2 April, 2010 in Church, Youth Group by Aonghas

Odd Time for Oddfellows

Today was Good Friday – the day remembered for Jesus’ death on the cross. As was customary, we attended church this morning for the special Good Friday service. Pastor Chan invited us to play accompaniment music on our accordions for the prelude as well as the Holy Communion. The song was called “Old Rugged Cross” and we played together with Tim on piano and Jenny on violin. The chairs in the auditorium were arranged to face the centre where there was the table for Holy Communion. We sat through the sermon before having refreshments afterwards.

We had pizza for lunch after the Good Friday church service

Because of the morning service, our youth group “Oddfellows” was shifted to earlier in the day instead of tonight. We all had pizza together for lunch before going into the church library for the youth group programme. Today Karvin led the programme by showing us a video about Jesus’ death on the cross. It looked like quite an old video and it was a bit cheesy in parts but on the whole I think it delivered quite a strong message and there were parts of the video I never realised about Jesus’ death before. When we were having supper after the programme, Cleo and I decided to swap jackets to see how they looked on us…

Apparently I looked like a Mexican gangster, or a cholo. After looking online, I found this article about how to become a cholo. I didn’t realise there were so many steps to consider in order to be one. I wonder if anyone actually takes them seriously.

19 March, 2010 in University, Youth Group by Aonghas

Building with LEGO®

Our group's LEGO model

On the topic of churchy stuff, tonight at Youth Group we had activity night. Calum led worship while I played the piano (tried to!). We also brought Angie along with us to Youth Group tonight as well. Gabrielle led the programme and told us that we’d be building a model using Lego. There was a bit of a twist though. Each group had to nominate someone as the ‘President’ and someone as the ‘Vice President’. In another room, Gabrielle had constructed a model earlier using different Lego pieces and each group had to recreate it without looking at the original. Only the President in each group could see the original model and then report to the Vice President what it looked like. The Vice President then went back to the room where the rest of the team was and had to tell them how to create the model, but only being able to answer “yes” or “no”. In our group I was the Vice President while Rebecca was the President. It took our group a bit of an effort to get started, but once we had the base sorted, things started to take off quite quickly. Rebecca did a great job explaining how the different pieces were positioned, using her arms and hands to show me on the wall. In the end we managed to finish the whole model, and amazingly we were only one space off from being exactly perfect. Great team work guys!

5 March, 2010 in Engineering, University by Aonghas

Breadboard

As part of Second Year Electrical and Computer Engineering, students have to attend an induction tutorial in the lab to get familiar with some of the devices and materials that will be used throughout the course. This morning I had my induction lab at 10am in Undergraduate Lab 3 (UG3). To begin with, we were given a talk by a guy named Rogan (I think?) about the Regulations for use of IT Equipment within the ECE Department. He basically outlined the rules of computer use, and told us not to play games online, look at porn or download any movies/television programmes etc. Pretty self-explanatory really. He told us about one time when a student was caught downloading a Harry Potter movie and tried to justify the download by explaining how it related to his coursework. Although that seemed funny to me at the time, Rogan spoke with a serious tone so I refrained myself from making any comical gestures.

We had quite a few things connected to our breadboard.

The crux of the lab was spent using these things called “breadboards”. I hadn’t seen anything like it before but apparently they’re quite common. We worked in pairs and my partner was a girl called Reya (sorry if I got that wrong!). She’s another student doing Computer Systems like me – I’m slowly meeting more people who are in Computer Systems which is reassuring. The basic outline of the lab was to get familiar with using a breadboard and connecting components to make a circuit. We got given a lab manual with detailed instructions, but there was a lot of background reading at the beginning which we just glossed over. Mr. Rob Champion was supervising us for today’s lab, along with several teaching assistants who floated around to help us when we needed it.

The lab induction tutorial detailed instructions to design an RC band-pass filter and amplifier. The circuit was split up into four sections, each section building on the one previous. The first section of the tutorial was the Current Amplifier. We had to play around with the function generator, multimeter and oscilloscope to get the correct readings of voltages and currents, but first we had to plug in all the resistors the BC639 transistor to the breadboard (don’t worry, I don’t even know what a BC639 transistor is either). It took a bit of time to get used to using the breadboard but after a while I became more comfortable with it. By the end of the tutorial we had only completed nearly two of the four sections, but they weren’t expecting us to finish everything and I think we put in a pretty solid effort!

A bit of a blurry photo of me and our breadboard.

