Chris Hansen’s blog

I figured I’d stay home today and take care of HWMBO, as he has a slight cold, while staying in touch with the office via my laptop. Well, all hell broke loose at 9 am when I set up the laptop and discovered emails sent long after I had left for the day Friday–I was to start at Big Investment Bank (subsequently BIB) this morning at 9. It was a bit embarrassing but I made it.

Meetings for the rest of the day. At least now I can’t say that I am not making any money for my employer.

…is an embedded video which may not actually stay up too long so go for it, guys and gals. You’ll split your sides.

Or, at least, reach under a stall or two…

…was an urban fox, in broad daylight, on Swan Street on my way to a meeting at the Cathedral. It probably lives in the bushes on the corner, behind a fence. It was just standing out in the open, staring at me. I’ve seen him before on that corner, but only at night.

We are surrounded by fauna here in the centre of the city.

This noon I got a call from the local Liberal Democratic party, of which I’m a member. They were asking me if, in view of the impending General Election, I would put a poster in my window or do various other things like canvassing. I said that I’d do as much as I was able to do.

Then Gordon Brown punctured everyone’s bubble by ruling out a General Election this year, barring unforeseen circumstances.

What a let-down! The Tories and LibDems are now able to accuse him of wimping out. It may be that, like Jim Callaghan in 1978, Brown has just blown his electoral chances. Callaghan decided not to call an election in 1978, when Labour was relatively popular. By 1979, when “Labour’s not working” was the Tories’ cry under Margaret Thatcher, Milk-Snatcher, Callaghan lost in a landslide.

I wonder if Gordon Brown will do the same when he finally goes to the country. I suppose that if the polls are bleak, he may even do a John Major and wait until the last possible day under the Representation of the People Act to call an election.

And most of us remember what happened to John Major in that election.

A while back HWMBO was awarded

Last night I was online talking to Mikiefresh of http://www.justin.tv/mikiefresh and a new person came online: lilash. She joined the conversation and after a while told us that her cat was ill but she herself was too broke to be able to get her cat looked at. I was upset, especially when she said that the cat was crying, so I decided that I had to help. So I wired

Well, we bade farewell to Marta at the office yesterday. She is one of the few bright lights there, and unfortunately, for family reasons she has to move back to her native Australia. The company, however, transferred her to our Melbourne office, and yesterday was her final day in our London office. We went to a bar around the corner and were very convivial–I had a martini with olive, which was marred only by the fact that the olive was unpitted, and I missed the pimiento. Goodbye, Marta! I hope that someday HWMBO and I will visit Melbourne and see you again, and I hope that your move goes well.

It’s a picture, and there is no recipe, sadly, but I think that this picture might be attractive to a certain ailuropod, namely . I came across it as I was adding tags to previous posts, and just could not resist. Yum! I think I’ll have one before dinner.

I’ve only been in LA twice, but this story is enchanting, whether you’ve been there or not.

I don’t suppose that any of the principals are still alive, but I’d love to have a meal at the Original Spanish Kitchen.

I followed a link from this Wikipedia article, listing unusual Wikipedia articles. Well worth a trawl.

He’s been denied the right to withdraw his guilty plea, but he says that nonetheless he’ll stay around until the end of his term, when he’ll retire from the Senate.

Oh, goodie! He’ll be around to torment the Republicans for months to come through the 2008 general election. O frabjous day! Calloo, callay! he chortled in his joy. No vorpal blade is needed.

Earlier this week a pimp^Wrecruiter called and asked whether I’d be interested in going on a job interview on Thursday. I told him, “Fine, what’s the job?” He had no spec, only the name of the company.

I told him, “OK, send me what you’ve got and I’m free at 3pm on Thursday.”

No email from him ever came. So I thought he either hadn’t been able to get the appointment or he’d lost interest in me as an interviewee. In addition, like all the other pimps^Wrecruiters, he withholds his phone number when he calls so that companies he’s cold calling can’t tell it’s him when he calls them to beg for a job to fill. So I didn’t have his email address or his phone number. I promptly forgot about it.

This afternoon, at 2 pm, I got a call. It was the recruiter. “Are you ready for your interview?” he said, brightly? I said, “No, you never got back to me.” “I sent you an email!” he said, indignantly. I checked MailWasher’s email log afterwards, and nothing came from his address so he’d not sent it, but that’s beside the point. I said, “I’m not prepared for a 3 pm interview as I’d assumed I wouldn’t have one today. I can do a 4pm.” He got back to me and said that was OK.

It’s a firm that’s basically in the same boat as my last permanent job: a relatively young company which has invested in developers and support staff but has not invested in testing. They don’t have any testers at all.

I think I did OK, and the job would be interesting. I think my price is a bit steep for them, but I’m not budging. If they have no testing function at all, and they want me to start one, they’ll have to pay me more than Searchspace paid me when I started there 6 years ago. Inflation, you know. I’m looking for

If you go into a church, courtroom, or business meeting, fergawdsake turn off your phone, or at least put it on silent. If not, you might end up embarrassing yourself like this bloke in Australia.

If you were cut off from a California state government website recently, this is probably the explanation. I do hope these people have nothing to do with launching missiles.

