According to the registration document I bought this campervan on 30 June 1999. It has accompanied me on holidays, house moves, festivals, travels and excursions. It has been used for many significant events, such as the departure vehicle on our wedding day and it even carried my canvasses to the Lambeth Conference.

Unfortunately for various reasons I need to sell it. I know I’ve said that before, but this time I mean it. It is likely I will be posting it on Ebay this weekend. I expect it to make in the region of 1000 to 2000 pounds, but it is very difficult to tell with these things. It will need to go for an MOT in the next few days, which of course it might fail. In summary: it is a VW Type 25 1988 1.6 turbo diesel (’turbo diesel’ is industry jargon for ‘a bit slow’, but it isn’t too bad). It goes and somebody could enjoy using it over the summer. Structurally it is sound, but cosmetically the bodywork is poor (worse than in this picture) owing to my incompetence. There are some other (hopefully) minor faults which I will explain when I do the advert. The interior is superb – better than most similarly aged vans on Ebay at the moment.

My other posts about this and other campervans are here.

Posted by Dave at 8:18 pm on June 30, 2009 and filed under Campervans, Photographs.

6 Comments

I’m pleased to say that my 2010 ‘Guide to the Church’ calendar is now available. It contains 12 brand new cartoons that are not available anywhere else. It is subtitled ’situations vacant’ and is a guide to some of the jobs that you can do in church, for example bell ringer, choir member, cleaner, PCC member, coffee rota volunteer etc etc.

Producing 12 extra cartoons nearly caused my expiration, as it does every year. I really am only remotely funny once a week, meaning that such an extra effort resulted in blood, sweat and tears. Well, no blood, thinking about it. And not much sweat except when I kept the fan heater on too long. But some tears. Secretly though I am rather pleased with the cartoons – having not looked at them for a number of months I quite enjoyed them when my box of calendars arrived at the end of last week.

You can buy the calendar, which costs £5.99, via your local Christian bookshop (You might or might not have to order it), at Church House bookshop in Westminster (or online – they post overseas) or direct from the publisher, Canterbury Press (who also post overseas). Waterstones are listing it, but say 2-3 weeks delivery and then there’s Amazon, though it is currently out of stock.

The ISBN which will be useful for ordering via your local bookshop is 9781853119576

Update: The calendar is available on Amazon.com for those in the US.

Posted by Dave at 9:49 am on June 17, 2009 and filed under Books, My books.

1 Comment

I made the transfer from PC to Mac about a month ago. Here are my thoughts about it, numbered because the ordered list tag exists and I just don’t use it enough:

1. I changed computers because I had worn out the keyboard letters on my other one out through my furious and continual typing. Also because I had filled its hard drive up with diagrams. And because it wouldn’t play Youtube videos properly owing to a minor but incurable error. And for other reasons I have long since forgotten about.
2. The Mac is more shiny, has rounded edges and the keyboard is the best I have tried.
3. It takes a bit of time to get used to a new way of doing things, but most of it you can work out using experimentation. You don’t need to go to the Apple shop for special seminars really.
4. Most things on a Mac ‘just work’, but some things don’t, so you still need to do a bit of hunting around for drivers and those sort of things.
5. It still crashes, but rarely. To be fair, I found Windows XP also crashes very rarely if you have enough memory. Unfortunately Firefox makes XP crash continually because it uses excessive resources, but it is still my favourite browser.
6. It is so good not to need antivirus programmes. They are all troublesome. I’ve had to swear at the ones everyone else swears by.
7. I love that thing on the Mac whereby you can press the buttons on the side of the mouse and make all your different open programmes appear and disappear (I do it repeatedly just for the joy of it).
8. I suspect any new computer would have been a huge improvement on what I was using before, but I don’t think a new PC would be this good.
9. I like using the Mac mouse, but sometimes it stops working. Getting anxious about this and then discovering various remedies is a bad 10 minute experience every new Mac use must go through. They should explain about this ‘10 minutes of doom’ in the shop.
10. I still haven’t got the hang of organising my files and finding things quickly (edit: without typing). The PC system for doing this seems easier to use, but it could just be me.
11. People on Twitter are very helpful at offering instant advice for which I have been continually grateful.
12. I still need to decide which programme to use for doing my diagrams. I’ve been spoilt on the PC by the superb but deeply unfashionable Microsoft Image Composer which offers 1) the ability to instantly change canvas sizes by dragging the sides in or out and (2) the ability to drag sprites/layers in and out of the work area. if I find something that can do those things I will be overjoyed.
13. Unfortunately at the time of writing I still need Microsoft Internet Explorer for my work. Do not ask me why. It is a frustrating set of circumstances which cannot be circumvented by using Safari, Firefox, Opera etc etc etc. This means I still have my PC working in my office and the Mac working in the second bedroom and I wander between the two writing web addresses down on little bits of paper in a deeply ineffective manner. I may have to put IE on the Mac but it is oh so complex to do so.
14. Overall I am very happy with the Mac and glad I made the change. It is a lot of money to buy one, but when using a computer all day for your job it is worth having good kit. Unfortunately I still need to use both computers at the moment, making my computing the least efficient it has ever been. This is a lamentable set of circumstances that exist because of my peculiar needs.

Posted by Dave at 5:08 pm on June 7, 2009 and filed under In-depth analysis, Technical.

29 Comments

Cartoon from We Blog Cartoons. It isn’t new, but I’m hoping no-one will notice.

My administrative systems are in a state of meltdown. I have never really got on top of the organisational side of running a business as many of you will be able to testify, but now it has got to the point of something needing to be done. I’d tell you more, but it is all rather embarrassing.

I think I need to get someone in.

What do you do? Do you have some sort of system that works, or do you pay someone else to organise things?

Posted by Dave at 3:06 pm on June 4, 2009 and filed under Household hints, Starting a Business.

16 Comments

In order to help understand the elections tomorrow I am explaining them to myself in church terms (Warning: could be badly wrong and misleading).

So, we have:

• Local Council = Deanery Synod
• County Council = Diocesan Synod
• Parliament = General Synod
• European Parliament = The Anglican Communion

If there is a low turnout at the elections it will be because what is happening is not explained properly anywhere. The polling card that I have just discovered under the rubble of paperwork in the kitchen says that the ‘counting area’ is for ‘Basildon District Council’, but the leaflets that have come through the door all say ‘Essex County Council’. Perhaps they are one and the same, making my fourfold explanation above meaningless.

The European Elections are not mentioned at all, except in the small print. The European ballot paper is yellow – pass on this information to friends and relatives.

I am hoping that someone will explain it all to me, otherwise I will have a sleepless night.

Posted by Dave at 6:34 pm on June 3, 2009 and filed under Politics.

10 Comments