There were only three lectures for me after the lab today, everything except MM2. Just quietly, I think MM2 is my least favourite paper right now. I don’t know if it’s just because we’re doing statistical analysis at the moment, but hopefully once we get into some REAL maths it’ll be more enjoyable. On the flip side, my most favourite paper would have to be COMPSYS201 (Computer Engineering) because our lecturer is quite funny (the Elmo T-shirt guy!) and I really like the content in the course. Computer Engineering was our last lecture for the day and afterwards I went to the gym since I missed it yesterday.

Tonight at youth group Calum led worship with the song Indescribable. I played the accompaniment on the piano, well tried to! Tonight’s topic was Bible Study and it was Fiona who led the lesson. We read out of Philippians chapter 2 – looking at Jesus’ humility and how we should be like Him. During our sharing time, we talked about our experiences with being humble, and putting others first before ourselves.

Week one of Uni is over already. Time just goes way too fast.

20 February, 2009 in Church, University, Youth Group by Aonghas

Reverse Photo Scavenger Hunt

Today I nearly missed the bus in the morning. I was so close to missing the bus that by the time I got to the traffic lights, the only thing stopping me from missing the bus was the fact that the lights turned red for the bus just as I ran around the corner to the bus stop! That was so close.

In the afternoon tutorial session there wasn’t a lot of work being done. I think it was down to the fact that it was a Friday afternoon and everyone was waiting to go home to start their weekend. The people in the room next door to us were enjoying a game of hangman, led by one of the tutorial helpers. Some of the words they had to identify included ‘DAN CARTER’, ‘FACEBOOK’ and ‘SADDLE POINT’. Since Luke, Marianely and I were sitting in a position where we could see the whiteboard of our neighbouring room, we were playing along as well, and Marianely solved a number of them quite fast. She told me to call out her answers, most of which were correct! The tutorial helper (I think her name is Jennifer) asked me to come up and choose a word. I didn’t know what word to choose until I introduced myself as Aonghas and was about to say “but it’s spelt differently…” That gave me the idea to use my name as the word for hangman. I started off with seven lines _ _ _ _ _ _ _, to which many people responded with a puzzled look. They managed to spell most of my name correctly quite fast but the only letter they couldn’t work out for while was the ‘O’ (A _ NGHAS). I nearly had the whole hangman drawn before someone shouted out ‘O’. That was quite a fun activity, and a good way to sort of get to know the others on the course.

Marianely’s dad gave me a ride home today. He dropped me off on Te Atatu Road because I said I could walk the rest of the way home. Luckily on the way home, my mum happened to be driving past so she stopped to give me a lift home. Before we went to Youth Group tonight, I stopped at David’s house quickly just to drop off the laptop so he could do some programming for the robot before tomorrow’s competition. He showed me the robot upstairs in all its glory, together with spare parts scattered on the floor. It looked pretty sophisticated.

Tonight at Youth Group Hamish and I led worship. First Hamish led the song we played off a CD, called “What the Lord Has Done in Me“, while I wrote the lyrics for the next song on the whiteboard. The second song we sang was called “Great is the Lord and Most Worthy of Praise“. I attempted to play the accompaniment on piano, a personal first for me at church. All in all I think it was okay, despite my many split notes and mistakes.

After our worship leading, it was activity time! On explained that we were going to be split into three groups and we’d each be given a set of captions. For each caption we had to take a photo that would match the caption. In my group there was Claire, Cleo, Brendan, Justin and myself. The three captions we were given were:

• It was pretty obvious to the onlookers how THIS was going to end.
• It is a miracle! A youth group walking on water! (or similar)
• Who would have thought a youth group could do THIS and no one got arrested!

We were stuck for ideas at first, but we decided to have a walk around the church anyway to give us some inspiration. We thought we might go into the bathroom to see if we could photograph anything in there. I had my first experience in the female bathroom at church tonight (don’t worry, there wasn’t anyone in there at the time) and I must say their bathroom looks a tad prettier than the guys’ one. They have more toilet cubicles for one, though I guess they make up for the absence of urinals. We ended up taking a photo of me in one of the toilet cubicles with my back to the camera… embracing myself… as though I was making out with someone! Don’t ask me how that idea came up..

Next we went into the janitor’s closest further up the hallway and found a huge gas cylinder in there. After playing around for a little while, Cleo taped Brendan to the gas cylinder and I put on latex gloves, ready to “interrogate?” Brendan (this was all for the photo of course, I wasn’t planning on carrying out any such act on Brendan!)

We got back to the classroom at the end of the activity and looked through all the groups’ photos after sharing time. Some of them were quite funny, while others were just plain random! Hopefully someone will upload the photos on to Facebook or something so you can see the final shoots.

