The Eleventh doctor will be Matt Smith.

I've never seen him in anything (although he's appeared with Billie Piper in Secret Diary of a Call Girl and The Ruby in the Smoke).

Apparently he's a great actor and more importantly, he looks like the Doctor.

Testers who really grok OpenVZ wanted! I know I could install it and test this myself but I want someone who really knows their stuff to take it out for a test drive. I've produced an OpenVZ image of openSUSE 11.0 + Updates (as at 17 December 2008). If someone wants to test it for me and give it a thumbs-up, I'll contribute it to the OpenVZ templates list.

openSUSE 11.0 OpenVZ template (i586)

Rather than making resolutions, here's a list of things I aim to achieve during the coming 365 days. They're realistic and manageable so hopefully I should be able to give a 100% report this time next year:

• Continue through my MA and submit two pieces of work.
• Conduct my first funeral at last.
• Arrange a placement as part of my curacy.

Israel has been bombarding Gaza for the last three days or so (BBC News report). In the news, it is always being described as targeting the "Militant group Hamas".

Now, imagine for a moment if the BBC and other news outlets were to describe it in a different and entirely accurate manner:

Israeli air raids have pounded the Gaza Strip, hitting key sites linked to the democratically elected ruling party, Hamas.

The West cannot go insisting upon democracy around the world if it is unwilling to accept governments that are elected in that manner when they have a complexion that is not what the White House wants. I just hope that when President Obama takes the Oath of Office, there is a marked change in this approach. I fear that there may be too much on his plate though.

Recorded last night at St Leonard's. 14 minutes long. Available as Ogg Vorbis or MP3:

No presentation this time, lines of sight at St Leonard's mean that we can't use the screen at the big services like Midnight.

This is just to wish a Happy and blessed celebration of the Incarnation of our Lord (also known as Christmas) to all my readers (via whatever service you choose to read this). As usual, I have not sent out cards, a practise I stopped following in my mid-teens. I hope the paper saved and the carbon not emitted help the world to breathe a little longer.

Later this evening, I shall be preaching at our Midnight Communion - the sermon will be on the Bursledon Parish Church website soon - but in the meantime, here's the text from which I shall be preaching: Luke 2.1-20.

11.1 DVDs have been pressed.

What a Christmas present from the community to the community (and the world)!

In other news, the updated python-xdg I've mentioned before is now in Factory and so once it gets to the head of the queue for building, it'll be in my home repo for 11.1.

Waiting for my DSL to be migrated to my new ISP - thought it had happened about an hour ago but it had just dropped for a couple of minutes.

[Ref 1] [Ref 2]

Last night, I commented to Amanda, "I wonder when my bio-mechanics appointment will come through".

This morning, it came in the post and, my friends, is some vulcan mind-meld mojo.

So, "I wonder when someone's going to post me a million pounds."

Oh and if you check the date on Ref 2, you'll see that it's basically 6 months to the day since the referral was made which is what I was told at the time it would be. Spooooooky.

Woke up yesterday with basically no voice and it was in and out (mostly out) all day. At Peter's request, I'm now taking a couple of days off to rest it ahead of Christmas (when I shall need it a lot). So, I've not said a word all day which must have been quite heavenly for those around me.

It was also a source of some amusement at our local Starbucks when I took a notepad and pen to the counter with which to communicate our order.

openSUSE 11.1 moves ever closer and so I've enabled openSUSE_11.1 as a target repository for GNOME:Community. Nothing there yet but once packages build, it'll be ready for its inclusion in the Community Repositories list in the released product.