Archive for March, 2009

Yesterday was a busy day at work. We ended up being £140 off the record day which was somewhat disappointing, not to mention it put us hours behind.

So in the end we didn’t get out until after 3am which as we were switching to British Summer Time resulted in it actually being after 4am and so not setting off home until about 4:20 I ended up getting to bed at 5am! Most unhelpful when I had to get up today at a reasonable hour to get some work done.

People being very unoriginal and lazy (not to mention late) we were forced to repeat a restaurant tonight. Still at least we did it in style with Nando’s as you can never have too much chicken. Rich went for hot this time and after pointing out my lack of nerves for only going for medium proceeded to struggle to eat his food because it was too hot 😀 .

Afterwards we headed for some ice cream and I finally met our new store manager Matt who seems like a decent enough guy even if we barely exchanged any words. Still I’m sure I’ll find out in full next Saturday.

With the Easter holidays having arrived activities have somewhat subsided and so I was able to get an evening free to head to the Deer Park with Si for some dinner. It’s been a while since we’ve been out for some good and the odd bottle of coke so I actually really enjoyed the short catch up even if in the grand scheme of things a few weeks isn’t that much.

On Thursday myself and Rich headed out to continue our work for the newly formed Humanist Action Group.

Rich had cooked up a chicken strew this week which we were hoping would be a little more popular than soup but apparently not. This was probably due to the fact that there were less people out this week but it didn’t help when one of them turns out to be a vegetarian.

It is good to see some people are really getting somewhere though, one woman who we talk to every week now has a job selling The Big Issue and as such is getting a house from the council too. It’s almost inspiring to think that we have only been doing this a few weeks and we’re already seeing people get back on their feet (not by anything we’ve done or anything, it’s just nice to see).

Having got the wrong month in February, we finally headed down for the long awaited karaoke social at The Eldon. It was in theory a joint Jazz & Blues and Atheist Society social but I’m not sure anyone from J&B actually turned up. Luckily, even with it being the holidays, A-Soc managed to put out a decent turn out and provide most of the musical entertainment too.

I signed up for to sing but ended up leaving before it was my turn so unfortunately everyone missed out on my Cerys Matthews impression to the tune of Catatonia’s Mulder and Skully but we did get Zoltan singing Rick Astley’s timeless Never Going To Give You Up so who can complain?

Our traditional final round of planning meetings for Rationalist Week which take place over the Easter holidays kicked off last Tuesday. We managed to keep the meeting under two and a half hours which isn’t bad going for this time of year.

Zoltan’s train had been delayed but he finally arrived back from his jailbreak and joined us in The Terrace around 10:45 for a well earned drink. He managed 150 miles in the end though by road that is actually 260 miles travelled which is pretty damn impressive.

This morning (well probably yesterday morning now) at the ungodly time of 6:15am myself and Sophie turned up to see Zoltan off on his way for his jailbreak to raise money for Rationalist Week. Armed with only £10 and his wits he had to get as far away from Leeds as possible, the more miles he got, the more money he earns.

Afterwards I headed over to Kirstall to get some breakfast and found myself outside of work by 6:45. Knowing Gaz wouldn’t be there until 8:20ish to open up I decided to stretch out along the back seat and grab some much needed kip. I can confirm that the back seat of a 2001 Astra LS is rather comfortable 😉 .

Having arrived home on Sunday I headed straight back out the door again to meet everyone at Colton Mill for a few drinks. Our Sunday night activities seem to be getting later and later, it is something that we really should work on even if I do really need the time to get more work done.

As part of appeasing my mum as is the tradition on Mothering Sunday I joined my family for a visit up to Hartlepool to visit my sister who is at university up there and had offered to host the day’s celebratings by cooking a meal. As predicted it was quite boring. But they do have a nice church.

Today saw the March edition of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub. Norm had decided to pull out last week so Daryl bravely stepped up at the last minute to present his talk. There were quite a few new faces down there which was good to see, hopefully the word is starting to spread.

Daryl’s talk was amazing, it was about the power of exponentials and the technological singularity which obviously was of great interest to me as a computer scientist. It was interesting because we also carried out usual hat of skeptism but nobody could really pick any major wholes in the latest thoughts outlined by Ray Kurzweil in his book “the singularity is near.”

In the book he outlines that the technological singularity is both achievable and near given that technological growth is exponential. It really is a facinating area and one that I will be keeping a much closer eye on in future.