Psalm 47:2

How awe­some is the LORD Most High,
    the great King over all the earth!

# by Josh on May 3rd, 2006 Tags: , , , ,
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Out of space

Yes­ter­day I realised my 40GB hard drive was finally full. And it was a most unpleas­ant sen­sa­tion. Now I need to actu­ally get a file­server work­ing, because it’s way too much has­sle to install a new hard drive in this machine + copy stuff onto it (I’m out of IDE chan­nels so I can’t just bang a new one in). Because, you know, set­ting up a file­server is just so much more trivial.

One of the rea­sons the hard drive is so full is the ridicu­lous num­ber of pho­tos I take. The sit­u­a­tion isn’t assisted by ridicu­lously beau­ti­ful sun­sets ridicu­lously often. These two just in:

A sunset
Another sunset

I’m con­tem­plat­ing mov­ing all my pho­tos onto the PC known as Media on our net­work (it’s a Shut­tle XPC thing with Win­dows MCE installed), because it has a 320GB hard drive, and because WOW Media Center’s photo album play­back is awe­some. I used it today and was very impressed. Def­i­nitely not for every­thing, but if you just have a heap of pho­tos to go through sequen­tially it’s great. I was sit­ting there with a remote click­ing “next next next” as required, and it was a throughly pain­less experience.

[Aside: I am proud at hav­ing com­bined these three things — start­ing with my run­ning out of disc space, actu­ally more due to video than pho­tos, but I needed the photo ref­er­ence to launch into the sun­set big and onwards to Media Cen­ter — under the title of “Out of space”. It really only applies well to the first one, but hope­fully the post mean­dered trans­par­ently enough that no-one noticed or cared. I say this now because evi­dently peo­ple do read what I write here for the writ­ing. Curi­ous as to whether or not I can get crit­i­cism as well as praise, or if peo­ple will choose to say noth­ing at all rather than some­thing nice. Not that I mind com­ments that are nice, but… it’d be good to move beyond that. Okay, this aside is def­i­nitely out­side the scope of the title!]

Hav­ing said all that, Merry Christ­mas all. That bears absolutely no rela­tion to the title, unless you’re some weird con­spir­acy the­o­rist who is con­vinced that Jesus was sent by Mar­tians. I pre­fer to believe he’s the son of God, which might strike some as no less weird, but at least it’s his­tor­i­cally cor­re­lated (both in prior prophecy and con­tem­po­rary record­ing)! What­ever your per­spec­tive, try and think about why you’re cel­e­brat­ing Christ­mas this year…

# by Josh on December 24th, 2005 Tags: , , , ,
| 1 Comment »

Good Friday

From Mark 15, NIV translation

Jesus Before Pilate

1Very early in the morn­ing, the chief priests, with the elders, the teach­ers of the law and the whole San­hedrin, reached a deci­sion. They bound Jesus, led him away and handed him over to Pilate.

2“Are you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate.

“Yes, it is as you say,” Jesus replied.

3The chief priests accused him of many things. 4So again Pilate asked him, “Aren’t you going to answer? See how many things they are accus­ing you of.”

5But Jesus still made no reply, and Pilate was amazed.

6Now it was the cus­tom at the Feast to release a pris­oner whom the peo­ple requested. 7A man called Barab­bas was in prison with the insur­rec­tion­ists who had com­mit­ted mur­der in the upris­ing. 8The crowd came up and asked Pilate to do for them what he usu­ally did.

9“Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate, 10know­ing it was out of envy that the chief priests had handed Jesus over to him. 11But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have Pilate release Barab­bas instead.

12“What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked them.

13“Cru­cify him!” they shouted.

14“Why? What crime has he com­mit­ted?” asked Pilate.

But they shouted all the louder, “Cru­cify him!”

15Want­ing to sat­isfy the crowd, Pilate released Barab­bas to them. He had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.

The Sol­diers Mock Jesus

16The sol­diers led Jesus away into the palace (that is, the Prae­to­rium) and called together the whole com­pany of sol­diers. 17They put a pur­ple robe on him, then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on him. 18And they began to call out to him, “Hail, king of the Jews!” 19Again and again they struck him on the head with a staff and spit on him. Falling on their knees, they paid homage to him. 20And when they had mocked him, they took off the pur­ple robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to cru­cify him.

The Cru­ci­fix­ion

21A cer­tain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexan­der and Rufus, was pass­ing by on his way in from the coun­try, and they forced him to carry the cross. 22They brought Jesus to the place called Gol­go­tha (which means The Place of the Skull). 23Then they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. 24And they cru­ci­fied him. Divid­ing up his clothes, they cast lots to see what each would get.

25It was the third hour when they cru­ci­fied him. 26The writ­ten notice of the charge against him read: THE KING OF THE JEWS. 27They cru­ci­fied two rob­bers with him, one on his right and one on his left. 29Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shak­ing their heads and say­ing, “So! You who are going to destroy the tem­ple and build it in three days, 30come down from the cross and save yourself!”

31In the same way the chief priests and the teach­ers of the law mocked him among them­selves. “He saved oth­ers,” they said, “but he can’t save him­self! 32Let this Christ, this King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.” Those cru­ci­fied with him also heaped insults on him.

The Death of Jesus

33At the sixth hour dark­ness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. 34And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” – which means, “My God, my God, why have you for­saken me?”

35When some of those stand­ing near heard this, they said, “Lis­ten, he’s call­ing Elijah.”

36One man ran, filled a sponge with wine vine­gar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink. “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Eli­jah comes to take him down,” he said.

37With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.

38The cur­tain of the tem­ple was torn in two from top to bot­tom. 39And when the cen­tu­rion, who stood there in front of Jesus, heard his cry and saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!”

# by Josh on March 25th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , ,
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Keeping 90%

We started a new series at church last night, on money and how we think about and man­age it. In the first of five talks, we looked at the rela­tion­ship which exists between God and money. Read the rest of this entry »

# by Josh on September 27th, 2004 Tags: , , , , ,
| 1 Comment »