As you probably know, atheists are currently celebrating Stephen Hawking announcing there is officially no god.

I was on BBC Radio Leeds talking about it earlier. It went pretty badly to be honest, I could have spoken a lot better and we ended up discussing what evidence I would require to believe in god rather than talking about Hawking’s new book. Never the less it’s always an experience and it’s great to get a mixture of view points on the show which BBC Leeds are always really good at.

You can listen again for seven days on the BBC website, it’s about 38 minutes in.

Last night was the best Wendy I have had in a long time. And it’s always good so that is quite impressive. The broad range of characters turning up really helped the situation I think, it felt so old school with so many people back there. Indeed in total we managed 18 people making us easily the biggest circle on the dance floor. Who says we’re too old to party .

The first weekend of September will play host to our new national event, Sunrise Conference. Hosted by LUU Debating Society in association with ourselves, Sunrise will bring together leaders of free thinking groups from across the UK to share ideas, knowledge and experience.

The conference will feature multiple streams aimed at local groups, student groups and also provide training for those wishing to volunteer as humanist chaplains. A full timetable along with a list of speakers already signed up to speak at the conference can be found on the website.

We got in this morning to find that one of the server’s external connections was down. Upon further investigation I found that the internet was in fact working fine, we just had a different IP address which is why the network monitoring was reporting that the server wasn’t responding.

I phoned up Opal, a part of TalkTalk, who have apparently taken over from Pipex – they didn’t tell us or anything, I just headed over to the Pipex Business website and found it was now an Opal website. I tried logging in to see our customer details but it didn’t accept my username or password and I couldn’t reset my password because I didn’t have an Opal customer number.

I phoned them up and sat in a queue for 10 minutes before getting through to someone who told me I was through to the wrong department. She informed me our line had a block on it and then put me through to the “other” technical department at which point I sat in another phone queue for 10 minutes before finally getting through to the right person.

I asked about the block and he informed me that they had cut us off because we hadn’t paid. This is because none of the credit or debit card payments transferred over when Pipex customers were moved over to Opal – only direct debit customers were safe and we’re not a direct debit customer because they messed that up recently and so we had to pay via credit card instead.

As a result they had cut our internet off – except in a moment of sheer incompetence they haven’t actually cut us off, they just think they have – I can actually access the internet fine. If it wasn’t for the fact that I needed our IP address back I would have just ignored them as the fools they are.

He informed me that if I made a payment they could re-activate my account. But he couldn’t take that payment or put me through – I had to phone back on a different number. I then asked about the fact I couldn’t log in and he said I would need to speak to Pipex, providing a third separate number I would need to phone to get that sorted out.

Fun times.

Less than 24 hours after I was in the BBC Radio Leeds studio talking about UFOs I was asked to make a return the air waves this time to talk about psychics.

I was actually surprised as I didn’t feel my previous interview went that well though this one went much better, I think because I was actually invited on to properly rubbish the claims rather than just add a one line counter voice to the Exopolitics conference.

The item was surrounding the recent news that Joe Power – the man who sees dead people – has had his show pulled from the Edinburgh Fringe because it’s rubbish. Watch him totally miss on Derren Brown Investigates in this clip.

Beginning the ground work for our trip to Monte Carlo next month, we hit Grosvenor Casino recently to get some practice in (because everyone knows the more you practice at games of chance, the luckier you get).

It was an interesting contrast to Alea which is a bit more up market but as a consequence the food and drink is a bit pricer, as are the minimum stakes.

Grosvenor was instead a little more cheap and cheerful but never the less had some great views and friendlier croupiers, even if some of them did struggle a little with the whole adding up on black jack.

Plus Norm managed to walk with with more than double his stake I can only came away £4 down so on balance it was a really good night. Unfortunately things didn’t go quite so well for George.

I finally got to see Gijsbert’s new house yesterday. It’s very nice indeed! Located in Adel, the street could easily be confused for a JCT600 showroom with lines of Mercedes, BMWs and and Audis. Detached and everything.

It was quite a nice garden at the back too – you could even describe it as being very appropriate for humanist summer BBQs similar to those held by the North Yorkshire Humanist Group which I attended last summer.

Michelle dropped by last week in between her many travels.

We went to Blackhouse, the steak house in the city centre now located where Est Est Est used to be which I really, really recommend! I’m not convinced it was better than River Plate but certainly matches it and River Plate was amazing in itself. Cannot recommend it enough.

Afterwards we headed up to The Hedley Verity which is the new Lloyds No. 1 bar (essentially, a Wetherspoon’s with disco lights). That is located where Baja Beach Club used to be. I can’t say I spent much time in Baja because I didn’t start really going out and getting drunk until I was 18 and was therefore already three years too old to be hanging out in Baja.

What struck me though was how easily we all quickly slipped back into old times, arguing over socialist vs conversative politics and getting drunk. Good times.

In a sea of everything going wrong at the moment, I got some very pleasant news on Thursday morning when I found out my car passed it’s MOT! I was expecting it to fail to be honest because of the right up it got on it’s last service but apparently everything is in working order enough for it to be road legal so let the good times roll.

Last Sunday saw the May meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds. It was well attended and all those who spoke to me gave positive feedback – indeed a record number of people stayed on for Sunday lunch and we had to have the restaurant expand the area we are normally in!