Posts Tagged ‘Leeds Atheist Soc’

The weekend saw another weekend of work (fun) especially as on Sunday night Gary had overspent on labour so Martin randomly picked a handful of people not to work and they all happened to be on the night sheet – we finished filtering at 1:30 in the morning (normally you know you’re behind when it isn’t done by 8pm). Got out at like 3:30, bit more money though I guess.

Went down to the banks on Monday to move money around and try and move my student account – I’ve got a meeting to sort that out on Thursday. Went to Sarann’s for dinner which was really nice, it ended up getting gatecrashed to twice the size of the original invite list though lol. Phil was there from the start then B was brought followed by Kieran turning up and finally Matt and Kat.

Then today we had a faith and culture assembly – or so I thought, turned out it had been cancelled (nobody told us, though what was I expecting from the union?). We tried to pull together a quick committee meeting and had a main A-Soc meeting too to sum up Rationalist Week. Finished as usual with a trip to The Old Bar.

Today (or rather yesterday by now) was the Atheist Society EGM in which we approved a number of constitutional changes. Nobody bothered to read the new constitution though so the change of aims to “world domination” went unnoticed even if I failed to push through a change of name to World Domination Soc.

On a serious note, we’ve made some important changes today. We’ve expanded the committee to a total of 7 people (4 of which places are actually filled lol) as well as making some other key changes, making sure we got nominated for a few Riley awards and planned out the events were are going to round off the year with.

Congratulations to Norm on his election as secretary and Sarann on her election as social sec. It’s been a long and hard race for election and all the candidates have been desperately battling it out to get the votes they need but in the end these two simply led the best campaign trail. It’s the little things like nominating yourself for election which really show through.

Since then I’ve been coding away in DEC-10 on my graphics coursework which is due in on Thursday. I’m finally getting somewhere with it though I think I am going to have to drag my ass out of bed tomorrow morning and go speak to my lecturer to get some issues I’m having with it, resolved. I have it down to a to do list though which is always a sign that you’ve reached the final stage. That said, “the final stage” in this coursework is the hard bit.

4 days without blogging, you can tell I’ve been busy!

Thursday resulted in another day of the tent being packed out when the talks were on. Then in the evening was the debate with the Christian Union. As of course we were always going to, we lost of the vote, but most people seemed to be saying that if they weren’t voting just because they were CU and not A-Soc (of which we had around 5 members there lol) they thought we put the better debate forward.

Afterwards we headed down to The Old Bar till kick out time and discussed some more theology. Plus it was great to catch up with loads of CU members that I haven’t chatted to in ages.

Friday was a bit down because of the weather but we still got some people in for the talks and continued it throughout the day into the all night debate which went really well. We ended up serving well over 100 hotdogs as well as loads of drinks and biscuits and chatting to lots of people and shifting a lot of leaflets. It was a long day though. Having been up at 8 to finish off some coursework we stopped serving at about 3:30 then finished packing up at 6:30 and then went for breakfast and camped out HSS so we could return the generator. I ended up getting to bed at 9am – 25 hour day.

I slept most of Saturday and then got up in the evening to go to the pub for my dad’s pre-birthday drinks (old people can’t do mid-week drinking sessions so we had to move it to the weekend before). After that I headed to Wendy which was an interesting but short night (I gave up at 1 and went to get some sleep). B made a move on Sarann this time and Norm managed to get photographic evidence too.

All in all, Rationalist Week was a massive success and it’s all down to the amazing amount of work put in by Norm, Rich, Paul, Moz and Claire that the society will be forever indebted to. You guys will be going down in A-Soc history.

Rationalist Week is going so well! Today for our 2pm talk we had a full tent. A full tent! All the seats were taken, standing room only. It’s been getting steadily busier as the week has gone on and more and more people are coming down for some good old fashioned debate as well as some free biscuits of course :).

It’s doing a lot for the society too. We finished an entire membership booklet today! I had to run up to the Arc and pick up a new one just so we could continue to sign people up. We also have a lot of what has been done on camera so we will have able to make an excellent freshers intro video for next year, it’s amazing how it’s all clicking into place.

What is most amazing is how well it has pulled the society together. Norm has been absolutely indespensible and it’s safe to say the week couldn’t have happened without him. Rich, Paul, Moz and Claire have also invested lots of time too, not to mention everyone who has just come and sat round and joined in the debates.

After the week is over I look forward to building on the fantastic success that the week has brought to the society. Let’s just hope the success of the week continues for the remaining few days!

Sunday was setup day. We got the tents up without much problems and managed to test things without a hitch and indeed the generator actually ran which was awesome. Indeed worryingly few things went wrong. Not that everything went perfect, I lost a microphone clip (which I’ve now found) and we had some problems getting the generator to output power until we realised it was and we just couldn’t see that the LEDs were actually on.

Monday was an interesting daym the generator failed on us so we couldn’t do much although we got both of the talks done and got quite a few interesting people through. We also signed up another three people to the society. Then in the evening we headed to The Old Bar and then onto Bondi but that is a story for a seperate post.