If you want to cook some Thai chili sauce (spelled “chilli” here in Blighty) you might want to warn passers-by that the odour they are sensing is cooking, not poisonous gas.

As I go through my livejournal entries adding tags, I’ve become very fond of news sources of links that have not expired. The Register is one favourite, the BBC is another. Other news sources, especially small town newspapers (which of course often have the most interesting and weird stories), don’t bother to keep their stories around, or change their addresses so that when you look for them a year or more later, they’re gone.

I’ve had to delete a few entries that contain dead links which I cannot resurrect. Some I’ve been able to refresh the links with a different, and perhaps more lasting, link to the same story.

As of today I’m mired in January 2007; I hope to have finished attaching tags to every post within a few weeks or so.

Last year, I posted, just after I started my current job, that I would have to cut down on my livejournal reading because of time constraints.

With the benefit of a year’s hindsight, I needn’t have bothered to worry.

Nineteen years ago yesterday (October 2, 1988), I was received into the Anglican Communion at the Church of the Holy Apostles on Ninth Avenue and 28th Street, in Manhattan.

…and many happy returns of the day!

30 September 2007
Sermon delivered at St. Anne

…of course, as soon as I started listening to KKSF, I accidentally downloaded some spyware and it took an hour and

As y’all know, I’ve been having trouble with my ISP. Briefly, the DNS server connection was continuously being lost, and just this weekend I could not set up a VPN that I had bought and paid for. I asked BT for a Migration Access Code and got one, with a request to call them to see if they could help.

I was put on to a rather incompetent call centre droid from India who did not understand what a DNS was and continued to insist that my line had not gone down for years. I asked for someone who was competent (not in those words) and got someone who gave me the global DNS address. I entered this as the lookup address and, lo and behold, I lost the ability to control my router from the desktop interface. I decided to try going back to the router I had previously.

Well, folks, it was the router. Once I changed routers, I was able to connect to the VPN first time, and the DNS lookup problem seems to have disappeared (I hope).

I am now listening to KKSF San Francisco over the Web for the first time in more than a year, since Comcast cut off service internationally for copyright reasons (the VPN has a US IP address).

O frabjous day! Calloo, callay!

I’m chortling in my joy!

And you think that you have problems? Get a little behind in your rent payments and you might lose, perhaps not an arm and a leg, but maybe a leg.

Florence Foster Jenkins is famous, even infamous, for her singing, or perhaps in spite of it. Here is an article from Coronet Magazine in 1957 which will tell you almost everything you wanted, or feared, to know about the Diva of Din.

is:

pompeii spike methodist

It sounds like a particularly vicious Italian Protestant.

May-December marriages are not too uncommon nowadays; HWMBO is 13 years my junior.

This May-December marriage is different: it’s May 1925 and December 1983.

Update: Dates changed to keep a certain ailuropod from dwelling in Squickia for too long.

…comes to us from the Southwest, where a bishop in Gallup, New Mexico is a bit confused, perhaps.

…as, thanks to Glasgow City Council, we now know where that ducky tycoon hailed from.

…and many happy returns of the day!

Recently I’ve been wasting time watching Mikiefresh on justin.tv. I stopped watching Justin himself because he’s no longer very interesting. So this weekend I’ve been watching Mikie, who is a young entrepreneur who spends a lot of time fending off his female following, which he has because he is cute as a button. You probably all think I’m crazy, but watching a cute guy sleeping occasionally thickens the blood.

So Saturday I had to finish the service leaflet for Back to Church Sunday at St. Anne’s, go to yoga class as I hadn’t been able to go last Wednesday, and get myself spiritually ready for the service. I shall have to buy a duplex printer; printing on double sided paper is a real pain if you don’t have one, believe me. But I coped. The yoga class was good; I seem to be doing better each time I do it, and it makes me feel pretty good. The other guys who take it are also treats for the eyes, so that helps. HWMBO cooked Singapore laksa for dinner, with chicken. However, the prawn paste was pretty strong, so I ate one helping and declined further helpings, which makes me feel sad. I so want to eat HWMBO’s lovely cooking, but the prawn taste was so strong that I just couldn’t bring myself to eat any more.

The service at St. Anne’s today was OK, nothing special. There were a few newcomers there, but only a few. My sermon will be in my next post–I read the reading set for today (Lazarus and the Rich Man) and just wondered what genius decided that having a Sunday where people who hadn’t been to church in a while or at all would be appropriate to hold on a Sunday where a very depressing and difficult Gospel reading is set. I therefore ignored the Gospel (which was the only reading St. Anne’s had) and preached on light, which I thought would be a bit more cheerful. I used the “who would light a lamp and put it under a bushel basket” reading as the beginning “Word from Scripture”, so in a way I did preach on a reading. However, as usual the microphone didn’t work right (they control it from the back and never switch it on in time to catch your first few words…) and the general feeling of incompetence they exude was there, in spades. The fellowship was good and I enjoyed that; at the very end, after the final hymn, I proclaimed the Peace (which was not in the service proper) and asked everyone to exchange peace with their neighbours. The highlight was ‘s rendition of a hymn “To Worship Rightly”, which was well-received and well-done. Thanks to him for a great performance.

