Give me FEVA
Thursday, 20 January, 2005
So we went to our first FEVA staff meeting on Tuesday. It took place at Malcolm's house in his front lounge room. When we entered the room, almost everyone had Macintosh Powerbooks on their laps and were typing away. Malcolm also has wireless broadband so they were also jacking into the internet and, later, giving us tips about ADSL and network cards. It's such a contrast to the technologically-challenged Wollongong team I can't help marvelling.
Staff meeting went for several hours, interrupted by the arrival of furniture. I love the fact that both Malcolm and Francis like Chinese tea so I can ask for it without feeling like I'm some kind of weirdo. We had a time of open prayer, we spent a few moments setting goals for 2005 before sharing them, we talked about follow-up at church and first-year enrolments on the FEVA campuses, start-of-the-year social stuff, we read from Proverbs and then Malcolm finished off the meeting by reading aloud from The Forgotten Spurgeon. Malcolm says he wants to make exercise compulsory for the entire staff team. Judith suggested going for long walks together and Malcolm said perhaps we could start staff meeting an hour earlier to accommodate that.
In the evening Ben and I went to have dinner with a couple from our new church, Steve and Cathy, who are also catechists. Steve is going into his second year of Moore college. They live in a shoebox in Newtown which becomes like a sauna in summer. We found out that Steve and Cathy are related to The Nicest Guy in the World (that's what Ben, Pete and I call him because he smiles all the time and he's always really nice to talk to). Steve also went to Ben's school (a couple of years ahead). We took a little stroll around Newtown and they showed us their favourite Thai restaurant (Thai-o-long), various parts of college and what properties are owned by Moore but which cannot be further developed due to insufficient funds. It was nice getting a sense of the history of the place and also hear about Steve and Cathy's experiences of the past year.
They served us this delicious vanilla chai tea. When Ben found out that they had clippers, he asked them to shave his head. The clippers stopped working halfway through so Cathy did a bit of a hack job to get most of Ben's hair off to make it easier to do the rest. When it was all done, they weighed Ben's hair. It came to 11 grams (one shekel). Pretty paltry compared to Absalom's 200 shekels and I cannot imagine how anyone can carry that much weight on his head, let alone grow it in one year. Ben also had a headache and they couldn't find any Panadol or Neurofen so they gave him some prescription aspirin which we then got a bit worried about since it said stuff like, “Do not operate heavy machinery after taking this,” and other dire warnings. So I drove us home and Ben's headache got better and he became drowsy instead.
There have been all sorts of reactions since Ben made the chop, the strangest being this guy who rubbed his head and made a wish. Ben would like to point out that no wishes made upon his head are guaranteed to come true.
Current:
Bible: Isaiah (ESV) 28/09/2010
seen: Tropic Thunder 26/09/2010
seen: The Life of Mammals 24/09/2010
seen: What a Girl Wants 19/09/2010
seen: Jerry Maguire 19/09/2010
seen: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 06/09/2010
seen: Tomorrow Never Dies 05/09/2010
seen: Nanny McPhee 28/08/2010
read: Mercury (Hope Larson) 27/08/2010
read: Spellcheckers Vol 1 (Jamie S Rich, Nicolas Hitori de, Joelle Jones) 16/08/2010
read: Solipsistic Pop Vol 2 (Solipsistic Pop) 16/08/2010
read: Chiggers (Hope Larson) 15/08/2010
seen: Josie and the Pussycats 14/08/2010
seen: Mr & Mrs Smith 14/08/2010
seen: Step Up 2 13/08/2010
Blinks:
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
Online magazine that publishes fairy tales that are not reworkings of old tales.
Journal that publishes fairy tale writing.
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Other comments
Wow - they used Mac Powerbooks?? More expensive than my iBook =P Seems there’s a bit of a Mac community within Christian circles (AFES and some Syd Anglicans seem to use them a bit).
Oh my… can I come work with FEVA?
‘sokay, Quakers Hill will do just fine for me.
Umm ... actually, I’m not sure if they were iBooks or Powerbooks ... I’m a bit of a Mac Philistine—don’t really understand the difference.
Haoran, I remember trying to talk you into working for FEVA yonks ago!
But don’t you like the design and intuitive nature of the Mac? I’m truly one of the Mac converted…
I guess you were already a computer (dare I say!) geek at high school…that super-fast typing and so on.
And look at me, able to comment again! There is something weird on macs with your pop-up to comment, not only on mine but on my mac at work…
Erin, what does it do? I’d love for you to send me a screen shot if you can (I like that Macs have an in-built screen capture program). I like the way Macs look (externally and on-screen) but not how they operate. I think they try to make things way too simple to lull the user into a false sense of security. Whenever I want to change a setting on a Mac, I can never find what I want but with PCs, everything can be customised.
But my biggest gripe with Macs is their poverty in the area of keyboard shortcuts. Macs are far too mouse-reliant which is probably why I developed the worst case of RSI I have ever had in my entire history of computer usage the year I was using a Mac in the School of English.