On Fridays I usually go into the City of London to the Church Times offices. I do some work on the blog and discuss things to do with my Church Times work.

Sometimes I walk there from Fenchurch street station. Yesterday I got a bit lost in the Barbican. I was taking a short cut but went astray. It is my suspicion that a good 20-30% of the people in the Barbican at any one time are people taking shortcuts who have gone a bit astray.

At lunchtime a few of us went to the food market at Whitecross street. I had one of the tasty Italian sausages in a wrap. The man on the right does the cooking, whereas the job of the man in the left is to stir the onions, ask the customers for their orders, assemble the sausage wraps, dispense the sauces and deal with the money. I’d say the man on the right has an easier job, but it ultimately carries greater responsibility.

Posted by Dave at 12:37 pm on April 19, 2008 and filed under Mundane.

5 Comments

Today I paid my tax. This is not, to most people, something that needs to be remarked upon, but it is a week’s work for me owing largely to incompetence, so I allow myself a short period of joy.

Unfortunately in my post-tax-payment euphoria I sustained a small cut on my finger by removing a carrot from the vegetable rack with excessive enthusiasm. It is a very minor injury, so you do not really need to send sympathy via the comments. Just be warned though, readers at home - watch out for sharp corners on your vegetable rack, particularly when removing carrots.

As a result of my very minor injury and the oversized plaster that was applied to the length of my finger I have been in a state of constant pointing throughout the evening. Fortunately pointing around the home is harmless enough, and is even quite fun for the first ten or fifteen minutes. There’s no harm in being a domestic pointer. I can only assume that people at my church home group have come to expect me to be pointing continually at the Bible throughout the in-depth study as no-one remarked upon it. (Did I tell you I go to a church home group by the way? Yes indeed. Thursday nights. I enjoy it.)

If I am still in a state of continual pointing tomorrow I may have to avoid social situations where pointing would be inadvisable. I’m sure there must be some. In the bank perhaps. People don’t like you to do a lot of pointing in a bank. It is just something that goes without saying in the same way that you don’t wear a balaclava into a bank or give people funny looks.

I’m rambling - good night.

Posted by Dave at 1:19 am on February 1, 2008 and filed under Mundane.

5 Comments

Link from the Times that made me mildly annoyed

Jeremy Clarkson: Unhand my patio heater, archbishop

Link from the Times that made me really quite cross

Matthew Parris: What’s smug and deserves to be decapitated?

No-one takes Jeremy Clarkson too seriously, so his rant against the Archbishop and environmentalists caused a brief frown and then… nothing. But I found the Matthew Parris article quite disturbing. Like Methodist Dave I think the writer “should be investigated by the Police, he should be fired by The Times who should print a significant apology and retraction of these remarks and make a significant contribution to cycle advocacy.”

Update:
Matthew Parris: …an apology to the cycling community
42: Lame apology
BBC NEWS | Wales | North East Wales | Cycling fury at beheading ‘joke’
Comment is free: Parris, je ne t’aime pas

Posted by Dave at 11:59 pm on January 2, 2008 and filed under Mundane.

8 Comments

This is not that interesting, but then it is Friday and none of you are reading anyway. Happy Thanksgiving, by the way, to readers from the USA.

Blog comments. As I mentioned the other day I’ve been having some problems knowing what to allow and what not to allow on the SPCK threads. There is much righteous anger which I’d like to allow, but on the other hand I don’t want to get into trouble. I’m still in the process of writing a clearer comment policy which should make the boundaries a bit clearer.

The other issue I face at the moment is comment spam. Lots and lots and lots of it. A few months ago I put some miraculous measures into place which halved the amount of spam I get overnight. I can’t tell you what those were in case the spammers are reading. Unfortunately the situation with spam has, over the last 10 days in particular got significantly worse. I’d say I now average well over one spam comment a minute - at times it is about 100 an hour. I’ve always accepted that wasting hours scrolling through spam is just a part of writing a blog you have to live with, but the amount of time it takes to go through them all is beginning to get ridiculous. I have reactivated the ‘Akismet’ anti spam device, which does a very good job of not letting very much spam though at all. The problem with it is that I have found that it marks a reasonable number of legitimate comments as spam too, meaning that you still have to go through all of the spam comments. I’m not alone in this unfortunately.

As I see it there are 3 options for the Cartoon Blog comments:

1. Allow comments as they are, but we must all accept that the Akismet device will eat about 5-10% of them, so those ones will never see the light of day
2. Make everyone fill in one of those CAPTCHA things - in other words a series of numbers or letters that you, the commenter, have to type in.
3. Give you the option to register, so that if you are logged in you can be sure your comment will get through. I know some people don’t like having to register for more and more things, so I’d still like to make it optional if I go this route.

