Flat3D

The Grand Tour

Ormo — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:11:42 +0000

Now the new blog has been online for a bit, I thought I’d show you around the new layout and some of the nifty stuff!
Ok, so here where you are reading right now is the main blog bit where the blogs go for blogging.
Then over on your right you can see some lovely photos, that is the latest 4 photos of my flickr Flat3D set, it is going to be a bit of a “heres an interesting/nice/funny picture I took recently” kind of area.
Just above that are a row of tabs to take you to various blog archives and suchlike.
Below the tabbed box there are a couple of menus: the right hand one has my links and some admin guff for the blog; the left has some interesting articles I have come across while surfing/reading and below that are category links etc for finding things more easily.
Speaking of finding things, the top right of the page has a slightly hidden away seach box for searching (no really) and a nav bar listing pages that are fairly constant (FAQ and About).

So welcome to the new stylee and enjoy your stay, may I particularly recommend the amusing Wired article on lego photographs in the Interesting News section, accompanied by a browse through the links to its right.

If you are reading this on a syndicated site (Facebook or OMF Social) you’ll just have to follow the relevant link to the real blog to see what the craic is!

Hurrah!

Oodles of Noodles…

Ormo — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:46:24 +0000

This week the Holiday Bible Club was on in the church, so there were 150 odd kids running about and screaming each morning… Great fun… I was only free to help three of the 5 days as I had work, and I have fallen a little behind on my dissertation as a result. But it was great fun really!

On Thursday I left the club and headed off to Belfast to go to the library at college. I arrived in the town and hunted for a parking space (building work has the college parking restricted to staff etc), parked and abandoned I left the car and strolled down Botanic avenue to get some lunch. I was thinking about getting a sandwich, but I remembered a small noodle bar I noticed there a week or two ago and decided to give it a go. On arriving I spied the chalkboard rendering of “try our ramen!” Now I love ramen! Ramen is delicious! So I hastily ordered some up and waited eagerly only to be presented with a bowl of soup with slim udon in it… definately not ramen… It was still tasty though!

Working away…

Ormo — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:51:34 +0000

This week I met with my new dissertation supervisor and we talked about moving on into producing an actual dissertation. After a bit of discussion and idea chewing, we have settled on the subject of the pagan reaction to Paul in Acts (This is a bit narrower than simply reaction to Paul). I am looking particularly at three instances in Paul’s 2nd missionary expedition, the interactions with a Roman colony in Philippi, Paul’s encounter with the philosophers of Athens and finally the confrontation with the Artemis worshippers of Ephesus. The main thrust being to look at the reaction to Paul’s message by the three main relevant aspects of pagan culture at the time: Roman government/imperialism, greek philosophy and pagan worship. I have been working away since our meeting at Philippi and it is so rich and deep in terms of material it is beginning to feel quite daunting (just this one section!) But at the same time it is very interesting, and as I read more and study more it is increasingly relevant to today’s society and also particularly to Japanese society, as each aspect studied has a parallel aspect there… I don’t know if I will be able to include a bit of discussion on that in my actual dissertation itself, or if it will just be something to think about on my own afterwards… but it is interesting and quite challenging too…

I have plunked for a flickr photo display on the right there as Picasa was just a bit too annoying to get to work quite right with the sidebar.. I want it to be like a kind of photo-blog, with the latest photo being most prominent and the previous few as thumbnails beside… Picasa wanted to start at the beginning each time! Maybe when I have more time I will write a little bit of php to do the work with picasa.. But for now I have downloaded picasa2flickr and am just sticking them up there instead. It is actually pretty well suited for this purpose as the limitations are upload bandwidth based, whereas picasa’s are storage based… I will continue to use picasa to share albums of photos though, but they will get posts of their own I think!

OMF and Recaptcha

Ormo — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:30:52 +0000

So omf.org.uk didn’t work out quite as planned, turns out it can’t take RSS (”yet” - T.Waghorn, 2008) but my blog is going live to another syndicated spot in the form of OMF’s social network! Hurrah!

In other news, I am reenabling Re-Captcha on this here doolally to help those poor bookscanners out with recognising their words!

OMF

Ormo — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:09:45 +0000

Hi! My blog over at Flat3D (www.flat3d.co.nr) has been integrated into the OMF website for all to see my OMF related posts!

So I guess I ought to introduce myself… My name is John, I’m from Antrim in Northern Ireland and I am a candidate to head to Japan to be the IT Coordinator for the Japan HQ. Of course this will only come to reality after Orientation Course, or OC, (God willing in November) and 2 years of language study, and so being the IT guy is a long way down the line even now!
I have already been to the european candidates’ induction course, which was extremely informative and useful and, if possible, even more fun!

