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I met Andrew Beaujon briefly at the Festival of Faith and Music last year and have been looking forward to his book ever since, so I was very pleased when Kate emailed to say that " Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside The Phenomenon of Christian Rock" was now available, and even more pleased when the first shop I tried had several copies in stock. The book is the result of a year-long exploration of ‘Christian rock’ that Beaujon (senior contributing writer at Spin, contributor to the Washington Post, the Washington City Paper, the Guardian and Salon.com) undertook last year. He openly acknowledges that amongst his colleagues in the industry there is a rather snide or dismissive attitude towards artists who are identified as Christians, and that for himself “I consider atheism too much of a commitment.” That context makes the sympathetic and insightful tone of the book quite remarkable. ...

For seven or eight years, I ran a website called Britlinks. Over that time, it grew from a simple list of links gleaned from altavista, usenet, and greenbelt programmes into a pretty hefty database of information about bands based in the UK and Ireland with some form of affiliation with the Christian faith. I tried to use the site to tread and promote the thin path of asserting some value in community between Christian musicians, but avoiding most of the trappings that plague ‘Contemporary Christian Music.’ That attempt met with mixed success, and its results are still difficult to judge, but it certainly drew quite a number of visitors and built up sizable mailing lists. ...

For seven or eight years, I ran a website called Britlinks. Over that time, it grew from a simple list of links to bands’ sites gleaned from altavista and usenet postings, to a large database of music resources with well over a thousand pages, and a sizable chunk of traffic. It let me cut my teeth with databases (first mSQL and then MySQL) and PHP, and to play with early versions of RSS for use on ‘my netscape’. It was also one of the earliest sites of its size to switch to an entirely XHTML/CSS set of templates, somewhere early in 2001. ...

One organization I do a lot of work with hosts their sites on a 1&1 Managed Server. Essentially, only their sites and applications are running on the server, but 1&1 manage all of the sysadmin work, and don’t provide root access. I have a number of misgivings about the configuration of the server, particularly the fact that the user’s root folder is also the document root for their main domain, but 1&1 have been good about keeping PHP up to date, and we don’t have to worry about being woken at 3am to fix stuck processes. Unfortunately, Ruby hasn’t been treated to the same attention as PHP and the system version is still languishing at version 1.8.1, which won’t handle rails for us. ...

I think it was Andy Tate who recommended I read Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love while I worked on my undergraduate disseration on narrative physics. It was an excellent recommendation, as McEwan used his fiction to express the heart of what I wanted to say much more cogently than my more formal piece ever could. His article in today’s Guardian advocating the building of a sense of a ‘scientific canon’—written on the 30th anniversary of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene—continues to make that argument. Too much scientific education operates as though the latest discoveries exist devoid of their tradition, exempting itself from any sense that discoveries might be influenced by processes and losing along the way a rich understanding of how science has developed, and how valuable even false turns can be. ...

There are two new entries on my last.fm journal: Primitive Baptist Lambchop and Jenny Lewis and The Watson Twins. And for anyone who was following the carbon offsetting posts, there was an interesting comment from Craig Coulter of carbonfund.org on my price discrepancies post.

Representative Lantos, the ranking Democrat on the US House of Representatives International Relations committee was interviewed on BBC World Service last night, as the confrontation between “the international community” and Iran continues to heat up. As the interviewer sat negligently by, the representative made a series of statements that belied the reality of that situation, and betrayed his ignorance of the realpolitik. There are many, particularly in Britain, who would have a lot of sympathy with the understanding of power implicit in his claim that the US allowed Europe to negotiate with Iran (nb: I wasn’t able to find a recording or transcript of the interview, so quotes are paraphrased from memory), but I doubt that such a statement is how the British, French or German (EU3) governments would like to see the situation portrayed. Beyond that, it is a statement that clearly reinforces the portrayal of the US government across the world, but particularly in Iran, as an Imperial power that manages the world through its proxy states in western Europe. If the United States want its claims that its stance against Iran in the current situation is anything other than a power play, its senior politicians would be wise to avoid so blatantly contradicting that. ...

A couple of years ago I moved the discussion boards on Sarah Masen’s website over from a rather nasty tangle of PHP and HTML that I had chosen for its threading view, to the considerably more flexible Phorum. Phorum has been serving us well, but a number of regular posters have lately been reminding me that the move left our archives from the old software inaccessible. I had always intended to put together a quick collection of scripts to allow access to those archives, possibly with some searching, but the prospect of getting it all together with the appropriate threading and the legacy database had put me off. That was before I read about Rails’ acts_as_tree option. ...

About fifteen minutes ago, our friend Adam called Kari to let her know that the area in which we live had been ‘quarantined’. A murder suspect had escaped from the county jail and was thought to be in the area. No-one was being allowed in or out while the police searched. I had noticed the presence of helicopters overhead, but it’s not that rare that I thought much of it. ...

Another one over at my last.fm journal.