A blog (short for Web Log) is a way of posting writings, thoughts or just plain inane ramblings to the web in a easy manner. It's easier to keep updated and as my site has proven troublesome to keep updated, I've employed a blog here to help keep things current.

Some of these "posts" may not be explicitly Christian - that is they may not be Bible studies :o) but all of them are written from my perspective as a Christian. It is , after all, part of what makes me... well, me.

Note that the blog pages are subject to a different licence to the rest of the site - see the bottom of the page for details.

Reading Matter

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

back after Christmas - been a bit quiet lately on the blog front but there you go...

I thought I'd note down - for posterity - what I am reading right now..

I was given a copy of the Bourne Trilogy by Robert Ludlum so I am currently working my way through them. I always had an interest in the spy/thriller books, Clancy, Craig Thomas etc. But for some reason never got round to these. The recent films sparked my interest and so now I have the books. I'm on The Bourne Supremacy right now (2nd book) and I have to say that the films, though excellent in their own right, do no justice to the excellent story of the books. Much of the plot from the books seems to have been dropped with only a few charcater names remaining. There may be good reasons for this - for example when the first book was written Carlos the Jackal had not been caught so Ludlum could use him as a character - by the time the film was made , Carlos was behind bars and I guess to set the film in modern times and still include him would have been silly.

I'm an Open Source afficianado and always look for stuff that promotes freedom of use . Recently I cam across the Creative Commons licence for publishing and through that I found Cory Doctorows books. I've read the first novel, Down and Out in the magic kingdom and loved it. I'm now on the second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, which is just as good. These novels are science fiction but not in the spaceships and aliens sense. They are set in the reachable future and Doctorow writes by seemingly taking aspects of today's world and following them to a point in the future. The great thing about them is the licence. It means you can download them for free, pass them around, copy them and transfer them to any device or format you like. You can buy them and - this may seem odd - but the books sell really weel, even though he's giving away the text as well. If you like sci-fi or even just a good story, get these books now.

cheers
C
Copyright Ryan P. Cartwright.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Hey we won!

They're like buses these posts....

In an earlier post I mentioned that MakingContact.org was up for some awards. Well, we won best secure e-mail servcie from the Telephone Helpline Association and were shortlisted finalists for the Guardian Public Service awards and the Community Care awards.

To be honest I pretty chuffed with all of these as we didn't set out to win awards just to make a good service. So recognition like this is good stuff. I know that pretty much everyone who loses something says that it's a privelege just to be nominated etc. but in this case we're a small-medium Charity with a big remit and a small budget. This project was developed for peanuts and yet it has won awards. That's why I'm pleased we won the THA award and got nominated for the others.

So if you have or know someone with a disability, speical need or medical condition and you think the situation would benefit from contacting others in a similar boat - get over to MakingContact.org. It's free to join, use and be contacted by others (even replying to them is free). There's a nominal annual charge if you want to initiate contact other people. We have listings for over 2000 medical conditions and special needs and over 400 members in the first 5 months with new members signing up at a rate of 10's per week.

Cheers
C
Copyright Ryan P. Cartwright.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.