25 July, 2008 in School by Aonghas

A Rutherford Promotion

Today we were going to go over to Rutherford Primary School during period three to donate the books we had fundraised for their school and Rose wanted me to film the presentation. Since I had Chinese in period three, I thought I might go and see Ms Hsiao during my study period to ask if I could be excused from class. At 10:20am, I walked over to the primary school with Rose and Caragh, as well as a few members of the Junior Council. When we arrived at the primary school hall, all the little kids were already waiting patiently for us inside. Rose, Caragh and the Junior Council members went and sat at the front of the hall while I took one of the seats at the back so I could film.

The assembly started with one of the primary students standing at the front as she introduced herself, before telling everyone to stand as we sang the National Anthem. When it was our turn to do the presentation, Rose wheeled the large table/box of library books out to the front and spoke to the children. I think everyone was delighted with the donation and we were thanked for our generosity afterwards. I thought that would be the end of the filming for me, but as I was putting the video camera away, one of the teachers told everyone to stand up and dance the Macarena, and that included the Rutherford College students! I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass by without filming it, so I whipped out the camera and focussed on Rose and Caragh. It was pretty funny watching all the students dance, and the range of enthusiasm amongst the little kids. What also amazed me as I sat at the back of the hall was the way in which the primary students behaved. Everyone was very attentive and sat up straight away when the teachers at the front told them to. That’s the sort of energy you see less of when you enter high school, and I think it’s a shame that some high school students cannot seem to find the brighter side of life.

Today at English was our last period to research for our seminars. I thought I might use the period to go online and research a little bit more about my topic of Divine Justice. By the end of the period, I still felt like I had more research to do because I had too many questions that I hadn’t answered. I guess I’ll have to look into it a bit more this weekend. Just another thing to add to the list…

At lunch time I had to track down the TDI projector and borrow one of the laptops in our form class to take to Te Atatu Intermediate School for the promotional presentation this afternoon. Mr Moore took me and Bryn down to the intermediate school (Bryn was going to be speaking to the school because he was a past student) in his car early so that we could set up the projector and laptop.

I managed to set up the laptop and projector on a nearby table at the front of the hall, but there was no sound cable that we could use to plug into the PA system. Luckily one of the intermediate students walked past and knew the teacher in charge of setting up microphones and audio set up for the school hall, Mr Felix. I thought we might just hold a microphone up to the speakers of the laptop while we played the promotional DVD, but in the end Mr Felix managed to find a cable long enough to stretch all the way from the stage down to the floor where the laptop was.

The rest of the performing students from Rutherford College arrived shortly after, as well as the intermediate students filing in after lunch. After the promotional video was played, Mr Moore addressed the school and then introduced Bryn to the stage, who spoke about his experience at Te Atatu Intermediate and Rutherford College. I liked the fact that he said “forget Kelston and St. Doms, they’re rubbish!”. The choir then sang the school song “The Rutherford Way” before an extract of our production “For Today” was performed. Overall, I felt our presentation was a success and hopefully Rutherford College gets the number of enrollments they need for next year.

Before youth group tonight, I remembered about the radio show and thought I might call in before it finished. When I rang up, David answered the phone and I told him that my name was “Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii”. I passed the phone to Calum after he put me on hold and Calum managed to get on air for a few minutes before the end. I think the topic on tonight’s show was sport, but I can’t be entirely sure because we only tuned in 5 minutes before the end of the show.

Tonight at youth group Calum and I led song worship. The first song we sang was “From the Inside Out” and our second song was “Jesus You’re My Superhero” where we got everyone to stand up and join in with the actions we had made up. It was pretty funny watching some of them dance (and for those of you who weren’t dancing, shame on you! haha) We had an activities evening tonight so we spent most of the time working on our poster boards for the foyer in our church. Our group was working on our “High School Musical” themed board, and it was starting to come together. I brought the cardboard that we were going to use as the stage for our board, but it was a little cheap-looking after I coloured it in with brown colouring pencil.

We played a game for the second half of the evening and we stayed in the same groups we were in for the boards. The game was split into physical and mental challenges. The first challenge was a physical challenge so I offered to represent our team, while Jireh was competing against me from the other team. The challenge was to see who could do the most press ups in 15 seconds. Uh oh.. I didn’t want to embarrass myself now. We got into position and waited for the countdown. As soon as On said “go”, both Jireh and I started doing press ups frantically. Initially I felt like I was doing okay, but 15 seconds was taking ages! In the end I managed 30 press ups while Jireh did 27, so our team got the point for that challenge. Phew, that was a good workout!