Any thoughts welcomed. Which option do you find best on your blog? (As a side issue I’d also be interested to know whether certain blog platforms perform better then others when it comes to comment spam. Do you Blogger / Typepad / Movable Type users find that your anti-comment-spam measures work for you?)

Meanwhile other bloggers in the UK Christian sort of world are debating whether to have comments at all. Adrian Warnock has done away with comments, owing to the amount of time it takes to moderate them. Peter Kirk sees this as a refusal to be accountable, and a debate has sprung forth in his comment section and also at Methodist Dave Warnock’s blog. Dave is an unrelated Warnock, in case you were wondering. See also Dave’s post ‘Do blog comments work?‘.

All in all a bit of a kerfuffle, but there are some interesting points being made for those who are interested in such things.

In the meantime if any comments posted here don’t appear after 12 hours or so send me an e-mail and I’ll try to fish them out of the fiery comment furnace.

Posted by Dave at 10:19 am on November 23, 2007 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, Mundane, Technical.

33 Comments

I was flicking through cartoons looking for some for my talk at Holy Joe’s tonight and hoped that no-one would notice if I repeated the odd one or two here on the blog. I think as long as I don’t draw attention to it I can probably get away with it.

I’m sorry once again that there has not been a lot of new material on the blog. As I have said before it is an interesting time for me workwise and so there are things to be thought about. This is in addition to some mild illness, trying to do my regular cartoons (see diagram), and the SPCK issue which has taken a bit of time what with one thing and another.

Posted by Dave at 4:11 pm on November 6, 2007 and filed under Mundane.

5 Comments

This is a holiday snap from our recent trip to here and there. As you can see it is taken from a great height in some sort of an ecclesiastical building where sitting on the right is more popular than sitting on the left. Either that or the person who is employed to put the chairs out on the right was working a bit of overtime.

A small commotion is taking place at the front, whilst at the back a seated man talks to his neighbour, who happens to be standing on a chair. And why not.

I will not tell you the location of these peculiar goings-on immediately so that people whose speciality subject is ‘views of ecclesiastical buildings taken from a great height’ can have their moment of glory in the comments section. There will not be a prize in any real sense.

So, what has been going on since I’ve been away? Tell me something about your life or the world in general to improve my post-vacation morale.

Posted by Dave at 6:19 pm on October 26, 2007 and filed under Mundane, Photographs, Religion.

18 Comments

Jonny Baker writes about Facebook oppression.

Sorry there hasn’t been much on the blog this week. I’m going through a slight drawing crisis. I need to get back to the days when I just used to draw any old rubbish. It usually turns out better that way than when I become too painstaking in my pencilated* preplanning.

Today I am wavering between answering the 161 e-mails and sorting out the 2 large boxes of probably important (but we don’t really know) paperwork. I start on the one task and then attempt to fool myself into productive procrastination by embarking on the other task without myself noticing. It never works because I can always see through my own cunning plans.

Talking of changing the world, this song always gives me a sense of wellbeing. Warning: the sound is rubbish. The video is good, if repetitive.

Have a great weekend.

*Not a word.

Posted by Dave at 12:51 pm on September 28, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, Mundane, Utter nonsense.

3 Comments

Friday
I was suffering from mild failure.

Saturday
We went to see some people in a mobile home near Harwich. (A mobile home is, for the uninitiated, a small home that cannot be moved.) The sun shone and there was singing and plenty of tasty chicken.

Sunday
I continued to suffer from mild failure.

Monday
Internet problems. British Telecom broadband would not connect me. I had this message:

Basically, when you see that message you know you are doomed, but with the possibility of not being doomed.

I have always had problems with my connections. These days the only way to make my computer connect is to open the e-mail programme, close the e-mail programme, open the e-mail programme, close the e-mail programme and then open the e-mail programme a third time. It will usually always connect on the third go. I think it likes to know that you are serious about collecting e-mails and not just larking around. Likewise if you leave the computer unattended for an hour it goes into a state where it will connect to about a quarter of the internet but not the other three quarters. The connection obviously works, but it becomes suddenly very picky. Restarting the computer is the only option.

But then, as we all know, the default setting for a computer is to sort of work, but not quite properly. This morning I became so irate about the non-functioning of the computer that I clicked my SeaFrance retractable biro in and out repeatedly until it broke. What a waste. That had been the shopping list pen for weeks.

Today it is my aim to achieve mild success.

Posted by Dave at 12:40 pm on September 17, 2007 and filed under Mundane.

