Mike's musings

The babysitters

That'll be us, then. Si and D needed to go out to a parents' evening at Morgan's school tonight, and were let down by their booked babysitter. So they called us up this morning to see if we could step in. I'm on one of Si's computers after he gave me a log-on before he left (saved me breaking in with his root password and giving myself an account, I guess!), Moo's on the sofa in the living room with Jo asleep on her, after Jo's had a lovely evening playing with Morgan until he went up to bed, then the Murphy (one of Si and D's dogs) until she went to sleep. We're not entirely convinced that Morgan's actually gone to sleep, but he went to bed very easily: he helped get himself undressed and put his pyjamas on, then picked out a book for me to read. After I'd done that, he was quite happy to be left, and so I turned off the light and went downstairs. We've heard the odd stirring, but not much, so we're pretty happy with how it went.

Spent the day at work writing a "support document" for a customer for whom we're about to start 24x7 support on Tuesday next week, answering calls from the same customer, and trying to get as much data off the really ill laptop hard disk as possible. It's going back to Seagate after their diagnostics program found 12 major errors (hardware sector level) on it. That's really quite bad, but this happens from time to time with disks, and I've never had problems this bad with any disk previously, whether Seagate or anyone else, so I think it's just bad luck. I'm going to have to reinstall Linux from the ground up, and I've decided to give Ubuntu a go. It's supposed to be pretty user-friendly (that's the down side...), is Debian-unstable based, has a good community feel to it, and I've heard lots of good reports. I'll try to remember to update this blog with information on how it goes. I'm hoping to get a working system up and running by the end of tomorrow, as it's a real pain having to use a crappy old desktop with webmail. Oh, and it's Windoze. Yeuch.

I've been thinking about what topic I should choose for my second Old Testament assignment. Not that I've chosen the topic for the first one, yet, but for the second I'm free to chose something that suits and interests me, as I'm not going for an academic award, but rather trying to move up to a more research-based academic methodology, with a possible view to a PhD in the future. The plan over the three years of the course is generally to find topics that resonate with my research interests, which are (broadly) online religious communities, but it's not so easy for this. What I'm thinking of doing is something on Author(ity) in the Old Testament (or maybe specific parts of it). I'm very interested in how we consider authority (and authorship) in a postmodern world, particularly as I come from a very poststructuralist and deconstructionist background which doesn't really hold much sway with the idea of the importance of the author. However, if the Bible (or, more accurately, the biblical canon?) is to be accepted as important and a guiding hand, then the question of authority is very important. How the canon was formed sets up a very interesting set of questions, and I know much less about the formation of the OT canon than the NT, so I'm hoping this will be fruitful for me and throw some relief on questions of how we relate to authority in a more peer-to-peer, ahierarchical online set of communities. I'm looking forward to discussing it with my tutor, Alan, who I've yet to meet, but have spoken to briefly on the phone, exchanged a couple of emails with, and about whom I've heard very good reports.