Archive for February, 2009

Sunday being Galileo Day we decided to celebrate in the traditional way with a Galileo Day Feast. Sunday would have provided far too much time to prepare so we held it on Monday night on which I didn’t get home until 6:30 so eating at 8pm wasn’t bad at all.

Well, sort of. AJaxian wrote a very interesting post about display: table CSS and how after all this time of moving away from table layouts to CSS layouts we are now putting it all into CSS so we can essentially use table layouts again. It’s about time.

We’ve all spent years moving over to CSS layouts and support has gradually been getting better but we still can’t do a lot of basic stuff that you can do with tables without lots of hacks and crazy implementations that shouldn’t be there.

Take for example creating columns. We’re still using faux background images to create the column backgrounds and then putting a clear: both div below everything which shouldn’t really be there in semantic mark-up because it has no meaning, it’s just a CSS hack. These are things we could do with ease using tables.

While I’m on the subject there is also an interesting article on TJK Design about building layouts without using floats, the site being built entirely using lists which degrades beautifully if you turn off CSS.

Sunday evening saw us head down for a nice meal at Bella Italia.

Which was closed. Balls. It being rather late and the other Bella Italias being a bit of a mission away we decided to head to the Flaming Dragon which was also at Xscape and offered a taste of the orient in some kind of mega buffet.

To be fair it delivered quite well, the range of starters was quite impressive, indeed I spent most of my time there as it was probably better than the choice of mains (which was also good) and the dessert selection included crunchy nut corn flakes and an ice cream machine so the hybrid mix was obviously.

I got through quite a random mix of stuff including sushi, squid, seaweed, some kind of pork belly thing and a large selection of other dishes that I at least vaguely recognised. The quality of the food itself was buffet quality shall we say but that is to be expected, given it was a buffet and all.

Afterwards we still ended up at KFC because it’s like, the law. Plus it provided as a nice place to sleep the food off as my missing Twitter update indicated last night. Good times.

I headed out to the Deer Park with Si this lunch time for Sunday lunch, perhaps somewhat in celebration of beating Charlotte by a good two hours on our closing race last night and because there is never a bad day to go for a pub lunch.

The real shock of the day is that having sat down and pretended to look at the menu before going for the same thing I always have, I actually choose something different this time! Sure I went for a burger rather than a steak but still, I think it’s big leap to actually alter my usual selection.

I really enjoyed today to be honest, it was nice that it was just the two of us, it’s an excellent chance to be cynical without someone dragging the mood up. Sunday lunch is about relaxed chat, a nice meal and then heading home for a nap, none of this hyper talkative nonsense. Just a relaxing lunch so I can drift off and pretend for an hour or two that I don’t have a pile of work to get through.

Friday saw the Christian Union come to Perspective to talk to us about their faith. It was an interesting event shall we say.

While so far Perspective has been fairly restrained so far there were some rather heated discussions on Friday and behaviour on the A-Soc side was quiet frankly not up to scratch. We persevered though and at least the feedback I got from Joe from the CU when chatting to him afterwards was that people were at least asking geniune questions which is what Perspective is all about.

The food was a bit of a disaster too, the catering plans feel through and so I had to be dispatached to bring in pizza which resulted in there not being much food to go around. All in all, not the most successful session but at least the discussions kept going long into the night.

Last Friday saw the first planning meeting for Rationalist Week 2009. While the event is still over two months away things are finally starting to fall into place and we’re about half way through our fundraising drive for it so we need to keep the momentum going on.

The first meeting was really just to throw around ideas but the week is starting to take shape now, at least as outlining the events we want to do. Exciting stuff!

Last Thursday saw A-Soc’s Darwin Day 2009 celebration in the union. Thanks to the hard work of Nicola and Sophie as well as the baking of Norm and Michelle, it was an all day party which ended up raising us some cash for Rationalist Week too.

If you aren’t aware, today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Darwin was a brilliant scientist that who moved our knowledge of the origins of life on uncountably despite the controversial nature of his work. Happy birthday Charles!

Well that’s it, I’m now a card carrying Humanist.

On the plus side, it would seem people are fairly receptive to moving the HSoWY meetings to a different night so we can finally end the clashing between HSoWY and A-Soc.

Last night’s talk was by Rich on Neodarwinism which was interesting. Meanwhile Norm lead a group discussion on Darwin at A-Soc, both events seemed to go down fairly well. Afterwards we converged in The Terrace so it was all good.

While I’m on the topic, congratulations to John and Zoltan who have been elected onto the committee at the EGM.

With a last minute lack of turnout on Monday night, I headed down to Club 360 at HiFi with Chris T to check out Subculture who had invited me down to watch them play.

There are quite a number of bands playing, each with their own unique style shall we say 😉 . I was impressed by Subculture, they got the crowd going and the music was good which is all you can really ask for from a gig.