Recorded Sunday at St Paul's. 18 minutes long including reading and beginning of response. Available as Ogg Vorbis or MP3:

The BBC wants to close down 6Music. This would be a tragedy for real music lovers. The proposal is now in the hands of the BBC Trust. They can be emailed at trust.enquiries@bbc.co.uk. Below is the text of my email:

To whom it may concern,

I am emailing to request that the move to close BBC 6music be stopped - this
station provides an invaluable service covering a range of music that the
commercial sector would not.  It is in the very best tradition of BBC Music
broadcasting, inheriting the mantle of John Peel for example and providing a
platform for quality music over and against the mainstream "lowest common
denominator" of the chart-focused Radio 1 and "classic pop" of Radio 2.

You will find you are being inundated with similar requests at the moment,
please take them - and us the listening public - seriously and save 6 music.

Kind regards

James Ogley

Track the campaign on Twitter.

Recorded yesterday at St Paul's. 26 minutes long, including reading. Available as Ogg Vorbis or MP3:

PDF of accompanying presentation.

I'm sure other people have discovered this but when I was Googling for it, I had no joy so for anyone who wants to know, here we go.

Firstly, you need to create some friend groups, including one of people from whom you might want to hide from time to time.

In the Chat popup, you'll see at the top of each group what looks like a little slider. Now, look at this screenshot:

Click the slider to go offline and online to certain groups.

Simples!

I am furious! Absolutely bloody furious with Nando's. For those who may not know, Nando's is a chain of Peri-Peri chicken restaurants, it's a relatively cheap and cheerful way of having a half-decent family lunch out and we go fairly frequently.

Now, Nando's have a loyalty card scheme which is a jolly good thing except that -- as I discovered today -- it is the most barking-mad, badly thought out, mind-numbingly stupid loyalty card scheme that the planet Earth may have ever seen!

My Nando's loyalty card

Upon my arrival today, the card had been filled in to the point of Number 6. To any normal, rational human being, this would suggest that -- having previously paid for six meals at Nando's -- I was now eligible to receive a free (gratis, no charge to the ol' Visa sir!) half chicken, made using the Nando's Peri-Peri baste to my requirements. I handed my card to Marta at the Southampton branch of Nando's only to be told that I had clearly already had my free half chicken!.

Naturally, I pointed out the error of her position and there then ensued a brief but robust discussion in which I ended up pointing out to her that I did not appreciate being accused of lying in order to try to hoodwink a free half chicken out of Nando's. She then sought the assistance of her colleague, Adam who eventually told her to put it through the till for free. They then both proceeded to tell me, in a completely patronising manner, that I ought to be more careful next time to ensure I used the card correctly. The card was then returned to me, with Number 7 now also filled in. The whole thing also took longer than was needed because neither Marta nor Adam appeared to have a reasonable grasp on the way the English language functions meaning that they could neither understand fully what I was saying nor adequately express their position. Now, I've nothing at all against people coming to this country and working -- I am a pukka Liberal -- but it seems like a basic principle of working in a service industry that one ought to at least be able to converse with one's customers!

So, why am I so furious? Well, firstly, I do not appreciate being accused in this way. Secondly, the Nando's loyalty card is clearly moronic. It ought to be the case that one chooses whether to save three, six or ten meals worth of stamps/signatures in order to obtain a free quarter, half or whole chicken. But no, it would seem that on the way to having accumulated ten meals, one should get both a quarter and and half chicken before finally obtaining the legendary free whole chicken -- and one is bound to do so. I have been denied my free quarter chicken because of the downright stupid way the card works. Furthermore, when I get to the whole chicken, this is going to be a waste of food as not even I am able to consume an entire chicken on my own and Amanda doesn't eat food on the bone. Thirdly, the people at Nando's today were clearly of the opinion that I had been attempting an elaborate con in order to obtain that greatest of prizes -- a free half chicken -- and had decided to let me have it just to make their lives easier. There was a time when the customer was right. That time appears to have passed at Nando's and this is a real shame.

So, sorry Nando's, you suck and I'm appalled!

I just did a massive (and I mean HUGE) catch-up on Planet SUSE.

If you're on the Planet and you recently contacted me about it, all should now be as you asked. If you think anything is amiss, please let me know, I'd hate to have missed anything in the mass of updates.

Recorded on Sunday at St Paul's. 23 minutes long, including reading and beginning of response. Available as Ogg Vorbis or MP3:

No presentation for this sermon.

There are few things so beautiful as what happens to water when it's cold and it's very cold in the UK at the moment.

Took a cracking photo this morning of a close-up look at some standing frost and it makes a really nice wallpaper for a computer.

Available as a standard wallpaper or a widescreen one.

Standing Frost (Preview)

Recorded yesterday at St Leonard's. 13 minutes long. Available as Ogg Vorbis or MP3:

I know I'm not the only member of the clergy who uses Linux so I trust that this post may be of use to others. Also, the notes here may well apply to users of other open source calendars, I use Evolution so I know it works there. Your mileage may - or may not - vary. The lectionary that can be downloaded and imported into your calendar software is a great service but I've always had one problem with it which is that in Evolution, it shows the whole of every day as busy time - a little bit awkward. So I decided this year to hack the raw file before importing to make each entry an "all-day" event but with the time not showing as busy. Here are your steps to do so:

1. Download the lectionary
   The Common Worship lectionaries can be downloaded from this site. Make sure you get the 2010 one, that's the one that started on Sunday just past, Advent Sunday. The file type you want is Apple iCal iCal file as it's basically the same as Evolution uses natively. This process works whether collects and post-communions are included or not so it's up to your personal preference there.
2. Edit the file
   Open the .ics file in your favourite text editor. If the editor can do a search and replace throughout the file, you're going to be a lot happier - most can. My favourite is Vim so the specifics here are for that but I'll also mention the generic principle. You need to add a line before each SUMMARY entry that reads TRANSP:TRANSPARENT - this makes the time not to be shown as busy. The line needs to end in a \r character not a \n - that's a CR (Carriage Return) rather than a New Line. In Vim, that means doing this: :1,$ s/SUMMARY/TRANSP:TRANSPARENT\rSUMMARY/g. Once that's done, save the file and you're ready to:
3. Import the lectionary
   In Evolution, this means doing File: Import and following the instructions from there but if you're using something else the process may be different.