Flat3D

Liffey Descent 2008

Saturday was the annual pilgrimage to Dublin to take part in the Liffey Descent canoe marathon.  This year we entered three teams, Jake and Lyle made their usual effort, Steve and Tommy were once again teamed up and team Scuba, or PC and my team, had the addition of Andy L slotting into midship.  Team Scuba also had a bit of a shake up with PC taking the more demanding stern position and me taking the more risky bow.  The amendments to team Scuba didn’t translate quite into the performance booster we had hoped, with 5 swims our total time was pushed up to 4 hours…  It wasn’t our best performance, but it was enough to earn us 8th place in our class (Canadian threes, out of 21 boats).

Tommy and Steve finished 24th and Lyle and Jake came in 8th in the canadian twos class.

The cycling squad was made up of Paula, Cherith, Emma and Ruth this year, taking a shorter route, but providing some good photo coverage of the river action:

Liffey 2008

Tags: 2008, Andy, canoe, Cherith, descent, Emma, Jake, Liffey, lyle, Momo, Paddling, Paul, Paula, PC, race, Steve, Tommy

Working away…

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!

Tags: Acts, dissertation, flickr, pagan, Paul, Philippi, photo, picasa