chris’sBlog

Via @mikepeat I came across this plugin called Zemanta. It sits alongside blogging tools (both online and hosted) and analyses your blog post, including spelling mistakes and the suggests other links and images that might be appropriate. If you do like the things that it finds, then you can just drag them straight into your post, which is pretty useful.

As an example it’s currently provided the image that you can see on the RHS of this page, and it’s also added all the hyperlinks that show up in this post, which is pretty good, and the links at the bottom. At first glance it seems really easy to use, and as you type more it refines it’s suggestions and offers you new content. So, worth a try if you’re still blogging like the old days.

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Last night I attended a gig, Taylor Swift at the MEN.
Now, I had a great time but boy did I feel a bit old.

Taylor Swift (2007 pic)

The good bit’s
I don’t really know why I like Taylor Swift. Perhaps subconciously it’s because she’s a nice looking 19 year old, but I’m not sure that is the reason. I do like the music. I’ve always kinda liked contry style music and she mixes this with some really catchy type pop stuff. Songs like “Our Song” and “Love story” are difficult not to like.
The concert was great, she’s not just a singer, but can play acoustic guitar pretty well and did so with some acoustic bits in the set. She got around the audience including one bit on a stage just in front of where we were sitting. The sound was good and well mixed and she did a really good 2 hours worth of material. There were ten costume changes and she certainly looked hot in all of them.

Taylor 2009 Fearless

Here’s a pic from the 2009 tour, to give you a flavour of the video used in the show, although at the MEN the centre screen was a 16:9 format, which was much more pleasing. There were a silly number of guitars (5 at one point) as well as a violin and some other random instruments at some point. For a mostly four piece style band lineup they made quite a full sound.

How I knew I was out of place

Most of the people at the concert, including those on our row (I took the wife, otherwise this would have been even worse) were teenage girls and were screaming their lungs off

The support act was a chap called Justin Bieber who appeared to be about 12 years old (although I suspect he might have been a bit older, but not much). This caused the girls to go mad and scream at an ear splitting volume which hurt my ears.

I was interested in the tech, and that’s sad. They had really nice back projection, projection onto the stage elements and an amazing waterfall effect at the end which was kind of the opposite of inkjet printing but with water drops. It spelled out words from the song whilst she stood under it getting wet… Cool (although not the 360deg version in the video).

I was anoyed by the girls shouting “we love you” every few seconds (well, every few minutes), when there was zero chance that anyone apart from the few rows around them could hear.

Of course, most of this starts to mark me out as a grumpy old man. However, I’m really glad that I went.. and for those who don’t mind a bit of no nonsence feel good music, the kind of people who take busted for what they really are and don’t get cross, then Taylor Swift might just be worth checking out.

So, recently we marked a milestone in Mr and Mrs Dixons parenting. That being James’s first day at school. So what’s to be expected if you’re a parent and sending your child to build their future at your local primary school.

James prepares for first school day

Firstly, you should be quite prepared for a very annoying lot of messing around whilst the child “settles in”. Now in my day you dropped your little bundle of fun off at school, there were sometimes a few tears and then that was it untill you left full time eduction, possibly at university! However, nowadays things are not quite a simple. After two settling in sessions we then had four weeks (yes, you heard me right) of alternating mornings and afternoons. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a good idea to ease things for the children so that they settle in well. Perhaps for a few days or a week, but not four weeks! There are a couple of things that I think are wrong with this:
1) It’s a nightmare to find childcare for all the bits where they are not at school.
2) After four weeks of getting used to 15 children and a series of half days they are then hit with not only full days but twice as many children as there were previously.
This cannot make sense?
Secondly, you should prepare for the fact that your child may not actually tell you anything about school. Now I don’t know how this works, perhaps something about independance, but questions go something like “what did you do at school?”… “nothing” and various varients on a theme. This continued until a non family member asked the same question whereby a load more details were revealed. Things have improved somewhat, but I still wouldn’t say that the lines of communication were fully open.
Finally, it’s harder than it was when I was at school. Well, I can’t actually remember how hard it was, but homework and reading practice is tough. Think for a second how you actually go about teaching people to read, it’s very tricky. We’re currently doing phonics, which means capital letters are out and letter sounds are in.

