AKMA’s Random Thoughts

You may remember that last Friday my MacBook Air’s screen gave up the ghost — or, more precisely, generated ghostly lines and shapes where the screen’s images and interface ought to have been; so I somewhat reluctantly ordered a replacement. I’m not ordinarily reluctant about new computers, mind you, but just last autumn I’d had a catastrophic charging port failure that required replacing the whole internal assembly, which for some reason Apple did not beneficently offer me as a favour for decades of customer loyalty. Having put a not-inconsiderable sum into repairs just six months ago, I was nettled that one of the few parts that wasn’t new on the internals that were replaced was now failing. Ah, well, such is life, and I would after all have a snazzy new MBA* out of it.

So on Tuesday — four days after my purchase — Apple announced new MacBook Air models. They don’t constitute a revolutionary change over the generation I bought, but the timing (and especially the timing relative to having repaired a five- or six-year-old MBA* relatively recently) impels me to return my fresh MBA and order an instance of the new model. That model, however, won’t be available till Wednesday, so for the interim I’m forging ahead boldly with the current new unit.

Ran this morning at a good pace, got home and did some marking, coffee and fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, coffee and toast, more marking, and so on.

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* ‘MBA’ neither in the sense of a Masters in Business Administration nor in the sense of ‘Margaret B. Adam’ (the current model of which, whom, I’m quite attached to) but MacBook Air.

I woke up this morning at about 5:00, rolled out of bed and gradually loosened up for my morning run. It didn’t feel like anything special — I just pushed ahead, thought I was going at about yesterday’s pace, and suspected that I was (as usual) clueless about my actual pace. As it turns out, I was: my pace came in at the best result since early November. Go figure.

Hot breakfast, I’ll shower in a minute or two, then Morning Prayer, then home. Back to church for Chapter Meeting, then home till I go in for Marriage Preparation class, session one.

The other day, Kottke linked to a post by Jon Hicks (a fellow inhabitant of Oxfordshire) entitled ‘My Perfect Music Player Doesn’t Exist’. This was catnip to a music listener such as I, since I have fulminated before about desiderata and disappointments among music apps.

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…I almost always listen to iTunes on a semi-random shuffle, because I love so much music, and I want to hear unexpected things mingled with the cuts I know and cherish, so Shuffle is my favoured solution. I wish iTunes offered a better solution for weighted shuffle; my usual playlist involves an arcane combination of nested playlists that give extra prominence to women, to tracks I haven’t heard as recently, and to favourites of mine (since I do actually enjoy listening to my favourites). It would not be rocket science for a music player to offer this functionality — but since Apple will not let go of iTunes (presumably as a feeder to their music store), and alternatives don’t suit me for other reasons, there we are.…

…I’m mightily exasperated, though, that Apple has eliminated iTunes DJ (formerly ‘Party Shuffle’) from the application.…

…It’s no secret that pretty much everyone thinks Apple’s Ping feature in iTunes 10 would take significant improvement in order to qualify as a “disappointment”…

I upgraded to the latest version of iTunes recently, and have been flummoxed by the “Now Playing” cover display function…

Still, one switch that assigns one (undefined) weight to one variable is very far from a twenty-first century solution to the “weighted shuffle” problem.…

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In short, I agree with Jon about everything he cites: Ethical company (always!), a very large cover image, happy to have magazine-like input on bands and releases I’m interested in, scrobbling simple and effective, some sort of functional rating system, sharing and streaming should cooperate, and (I, not Jon) insist on some form of weighted shuffle. If you build it, whoever you are, they will come to listen!

Morning run went well, hitting my pre-injury, pre-wedding-holiday plateau squarely. Nothing to boast about, but I felt good. Coffee and fruit, shower, finishing a bit of marking, Morning Prayer, bus to Oxford for a tutorial and lunch, home for the afternoon.

I did put in my miles this morning, but at a deliberately lazy pace. I actually came in three full minutes slower than my recent plateau, which I’d have thought would require a specific effort with special steps (like ‘one, two three, twirl’ or summat). But I was indeed trying to take my morning easier, so that was a desired result. Coffee and fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, and now at R&R for public office hours.

Last night’s Evensong at Oriel was lovely. The choir was as glorious as usual, and Margaret’s sermon went very well. I just checked the Oriel Chapel YouTube page, but it’s not there yet — I’ll try to remember to post the link to it when it’s uploaded. Pleasant conversations, a delicious dinner, and a convenient (rapid) bus back to Abingdon for a good night’s sleep.

Not for me, mind you, but for the other doctor in the house. Margaret has been invited to preach on Mary (specifically, the scene at the end of John’s Gospel where, from the cross, Jesus assigns Mary to the care of the Beloved Disciple) at Evensong at Oriel’s chapel. Then, of course, dinner at High Table. I will of course attend, and will fairly glow with pride.

But I began my day with a run, a good time if not quite as rapid as yesterday. Coffee, fruit, shower, coffee, toast, and off to church in a short while. I hope to get some marking done this afternoon before Evensong, to begin my week with a somewhat clean slate. I need to write a cover piece for this coming week’s church newsletter, which will probably involve some of the stuff I will have been saying about liturgy, practice, and meaning in the series of post-service short ‘Spiritual Snacks’ — but I can put that off till tomorrow, I think.

