In a very drunken state on New Year’s Eve I got up and announced to my good friends attending the bash that this year was going to be the year of the Chris Worfolk Foundation.

And I mean it.

As such the foundation is officially making 2010 the year which we make a name for ourselves. We have some very exciting projects on the way which we will be announcing soon alongside the exciting projects that we are already working on.

I find the current climate an incredibly interesting one, interest in making a difference in the world has never been higher, people are really passionate about improving quality of life. With the right opportunities being provided this can be put to work to do tremendous good and I fully believe we have the experience, the skills, the drive and the ambition to achieve this.

We’re already on our way building better links in the community. Next week Leeds Skeptics will be celebrating it’s first birthday and in February our first humanist community will launch – I can’t express how excited I am about opportunities such as these to bring people together in the spirit of celebrating shared human experiences.

Later this year we will be doing this on a larger scale and will expand our activities to other regions as well as continuing to drive forward with new projects, form stronger links with other organisations and inspire more people to get involved and make a difference.

2010 will be a year to remember. I hope you will join us for the journey.

Best regards,

Rev Chris Worfolk
Trustee, Chris Worfolk Foundation

Rage Against The Machine’s “Killing in the Name” beats out the X Factor single to be Christmas number one. Win.

The Saturday before last I worked my last McShift.

It’s very depressing because it’s a clear sign I’m getting older. Not that the fact that many of my work colleagues were 6-7 years younger than me wasn’t a constant reminder of my aging but somehow getting up and moving on with my life really drives the message home.

I’ll miss the place, I’ll miss the people. The people really were fun. I like most of my work colleagues but there is something about the fun and the energy of all been stuck in a crap dead on job (not that I was stuck there, essentially working for laughs but anyway) and making the best of it.

Still, onwards and upwards. I have exciting new work commitments now and new challenges ahead with my charity. This chapter may be over but the book has just begun.

I’ve added a new category named essays to my blog.

It will house all of my long whiney posts that you probably won’t reach the bottom of but should because that’s where the message is. It will hopefully be sufficently different from the thoughts category in a number of ways.

First off, they should be longer and more involved. I’ve gone back and categorised a lot of old posts into the category but rejected a lot of them simply because they were too short even though they perhaps otherwise fitted the bill.

Secondly they should be relevant to the wider audience. A lot of the posts in the thoughts category are just literally stuff I have thought about or which is relevant to my life but anything categorised into essays should have meaning for at very least a group people who don’t know me personally.

Finally they should be on some kind of important topic or aspect of life. As such many also share the categories of politics and religion, but not all of them do.

If you think there is something I should write about, why not suggest it in a comment.

Yesterday we re-launched the Leeds Skeptics in the Pub group with a new venue, new format and new speakers. The event went quite well despite Ariane have cancelled us on due to illness earlier the week – we got a better than average turn out and it was thumbs up all round for the new venue. We also took a lot of feedback about how we can improve in the future so we will continue to improve from here.

Wednesday saw the first official meeting of the trustees since formation.

It was most productive with us talking long into the night over possible ideas and strategies for the organisation and out of it has come some really productive action points. I can’t talk about what these are yet but hopefully we’ll have more news on these soon!

We have also established regular trustee meetings now also so things should start moving forward at quite a pace.

Received the certificate of incorporation from Companies House on Monday! As such it went straight into the most expensive Tesco Value frame available – and no, I won’t be claiming that on expenses .

Having taken over iStock a while back, Getty have now aquired by other favourite stock site, stock.xchng.

Granted the quality of iStock has not dipped since Getty took over but the prices have certainly seen a significant rise since they did. It will be interesting to see what changes they bring in to SXC, they have already replaced the Stock Expert premium links with iStock ones though so far little else seems to have changed.

In preparation for a more formal launch of my foundation, ChrisWorfolk.com is being redesigned to be a bit more appropriate for incorporating the foundation’s website into it. Also it was finally time to move up the world – the days of 800×600 resolutions are gone and it just looks silly on the 22″ monitors the kids are knocking around with these days. As such the new design is expanded to fill more space.

The new site is now available for feedback before the final steps such as validating the HTML and doing browser compatibility are done, you can check it out here.

Today is ananniversary. It’s been five years since I made my first blog post. Back in the day it was on Nerd Federation and I’m not even sure if I really knew what blogging was but since then I’ve go on to write over 1,700 posts on my personal blog alone as well as for dozens, maybe even hundreds of other blogs.

It’s interesting to see the generational shift between us and the previous generation. I, and I’m sure people like Will and Kieran feel similarly, love my blog as it is a fantastic opportunity to share our thoughts, opinions and adventures with the world. And besides, who needs privacy anyway .