Tuesday we were supposed to get a replacement generator – it never arrived. We’ve been promised it tomorrow. Signed up another two society members and got a big debate going – Rich’s talk on evolution went down really well and sparked a long debate of which we have about an hour of on video. The Beauty in Atheism talk didn’t get done in the end as I didn’t feel it was worth doing given the audience size and lack of a PA system to project it to people outside the tent. I have my big Why There Is Almost Certainly No God speech in like an hour. Eeppp.

We topped ourselves last night with the 3rd Rationalist Week planning meeting lasting 3 hours 20 minutes which is 20 minutes longer than normal. That involved some quality debate and discussion as well as planning though. Things are finally coming together, we now have the plan pretty much set out, though to be on schedule we should have by now. I guess that means we are pretty much on schedule though that would seem weird as everything students ever do is done at the last minute.

I’ve already had a busy today – after grabbing breakfast with Norm I went down to Maplins to buy some electronic gear, went to the bank, came back to place some orders, went to speak to Kay in the union, went to the cash office and I’ve been down to media services to get the posters printed. Oh I also went down to the office to get my deliveries as well, the megaphone has arrived.

I maintain that some kind of deity is watching over the events and trying to smite us though. As I shall explain.

Ordering the PA system
Last Thursday night / Friday morning I started an electronic fund transfer to move the money I needed to buy the PA system onto my credit card. I takes 4 working days given it was after 4pm on Thursday which resulted in it going into my account today.

So after 5 days of waiting I logged on at midnight last night to see if it had been sorted. It took an hour or so but eventually went through and the money was on my account! This was after the payment had appeared in my account but my balance had not updated at which point I phoned Egg to find out what was going on and was assured my balance would update soon (which it did).

I went through the shopping cart and came across a notice saying they could only deliver to the card holder’s address. My Egg card is my one thing I have registered to my uni address! And I can’t get it delivered to uni as the office closes tomorrow which is when it would be delivered so there would be nobody to sign for it (even if I could get them to contact me, I would be at work) which is why I spoke to my parents and asked them to sign for it when I got it sent home.

This had screwed me over, I needed to get it sent home so I would get it in any decent amount of time. Plan B was to use my other credit card registered at home – but the credit limit on that one isn’t high enough for me to make the purchase.

Plan C, use my debit card, but I couldn’t do that as I didn’t have enough money in my overdraft. Why you may ask? Because I transfered the money over to my Egg card to pay for it. Plan D was to split the items, max out my HSBC credit card and put the rest on my debit card as I had enough in each account to do it so that if I balanced it right I would still get free shipping on both orders.

Except they don’t accept Maestro debit cards.

So Plan E I ordered the first half on my credit card last night, then this morning I went down to the bank, drew money out of my overdraft and paid it onto my Lloyds TSB debit card which is a Visa and I did it in person so that it would go on my account straight away (at 10am because unlike every over weekday, they open at 10am instead of 9am) and then went home and ordered the second half of my order using the money I had just put onto my Visa debit card.

Then finally today I came to move the money back from my credit card to my bank account that I no longer needed on my credit card and found no option to do it. Neither Egg nor HSBC’s online banking allow me to make transfers that way. Maybe they are not configured right or haven’t been setup to do that but I can do it the other way.

So now I’m left with a credit card with loads of money on and an overdraft that is almost maxed out with a massive credit card bill from my other credit card heading it’s way. Perfect.

Despite getting to bed as late as usual last night I managed to drag my ass out of bed and make it down to The D for breakfast. Didn’t quite wake me up as much as I had hoped though, I think my spirit was all beaten down by the miserable weather. I did manage to get some productive work done though, I posted my student loan application form off, did a bit of shopping then made it to DEC-10 to finish off the A-Soc posters and do a very small amount of SY23 and SE24.

Speaking of the posters, curtesy of Izzy we now have two of them printed and they are looking pretty cool! Let’s just hope that everything on them is typo and error free as I only had time to proof them on screen so nobody else has proofed them and it wasn’t even a printed out copy, though to my credit I did read through everything as it was copied over from Writer to PowerPoint which I normally wouldn’t bother to do. Still though, I’m going to have to use a few of the stockpile of faith points that I haven’t really invested anywhere else ;).

Having said I would be in the lab yesterday I actually managed to drag my ass out of bed to get in there for 12 after another night of insomnia and get some coursework done. We’ve made a start on both SY22 and SY23 which I am quite pleased about. This compares to today when I managed to get a decent night’s sleep in and still I’m not quite up :(.

The evening consisted of another three hour planning meeting for Rationalist Week – at the moment we’re not looking too much over budget if you work the figures out the right way. Moz bought the tents and I’m buying the PA system so if you don’t count those and you don’t count all the food and drink which we’re again funding ourselves because the union won’t cover those costs (even though we wouldn’t have enough money to cover them anyway) we are only £7 over budget! That is of course before we upgrade to a bigger generator.

Everything seems to be falling nicely into place though, there is still a lot of work to do but I think we have the timescale to do it in and once we get a few more things finalised I will even pretty set. Once the event is rubberstamped by the university and we have the generator sorted I think are the main concerns at the moment. Although I’m sure it’s going to be nerve racking throughout the build-up to the event.

Later that evening we hit The Terrace to chillax for a little. It closed at 11 though, they are just not hardcore.