The Grace Pages

Welcome Gill to the blogdom of God

Please welcome my old friend Richard "Gill" Gillingham to the blogosphere. Gill is a bit of a theological and philosophical boffin with Anabaptist sympathies. According to one of those "Which theologian are you?" tests, he's Neo-Orthodox in the vain of Barth. His recent entries deal with John Howard Yoder, Pentecostalism, pacifism and Elmer Gantry. He used to be in love with Meg Ryan, but I think she has been replaced in his affections by Reese Witherspoon. I think lots of you guys will like him.

My passionate online affair

One of my alltime favourite blogs is Creating Passionate Users. It's full of tons of useful advice for just about anyone with a product. Its founding principle is that people will use your product if you can make them passionate about it. One thing that the folks at CPU have often pointed out is that if you can make your users passionate about your product, they will forgive you anything. They will overlook the occasional glitch or failure, because they're committed. They'll defend your product to the hilt.

One company that has been great at this has been Google, although I don't want to speak too soon, because the whole enterprise could easily go the way of Microsoft and become as reviled as it is powerful. AppleMacs have the same devout following. Another is Mozilla Firefox, which has its users eating out of the palm of its hand.

I speak from experience, because I have been engaged in an intensely passionate love affair with the Firefox browser for about six months now, and it shows no signs of letting up. Even when it does crazy things like it has been doing all week, Firefox is still my friend, and I won't hear people badmouthing it. It's been freezing up on me periodically for about the last ten days, but still it reigns supreme over every other browser, in my heart at least. The Mozilla team have successfully created a passionate user out of me.

The CTU crew have also made me a passionate user of their blog. Hell, they've even got me giving them free advertising like this. You're doing something right when your users want to go out for free and evangelize on behalf of your product. Check it out.

Odds'n'sods

Wikipedia will no longer allow anonymous users to edit entries.

I was extremely giddy when at about 1 o'clock last night I came a cross a mention of Tony's blog in the Telegraph.

This music video is magical.

PS. Notice the new banner and sidebar?

Weekend waffle

Stephen Green's appearance on the Beeb's Question Time last night did not really justify the uproar I witnessed on some gay forums. There was outrage that the BBC were giving him a platform, but he only ended up making himself look utterly ridiculous, which I'm sure the Beeb knew very well when they asked him to come on the show.

He was quiet for most of the programme, actually, and when he did open his mouth he only made a fool of himself. The rest of the programme was unusually flat by QT standards, I thought.

Onto other things: Despite the overblown title, this is an interesting film about hysterical overreaction to alleged "discrimination" on a few American university campuses; its main virtue is that the tone of the documentary itself is generally not overblown, and it contains some enlightening interviews.

If you're too sore from the last time a Republican whupped your ass to appreciate the documentary, here's some lighter fare: a sneak preview of The Shining (QuickTime required); proof that you probably shouldn't trust movie trailers.

Oh, and here's some parting advice: Think young.

School-run observations

Nothing much was happening at the office. I'd been abandoned by my colleagues, and I hate working in an office anyway, so I decided to get an early bus home. As usual with the buses in England, you wait half an hour for one, and then three show up at once. Thought I'd manage to avoid the school run, but by the time the bus got there, the kids were just getting out.

It was interesting to see a new generation of schoolchildren from my alma mater; putting myself in their shoes brought back memories of when I used to make the same trip home wearing that same uniform.

One lad, who seemed to be in his own little dreamworld, was strolling up the aisle of the bus when the driver turned round and called after him. "Oi," he grunted rather rudely. Then more loudly: "Oi!" The driver wasn't sure the kid's ticket was valid. So he shouted after him like he was a common criminal caught in the act. If it had been an adult, what are the chances the request would have been something more like a polite, "Excuse me, sir"?

Everyone says that "kids these days don't have any respect for adults". But how about this one: "Adults these days don't have any respect for kids"?

The deadly depths of the Urban Myth

Some urban myths are merely funny, like the one about the guy who developed his holiday photos and found a picture of his toothbrush up the butt of some burglar or prankster. Others are plainly irresponsible, warning of fictitious bomb threats or contaminated products.

Another category of myths informs a person's outlook on a whole group of people, often a minority. 'All the Jews stayed home from work on 9/11' is one such legend. It was this past weekend that I realized just how powerful urban myths are in determining a worldview, and how fundamental urban myths can be to shaping a person's prejudices. A friend of mine made a passing comment about how "the Americans" are always suing for crazy reasons. I asked what he meant by that; in other words, I asked for evidence. His evidence was a story that was "in the news" a few weeks ago.

"There was a woman in the USA who sued the company who made her microwave. She won, like, thousands of dollars or something, because her dog died when she microwaved it -- and there was no label on the product warning her not to microwave her dog."

It was a classic urban legend. To believe it actually happened is about on the same level as actually trying to microwave a dog in the first place. Yet this was an intelligent, educated man, a teacher. I immediately challenged the story, and he informed me that a trusted colleague had told him the story.

This bizarre legend had become yet another pillar in his view of Americans as a certain type. I wondered how many of the other disturbing opinions he had expressed during that weekend -- that ethnic communities contribute very little to Britain, for example -- were based on the same principle, a network of urban myths, each of which functioned as verification for the others. It wouldn't be the first time an otherwise intelligent person swallowed hook, line and sinker a blatant urban legend that happened to confirm a prejudice.

We would all do well to familiarize ourselves with the Urban Myth. Some are simply amusing -- at least if you haven't had the same story in your inbox a hundred times -- in reality they can be the insidious tools of prejudice and intolerance.