Once I got home and decompressed HWMBO and I decided to go to the Jerwood Space to see a drawing competition show–I thought it was very good but I do wish that people who do video/animation pieces would put the timing on the information card so I can judge whether I should watch it all the way through or not. Then we walked to the National Film Theatre (now called the BFI) and got tickets to “Syndromes and a Century” for free, as I’m a member and get a card entitling me to two free tickets (once) and buy one get one free (once), so we used the first one. So we saw it for nothing.

While we were waiting for the cinema to open, we went to the Film Caf

I know it’s a bit late for Talk like a Pirate Day, but this is laugh-out-loud funny. “Baby Got Back”, as interpreted by….who?

As I have discussed before, one of the things I have undertaken for the Diocese is being a Companion in Mission. That is, as part of a team of five people (4 priests and me) I spend one Sunday a month (and some other time) at a parish in Bermondsey helping them to nurture and grow their parish family. Last week I held the first of three meetings with members of the parish talking about fear. We took as a framework the Serenity Prayer (God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change/The courage to change the things I can/and the wisdom to know the difference). There were 15 people there (including me) and we had an interesting discussion, I thought. We ended with pizza and fellowship, and those I spoke with gave me the impression that they enjoyed it.

Well, this evening we Companions had our regular monthly meeting, and it turns out that not everyone enjoyed themselves. One felt that I should not have used so many examples from my life in the US as I spoke, another didn’t understand what I was doing (for various reasons), one said that s/he wouldn’t come to the next one. This was all relayed through the leader of the team.

When I heard that, I was quite depressed. I now feel very upset about the following two meetings that we will be having in October, the service I’m taking on Sunday, and the project in general. I realise you can’t please everyone, but sometimes I feel like I can’t please anyone.

Those of you who are people who pray, could you think of me and the little flock I’m helping in Bermondsey. We both need your prayers.

And if you aren’t people who pray, a kind thought or a comforting word will be helpful right now.

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church has referred to “standing at the foot of the cross” after coming up with a weaselly statement on the place of lesbian and gay people in the church and especially in episcopal orders. This is, I suppose, meant to reflect the personal pain that each bishop feels at being “forced” to abandon our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters to the wolves of Lambeth Palace in exchange for an invitation to tea with the Queen and Bible Study with Peter Akinola.

My response, in another venue, was this:

This guff about “standing at the foot of the cross” needs to be countered forcefully. We are all crucified and raised with Christ; this I believe fervently. However, bishops suffering from cognitive dissonance are not “standing at the foot of the cross”. These bishops have themselves selected the tree, sawed it into planks, required lesbian and gay people and their friends to carry the cross to Calvary, personally hammered the nails in, and raised the cross on which they’ve crucified us on high. They should not be allowed the luxury of standing beneath that cross wringing their hands and saying how upset they are. The honourable exception, of course, is +Gene, who has himself suffered in this entire sorry situation perhaps more than we know. He’s up there with the rest of us.

If you buy an item at auction, it’s usually in “as is” condition. There was a bit more to this item than met the eye.

I was dreaming that I was on a bus somewhere in Massachusetts, near where my grandparents lived. My mate Ethel was on the bus doing some knitting or sewing, and I was in shorts even though it was snowing outside. All of a sudden as I was standing to get off the bus, I got a leg cramp. I stamped on the floor (as I would when awake) to stretch my leg and make the cramp go away, but it didn’t go away. I stamped harder and harder, but it didn’t help.

So I awoke to find I was having a leg cramp in bed, and sat up and stamped my foot on the floor; the cramp then duly went away.

My Archdeacon is travelling to Singapore in December to attend a Muslim-Christian interfaith conference being held there. As he knows HWMBO is Singaporean, he’s asked us to give him some tips for good restaurants. We thought that perhaps our friends in Singapore might be able to give even better guidance. Non-Western restaurants, of course, with a preference for Singaporean or Asian delicacies that can’t be eaten or gotten in restaurants here in London.

If you could leave a comment with the name of the restaurant, the address, and what kind of cuisine it offers, along with your favourite dish(es) there, I would be most grateful.

I am also giving him the recent New Yorker “Singapore Journal” article on Singapore food, so he’ll have some guidance (The New Yorker, Sept. 3&10, 2007, pages 48-57, not yet available online).

He is also going to do the tourist thang and see Changi Prison Museum, as his father was a prisoner-of-war there.

Thanks so much in advance for your kind assistance.

Update: “Restaurants” includes hawker centres (especially hawker centres) and food courts (if there are any exceptional ones that you like). Thanks to for pointing this out.

A Brother forwarded me an email from the Grand Officer who was present at our meeting and Festive Board on Thursday. He congratulated us on the good meeting, but was distressed about the joke that was told. So I think that will be the end of that particular problem.

Church gives birth to baby girl

I thought at first that it was some bizarre ritual where a church building disgorged an infant. Instead, look here for the explanatin.

The Rev’d Paul Woodrum wrote, in another venue, of pronouncements made down the ages. He’s hit the nail on its ecclesiastical head.

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