Adam White

I stumbled across this article the other day. Basically, a man who kept getting fed up by his over-evangelistic work colleague decided to trip him up with a soul-searching dilemma. This dilemma pretty much comes down to the following question:

If given the opportunity, being present at the crucifixion and knowing what you know now, would you save [Jesus] from murder? If you knew you could succeed and assuming you love him as much as you claim, would you retrieve him from torture and death, or would you watch him suffer and expire in order to win your so-called salvation? Which is essentially a selfish act.

In the article the Christian walked away frustrated and baffled and the athiest had won a personal victory.

It got me wondering what I would say if asked the same question.

First off let’s deal with the practical issue of being able to save His life (and scupper God’s plans to save us all). If Jesus was who He said He was then He knew about everything that was goinf to happen to Him; from Judas’ betrayal to dying a painful death on a cross. If this is true then He would also know that I would go back in time to try and save Him.

If I was to succeed in saving His life then this was part of God’s plan and I was just playing my part, otherwise something would stop me in order for the events to play out exactly as God had planned.

However, this is not the purpose of the question the athiest is asking. He is trying to find out if a Christian would do “the right thing” and save Jesus if we could or if we would let Him die to save ourselves.

My answer to this question would be this: I would walk up to Jesus and ask Him if He wants me to save Him. As my Lord and King I would respect His answer and follow it. If He said yes then it is part of God’s plan and I am doing my part. If He said no (which is what I am certain He would have said) then I would watch Him make the ultimate sacrifice and bow at His feet in thanks.

Posted by Adam under Faith | 3 Comments »

Today was beautiful. After all the snow and cold we have had recently it was a pleasure to wake up to proper sunshine. So, what do you do on a rare Saturday like this? Go for a ramble of course!

After a short drive to Newbury it was time for a 3 mile Hike around some lovely, early-spring countryside.

The highlight of the walk had to be Donningtion Castle…

Posted by Adam under Personal & Walks | 1 Comment »

I have always been a fan of Danny Boyle: Shallow Grave was ace, Trainspotting was gripping, 28 Days Later… was astounding and Sunshine is one of my favourite films of the last few years. How does Slumdog Millionaire stand up to a pedigree like that? The answer is not too badly!

I went into this film expecting to be wowed and amazed. I had heard nothing but praise and am expecting it to be the big winner at the Oscars. However, with that much hype, how can it possibly live up to expectations? It was beautiful to look at; the slums of India came alive with lots of vibrant colours and people. It had a superb soundtrack that made my ears prick up when the first drum beat kicked in. I even noticed the editing in the film that was used perfectly to jump between the present and into history.

So, what’s it about? Basically (without giving too much away) it follows a man called Jamal on the Indian version of the gameshow Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? He is just a man from the slums but has got to the very last question and is now being interrogated by the police to find out how he is cheating. However, he claims he just knew all the answer and dredges up things from his past (mainly bad things) that show how.

That’s it in a nutshell. It follows him as a young boy trying to survive, up the a teenager trying to become a man and finally as an adult.

Unfortunately I couldn’t watch this film without thinking about City of God which is about growing up in the slums of Brazil. City of God knocked me off my feet whe I first saw it and is a much better film than Slumdog. While Slumdog adds a fresh twist to the slum-tale it still felt like it was the same underlying story being retold.

Judged on its own merits though it was a very good film and makes me look forward again to what Danny Boyle will give us next.

8/10

Posted by Adam under Films | 1 Comment »

This article came as a relief to me when I read it…

http://www.catalystspace.com/content/read/larry_osborne/

Posted by Adam under Faith | No Comments »

It is coming up to a year since I started this blog and I’ve never talked about development. So here is my first attempt:

In the development world there are always new methodologies appearing and better ways of coding. However, there are some basics of object-orientated .NET development that I thought were pretty fundamental and I didn’t need to consider alternatives of. One of these was instantiating an instance of a dependency within a class by just declaring MyClass Foo = new Foo() when I needed it.

Apparently I was wrong! This week I came across a “new” way of calling your dependencies from within a class: Inversion of Control (IoC) and Dependency Injection (DI).

