I’ll tell you what normally happens: I sit down at a computer with the intention of posting to this blog, or even doing something genuinely useful. Before I get started, I have “a quick look” at facebook to see what’s been going on since I last looked. And twitter. And flickr. Oh, and I always have some reading to catch up with on google reader, too. And then before I know it hours have passed and I’m out of time.

So this time, for once, I’ve logged on and the only site I have open is this one.

The only time I pray with any regularity is when I meet with two friends most weeks as part of a “prayer triplet”. We chat, we discuss what’s going on in our lives, in the world,  and in the church, and then we pray. And most weeks I do pray out loud. For quite some time now I’ve had no sense of any form of communication taking place when I pray. Or more specifically no sense of communication with God. Of course my two prayer partners can hear what I’m saying, and praying out loud helps me, to some extent, organise my thoughts and think through issues in a way that I may not do otherwise. But whether prayer is actually “achieving” anything, I have very little confidence. In fact, I’d say none at all. I am not at all sure why I pray, and it feels like I’m just talking into thin air.

I suspect I am.

And having rejected the notion that the God I’ve believed in does intervene in a direct way with human lives, quite what to pray about, and how to pray, has become something of a mystery.

But as I mentioned in an earlier post, something’s cropped up that has got me praying quite specifically. My brother and his wife are expecting their second baby. At the 20-week scan, the radiographer spotted a problem with the baby’s heart. Quite a serious problem. Everything else is going fine, and there should be no problem with the pregnancy or the birth, but without serious intervention, the baby will not survive more than a couple of days. She will need open heart surgery within three days, and two more open heart surgeries before the age of five, and even with the treatment will have only a 50/50 chance of survival. And the long term-prognosis is not known; the procedures have only been around since the late 1980s, so the oldest survivors in are only in their 20s.

So my brother, who is an avowed atheist, has asked us to pray. Well, he said “I know you’re not sure about prayer and stuff at the moment, but please do pray for us if you’re praying.” (Paraphrased!) Specifically, he and his wife have asked that we pray that the left side of the heart will develop more that it currently looks like it will, as then the procedures will be smaller and less risky.

And so that is what I found myself praying when I met with my friends. But then figured if I’m asking God for a miracle, why stop there? So I’m now praying not that the hearth would just develop “a bit more” but that it would develop completely and wholly, such that the medics would be utterly confounded. In all my years in the church I’ve heard enough stories of miraculous healings. Whether I’ve ever really believed them is another matter, but what the heck – I might as well pray.

But it’s a funny prayer, as I still have no faith or expectation that God is able to do what I’m asking, but it makes a change to be praying for something so specific. And if it happens? Will I return to my faith? And if it doesn’t? Will I reject it entirely?

I have no idea.

Right: now I’ve run out of time before getting on to facebook etc. That’s a good thing, I feel.

(If you want more detail about the condition itself, it’s called Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. There’s a useful explanation of the condition and the treatment on the American Heart Association website.)

My promised post about prayer has not materialised “in a day or two” as suggested, and now I’m off camping for the weekend so it won’t appear until next week now.

But to summarise: a family situation has got me thinking about prayer, and has actually got me praying about something quite specific – despite the fact that I actually have no faith whatsoever that prayers will make any difference.

More to follow…

Been a while since I’ve put anything on here, so thought it was about time I checked in – if nothing else so my occasional visitors don’t think I’ve just given up on it.

But that’s all for now, except to say that I have a post milling around in my head about prayer which I should get up in a day or two. And that was, after all, what this blog was supposed to be about in the first place.

Now, I can hardly be said to be concerned about privacy the way I put so much online. I blog, I use facebook, I use twitter, I use Flickr. And all in my real name.

But people who follow me on facebook or twitter may have noticed something odd. A good friend summed it up: I come across like a single guy. I’m a married man with a two-year old son, yet my family hardly ever get a mention. Well, there’s a reason for that: Rachael is just not very comfortable with “our lives” being so open, and she asked me to never mention them on facebook. So I don’t. Well, hardly.

Well, this weekend there’s been another update: I’ve made a change to the privacy settings on our photos. All my online photos are on Flickr, and until now I’ve always had them openly available. After a couple of chats over the weekend, family photos (as opposed to all my random shots) are now marked on Flickr as viewable by “Friends and Family” only. So if you click on the link to my photos you’ll still see plenty there. But none of my son. They are still on Flickr, so if we actually know you and you’d like to be able to see them, you can either sign up for a flickr account, and I’ll mark you as a friend, or ask me to email you a guest pass.

I’d recommend signing up for an account – Flickr is a great service – but if all you want to do is look, then a guest pass will do just fine.

We do still have our family blog over at Which Way’s Up?. There may be some changes happenning there, too.

Just had to fill in a form about civil service training, and – as usual these days - there was the “a bit about you” section. Brushing aside the sad fact that I’ve moved up a box in the age categories recently, I was amused to see the following qualification in the religion question:

Q37. What is your religion, even if you are not currently practising?

Which very neatly allowed me to tick the ‘Christian’ box without to much trouble.

