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Yearly Archives: 2010

Newday: Lonnnggg Day

am writing this the morning after the long day, Wednesday was officially Day 1 of Newday, delegates started arriving and also so did the bulk of the servers, we had been prepared and made up all the badges we could before had and distributed the relevant ones to there teams but that was not even half of our number of servers (about 300 out of 750) so as normal we were manicly busy all day from about 8am until about 9:30pm only stopping for 45 mins for lunch and 45 mins for dinner.

i was on my feet all day and basically, taking photo’s, printing badges and laminating them, we must have printed somewhere near 200 badges yesterday, of which well over 100 were after lunch alone. i think i am slowly getting feeling back in my feet. as a result i sadly missed the main meeting last night and as i left this morning not had chance to listen to any of the worship or word. am actually looking forward to the live album this year. had a record low number of mocha’s this year at 2, not because i was trying to cut down but purely because we were so busy we never had time to have them, have possibly OD’ed on Mcdonalds McFlurry’s though because have had one every evening after leaving the showground this week.

am headed back to London on a train as i write this (hooray for iPhone tethering!) am glad to be able to pick up a reliable phone signal again, headed straight back into the office and back to work. after having had a nice fry up for breakfast.

keeping it short this morning due to sleep deprivation and the need to catch up with emails and civilisation in general.



Newday: The calm before the storm

end of my first day of setup (almost) its been a struggle of a day. started at 8 am after a hearty newday breakfast

got straight to work on getting everything ready to print our main run of server badges – downloading photos, batch processing them into right size etc. without going into boring detail, what should have been a task that only took an hour to 2 max just to print the badges out took a whole 8 hours including working through lunch to coax into life.

its a good job we had today to prep and print the first batch (those that bothered to upload photos) it would have been a whole different ball game if we were doing this tomorrow when a lot of the main event servers were arriving. after that we got efficient and got the full print batch printed, cut, laminated and punched within 2 hours – even with 100 reprints!

all leading on to a nice relaxing dinner (wont post the photo!) and a peaceful evening to moan about slow internet. praying that they have the wifi enabled back at the agricultural college and that the room doesnt smell of paint this evening. going to sleep well i hope.



Busy month ahead

i have a very busy month ahead of me, some would say a gruelling schedule, so far it looks like this:

  1. tonight (8th) until thursday (12th) – working at newday
  2. 19th – 6th Sept in Zimbabwe! ( i fly through 2 other countries just to get there!)

Zimbabwe will include quite a few things such as

  • Meeting Marie’s parents for the first time (on my own no less – Marie comes out a few days later)
  • 5 hour drive to Antelope park for a friends wedding
  • hopefully if time permits, safari or standing with lions (no wrestling i promise 😉 )
  • being an usher/groomsmen at said wedding
  • 5 hour drive back to Harare from Antelope Park
  • helping prepare for a christian youth conference (Ignite Twenty 10) – hopefully fit in a bet of jet skiing too 🙂
  • helping run all things tech at Ignite Twenty 10 🙂

so all in all i am gonna be busy, but i am going to be having fun all the time, doing what i enjoy mixed in with meeting new people and some fun play time too! i will need a holiday from my holiday no doubt. if i can i will try and blog when in Zim but cant guarentee how the internet will cope out there not forgetting the not so unusual power cuts. i am praying that my time in Zim is fruitful and restful as well as busy. i am praying that all the technical aspects of Ignite go well and that we have no problems.

please pray for a safe and exciting trip



Interesting Statistics

just doing my regular peruse through the backend of my site to make sure stuff is up to date, spam is blasted (not that i get much feedback anyway) and otherwise things kept ticking over, even if i dont have anything to say at the time, i have experienced sites being hacked by not keeping stuff up to date so always spend a few mins checking very regularly.

Google Recent Visitors Map for antsomerset.co.uk

Google Recent Visitors Map for antsomerset.co.uk

i was briefly looking from my wordpress stats and saw the map of recent visitors and was quite intrigued by the places where some people have been visiting from.

people have visited from as far and wide as china and chile or canada. so apparently i do reach a global audience, the most common posts they seem to hit are my geeky ones, so it looks like they are set to continue for now 🙂

its been an interesting 2 weeks for me. I had a number in mind of how much to put into the Newfrontiers brighton conference offering, and during the thursday night worship and prayer time, i felt God tell me the number needed doubling. I thought my original number was sacrificial! i was thinking at the moment how was i going to do it, but Marie told me “God will bless you more than that”

the reason i didnt say much about this before now is because i realise that in the last 2 weeks i have had more freelance work than before the conference and have including some new semi regular clients – semi regular in the sense that they dont take up my monthly server management services but keep asking me to do server stuff for them 🙂 God has blessed me more over so far with work that has already paid back what i gave into the offering!

One particular project i am working on which is quite exciting is helping a church friend improving the SEO ranking of the website for her business, you should all take a look over at uneon.co.uk 🙂

Quite a few exciting things in the pipeline over the next few weeks and months including Zim in less than 1 month!!!

for those interested in the plugin i use for stats on my blog, i use wibstats by a fellow christian Chris Taylor

DISCLAIMER – i dont just choose wordpress plugins because the author is a christian, i choose the best plugins available for the job and for that Chris really deserves some credit with his Wibstats plugin



Inception – Great film

Marie Surprised me last night by taking me out to Bombay Bicycle Indian Restaurant in the holland park area, i can say it was awesome food, excellent service and an all round great restaurant, we were leaving at 8 and decided to see what was on at the cinema in Shepherds Bush and decided to see Inception.

Just as a rough guide of what inception is from the cinemas this is Vue’s description:

Blockbuster sci-fi thriller written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a professional thief with a difference: the spoils he goes after are not material objects but the thoughts, dreams and secrets buried in the minds of other people. This rare talent has cost him dear, rendering him a solitary fugitive stripped of everything he ever really cared about. When he is offered a chance for redemption by reversing the process and planting an idea rather than stealing it, he and his team of specialists find themselves pitted against a dangerous enemy that appears to pre-empt their every move. Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine and Joseph Gordon-Levitt co-star.

the film was very cleverly put together and had me on the edge of my seat throughout (although that could have also been the not so comfortable seets at the Shepherds Bush Vue cinema!) the actors played brilliantly and i really did like the love tragedy aspect of it, it almost made it a modern shakespeare equivalent it was written so well. The film did take a few minutes to really get going though and they perhaps could have gotten things moving faster but all in all it didnt detract that much.

The story was complex and at times i got lost in the details because the film was very detailed and it covered virtually everything, it almost made me think was this real or not. the ending was very cool too, wont spoil it too much but it leaves the imagination running high of the possibilities as it leaves just one question unanswered which runs through the film via the character of Leanardo Di Caprio’s Wife.

all in all a very good film to go see on a saturday night, as much as i get annoyed when people are noisy in cinemas, it was great to go see a film where the screen was mostly full rather than being only 1 of 5 or 6 people watching, there is something different about watching a film in a full cinema screen over an empty one.