Now the good thing is that there are useful things such as letters sent home from the school to actually tell you what your children are learning and lots of resources in the form of games and library books etc.
So, if you’re sending a little one off to school. good luck.

Now, I’m only 33, which I don’t recon is all that old so why therefore am I getting urges to do loads of crazy things and also worrying that I’m not making enough of a difference to the world? In the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about doing a parachute jump, buying a motorbike and learning to fly. I’d like to do all those things, and whilst I’m at it quit my job and go full time with a band or be a record producer. However some of the things on my list seem a tad unreachable.
Perhaps another worrying sign is that I’ve finally started Stephen Coveys “the 8th habbit” and I’m actually enjoying it. It does make you realise that there might be more to managing people than sending emails all day long. Ah well, back to flight simulator if I can clear enough space amidst the pizza boxes to place my joystick, if the kids hav’nt broken it. Aghh…..

Yesterday I attended a day at a church in Ripon where such subjects such as prophesy and the holy spirit were covered. I was primarily there to play keyboards, but rather than hide behind that (which I sometimes have a tendancy to do) I listend and participated in what was actually going on.
It’s no secret that I think that a lot of the time churches are freaky places and don’t actually do a very good job of communicating what it means to be a Christian in our world. I also think that sometimes (well, most of the time) a lot of christians don’t help things by being a bit.. well… abnormal.

So it was refreshing to hear the speaker, Gary Best from Vineyard in Canada speaking and being compleatly normal. He talked of his struggles in engaging with God and especially in dealing with some of the thinks regarding the holy spirit that might be likley to flip people out (falling over, laughing etc.)
There was a strong theme of community. For example, rather than expecting some kind of prophetic future predicition, or some kind of rebuke for how bad we all are, he suggested that we should spend time looking deeply at others around us and asking that we might know what to say to them in their situations.

Ever had an experence when you just know that someone is upset, or had a problem deeper than that which they are approaching you with? I know I have, and that to me is God prompting me to say something and try and assist in that situation.
How great it would and should be, gary said, if our churches were places where we could respond to the needs of the people around us and where we all could get involved in ministering to people.

He used the illustration of the seaguls in finding nemo to describe a situation where a group of people might be about to be able to experiance God but being ruined by that annoying “mine, mine, mine…” We should encourage others to engage in experiencing God and not worry if we’re not having the same experiences as they are.

Above all, I was struck by how non judgemental, normal and interesting the teaching was, and that’s something that it often missing.
Fair enough, people do poke fun (more than most faith groups I think) at Christians, and indeed there may be much to poke fun at. However, some Christians may be more normal that you think!

I’m still here and having a go at twittering. See the sidebar on the RHS for details of my recent twitter activity! Perhaps I’ll even do a main blog post soon.

Can you believe it. Must be getting old because James was 4 years old not so very long ago. It only seems like yesterday that I was asleep in the hospital after a traumatic (hope Emma doesn’t read this!) labour. Time seems to fly by, and I sometimes worry that I’m missing chances to see him growing up. I suppose when I think about it we do OK, after all we’ve had several trips to see trains and planes and all the things that dad secretly likes.
It was great to celebrate with him, especially as I just made it out of hospital in time.

James (4) prepares to eat birthday cake

Well it’s that time of year again when the home appliances stop working and you shell out you’re hard earned cash on new ones. The casualty this year, the washing machine. Well, it’s done about 9 years of service, which in this day and age is’nt all that bad but it’s now given up.
A new Bosch machine at around £300 is on it’s way and nowadays they even take you old machine away and recycle it for you. I hope that the new machine gives even more service than the old one!

After a number of years experimenting with gallery software and wordpress, I’ve decided that I never maintain all the other bits of my site, so I’m moving my blog to the main directory of my website. I’ll leave the blog directory there with a redirect, but from now on http://www.chrisdixon.net/ will direct you straight to this blog.