Friendfeed

…anyone use it? I just made myself one which you can find here, should you so wish. It aggregates all your social networking activity online (for instance, facebook, twitter, last.fm, flickr, tumblr, blogs, etc etc) and makes one feed which people can view and comment on and generally enjoy. If you’ve not got one you should totally make one up and we should all be buddies on it or however it works. Sign up here.

2:27 ftw

Fran, Rach and I were driving to Morrisons to get stuff for baking (we made awesome brownies we we munched at the Minster Carol Service) and we were listening to the 3rd Radio 1 Live Lounge album. Some of it was a bit hit and miss but there easily the stand out track was this cover of a favourite from first year. Listen to the end.

How to get a Facebook status RSS feed

Since my last post a couple of people have asked me how to get an RSS feed of your facebook status since the button was removed from the website. I’ve tried numerous methods found on various pages to no avail. Credit to Hugh for pointing out this very simple method; hopefully you’ll find this useful.

Interconnectivity

Bring on the trumpets to herald my arrival in (or perhaps submission to?) the huge and dizzying universe of web2.0. Not only am I on millions on Social Networking Sites with all kinds of different emphases, but most of them connect with each other. Joy of joys.

Adventures

So, once more to topical commentary, dear friends.

Question: Should Atheists celebrate Christmas?

Answer: If they want to.

Comment: If you’re a Christian or you vaguely know one then the chances are at some point you have been involved in some sort of discussion about whether it is suitable or proper or pointless or whatever for people of alternative faiths or none to celebrate Christmas. Until recently the logician in me couldn’t really understand why you’d want to if it went against everything you believe in. A revelation: it doesn’t, for pretty much anyone. People enjoy a celebration, we love food and good company, exchanging cards and gifts, time with family, holidays, walks, decoration, festivity – without a single mention of Jesus, there’s a whole lot of fun to be had at Christmas – and you know what? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Maybe the fact of the matter is that for many people Christmas doesn’t focus on Jesus – but why should those of us for whom it does begrudge them a great time? I’m all for people having fun and I certainly don’t hold it against my friends who aren’t Christians when they enjoy themselves the rest of the year, so why should I start now? Why, as we’re celebrating the birth of God made man would we decide that it’s up to us who gets to have fun and why?

I will be going to the carol service – but I’m definitely going to be at the work party too. And I’ll tear it up! This advent I have learnt that it’s time I stopped attempting to limit God to the safe and sanitized but realise that he was born in a crappy stables in some backwater and he did all that to turn the whole story around for me.

I want my friends to know that the God I love isn’t against fun and celebration, Christmas isn’t a members-only event and Christians can not limit Christ, whatever they might sometimes think.

Isn’t it time we presented the gospel as something which explains the mess with we live in and offers some answers rather than another set of restrictions and a big ladder up to a rather high horse?

To my non believing friends, I hope you all know me well enough to know that I have no plans to subvert you (read this) but I would love you to know a bit about the God that I know; who is probably quite different from how he has been portrayed. This article in Esquire is one of the best explanations I have read in a long time and although it’s a tiny bit lengthy I’d be delighted if you skimmed through it. This blog inspired some interesting discussions about the season and is equally worth a quick read.

Oh and I hope someone enjoyed the title.

Party

Last Night we had a house party. It was awesome! It was a birthday party for my housemate and a friend who have recently turned 21. There was epic preparation – every thing got cleaned! Somewhat ironic given the state of the place in the morning, but still, at one point it was the cleanest the house has been all year. We mixed the most awesome drinks. There was fruit and juice and fruit juice and juicy fruit and all the alcomahol you can imagine -  we seem to have amassed a pretty varied and interesting collection. Recently I’ve taken some advice from the D-O-Double-Gizzle himself and have been enjoying all kinds of Gin & Juice type concoctions. They’re the most of the yummy. That said, it should be noted that Frank mixes the best drinks of anyone I’ve ever met and some of his were awesome. We also spent hours creating a spotify playlist for the party so we all added some of our favourites and then left it on random (well, we were supposed to anyway!). We bought one of those day passes for 99p to avoid adverts – clever business, you know. Worth it too – we had 11 hours of music in the end! So there was a clean house, plentiful supply of choons and buckets of cocktails: the stage was set for a pretty good time…

And it really was! If you are friends with the right people on facebook there are tons of photos of the awesome dancing and people and fun. Even better the whole thing was relatively without serious incident which is jolly good.

