Archive for August, 2011

Recently, I’ve been trying to finish off some candles so I can get rid of them. This has resulted in a rather alarming number of romantic nights in with Norm and George. Still, at least it brings back memories of Munich…

Today, we’re proud to launch our latest project, Worfolk Lectures! The site is an online archive of academic lectures on a variety of ever expanding topics, all available to download or stream in full high definition.

Over the past twelve months we have been rapidly recording and editing together lectures from a variety of talks, conferences and events and after a long and hard slog, we’re finally able to bring this content to the world.

As well as issues with transferring and editing the content together, the final piece fell together in June when Dailymotion offered us a partnership agreement to allow us to host the content, in full HD.

There are already ten lectures available on the site and we will be releasing a new video every Friday in something we’re hoping to coin the Friday lecture. No prizes for guessing how we managed to come up with that name!

Speakers will include Professor A. C. Grayling, Processor Chris French, Dr Gijsbert Stoet, Dr Antony Lempert, Dr Terrence Kee and many others. You can follow us on Twitter to keep up with all the latest updates.

Recently, Bradford Atheists headed over to Leeds to join us at Nation of Shopkeepers.

Last week, we headed down to Alea Casino for a poker night that had been organised by the analysis team.

Row One, aka myself and Jason where there to represent the office and I brought Norm along too. After the night we had, I think future tournaments might be restricted to analysts only though.

As part of an elaborate tactic, I went out first to make sure I wasn’t stealing chips off Jason and Norm. They then went on to place first and second, taking almost all of the prize money. Good times.

Having officially launched Atheist Stock out of beta last month, we’re pleased to announce the next stage of development – the Atheist Stock API.

The new API service will allow our partners to integrate with our site to allow them to offer our content to their users! It is easy to integrate with and comes with a full software development kit (SDK) as well as documentation to make everything as simple as possible.

While mentioning I had just written up a negative review of Trio recently, Norm suggested that I was too negative and just hated everything. As such, I wanted to write a short piece recommending a few of my favourite restaurants in Leeds, to point out a few places that I would highly recommend eating.

Blackhouse, one of the best steak restaurants in Leeds, nice atmosphere if a little noisy, but that is mainly due to the live pianist they normally put on. The steaks are fantastic.

River Plate, another fantastic steak restaurant, this one Argintinan. A bit on the pricey side, but arguably the best steak you will get in Leeds.

Chaophraya, despite mixed reviews from some of my friends, I have to recommend Chaophraya as the best Thai restaurant in town. I’ve always enjoyed amazing food and good service there.

Sam’s Chop House, if you’re ever in the mood for a bit of traditional English, if such a thing actually existed, you can’t go wrong with this place.

Cattle Grid, another great steak restaurant, perhaps not quite Blackhouse or River Plate, but what it only slightly lacks in quality, it definitely makes up for in portion size. Try the ribs, they’re amazing.

Las Iguanas, two for one cocktails and fantastic Latin tapas make for an excellent combination, and according to our waiter at their South Bank branch, Leeds is the best one in the country – staff even get sent up here to train.

Also, honourable mentions to The Restaurant, which despite it’s steep prices and odd name, win lots of points for greeting me with “good evening, sir” as well as having great food, and Oranaise, which I wouldn’t describe as the best Moroccan restaurant in Leeds, but is certainly the friendliest.

As we know from the whole religion business a lot of us have been involved in over the past few years, it is very difficult for someone to change their mind. It really takes a lot, especially when you’re emotionally invested in something.

I’ve been a champion of the Firefox cause for many years now and I think the Mozilla Foundation have done some great work.

But I can’t champion its name anymore.

Let’s face it, it’s just rubbish these days. Their rapid release cycles have brought around faster versions, but this has just made them increasingly unstable and still trailing the competition.

Firefox uses up more memory than anything else on my computer. Anything else! I run Zend Studio. That is based on the massively bloated Eclipse Studio, and then Zend came along and added a lot more bloat, and it still uses less memory than Firefox!

So, unfortunately, I’m cutting my ties.

I’ve already replaced my Firefox/Opera combination at work with a Chrome/Opera combination, and plan to do the same on my laptop as well. The only thing I have held out with on Firefox for this long was Firebug, and Chrome’s Developer Tools and Opera’s Dragonfly do just as good a job, once you get into them.

Farewell, Firefox, you broke my heart :(.

Last week, we headed over to Trio for a bit of a work social. Despite making it clear that partners were invited, but not welcome, it somehow quickly turned into a bit of a couples-fest and as a possible first for Buzz, actually ended up with an equal gender balance.

The drinks were good. Their Rekorderlig was a bit of a rip-off, they had a “special offer” of bottles for £2.50, but it wasn’t the kind of bottle you would expect if you got a bottle of Kopparberg, it was a small beer style bottle.

Far more importantly, however, we were there for the two for one cocktails.

These started well, they had a menu but the first bartender we got was willing to mix up anything and I was soon sipping on an apricot martini. The second bartender we got was far more disappointing, however, despite working at a cocktail bar, he had never even heard of a sloppy joe, let alone being willing to mix one. Service was at least reasonably speedy, however.

The restaurant was far more of a disappointment. Despite charging almost £20 for a fillet steak, it couldn’t even compete with the likes of Brooklyn Bar or The Restaurant, let alone Blackhouse or Cattle Grid, all of which are cheaper, despite being in the city centre!

All in all, a good place to go for cocktails, but I can’t recommend eating there.

Last week, I took Elina for a romantic night’s food shopping. Came back from Marko with 16 steaks, 30 bottles of Kopparberg and a box of chocolate bars. Job done :D.

Last week, Atheist Society hit the Cuthbert Brodrick for steak night. Having left in favour of Stick or Twist last year, it was great to spend some time in the always loved Cuthbert, especially given it was the Summer Cider Festival. I was a little disappointed by Addlestones Cloudy, but the Strawby Cider was fantastic.