In case you were wondering, here’s the list of options: 

Christian (including Church of England, Catholic, Protestant and all other Christian denominations)

Buddhist

Hindu

Jewish

Muslim

Sikh

Other(Specify)

No religion

Prefer not to say

Thanks to Bishop Alan Wilson for posting this on his blog. Everything you need to know about internet social media in less than a minute (by Mitch Benn):

My attention’s been drawn to this news report: Steve Molyneux, an experienced magistrate of good standing, has resigned from the bench after being seen to post updates to Twitter about cases he was involved in. Why has it caught my attention? Well, because I’m a magistrate, and I use Twitter, and I have posted occasional updates about court business. So I though I ought to look a bit further and see what’s happened.

Here’s the brief summary from BBC news: BBC LINK.
And here’s a bit more detail from the local press in his area: SHROPSHIRE STAR LINK.

My initial thoughts are these: From what I can see, he’s posted nothing that wasn’t already in the public domain. (The Shropshire Star link has details of the actual updates he posted.) And his reason for resigning is not because he posted updates, as he maintains that he’s done nothing wrong. He’d already met with the chair of his bench and agreed to not post any more, but when he realised it was being taken further (he was asked to meet with the local advisory committee) he tended his resignation. But he points out that he resigned because after being “shopped” by a fellow magistrate anonymously he feels he can’t continue knowing that he could be having to work with that individual.  At least, that’s the impression I’ve picked up as I’ve read the reports. I don’t see that he’s done anything wrong; anything that happens in open court is a matter of public record anyway, and he doesn’t appear to have said anything about confidential retiring room discussions or mentioned anything beyond what would have appeared in press reports about the cases in question. My own updates have been even more vague, as I’ve not said anything at all about individual cases. I’ve occasionally posted updates like “Day in court today; I wonder what type of business I’ll have to deal with” or “Broken for lunch, but have long report to read while we eat”, but certainly nothing that could be considered as breaking a confidence or discussing an individual case. 

Even so: how do I respond? Do I decide that, until we’ve had any official guidance, I should never say anything about court online? To be on the safe side, I guess so. I expect I could have a long wait for any official guidance, though.

As I read more about the matter I may revise my views, of course! 

Other links:
Steve Molyneux’s Twitterstream (You don’t need to be a twitter user to see this.)
My Twitterstream (in case I ever say anything about court business again).

Added later: found a couple more interesting links…
A podcast with Steven Molyneux talking about the matter: here. 
An American lawyer writing from a slightly different perspective: here.

For a few years, whenever I downloaded an album – initially from iTunes, then from AllOfMP3 and latterly MP3Sparks – I burned a copy on to CD and even went as far as printing up covers. Call it obsessive, if you like, but I loved the look of a shelf full of CDs and I didn’t want the fact that I was now obtaining most of my music digitally stop the collection from growing. And if we had guests it was easy to ask them to choose some music to put on, because they could just look and see what I had.

 But recently I’ve made a discovery: I should have bought better quality blank CDs. I got home from work and my wife was playing some music and it sounded awful. Crackly like an out-of-tune radio. One of my carefully burned CDs. I tried a couple of others out. The same. They’ve simply worn out with age.

And so I decided it was time to have a sort out, and yesterday I went through the whole collection and weeded out every CD that I’d burned at home. Here they are laid out on the sitting room floor: 

The home burned CDs now being cast out.

The question is: will I miss them? Well, no of course not. Every track on these CDs, along with every other track I own, is on our iMac, on my iPod, and backed up on an external drive. And the chances are the vast majority of it is available on Spotify in any case. So getting rid of the CD copies is hardly going to matter. It’s just another sign of times changing, I guess.

Look out for 70 empty CD cases appearing on a Freecycle list nearby soon!

You’ve probably not noticed, but there’s now a bit on the side of this page showing my most recent twitter updates.  I had one before that used an RSS feed, but wordpress has now released a bespoke twitter widget so I’m trying it out.

One problem with both versions: I’d much rather have only my actual updates showing and not any @replies, but they show up either way. The wordpress widget doesn’t have a way of stripping them out, or at least not yet (I’ve asked), but I’m guessing it must be possible to find a feed of just my actual updates. I do after all have my twitter updates automatically posted as my facebook status, and that doesn’t include @replies. I’m hoping there might be a way of accessing that feed from twitter to facebook and using it to create a widget, but I wouldn’t know where to start.

Any suggestions gratefully received!

Apologies to any readers who have absolutely no idea what on earth I’m talking about here. I don’t have much idea either, to be honest.

Update: Following a suggestion from Matthew, I took the wordpress widget out and replaced it with an RSS feed taken from facebook rather than twitter. This sort of worked, but then the entries linked back to facebook, and I’d prefer them to link to twitter. So I  followed his other suggestion and dipped my toes into the world of Yahoo Pipes. Good grief – I really had no idea what I was doing, but thankfully found someone else had done exactly what I wanted, so I just copied them. It’s still not perfect, but it’ll do for now.

I still don’t know what I’m talking about, mind.

A few years ago, a series of robot stickers appeared around Stevenage.

Most of the originals are now faded or gone, and I’ve kept my eyes out for any new ones, but assumed that their creator had moved on, or got fed up. This weekend I spotted some new ones – like the one pictured above. And when I went for a walk on Wednesday I spotted some new designs featuring the robot, too.

I always enjoyed spotting him around town before; now I’ll look forward to seeing what else appears.