All that remains to be said is that the C.A.T.E.M.P.I.R.E has G.O.T. a par-ty H.A.P.P.E.N.I.N.G…. Oh, and thank goodness we didn’t open the sky lights.

Modern Warfare 2 Fallout

Towards Wisdomousness (or, an analysis of cartoon dinosaurs)

Do you know what I’m not good at? Making decisions. Well. Making good decisions, anyway. Ever. Give me two options and I’ll pick the stupid one. I could get a reasonable night’s sleep – or I could stay up late and be knackered and irritable tomorrow. I could cook real actual food, or I could have a sammich. Or biscuits. Or subsist purely on haribo. I am not what I would describe as a wise person. By any stretch of the imagination. But questionable nutritional choices and exotic sleep patterns aside, if I’m quite honest, I can recall scores of pretty terrible bigger decisions which have had wider repercussions and lead to quite epic quantities of fail in life more generally. In fact anyone with whom I share even the briefest of acquaintances with will probably be able to reel off a fair sized list.

Bob here, sometime companion of Dilbert, is not really about the decisions. He is what is known in the trade as a tool. Arguably worse than failing to make good decisions, he pretty much fails to make any decisions at all. Ok, here he seems to have chosen to eat his Blackberry all of his own accord but that’s not exactly a moment of triumph. Usually he plays the role of dumb henchman quite excellently with a dedication to passively carrying out orders. I almost started to attempt to justify him by suggesting that being somewhat lacking in initiative is not an actively bad thing in itself – however, there are definite grounds for arguing that following other people’s bad decisions is an equally tragic decision failure on your part also: you are complicit in their jackassery.

In some respects I guess I could substitute myself in the place of the bad decision dinosaur right here. Not an avid reader of cat and girl, perhaps I should refrain from passing judgement too harshly on the poor chap but nonetheless he makes my point. I’d be the one who says, “Sure, Boney, you can take Russia” and “I believe it is peace for our time“. Oh yes, that’s me – devoid of perception and lacking in foresight and better judgement. However, I would even go as far as saying that often the issue can not be put down to lacking foresight. I can recall plenty of instances whereupon I have been in such a position as to accurately perceive the consequences of my actions, judge them as undesirable and yet still persist to make decisions which ultimately secure these ends. I mean, nice going right there. Surely that requires a special kind of stupid? Or is it uglier things like indiscipline or plain old weakness of character? Perhaps it is a similar character flaw to following the bad decisions of others as well. Perhaps Bob and the BDD aren’t too different afterall.

Slightly more generously, perhaps I might even be favourably compared with another prehistoric patriarch of webcomic stardom – namely T-Rex of dinosaur comics. He’s naïve and boisterous, occasionally witty and sometimes even quite sweet. Often his ever present companions foil his ever more ludicrous schemes but generally he learns some form of life lesson from his musings and dialogue within those six strikingly similar boxes.

I guess my point is that although undeniably loveable the best thing you can say about these guys is that they are stupid rather than malicious (perhpas in contrast to the dinosaurs found here). They don’t intentionally harm anyone but often manage to in the course of their generally self interested (…if that) existence. That is the category in which I would like to place myself, the box I want to tick: my plea against the charges of ill treating those around me. I might be lacking in initiative, sensitivity or consideration but I am not malicious.

I had almost settled with that position. But you know what? It’s not good enough. It’s not enough to say, “Well, I meant to look out for ice bergs…” or at least, “well I had nothing against the guy I ran over, it’s not like I meant to kill him – I just needed take a call” – sometimes one has to take an active interest in specifically avoiding the bad stuff [Edit: contrast to my last post much?] rather than simply deciding not to aim straight for them. If we’re heading for problems because they seem to be the default then observing this and failing to change course has to be a problem in itself. The reason why any of this came to mind is that earlier I made a very small decision. I believe it was perceived as rudeness and I probably came out of the situation looking like the bad guy – but knowing that the alternative was all different kinds of ugly for everyone involved, to allow that to happen has to be seen as worse. I’ve got it wrong before. I got it right today.

http://catandgirl.com/