Campaigning Success!

There are a number of situations in the world that I take very much to heart and try to do something about. Changing the world isn't easy, but organisations like Tearfund, Christian Aid, and Oxfam provide plenty of good resources to help us badger big businesses, and make our views known to our MPs.

Sometimes this feels futile. If lucky you get a standard letter or email back to your campaigning message and, though we see some token gestures to some of the issues that we raise, it's rare that the things that we ask for are actually implemented in full.

There's been a lot of campaigning going on lately regarding a piece of legislation called the climate change bill. This is going to commit our country to major reductions in carbon emissions. I've written to several members of parliament and sent postcards and emails about this issue because I really believe that it's something we need to do - and sooner rather than later.

So I was heartened today to read this Guardian article about how, not only has the government included the full emissions reductions in the bill, but it's decided to incorporate shipping and aviation emissions as well. This is exactly what I and many other people have been campaigning for.

I particularly like Thom Yorke's encouragement that "it came about simply because hundreds of thousands of people on the ground hassled their MP, who in turn hassled the government. Amazing."

So, if you care about something, find an organisation that can help you campaign about it, and get writing. Sometimes it really does work!

It's alive!!!

It's been a while since the garden got much attention (though I'll be writing about the harvest soon), but this is a little set of observations that's been bouncing around in my head for a while.

Despite, or including, the slugs and creeping cinquefoil (this is what we thought was creeping buttercup), our garden is so alive with nature. Masses of it. It's awesome! Everyday, English creatures that exist all around us that you start to notice once you get close to the ground.

Earthworms: There are masses of them in our garden. Hundreds...probably many thousands. They're brilliantly camouflaged (yes, really, they look like plant roots!), live underground, and help to break down our soil and compost. Brilliant.

Frogs: We don't have a pond but we do have lots of clay-y soil and it's moisture rich. There's also a large patch of our garden that hasn't been weeded and has a thick layer of grass and weeds on it. This provides ample cover for the little amphibians and there's lots of them around. Also brilliantly camouflaged, they give you a real fright when they unexpectedly hop out of the grass. You have to be careful not to step on them at night though!

Spiders: If you were reading last year you'll know I love a good spider or two! And though we've moved house, we have plenty of arachnids in the new neighbourhood. Amazing co-ordination and web building skills. Awesome creatures. And there's a surprisingly large amount of them that just scuttle around on the ground too.

Bees: I'm not a huge fan of wasps (of which we've not seen very many this year), but bees are more tolerable. They seem to defy physics by flying, elegantly drifting from one flower to the next. They seem to come from far and wide in little teams to visit our plants. And, of course, we wouldn't have our fruits without their pollinating. Sadly, bees are rumoured to be in decline. We may well be setting up a little log or something next year to encourage bees to nest in our garden.

Everything else: There's beetles, ants, slugs and snails, weevils, grubs, caterpillars, centipedes. Really a plethora of different tiny creatures who make up the eco-system that is our garden. Some of them we love, some of them we hate, but they're all important in keeping the ground workable and fertile.

Nature is truly an awesome thing and when you get close to it you start to realise that even more. We praise God for the amazing things that has made, the detail of each little creature and the incredibly complex way that it all works together to bring us our food.

Brain Dumping with wikidpad

Recently someone asked if there was a good tool for dumping lots of stuff that was in their head in a GTD (Getting Things Done) manner.

I use a tool called Wikidpad for this. It's a desktop Wiki, which enabled you to write short or long notes, and link them together in a variety of ways - in much the same way as a web-based Wiki. But it's not very well documented and there's not tutorial for using it. So here's my own little guide to how I use it.

I'm not going to cover the basics of Wikis - you can read about them elsewhere. Wikidpad uses simple CamelCase as WikiWords that automatically become links to other pages (though you can suppress this for specified words).

I'd recommend opening the help Wiki and looking at the pages TextFormatting, TodoItems and WikiDocumentAttributes as a starting point.

For me, what really makes Wikidpad useful is its auto-indexed attributes and todo-type tags. Not only do your pages appear in a tree showing their location within the Wiki (essentially creating folders of related information), but you can also create hierarchical attributes that are
indexed and then displayed as a tree in the "Views" section. This is essentially an index of information that you've "tagged" with attributes.

For example, I can have a "Customer" attribute. If I put the text "[Customer:New Technologies Inc]" on a page, this will create, in the index, a customer folder, containing a New Technologies Inc folder, containing all the pages with that attribute.

This is HUGELY useful because it means I can "tag" information in a whole multitude of different ways:

• By customer
• By any number of different references that may exist (e.g. a request for change reference).
• How's about atrtributes by date? I can effectively create a journal by using attributes like "[Diary.2008.10:07]" - then everything I did on that date is referenced from the index views under 2008 -> 10 -> 07.