But I have been to Japan before and with OMF no less. I was an OMF Associate member for a year in 2005/06 working with the Elliots and Ghents in Aomori prefecture, and taking part in the Kids’ Gospel Team.
But even that wasn’t my first OMF/Japan experience! In 2004 I went as a member of the (then canadian) Kids’ Gospel Team!

So that is a bit about me! I hope and pray you enjoy reading my blog through the OMF site and are encouraged, challenged, entertained, informed as much as I will be writing it!

New design

Ormo — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:40:55 +0000

I have gone for this theme by http://www.blogohblog.com/ called Statement, with a little bit of customisation (title and photo slideshow on the right there, it’s not quite right yet though…).
I quite like it!

I plan to use the photo slideshow as a mini-photo blog, when I take a new pic or something and want to stick it up I can, it integrates with Picasa (http://picasa.google.com) so it’s all nice n easy!
I am also going to contact Tony at OMF about integrating with the OMF website… I think I will need to make a few adjustments to allow that to work correctly…

Anyways, feel free to comment and let me know what you think!

Back again

Ormo — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:01:23 +0000

Well, I had planned to move across to wordpress.com when my categories got deleted in the upgrade to Wordpress v2.whatever-this-is… But it didn’t give me the flexibility I want (specifically it doesn’t let me use picasa for photos very easily! Why not? I don’t know… probably because it’s owned by google and google own blogger…)
But with a self-hosted wordpress installation I can pretty much do what I like, so we are back on f2s space for the meantime! But still in crappy theme mode, so I hope to get that sorted out soon!

Women driver strikes again!

Ormo — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:54:01 +0000

Sorry to be sexist, but this is too good!

Check out this BBC News Story…

It’s been a while…

Ormo — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:27:02 +0000

… since I last posted something on here!
I guess that is an indication of how busy I am!

Since the last entry I have finished my exam (only had one…the LAST one!) and have literally just checked the result online to find I passed! But it ain’t over yet. Gone are the days when you’d be free after your exams, but not me, oh no. Now I have to complete and hand in a 20,000 word dissertation by mid-September… Yikes…
My subject of choice is “Paul’s Church planting in Acts”. I chose it because the majority of the work that goes on in Japan is Church planting work, and I want to do something linked to what I will be involved in (both directly and indirectly) out there (it’s hard to find Japanese topics to study in Belfast!). So far I think it is going ok, I have been working through Paul’s work in Acts, I’ve scrutinised it in a fair bit of detail and am now working through more specifically… I have chosen to look at the major points Luke makes about Paul’s work (he tends to pull out a major point at most of the stops Paul makes, often something done regularly, but studied at that juncture in detail…)
Anyways I’m probably boring you and you’ll stop reading if you haven’t already…

Recently I have bought a new camera! Well, new to me! It’s been a few years since the digital revolution really took off and the result is that there are a bunch of decent DSLR cameras out there second hand at pretty reasonable prices. I haven’t done much fun photography (ie photographing for photographing’s sake rather than recording events etc) and would quite like to start into it a bit again… So I was on ebay and snapped up a Canon EOS 300D, not the most up to date camera, but a great camera of it’s time, and still a quality camera! I got a great price and can’t wait til it arrives!!

I haven’t heard much, but hopefully some of us will be doing a bit of paddling soon too. I haven’t been out in my boat since YC stopped! Jake has also given me lend of his Mega Maverick, a plastic surf kayak, as he has got himself a beautiful carbon fibre boat (along with Lyle and Tommy…) and I am really looking for an excuse to get out.
Some of us also have (sketchy) plans to paddle from Antrim to the North Coast along the Lower Bann one of these days… Hopefully pretty soon!

Still at work at GCD… NICarfinder.co.uk is getting underway and keeping us pretty busy, along with the usual raft of other work…

My OMF applications are still working along, I pretty much have my medical forms filled in and just need to find out and tidy up some bits and get them sent off, candidate’s Course is at the start of July and I am travelling around various places speaking and sharing about Japan and future plans for me.

So thats about it I think! Life is extremely busy at the moment and so forgive me if I don’t get much chance to update this in the near future!

Doc Brown was right!

Ormo — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:54:02 +0000

HP have developed a flux capacitor!

But before anyone gets too excited, it turns out the flux capacitor isn’t what we all thought it was…
This is what it really is

The boffins at Hewlett Packard have developed what seems to be a “memristor”, a passive, fundemental component that can remember it’s set resistance… It sounds a lot more boring than Marty McFly’s gear, but it could have a big effect on industry…