My morning run began somewhat woodenly, stiff from a day of not having run nor having walked as much as usual on a Friday. I gradually got looser, and then encountered comically direct, firm headwinds. When I got home, though, it turned out that I’d arrived in my second-best time of the year. You can never tell (or perhaps you can, but I can’t). Coffee, hot breakfast, Morning Prayer at home, some time reading John Darnielle’s This Year as I practise building up my focused reading muscles, shower, and here to blog.

Last night I did the necessary and processed The Last Essay through a manuscript submission system. The developers of these systems evidently hate authors, because the process entails such painfully non-academic-writing considerations, and the interface reminds me of the days when the very notion of a graphical user interface was a novelty. Near the end, I encountered a headachey problem that rose from the fact that I do not, and will not, use Microsoft Word (though I am content to export to and submit in Word .docx format). Apparently some editing processes just don’t register when done by LibreOffice, Pages, or Mellel, and the submission interface kept showing me text that had been deleted as strike-through-ed. At that point I decided just to forge ahead and send the final version to the editor themself. But that’s dome now.

The replacement computer is ordered and should arrive Monday. And I registered for this year’s Bannister Mile this morning, trusting that I won’t spend the day before and the day of bedridden (as I did last year, save for the time it took me to get to Oxford, run the mile, and get back to Abingdon). So it goes on and then it goes around again, it goes on again….

[Whoops! It turns out the MBA arrived today, not Monday. Now I’m struggling to figure out how to transfer data from old to new when the old unit’s screen is useless (remembering that Migration Assistant is incompatible with screen sharing to my iPad).]

I pulled up in my first tutorial this morning, retrieved my five plus-year–old MacBook Air, and opened Accordance (my biblical reference weapon of choice), only to see the screen display a series of pixel-wide lines along the left and bottom. I put it to sleep… and opened it again, and no joy. If anything, there might’ve been a few more lines. Restart? Same story. Shut down? Even more lines.
So, the screen, or the screen controller, has perished. New unit coming next week. Luckily, Apple devices can screen share in such a way that I can use my even older iPad as the screen of my laptop with only a little trouble. Till sometime Monday.

I had a little leftover marking for this morning, and an interrupted night of sleep, so running just didn’t happen. Marking did, so I’ll have everyone’s paper back. Coffee and fruit, Morning Prayer, off to Oxford for tutorials, home to Abingdon for the weekend (the NT Seminar concerns ‘getting a post-doc’, which is not a current item on my scholarly agenda). Whew!

Had a good run this morning — dry, milder weather really makes the whole experience less tiresome — then coffee, fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, then home to spend the day marking (and being distracted). Four essays came in, five must be returned tomorrow. (One came in at last week’s tute, so I return it not at the tute but at the next one.)

I forgot that I had yesterday’s midweek Eucharist at St Helen’s, so I gave a short-order homily; it turned out well, I think, but I was lucky cos the readings were about the Sign of Jonah, about which I wrote a student ewssay that I then developed into my first academic publication (first accepted, not first in print — so it goes).

Run at a very good pace, hot breakfast, on my way to shower and go to Morning Prayer. After Chapter Meeting, some reading and marking.

I decided to walk, rather than run, this morning — a steady walk with intermittent gentle jogging — then coffee and fruit, showered and dressed, and off to Morning Prayer. I’ll go on to Oxford for tutorial and lunch, then home for the afternoon.

Good morning run, a bit faster than yesterday (though still not up to the pace I’d been attaining a fortnight ago, don’t know what happened). Still, a minimally unpleasant way of keeping moderately, marginally, fit. Coffee and fruit, cleaned up, Morning Prayer, and now public office hours at R&R.
Tasks for today include a report on pastoral care, marking an essay, email to answer, updating my publications web page at Oxford, and… there was something else. This evening there’s a book event for Prof. Najman that I’ll be logging in to.
Oh, I know — I’m to write up for the parish magazine some notes on my very brief ‘Inside Liturgy: Meaning and Action’ talks, that was it.

Hello, my name is AKMA. I used to blog here.

Well, I did miss a day, yesterday. My morning run went well; a good pace, back to the ‘very good’ part of the plateau spectrum. Hot breakfast, changed, then to St Helen’s for our annual Wedding Workshop. The Wedding Workshop brings together couples from the parish whom we’ll marry later in the summer, and gives us a chance to walk through with them a lot of the variables among which they’ll be able to choose: Scripture readings, hymns, instrumental music, and clergy. (Some will already have met us and have asked for one or another; some are just meeting us and forming an impression of whom they might request.) After the Workshop, I settled in to extrude a sermon from my already wrung-out brain, and took a much-needed nap.

Today, the day after my ‘day off’, I ran an even better pace, reworked the ending of the sermon, cleaned up, hurried in to get ready before the service, and there we go (or, ‘went’). After the service, I gave one of our brief ‘Spiritual Snacks’ on ‘Inside the Liturgy: Action and Meaning’; it’s part of my effort to gin up interest in serving at the altar). (Don’t tell). After the service and my wee talk, I crossed over to the Parish Centre for a Faith Forum, and then, now, home for a rest.

