Archive for the ‘Atheist Soc’ Category

The early hours of Friday morning saw my new podcast launch onto the world wide web!

The first episode recorded by myself, Moz, Liz and Fonze is, as with all the episodes, officially about “religion” nut completely off topic constantly. From now on a new episode will appear each Friday and judging my the standards of last night they are going to get better and better as we go along.

You can find the podcast on my website and there is also an RSS feed so you can subscribe with RSS readers, iTunes, etc.

Thursday saw us do a second session of podcasting. Luckily my new studio mixer arrived that very afternoon so we were able to huck up all 4 microphones and all the sets of headphones so that pretty much everyone could have their own mic and headphones plus I dropped my Maplin on my way home to pick up a few more accessories.

Paul, Moz and Nicola turned up along with Liz and Sarann eventually joining us which resulted in a good solid number and some random conversations. We made it through 3 episodes though didn’t really manage to discuss any of the official topics for any length of time lol.

All in all it was really good although we were up talking until about 1:30 or something and because I had work to do after that my early night turned into getting to bed at 3:10! Needless to say I was rather tired Friday morning.

Another Tuesday, another record breaking A-Soc social. This time we managed 18 people just creeping ahead of the previous summer socials and most probably the most well attended event since Rationalist Week 2008. We had more people in there than the rest of The Old Bar put together including both patrons and staff.

There were so many people I wanted to chat to I didn’t manage to make it round everybody though I did manage to beat Oli at pool. It was fantastic to see everyone in good spirits too - Rich returned for a second week which was fantastic, Liz got quite drunk, George was out and about and both Matt’s were brandishing a smile which I am most pleased about.

The evening came close (in a way) with my somehow standing on the steps outside of the union preaching about upcoming events to everyone and though I am reliably informed by a multitude of texts from various people that many of the others went on to party in Hyde Park. Fantastic stuff.

Yeah :D.

A-Soc is continuing to do well over summer, we managed 16 people to this week’s Tuesday social.

We are getting a great attendance every week and a good mix of new people and recurring people which tend to mix from week to week as people go on holiday and we still maintain our numbers, not bad, not bad at all.

Meanwhile I got the proofs from the printers back for the business cards. I sent them the high quality 300dpi source files to printing and to make sure the vectors looked right when they opened them I sent along some sample JPEGs in low quality with the word “sample” written in big letters on them just so there would be no confusion.

It having been a few days I had already phoned them to ask where the proofs were, apparentely they had been sent and had just “gone missing” before they arrived in my inbox. So once it was re-sent I opened them up to find them with a note saying the image quality was poor and with the word “sample” written in big letters across them.

I’m assured by the graphic designers in my office that this is quite normal behaviour for printers. So the fun may be just beginning there. Hoodies might turn up soon if we’re lucky too.

Short tags. My one victory of the night.

It’s been one of those days.

I got my new equipment delivered today in preparation for the podcast. The mic stands are, well, awful. They are way too big. Still I’m sure I can look beyond that if only Behringer had got back to me in terms of configuring my mixing deck so sound comes out. I haven’t got that far yet so I’m now sitting on lots and lots of very expensive equipment that I can’t get to work and we start recording the show in just over a week.

A-Soc. I had to redo the artwork for the membership cards because everyone prints different “standard size” business cards apparently. I don’t know if my artwork has sent because all my SMTP servers sent my email then told me it had rejected it. And I can’t order the hoodies because people aren’t answering their phones after they haven’t responded to my emails. I can’t test the A-Soc website locally because the MySQL server keeps rejecting my connections.

Finance. I’ve had £170 go missing out of my account which means I have had to cancel my card so now at some point I need to go home and get my new card and no doubt spend time on the phone activating it too as well as going through the fraud procedures.

Web. My web host isn’t returning my emails with regards to the fact they have lost my database. I still can’t commit all of my files to the SVN for House Metrics but the one victory I have had tonight is short tags. Having finally got everything running, anything without a full

Plus I finally have the second series of Doctor Who. Guess you have to take your victories where you find them.

I think it’s saying something when an attendance of 12 for A-Soc in the middle of summer when all the students have gone home and when we’re not even running a tangible event is a low turn-out :D.

I went down to Leeds’ Cafe Scientifique last night to check out what it was all about as it comes highly recommended by Paul. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s basically a monthly event where you can go for a coffee/beer/etc and there is a talk and discussion on some kind of scientific topic.

It’s all very laid back, the topic of yesterday’s meeting was “psychotherapy – science or religion?” which involved a 25 minute talk, an interval so we could get another round of drinks in and then a general discussion session where people could ask queations.

The talk wasn’t bad though I wasn’t overly impressed. While most people there seemed to have a fair grounding in psychotherapy, I felt a bit lost not knowing a whole lot about it. Having said that, it was fairly glossy, which is to be expected in a 25 minute talk but I thought there could have been a lot more complex detail for some of us to try and get our head round if we so wished to try.

It was all very middle class though the age range wasn’t too bad, there were plenty of “young” people there (people aged below 40 shall we say). It is hosted by 7Arts in Chapel Allerton which is a lovely new building that, I noted, would make an excellent venue for a fledgling Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that needed to hire a venue until his noodliness blessed us with huge amounts of finances.

Camping having been cancelled, it was down to Chris the wonder kid to throw together some kind of A-Soc event to ensure we did something over the weekend. So, us now having a dining room and all we throw together a dinner party for those of us that were still around over summer.

In the end it turned out rather well - we managed a full seven courses as well as offering people a choice with several courses and best of all, nobody died. Nobody at all. There was a turn up for the books indeed. So given I haven’t really cooked for like a year or two now, I’m going to chalk it down as a victory.

It also presented some interesting experiences. I gave the port a try, which I didn’t find very drinkable but there you go, it wasn’t particuarly good port anyway, and some of Norm’s fancy Brazilian coffee which I did manage to stomach. I think that is a sign of me getting old. But should be good for all nighters I guess. Not that anyone is going to be pulling out a cafetiere during such times.

A-Soc rules.

It really does. We’re like the only people doing anything at the moment it seems.

Despite it now being summer, university having finished and everyone having gone home we are still seeing turns outs of dozens of people for A-Soc’s weekly social event. Take that Buddha!