Let’s start at the beginning. The applications I am developing at the moment are split into layers: The presentation layer that will be written in ASP.NET (or maybe MVC if it gets released in time!), a business layer to manage all the business rules and a data layer to interact with a variety of data objects. I will also have business entities being passed around the various layers. The reason for splitting everything out into layers is so that you can reuse the code in a variety of different applications if needed and to make it easier to make changes without having to recode everything.

In the old world that I have used since I began coding, each layer knows what it needs in order to function (e.g. the business layer knows it needs a data layer object, the data layer knows it needs a database connection object and a configuration object). These dependencies are created by the layer when they are needed.

However, this week I have found out that there is a glaring issue with this approach: There is a hard-coded dependency on other components that cannot be disconnected without altering the code. When it comes to unit testing a layer this can be a real problem if you want to mock up any of these dependent objects.

There is an answer though, one that the community has known about for a while but I had been blissfully unaware!

Dependency Injection is very simply about passing in dependencies to objects rather than making the object create them themselves. So in the constructor for a class you declare the dependencies it will need and pass the fully formed objects in. So if your business layer needs a data layer object in order to function you create it and pass it into the business layer when you instantiate it. Simple, mind-blowing and brilliant!

This approach means you can create your classes in total isolation and use mock objects to simulate the dependant objects and just replace these mock-ups when you are ready without having to change any of your code, all you will need to change is what is calling your class.

It is still very early days in my understanding of this principle and I still have a lot of questions (noteably what is an IoC container and how does it manage the calling of objects). once I have had a chance to put this principle into practise I will try and blog again with my findings. It’s going to be a crazy mids-shift for me but it should be fun

Posted by Adam under Techy Stuff | 5 Comments »

Every now and again an ensemble drama comes around and wins lots of accolades and awards. In recent history these inlcude Syriana, Magnolia, Crash and Traffic. Traffic tells the story of drug trafficking between Mexico and the USA from different viewpoints. To add a bit of extra style though (and to help us follow what is going on) each storyline is bathed in a different colour!

Firstly you have the dusty coloured Mexican police officers on the front line of the war who are trying their best to fight the drug traffickers with very little finance and corruption everywhere. Benicio Del Toro acts his chops off (and deservedly wins an Oscar) through this fine story. Personally I got a little lost with all the various mexican names of drug lords and generals and by the end had totally lost track of who was a good guy but I guess that was half the point!

Next (using normal lighting) you had the other end of the scale where a main importer of the drugs is arrested and put on trial. He is a very wealthy man whose wife (played by Catherine Zeta Jones) had no idea she was married to a drug trafficker. We see it from two real vantage points: the wife’s struggle to come to terms with her husband’s trial and the DEA agent (played by Don Cheadle) trying to take the big guy down.

Finally, bathed in blues, is my favourite storyline was from the viewpoint of the newly appointed head of the US government’s attempt to fight back against drug trafficking played ably by Michael Douglas. At first it seems like it is going to take a very high level view of the battle from a political point-of-view but quickly we see it shift to a far more personal tale: Michael Douglas’ daughter becomes hooked on hard drugs herself and it shows the battle the family have over this. It is very powerful and shows that drugs don’t just impact communities and governments, but in the end it is the families of those addicted that are most affected.

This is a very hard hitting film with some great performances and direction form Soderbergh but in the end it is the writing that immerses you and keeps you hooked that really deserves the accolades (one of the four Oscars).

8/10

Posted by Adam under Films | No Comments »

Every day is struggle for me at the moment. It is not illness related; I am blessed with good health and the only thing I can complain about is dodgy eyesight and a receding hairline. It is not money related; I have a great job that pays me well, the only debts I have are with my house (that I own).

The thing I struggle with at the moment and what is at the root of most of my troubles is time.

I’m not going to complain at needing more time as I get 24 hours in a day like everyone else. It is how I use those hours that is at the heart of the problem. I have worked out after 27 years of trial and error that I need around 8 hours of sleep in order to feel refreshed the next day. I can get less than that if necessary and be okay but after a couple of days of late nights and it really starts to affect my energy.

This leaves me with 16 hours a day. This does sound like a lot but then take away another 9 hours for work and that leaves me with 7 hours, 5 days a week. The time between waking up and getting to work can also be considered as a write-off. So that leaves me with 5 evenings of around 5 hours each.

Now, one of these evenings is always taken up with a small group meeting. Normally it starts at 7.30 so it is not the whole evening gone but by the time I have gotten home from work, checked my emails and eaten dinner it is time to head off anyway.