15 Comments

This is just a sensationalist headline to make you think that I had a grandiose purpose for going to deanery synod when I am not on it, whereas the reality is that I had nothing better to do and it is better than wandering the streets. It was an open meeting at which an area dean was installed in part one and then after the break there were some speeches about women in the episcopate, which were interesting.

This cartoon isn’t meant to be especially good or funny. It is just that I promised myself I would not turn on the computer unless I had drawn something to put on the blog. I often make these deals with myself, but usually break them within five or ten minutes. Usually you are none the wiser, as I keep it to myself and just live with a sense of inner failure. But as I kept my side of the bargain I am telling you about it, though you have to live with the second rate cartoon and two paragraphs of third rate waffle.

Posted by Dave at 3:10 pm on September 12, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, Mundane, Religion.

6 Comments

I am still not reverting to daily posting on the Cartoon Blog, but on days when I will not be posting I will attempt to make a post like this just to let you know that there will not be a post so that you are not continually on the lookout for one.

I will now just fill the space up with uninteresting news just so that there is not blank space.

Today we loaded the bicycles into the camper van and drove to a place where there is a road with no cars. It is the only road in Essex with no cars and the location is a closely guarded secret (It is near Brentwood, just off the A128). I do still intend to sell the camper van of course, but I have not got around to thinking about how I might start to plan the preliminary steps that will be required to proceed towards a point where I can contemplate beginning the initial stages of the process.

We went to the supermarket with the camper van. The camper van is large, which is good for carrying things. The problem with carrying supermarket shopping in a camper van though is that the groceries tend to roll around a bit, as there is too much space for them. Various items tend to go skedaddling across the width of the van, which is not good if they are eggs. The answer is to stack the groceries against the left hand side of the van and then only go around corners that will cause you to bear right. It can be done as long as you live somewhere that can be reached via a spiral route.

This evening we did barbecuing. We do have a proper metal barbeque, but the wire grill is not fit for cooking owing to the fact that it was left outside for a lengthy duration whilst a winter was taking place. We therefore use a disposable barbeque, but perch it on top of the proper metal non disposable barbeque in order to keep it away from the cats who are nosey parkers. This is not an ideal situation, but it is the best you can do if these are your circumstances. I am hoping that we might be able to buy a wire grill to replace one that suffered under the elements. If you see one let me know. These are the specifications: Shape: round, Size: largish, Handle-y things: yes.

Posted by Dave at 11:37 pm on September 1, 2007 and filed under Mundane.

6 Comments

This is an old one from my old blog.

The weather forecasters have managed to get their weather predictions quite wrong for Essex for much of the last two weeks. On most days the promised showers have failed to materialise, which is good for people with no umbrellas but bad for agricultural sorts like me. By agricultural I mean that I have some radishes and peppers and carrots which I have been watering.

Today it did rain though, so I stayed in and did my work.

I hope none of you have been flooded or caught in large quantities of mud with inappropriate footwear.

I’ll be more interesting tomorrow, I promise.

Posted by Dave at 11:54 pm on June 24, 2007 and filed under Mundane.

9 Comments

Here are some cartooning links:

1. First of all, The Dilbert Blog: How to Make a Comic Strip. I’m a great fan of Scott Adams’ work. As well as his cartoons he writes a splendid blog, which is one of the things I read on a ‘daily basis’ basis. This entry shows what he does each day in pictures.

2. Procartoonists.org is a new organisation for professional cartoonists in the UK. It describes itself thus:

The PCO’s membership spans the best, most experienced and most published full-time, professional cartoonists and caricaturists in the UK.

I am not a member as I am a bit second rate, not that experienced, not that published, a bit of a part-timer and not that professional. I am in the UK though, so I have made a start on the long and rocky road to membership.

3. If you find cartooning a bit difficult you could always try doing this with your pencils.

4. Article about cartoons and religion.

———————————–

Anyway, how is everyone? I’ve spent the day working on the church website. It isn’t what I should have been doing, but I’ve got so far behind with it that I just had to concentrate on it and get it done. I’ll post the link another time so that you can see what it is like, but I must not do so before the Vicar has looked at it in case I have written libellous information on it.

Tomorrow I’m going to do some in depth perusing of your cartoon ideas followed by some drawings. The stuff you’ve written really is most splendid, so thanks again.

Later in the afternoon the cats and I might play ‘bird’, one of our favourite games. We’ll have to see how things go though. If we haven’t done two decent cartoons between the three of us there’ll be no game of ‘bird’, that’s for sure.

Posted by Dave at 11:59 pm on June 21, 2007 and filed under Mundane, Cartooning.

6 Comments