I’ll paste this morning’s sermon in below the fold.
Continue reading “Breaking Plateaus (Plateaux?)”

I will be meeting my first-years four times (as usual) this term, and I have conveniently — if intensely — arranged for all the meetings to take place on Friday. That’s along with the New Testament seminar up at Keble, and my parish duty to check messages in the morning and afternoon, and the commute to and from Oxford which can vary in duration from about twenty-five minutes to almost two hours (in bad, Friday afternoon traffic). So if I look or sound frazzled on Fridays, or Thursdays or Saturdays as well, I have a reason. Plus, I’m preaching Sunday and we hold our annual Wedding Workshop tomorrow.

Didn’t run this morning, but walked the whole way. I started out running, but my body rebelled. No part of me, not joints, muscles, bones, or lungs, was willing to pick up my pace even to a gentle jog. Coffee, fruit, finishing marking, dressed, Morning Prayer, then off to my tutes.

I have three tutorials, five essays, tomorrow, so today’s agenda involves a lot of marking. Happily, three of the essays have already come in, so I can probably get them all sorted without stress. Shortened night of sleep, so I took an early run. It felt sluggish and rusty, but I came in with a pace at the slow end of my plateau. Maybe just across the inflection point that separates my plateau from the slope that leads to it. Coffee, fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, coffee, toast, marking, and I’ll pitch in to my Lenten goal of reading — just reading (doomscrolling and interrupted reading don’t count) — a half hour a day.

‘St Paul and St Thomas Aquinas tell us how there is always more to be hoped for in any and every situation than the empirical facts seem to show.’
— Alasdair MacIntyre, “How Aristotelianism Can Become Revolutionary,” Philosophy of Management 7/1 (2008), p. 19.

‘…however dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience, which therefore always potentially contains space for alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project.’
Politics and Letters (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 252).

Last night’s service at St Paul’s showed Oriel’s choir in a radically different setting from the usual intimate college chapel, and permitted them to sing magnificently at full power. No doubt Dr Maw’s excellence as a teacher and conductor, and his wisdom in selecting pieces that made the most of both the setting (with St Paul’s notorious eight-second reverb, when the nave is relatively dull) and the choir’s strengths, combined to amplify all the best gifts of the choir. The cathedral was surprisingly (to me) full, the officiant, lectors, and intercessors read effectively (I noted that Lord Mendoza read to his usual high standard), God was greatly praised with words from our own St John Henry Newman, and satisfying pizza followed after. I napped on the Oxford Tube back to Our Fair City, and the bus trip home to Abingdon passed fairly quickly. After lugging my backpack and a travel bag crammed with vestments, I slept like a champion, thank heaven.

I had already decreed my intent to have a lie-in and not run today, so after a leisurely wake-up interval I cooked my hot breakfast, changed to work clothes, joined in Morning Prayer at St Helen’s, and have come home for another mug of coffee and some work time. Ash Wednesday parish service is at 7:30 tonight.

I should say something about the political situation in the USA, in answer to Dave’s cry of outrage. I’ve hitherto been venting my spleen on the socials, but at this point my relatively un-visited blog may as well join the party and affirm what Dave says: As if the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti were not blatant enough evidence, the recent revelation that the DHS sought subpoenas for the operators of online accounts that criticise ICE makes it clear that the US is sliding into the worst kind of authoritarian state, as the government exercises control of the media through its billionaire proxies, executes and disappears citizens for their exercise of First Amendment rights, and indulges its gluttonous id in shameless corruption. At this point I can’t imagine going to the US again even to visit my beloved family, at least not until after the half-terms reveal a clue toward the trajectory the government will follow.

I woke up at a usual time, which meant a short night since I was out late at the Theology Dinner; I felt ambivalent about running this morning, but force of habit won out (yes!) and I covered my miles at a plateau pace. Not a fast plateau pace, but a sound, square plateau pace. Coffee and fruit, shower, fed and put out the ladies, Morning Prayer, bus to Oxford, coffee, tutorial, lunch, bus to London, Oriel Evensong at St Paul’s (if you’re thinking of going, don’t worry about tickets or fees, just come right in, there’s plenty of room and no charge (the tickets and fee cover special seating and an after-service drinks reception to which I shan’t be going), bus back to Oxford, bus back to Abingdon.

That’s a day.

Last night, the speaker for the JCR at Theology Dinner alluded to looking up my blog in advance of his admissions interview, only to find (as he said) that I ‘like running’. For the avoidance of doubt, I do not like running. I like being healthy, and (regrettably) the handiest way to attain that goal is to exercise regularly.

I noticed that someone arrived at my ‘What’s So Hard About Exegesis?’ post last week, and as I thought about the topic and my very wordy post, it occurred to me that a shorter answer to the question might be ‘Students come to exegesis want to know “how” in terms of method, whereas the crucial ‘how’ is a matter of manner — not ‘Step One, Step Two, Step Three’ but ‘In what sort of spirit, what frame of mind, should one undertake exegesis?’.