Congratulations to Steve Taylor who got the big “thumbs up” to his PhD oral yesterday. Why don’t you drop on by e~mergent kiwi: Examiners recommendations and leave a message for him.

Saw these tonight

The Grace Lent Blog where “every day during lent someone from the grace community/network will (if they remember) post a scripture, a thought, a reflection, an animation, an insight, a photo or a space to be silent….”

And Maggi’s nice summary of Lent, Ash Wednesday and Shrove Tuesday.

Today is Ash Wednesday – a time of self examination as Lent begins.

A collect for Ash Wednesday from the New Zealand Prayer Book.

God of the desert, as we follow Jesus into the unknown,
may we recognise the tempter when he comes;
let it be your bread we eat,
your world we serve and you alone we worship.

An excellent contemporary collect for urban dwellers is A Collect for the City Desert by Matt Humm.

More about Ash Wednesday at BBC – Religion & Ethics – Ash Wednesday.

For more on Lent and why “purple” see BBC – Religion & Ethics – Lent. (Some Christian traditions use different colours for Ash Wednesday and Lent (including unbleached linen)).

Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) today. On Saturday while at Cityside Baptist we were all given a small black envelope with a fold-out series of reflections for Lent inside it. Some thoughts for milestones through Lent with suggestions for reflective activities on that day.

Today’s entry reads

SHROVE TUESDAY – 24 February. Day before Lent
Sometimes know as ‘pancake Tuesday’ from the tradition of using up the eggs and fat in the house before the Lenten fast.

Suggestion: Gather friends together to make and eat pancakes. Talk together about changes you would like to make to who you are and how you live your life.

Sounds like a plan to me.

We’re having house group here for pancakes tonight – must go and get some lemons off the tree in the garden.

More info on Shrove Tuesday at: BBC – Religion & Ethics – Shrove Tuesday.

Just looking through my bookmarks collection and came across Heidi Campbell’s Web Page: Research in New Media and Religious Online Communities. She’s “investigating the nature of community, religion and the social through an analysis of new media technologies.” Intriguing stuff.

There are some links to things she’s written including online versions of some of them.

Some links to activities and reflections for Lent and Easter from the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand. They’re pretty trad but they can either stand on their own or as a starting point for variations upon the theme. See presbyterian.org.nz: Lent and Easter 2004

Too tired to blog anything much for the next few days. Went to the discussion day with Brian Walsh at Cityside Baptist yesterday. Intellectually stimulating as well as a good time to talking and eating with all sorts of interesting people (including Paul). Big thanks to Andrew (at CCSP) and Mark (at Cityside) for putting it together.

Also going to create a “Lent” category to generate a set of resources for the Lenten season. Over time I’ll add bits and pieces in there.

Oh, and Maggi has an good posting “Postmodern Church; Antediluvian Attitude?” over on her blog.

Very busy week coming up with Kim working extra hours, kid stuff needing attention and lectures starting next week. And somewhere along the way I need to do some more on my critique of models/categories of science-religion interaction.

From the blog A Cup of Rich I see that the outfit that brought the great Follow the Star Christmas devotional site has one for Lent (with the same cool Jazz).

Check out Journey to the Cross: A Daily Online Devotional Guide

For those of you whose churches don’t follow the Church year (like the liturgical traditions do) you can find out more about the Christian Holy Days at BBC – Religion & Ethics – Christian Holy Days.

Found the link the other day when I was searching for some Lenten stuff on the net and the articles are good for beginners.

The next one is Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) next week, BTW. We have house group that night so hopefully pancakes all round.

The new university year rolls around and it’s been 15 years since I began my postgraduate journey (with a few years off here and there not studying). So in honour of what seems like a fairly momentous anniversary for me here a quick class snap and a link to some from my fourth year computer science class back in 1989.

Raymond Wilson, Neil Sharman, Colin Daniels, Tim Wilson, Clinton Logan
Greg Davidson, Simon Glass, Craig Nevill-Manning, Stephen Garner
Computer Science Honours & First-year Masters Class, University of Canterbury, 1989

Full archive at: Nevill-Manning Photo Album: “Canterbury University: Computer Science, 1989″

It was a pretty brutal year as I remember it with stacks of pressure and work covering courses on geographic information systems, computer graphics, data encryption, data compression, computer networking and database theory (relational alegra & calculus) to name a few. (Kim was doing Operations Research postgrad at the same time and they worked pretty hard too).

As you can see there were no women in the class so it had the whole monastic type feel (plus a lack of balance). Kim was the only woman in her year in OPRE.

The Internet was pretty much unknown out there in the “real world” but we used Usenet, e-mail & FTP (gopher, archie, WAIS and WWW weren’t really there yet) and computers with a mouse were still a novelty outside of Apple Macs and Sun Workstations.

It was around here that my love affair with UNIX began and now I can run a UNIX-based Mac OS on my iBook I’ve pretty much reached heaven on earth.

The pictures give a quick view into life in the Honours room but it looks like most of them were taken at night. Ah, those were the days when youthful vigor (and caffeinated soft drinks) allowed all night coding.