Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

I love Leeds. It’s the Northern way of doing things. London Pride has barriers all the way down the parade route. In Leeds, you can just wander into the middle of the road, sit on a traffic island, and watch the parade swarm past you on both sides.

When Google had its ten year old birthday party, it was hard to believe that such a name, synonymous with our every day lives, was so young.

You probably do not feel that way about Worfolk 18, my adult publishing arm. But hard as it is to believe, it has now been going ten years! A decade of supporting freedom of expression, fighting censorship and empowering women.

To celebrate we got together in Fab Cafe. Here is a photo. It is very dark for obvious reasons.

Last month I attended a Leeds PHP event where the guest speaker was Konstantin Kudryashov, author of Behat. He made a great case of how using BDD can really help you stay on track with the agile process.

Unfortunately I was sat directly behind a massive dan boy who spend the entire time enthusiastically nodding to everything that was said. I am sure he is a nice guy, it was just very distracting.

Richard had a very different opinion. He described most of what BDD did was nonsense. It works fine on your Symfony2 stack, but it just adds massive overhead for little benefit he argued, citing an example of how the company he is working with at the moment has just ripped years worth of it out.

I know what he means. It does work great on some stacks but become difficult on others. Also, I was working with a company that had done half their unit testing in it. I will not mention which mayor subscription TV company that was, but it was a great example of applying Behat to the wrong use.

However, on the whole I think BDD really can add a huge amount of structure and benefit to a product. You can knock “value” as a buzzword, but actually it just means actually focusing on what makes a product better and that genuinely is all that matters.

For the February meeting of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire we had a talk on highwaymen. The first half looked at the practice in general and the second half focused on Dick Turpin and how he ended up in Yorkshire. With some myth-debunking along the way too!

What was a little confusing though is that the speaker the last recorded case was in the nineteenth century. Has nobody been robbed then? Because my understanding was that it still happened…

For the January meeting of Leeds Skeptics, Anna Semlyen spoke on why Leeds should have a blanket twenty mile an hour speed limit.

I thought it was a fascinating topic as it is one that really challenges us to think about our views (as opposed to Big Foot, that is just us basically laughing at stupid people). She made some great points about safety, though the other points about public health benefit (people walk more when the speed limit is lower) remain unproven. It invoked some engaging debate and I really enjoyed the event.

You can find out more about the campaign on their website.

What do you do when your Business Analyst spends all his time working from home? Individually wrap everything on his desk and put it under the office Christmas tree of course.

Last month, Simon Singh came to Leeds Skeptics to promote his new book, The Simpsons and their Hidden Mathematical Secrets.

Turn out was excellent, we had 85 people there, topping our previous record of 68. We had to move a lot of the tables out of the room, move extra chairs in and still had people queuing out of both doors.

Simon put on a very entertaining talk and it was a pleasure to host him.

At the end of October we went down to Wembley to watch the San Francisco 49ers at the Jacksonville Jaguars.

It was quite worried before going in that the stadium would be so huge I would find it intimidating, but it was actually okay – I found it a lot better than the MEN, despite it holding four or five times as many people. The hot dogs were pretty good. The queues to get into the stadium were annoying.

The game ended 42-10, which was always going to happen given Jacksonville has lost all 8 games this season, and the 49ers went to the Super Bowl last year. It would have been nice if the game had been a little closer, but far more enjoyable than spending all that money to see San Francisco lose.

It moves quite slowly on TV, with them constantly stopping and starting. But that wasn’t the case in the stadium. Between every play there were a band, the cheerleaders doing a dance, scoring from NFL Red Zone or other distractions to keep you entertained. In fact, before I knew what was happening, the game was over!

Here are some photos, albeit taken on my phone:

The Jaguars ran onto the field with flags twice. This is from the second time; the first time they spelt it “JAGAURS”.

Also a panorama, click for full size:

After a three month break covering July, August and September, Wendy House finally returned this month. Here are some truly terrible photos.

Following the recent elections, we handed over to the new committee at White Rose and celebrated with a meal at Las Iguanas. The restaurant itself was a big disappointment – it took an hour and a half from us arriving to the food being served, but the company was good.