I thought about this two nights ago, although I didn’t connect the whole concept with heroism. I’ve been really challenged by this verse recently:

Answer this question: Does the God who lavishly provides you with his own presence, his Holy Spirit, working things in your lives you could never do for yourselves, does he do these things because of your strenuous moral striving or because you trust him to do them in you? Don’t these things happen among you just as they happened with Abraham? He believed God, and that act of belief was turned into a life that was right with God.

-Galations 3:5-6

I took this one from the Message, I hope you don’t mind. It gets the point across pretty clearly, anyway.

pop·u·lar adj

1. Widely liked or appreciated: a popular resort.
2. Liked by acquaintances; sought after for company: “Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved” (Margaret Fuller).
3. Of, representing, or carried on by the people at large: the popular vote.
4. Fit for, adapted to, or reflecting the taste of the people at large: popular entertainment; popular science.
5. Accepted by or prevalent among the people in general: a popular misunderstanding of the issue.
6. Suited to or within the means of ordinary people: popular prices.
7. Originating among the people: popular legend.

…Is my besetting sin. In a major way, and this is linked with the internet in such a huge way it can’t be denied, so I’ve decided to use the internet for work only during the week, check e-mail once a day only, but have it open to be used at the weekend. This is the system I had before the Summer Holidays, and it worked well. During the Summer it was thrown away, however, because I simply had that much time. I don’t now, and I’m going to reinstate it. Eventually, I want to get off the internet completely except for e-mail and work. However, the last time I tried that was for Lent one year, after Lent, I was back online in full force, although I did stay offline during that time.

I can’t guarantee this will last, but I want it to. How you can help is to make sure I don’t post on anything other than on a Saturday or a Friday night. I want to stay off on Sundays completely including e-mail, because on Sundays it’s really not helpful at all. If I do post on a weekday, remind me what I said. Please. Do.

This policy starts immediately from now, so even if I post again today, remind me.

I really want to make this site look less like Whalesalad. I don’t know quite where the division between stealing and being inspired comes. I think my site is well over that division, since it’s a completely different feel and everything, but I was heavily inspired. The most heavily inspired site of mine was Tentmaker Publications, which, you may notice, looks a little bit like Blogger, the design of which I criticized back in the day, but can’t find the post.

However, those things helped me to learn, and I changed the look quite significantly on both. I’ll be trying to be more original in future.

This site was also inspired (in a good way) by all those Ruby on Rails preview sites, you’ll notice it most in my posting style. The patterned background was inspired by how Challies Dot Com used to be

I haven’t been able to stop using those shadows at the sides of my designs since I made Tentmaker though. Please note this site, Tentmaker Publications, china.adversaria, and my latest project. What do they have in common? …Apart from them mostly having 750px wide content sections of course…

As you know, I went on a geography fieldtrip this week. I decided beforehand to enjoy it, because originally, I’d been feeling sort of ‘meh’ about it, you all know what I mean. Anyway, Flamborough was REALLY beautiful. Look up ‘flamborough’ on Flickr, and that will give you some idea. I loved that place, I wanted to go on holiday there. You should go there. The pictures really do not capture it. The white rock was beautiful, such a clean, pure white.

The same could not be said, of course, of Hornsea and Mappleton. Hornsea’s one of those seaside resorts that no-one goes to any more, and just feels like a ghost town. Of course, it’s not in season, but all the shops would have been naff in season too. However, there were some huge, impressive waves there, because, apparently, the UK may be about to suffer a 1953-style north sea flood, or at least some impressively high tides. This is all bad news for the residents of places like mappleton, who experience things like this:

Photo on Flickr

The above picture is of Barmston, not Mappleton, although Mappleton is similar. The thing that’s really gutting the good villagers of Mappleton, however, is that the government have protected the road which leads to their village, but not the village itself. This is, of course, because the houses aren’t worth very much but the road is too expensive to relocate. I’ll leave you to debate this among yourselves.

I’ve really been having trouble getting work done in College, this has been for a number of reasons:

• I’ve been having real difficulty getting to sleep. I want time off, but that wouldn’t help anything.
• I have a serious problem with laziness, or sloth, for those who like to call me a big fat primate who hangs upside down from trees, and achieves very little. This has been going on for years, pretty much since I could use a computer, and the two go hand in hand. I wish I could pluck out the offending eye that is the computer, but I do, genuinely, need it for study. I could, and should, cut down a lot, but I’m not mentally strong enough. That’s no excuse. It’s only an observation from the past. However, now I think about it, this blog should be frozen, or something.
• I’m disorganised. I’m used to having four or five pieces of serious homework a month, and having that quantity a week really throws me. I like getting one subject done with at a time, but now I’m at the stage where if I did that, I could only do one subject a day. This is far from optimal. I need to do at least an hour of Russian a day, but I haven’t done that long in the last week, mainly through a combination of this and the above factor.

I’d really appreciate prayer about these things, because I do find them difficult. I did about 9 sides of maths work on Saturday. That might sound good, and I was pleased, but maths wasn’t the only thing needing to be done. I was too shattered in the end to do any Russian. If I want to be a missionary in Russia, that’s pretty much the most important thing I’m studying, and not doing any for all of a week is terrible.