Archive for the ‘Photos’ Category

A few weeks ago, myself and our office manager Rebecca were engaged in a casual conversation about life, the universe and everything. We ended up on the topic of universal justice and how the only way we could really ensure that was to have some kind of vigilante system, like Batman.

She agreed, so I asked if we were to get her a Batman costume, whether she would wear it to work. She launched and said she would, if it were a Batgirl outfit.

So half an hour later I arrived in the Snooty Office (that’s the other side of the building where the business development team sit who are far too above coming to the pub for lunch) with a tin full of money – it’s amazing how the office really come together in donating to a good cause.

I recently headed over to Hull to present a talk to Hull & East Riding Humanists.

The journey was reasonable, I was pretty starving by the time I got there but the only place I could find to eat was a Little Chef so I ended up going hungry 😉 . Having arrived with an hour to spare, I decided to have a look round Hull. Turns out some parts of it are quite nice.

The talk was fairly well received, there was a good mix of skeptics and believers though I perhaps didn’t answer the critics well enough – there was nothing suggested that wasn’t pre-answered by Kurzweil or De Gray and that perhaps prevented us from discussing the criticisms which actually do stand up in more depth. Still I found it a very much enjoyable talk to give.

The venue was the Plotting Room of Ye Olde White Hearte which is apparently where the English Civil War was started. It’s a hard act to follow to be honest, I feel a bit of a let down after I found that out.

Earlier this evening Jonni dragged us out to Eccup so we could have dinner at a pub named the New Inn which he had been raving about for a while.

It was a bit of a mission to find. Having headed up Scott Hall Road I ended up on some windy country lane which was only one car wide and had trees overgrowing, entirely blocking out the sky making it feel like the Forest of Fangorn. Having got through that we eventually found what I can only describe as being similar to Westfall at night with no lights and just the occasional rustic farm signpost.

Never the less we eventually found the place and ordered ourselves up a couple of 16oz t-bone steaks. The photo really doesn’t do them justice, we spend a good 30 minutes going at them and what was left at that point still looked like an entire meal. Ignore the massive onion rings, compare the size of the plate to Kat’s meal behind. Needless to say, I was eventually defeated (which to be honest, I’m quite proud as, as I actually managed to tell myself to stop eating because I was full lol).

Having safely returned from our trip across Europe I’ve finally got round to adding all my photos into the photo gallery website I designed while in La Rochelle.

You should be warned now that essentially “this site is best viewed on Chris’s computer.” Ideally you need a Javascript enabled Firefox which you can run full screen on a 22″+ full HD resolution monitor hucked with a reasonably fast broadband connection. You may think to yourself this reasonably poor usability – and you’d be right. But as I have that, my friends at work have that and my parent have that, I don’t really care about anyone else. Well, not that I don’t care about you, I just don’t think it worth my time to make a usable gallery for photos you probably don’t give a crap about.

In any case, you can check out the photo gallery in all it’s beautifully transitioned jquery glory which doesn’t even look good over the internet because it takes so long to load everything and is therefore only good when viewed on a local machine anyway, but again, see above, here.

We’ve long talked about doing suit day at work. Well this week it finally happened! Now of course we’re back to “dress down year” but it was fun while it lasted.

Last weekend saw Leeds Pride 2010, stealing many of our members of Humanist Community away for the day – but we’re not bitter or anything 😉 . The event itself was good, there were stalls and some live entertainment though I have to say I was somewhat disappointed by the parade.

Having spent time at Disneyland maybe I expect too much out of parades but Gijsbert noted the same thing – even compared to St. Lois our parade was rather low effort. Most of it was just people walking around, which is rubbish, you want to see floats and coordinated dancing, and costumes. Even the floats that were there were simply people riding around on buses.

Ultimately though it probably comes down to the apathy generated by a lack of marginalisation. Gays are simply not discriminated against in the UK, it’s perfectly normal and acceptable to be gay (as it should be too!) so we simply don’t feel the need to make as much noise as they would in the US for example.

A few things did really amuse me though.

First of all, LGBT Conservatives. Lol.

Also, the fact that there were two different Christian groups – “Christians Together at Pride” and “Some Christians are Gay – Get over it!” Even if something as niche as gay Christians (or Christians suffering from “same sex attraction” as the True Freedom Trust puts it) they still manage to splinter themselves.

You can see loads more photos from Leeds Pride on my Facebook album.

While my photography skills are far too amateur for me to call myself an amateur photographer, on reviewing the photos I got back from London I was quite pleased to find that some of them turned out quite interesting, particularly those where I had managed a short depth of field utterly blurring everything but the focal points.

Lachlan having sent us over a picture of himself on the beach in Melbourne where they are currently enjoying 42 degree days we decided to enlighten him on the sudden heatwave that had hit the UK causing us to head off to the beach on Monday. A quick snaps and non involvement of Photoshop later and the email was on it’s way. You can’t tell by the pixels or anything…

Props to Vince for touching up everything slightly given the time constraints we were working under.

On Thursday myself and Kieran braved the bitter cold to go for a wander round Kirkstall Abbey. A lot of it was unfortunately closed off but we got round the main parts and the visitor’s centre which was informative if a little brief.

Myself and Ian Abbott from Lancashire Secular Humanists at the Ummah Channel studios where we were filming a debate.