my home church, this was very different to the previous groups as people were from all kinds of backgrounds; nurses, drivers, designers, programmer-cum-theologians, missionaries to the Philippines…  And again it was great!

So now I am pining for small groups!  There is a reason for this though…
Irene approached me a while ago asking if I’d be willing to partner up with a small group from Queen’s University, the small groups were going to partner with missionaries and pray for them etc through the year.  So tonight I went and met the group who got (landed with) me!  The group is Steve and Sam’s medical small group (as in medical students) and is part of the CU at Queens.  The meeting tonight was great, there was, of course, a time of bible study, time to spend together and chat (with unpaid for coffee…), time for prayer and all in the kind of relaxed attitude I remember of small groups!  It’s a time when bible study mingles with banter, when fellowship mingles with accountibility, when prayer mingles with honest concern and love for those you are praying with.  It is an excellent small group with great members, pulling together Christians and making it a quality time.  It’s great to have been able to meet them, and it’s great to know they will be partnering with me in prayer as I head off.  Thanks guys!

So yeah, now I’m pining for small group ministry.  I can’t wait to see what God will make me part of out in Japan!

Tags: Church, CU, Marky, medical, ministry, queens, sam, small group, Steve, student

Technology makes life more difficult…

Doesn’t it sometimes feel that technology makes life more difficult?  I know all you guys reading this (as if anyone is reading this guff!) are fairly technologically literate and capable, so this kind of thought doesn’t cross your mind too often, but it always does at some stage, right?

It usually begins with something that seems fairly straightforward or simple, something that shouldn’t be a problem at all!  Things go smoothly at first, but after a short while something appears that was unexpected, soemthing isn’t formatted quite correctly and to get any further you will need to spend hours reformatting it, maybe the data isn’t as complete as you thought and you will need to spend a while typing in or copying and pasting the rest into the file, or there might be a step in the process that you didn’t foresee and seemingly no easy way to overcome it…  But you have come this far!  Surely to go back and do all this by hand would be much more labour than to overcome the obstacle and get it done right?  So you plough on, and as time wears on and the text on your ctrl key is worn back to unreadable from all the copying and pasting it begins to look like the manual option might have been quicker, but surely there isn’t long to go now?!

This is the kind of thing that crops up all the time in IT work, particularly in software work that is heavy in data processing.  In my last job we often took feeds from various places and attempted to automate them to make life easier (well in this case actually just to make the project possible!).  Of course if you have the right tools and so on, you can overcome the obstacles and, to quote someone else, “anything is possible!”

But the issue is made even more frustrating as you realise why it occurs and what it means.  If (suitable) data is already in a digital format, it is sheer lunacy to have to do manual work in order for it to be acceptable in another location.  The whole point of digitising data is to increase its accessibility, portability and usefulness and this too often is forgotten as people make an application that produces data or transfers it.  Perhaps the developers didn’t use standard formats designed for transferring data such as XML, CSV etc for textual data, common image formats or whatever is suitable for the data in question.  This is less of a problem now thanks to the web and forced portability of data.  The real killer comes in lack of consistency, when data is being transferred in a common format, or even a well specified uncommon format, but all of a sudden something changes and data is coming across in a slightly different format.  Of course this results in lost data, mistransmission, etc, but it also makes attempting to process the data automatically a real headache, and it is inevitably down to poor design and implementation of the original system.

So I’ve warbled on and no one is going to be reading now, even if they were the last time I checked!  But the next time you find yourself thinking “technology makes things so much more complicated” ask yourself if it is the technology that makes it difficult or the design of the system.

(This post was inspired by my attempts to get my supporters addresses from the automated email sent to me and into my pc’s address book.  Surely someone might have thought about the format that the addresses are provided in and thought that commas alone might not be the most useful separator…)

Tags: complex, csv, data formatting, difficult, ebcak, formatting, meatware issues, Technology, xml