Another example is meetings - I write up meeting notes in my wiki with
attributes for like:

[Diary.2008.18:15]
[Customer:Random Corp]
[Meetings.Present:Dave Smith]
[Meetings.Present:Joe Bloggs]

Thus helping me answer questions like "Wasn't that mentioned in a meeting with Dave back in November?" quickly and easily.

The todo's are good too. I can use keywords like "action", "todo", "done", "track" and "question" to gather items that need my attention. If I write "action: Send documentation to account manager", this will appear in the index under my actions. These can also be nested - so I can classify actions. e.g. "todo.Personal: Book next year's holiday", or "action.Objectives:Deliver storage improvement project".

I'm not entirely clear in on the GTD philosophy - I know a little - but this is great, it allows me to group all my meeting actions and todo's together, review them in one go, pick off the little ones that can be cleared down easily, and then focus on the bigger ones.

The only thing that this doesn't really allow is setting deadlines. But I'm sure you could use some combination of todo's and attributes to do this.

In fact, it's the combination of a page hierarchy (as in a standard Wiki), todos, and attributes, that make this tool powerful and flexible. You can really customise it to how you want to work!

Of course, these's a full search facililty, as well as the ability to produce lists of backlinks, rename pages while keeping WikiWords consistent, and you can do neat things like add little icons to your
hierarchy of pages.

It's a bit clunky at first but worth persevering with - it really has become my second brain (and it's backed up to a memory stick FREQUENTLY!). I also export all the pages to HTML every now and then so that Google Desktop can index them too.

Hopefully that's of use to someone. Enjoy! And if you've any other tips for productivity, let me know!

Magic Roundabout!!!

Sorry. I can't help it. This is simply a gratuitous link to a piece of 1972 news footage that I've discovered about my beloved Magic Roundabout. Great stuff!

Discipleship Academy and SoulSpace

I've had an inspiring evening with these two little events. They won't mean much to some so I'll try and explain.

"Discipleship" is lots of things. For me it's the process of being a disciple of Jesus Christ, learning his ways, following in his footsteps, trying to lead a godly life. What's a godly life you might ask? Well, part of the process is finding that out. There are general rules but it's worked out in different ways for each person, and each time.

We've just had a new youth minister start at our church and he's really interested in helping people on this journey and is exploring ways of doing this. Discipleship Academy and SoulSpace are two of these things.

Discipleship Academy is mostly for the young people of our church, but I'm tagging along as a "fellow journeyer". I'm hesitant to call myself a "leader" in this activity because I'm actually going through the process myself.

This is intended to be 12, monthly sessions looking at, and equipping us to do discipleship.

I missed the first session, but went along today and it was really inspiring. The youth minister has produced a set of what I would call "tools" (things like study, reading, finding space, journalling and attending church) which we're all discussing the use of and encouraging each other to actually do. It was really good and I'm sure that these tools and sessions will be useful for us all as we try to do "discipleship" together.

SoulSpace is the new minister giving our Sunday evening church service a bit of an overhaul. We won't be doing this every week, but it will happen 2 weekends every month.

The idea of this is that rather than do a typical church service (a "hymn sandwich" as he called it today), we'll be trying to do church things in different ways. Sometimes we'll sing, sometimes we wont. Sometimes there will be a talk from the front. Sometimes we'll have group discussions. Sometimes we'll have other creative forms of worship or prayer. We'll just try, as a community, to learn from God and respond to him in different ways.

And community is key in both of these activities. This is something we'll do together. But also something that is not confined to Sunday evenings - the things we learn, the things we're encouraged to do, will, hopefully, spill over into the rest of our lives.

So tonight we've looked at:

• using the Bible as a tool. How can we use it? How do we break it down into bite-sized chunks, read it, understand it, and apply it to our lives; and
  
• authenticity - being real. How do we carry all this church stuff with us in our daily lives. Are we honest with people about who we are, and what we believe in? Or do we hide for fear of being "found out" and embarassed about that key part of our lives: our faith?

These are both difficult things to grapple with - Jesus didn't promise us following him would be easy. But I've been really inspired tonight in both these things, and the fact that a little pocket of people around me are also grappling with them helps a LOT.

We also had a really good church service this morning. The speaker did lots of storytelling, which I always find a powerful way of communicating. The story was of Joseph and the key thing I got from it was that he wasn't called by God. He didn't have God speaking from a burning bush like Moses, or a revelation from angels or anything like that. He just did what he thought he should be doing and God lead him and worked through him. Some people have things that God clearly wants them to do, but the rest of us shouldn't feel left out - God can do great things through all of us who follow him, wherever we are!

It's weird writing publicly about my faith, but in the interests of taking a step in discipleship and being real, I feel I must be writing more about what God is doing and saying. My faith is more important than my cycling, gardening, housework, DIY, music and technology interests, but that probably doesn't come across here. I hope it will in future!