What about the weekend though? Surely I get time then? Sadly, being so involved in church activities pretty much means that Sundays are a total write-off as well. Church starts at 10.30 but I am regularly there by 9.30 to set up the projection requirements for the service and then I normally end up staying until 1.30 in order to get the day’s “message” onto CDs and run around doing all the other jobs that need doing. It also looks like I am going to be heavily involved in Alpha again starting at the end of February which takes my time from 5.30 on a Sunday night for the rest of the evening.

That leaves me with 5 hours a night for 4 weekdays, all of Saturday and 4 hours on a Sunday. Now what do I have to squeeze into these 48 hours…

I have three passions in life (as highlighted by the sub-title of my website): God, my job and films. I want to grow my knowledge in each of these areas and that takes time. The most important one of these is obviously God and I would love to spend far more time praying, reading my bible, listening to sermons and reading books and blogs. I pray on my way to work in the morning and I try and listen to a preach on my way home from work each night but I would love to find more time to pray and read my bible at other times in the day as well.

I love developing. I have been a web developer for nearly seven years now and love it. I have chosen to specialise in .NET development. This is a very fast growing technology and it is very hard to keep up to date with all the latest developments in CSS, JavaScript, MVC frameworks not to mention the various C# features I haven’t had a chance to learn or use yet. I try and keep up to date with the latest via magazines, blogs and the occasional podcast. A lot of this I can do at work but if I really want to be as good as I can be I need to take my learning into my home time as well.

And finally there are my films. I use my films as a way to shut down my brain and relax. I listen to Mark Kermode’s film reviews podcast once a week and read the occasional blog about what is happening but I don’t spend as much time on this passion as I used to and I rarely go to the cinema any more.

What I haven’t mentioned so far is all the things I do for my church outside of a Sunday. I look after the IT for the church which involves the website, projection, recording and all the IT equipment. I have a huge list of jobs that either need doing or I want to do.

I also love helping people. God has blessed me with lots of talents and a desire to serve but I can’t help everyone. If I could I would though, I just need to find the time to do it!

I haven’t even mentioned my friends yet. I have always preferred to have a handful of really good friends that I spend time with than lots of acquaintances that I don’t get to know as well as I would like. I could count the number of close friends I have on one hand and that is a good thing. However, when I see these friends I want to spend a good amount of time with them. Even today I spent most of it with my friends wandering around various shops in Swindon. If I could I would spend at least one night a week with each of my friends but that is just not feasible.

Other things that I haven’t mentioned here that I would love to do include: DIY in my house, getting myself fit and, dare I say it, a relationship!

So, I’ve have just written a 1000 word essay on my struggle with fitting everything I need/want to do into my life. I must have needed to vent. But unless I do something about, this situation is only going to get worse not better. So here are my goals to tackle this problem:

1) Use the time I have got more efficiently

2) Prioritise better

3) Start to say no

4) Give up some things

I’ll let you know how it goes…

Posted by Adam under Personal | 3 Comments »

I haven’t had time to write on my blog recently so I thought I would quickly recap some of the films I have seen recently and what I thought of them…

Inkheart (2008) – They don’t make kids adventure films like they used to based on this. Never gripped and rarely entertained. – 5/10

Tropic Thunder (2008) – Ben Stiller being Ben Stiller trying not to be irritating. Thank God for Robert Downey Jr! – 5/10

Be Kind Rewind (2008) – Jack Black on fine form. Funny and moving in surprising places. – 7/10

Kung Fu Panda (2007) – Can’t compete with Pixar but still fun. Nothing new here to shout about though. – 6/10

300 (2006) – Bloody, stylish, action-packed and full of the best fight scenes since the Matrix. Roll on Watchmen…- 9/10

King Kong (2005) – Jackson was always going to struggle with his next film after the Lord of the Rings but he does well. Big, bold and entertaining. – 7/10

Legally Blonde (2001) – Not funny, not clever. Clueless without the smarts. – 4/10

Delicatessen (1991) – Wacky French fun. Watch it with a look of confusion on your face! – 6/10

Conan the Destroyer (1984) – A poor shadow of the superior original. Better things were to come from Mr Schwarzenegger – 5/10

Posted by Adam under Films | 1 Comment »