Newtown in Photo Pt.1

During the week I catch the train from Hornsby (where Kirsty and I live) to Redfern and then walk to Newtown (where college lives). One of the things that I love about the walk is all the great architecture that I see along the way.

In high school I studied photography from year 8 till year 12, which involved it being a part of my HSC. There are various different genres of photography, but the one type that I really liked was photos of Architecture.

On my walks to college each day, I have started taking photos of the great buildings that I see. These were all shot using my iPhone 4, and edited using the Photoshop Express iOS app.

I hope you enjoy them.

Need a new desktop?

Time for a desktop refresh. This month smashing mag has another great set of wallpapers for you to download and freshen up your computer.

I chose this wallpaper for this month, mostly because it has the symbol (π) featured. I’m learning Greek at college at the moment, and I need all the visual help I can get.

So if you need a desktop refresh, head over to smashingmag, and let me know what you picked and why.

 

Introducing, SIFC online.

I heard recently that “if it isn’t online, then it doesn’t exist”. While being wrong, the phrase is also right.

One of the things I’m responsible for at my new church has been developing a new web presence for them. Something worthy enough that you would be proud of it enough to actually want to show someone. Still with me?

We meet in a school hall, and have very strong ties to the school in which we meet. We are running various community events during this year, and in the essence of the quote above. To exist, we needed to get online, and quick.

Anyway, I thought I would share it with you. There are still a few things to iron out with it, but here it is.

I introduce to you. St Ives Family Church online.

This just got real…

This week has been an especially busy one, College started for real this week, and the busyness also started for real. I generally have different subjects on each day of the week, which is good for consolidation of learning.

My week is generally made up of Chapel a couple of times a week, Lectures and a couple of study groups. I’m studying full time, so I’m doing 6 different subjects. New Testament, Old Testament, Greek, Communication in Ministry, Ministry and Mission and Biblical Theology are the subjects.

I also have a whole bunch of readings to get done each week, and I got my first assignment on Monday morning. A 1000 word comparison between a historical document and a biblical document of some dudes in the book of Mark.

It was nice having a few subjects in English this week. I’m really thankful for all of my lecturers at college, all Godly and Humble christian people. I have also made some awesome friends.

Meet James

I wanted to share with you a project I did for Christ Church St Ives last year, when I was working in the office as a Graphic Designer.

Christ Church has a threefold strategy for doing church, these are Connect, Grow and Serve.

I had the opportunity last year of putting together 7 video testimonies of some members of Christ Church. Each one of the focused on one particular element of the Connect, Grow, Serve framework. This video is of a guy called James, James is a good friend of mine. It was great to put this video together, documenting how God had been working in his life to Grow him. Enjoy.

One year and Isaiah

Yesterday I had the privilege of preaching for the second time at our church, St Ives Family Church. My text was Isaiah 6. In my preparation I was struck by the picture of how big and mighty God is, and how, even in his mightiness he chose to love us by sending the Lord Jesus to earth to die and rise again.

Yesterday was great for another reason also, Kirsty and I celebrated our first year of marriage. We can’t believe how quickly a year has gone. A year in which I have given up work to study full time, Kirsty has started full time work, we have moved house, twice, and also now changed churches.

Kirsty and I met each other while we were both doing ministry together at a Beach Mission in Kiama, NSW. So it was very cool to be able to minister to others on our wedding anniversary, something that we are both committed too.

Our first year of marriage has been a great one, if this past year has taken us though so many things, we can’t even imagine what the next 50 might look like.

2 weeks in…

Thought it would be a good time to update you on how college is going after almost two weeks of Greek intensive.

Greek has been a hard slog, exciting, but still hard. Early this week I couldn’t help but think that it was all a bit beyond me. Learning verbs, as well as all the other vocab we have learnt was maxing out my brains ability to store new information. Then yesterday everything clicked, almost.

I’m a practical kind of person, which means that I work best when I’m actually doing what I am learning. Which is what we started doing yesterday. Yesterday we started doing some translations of whole sentences, from scratch. It was such a relief to be able to see where different words fitted in to the sentence. It was also nice to see that all the formulas that I had been working on perfecting was actually leading to something more tangible. Remembering most of the vocab was nice too.

So we have one more day of intensive to go, no doubt we will learn more tomorrow. So Greek is proving to be the challenge I thought it would be, but it is also more enjoyable than I thought it would be too.

And the winner is…

Arcade Fire

In 2010 I was introduced to an awesome band by a friend. They are called Arcade Fire, and they released an album in 2010 called The Suburbs.

Since its release it has won alot of critical acclaim, most recently of which was winning ‘Best Album of the Year‘ at the Grammy awards.

Alot less known was the award of ‘Site of the Year‘ by theFWA that was given to a great site called the The Wilderness Downtown. Its a site built completely in HTML 5, and is basically an interactive video clip of the Arcade Fire song ‘the Wilderness Downtown’.

It is a great example of what can be achieved in HTML 5. You can check it out here.