Archive for May, 2009

Me and Eric had been saying for a few months now that when the weather got warmer we would do a BBQ after the close one night. The weather having got better recently I decided that Saturday was the day we should finally go for it and despite initial rain when we started out shift it was (relatively) warm and dry by the time we got out. So we settled down for a BBQ and a beer in the car park – epic win 😀 .

The photos didn’t come out too clear as I’m still playing around with my various camera settings but it portrays the idea.

I’m quite proud I managed to cook everything without killing anyone and Becky brought along drinks and donuts too so it was quite a night.

I ended up with a bit of a crazy weekend (again) over the past few days.

Friday I did my usual shift at Open Door before heading over to The D to do a close. I then got up on Saturday and did some freelance work before going back to The D to do another close. On Sunday I got up early (having only got in at 4:30am) to go to Michelle’s baptism then grabbed some more sleep before heading out to the pub and then back to The D for a third time for another close.

This resulted in me getting to bed at about 3:45 and getting back up for work about four and a half hours later.

As such, tiring would be a good way to sum up my weekend.

Thursday saw an interfaith social supposedly organsed by the interfaith assembly. They didn’t really do anything other than delegate all the work to Nicola though. The event featured a quiz and a buffet which was nice though Nicola did all the food so it soon ran out. Of course the real socialising took place in The Old Bar afterwards but that is to be expected 😀 .

Congratulations to Paul, who along with others including myself, who was one of the first set of people to be awared honorary life membership to Leeds Atheist Society. It just shows you if you that if you really put time and effort in you can come out with a nicely designed certificate ;). And much more besides of course!

On Tuesday I delivered a short series of talks to Atheist Society on evolution. It focused on some of the fun facts of evolution and strange twists which don’t seem to make sense at first but then, when you actually find out the answer, it makes perfect sense. The enemy of the god of gaps if you will.

ASP has a lot of “interesting” features shall we say. I’ve just been working with the dictionary object which is basically an array with named items, so everything has a key and value pair.

There is a method to add elements to it which accepts variables instead of literal text strings (as you would expect of course) but it doesn’t seem to accept variables in array.

For example, this will not work…

totals.Add RSTdata(“id”), 10
Response.Write(totals(RSTdata(“id”)))

However this will work just fine…

idNumber = RSTdata(“id”)
totals.Add idNumber, 10
Response.Write(totals(idNumber))

This isn’t quite as cool as the way ASP decides the forget about some variables but only after you’ve referenced them for the first time creating a rather nice heisenbug when you put in a few print lines but never the less interesting.

Having got to bed for the first time in a few days in the early hours of Sunday morning I found myself waking up and checking my phone to see it was 7:30pm! So I got up, headed out to the pub for a few drinks, grabbed some food and then came home and went back to bed. If only every day could be like that 😀 .

On Saturday myself, Tom and Norm were down at Conway Hall for an AHS meeting. Unfortunately given that it was sandwiched in between two shifts at work I wasn’t able to spend any extra time in London, which is very disappointing especially given it was a bank holiday and so otherwise I didn’t have to be back in Leeds until Tuesday. Still, probably for the best given I don’t have any money at the moment.

The meeting itself was resonably productive, at least given the baseline of not productive in any way which was what I expected. It has certainly given some food for thought although I think as well as moving things forward we’ve still come away with conflicting visions of what we think the AHS is as this issue never really got raised in the meeting.

At the end of the day though that is probably always going to be the case in a free thinking organisation. And all the better for it.

For those of you that have been following my Twitter feed you will probably have seen me counting up the hours over the Friday Saturday period. Why? Because I had a 44 hour marathon to work through.

As usual I did my regular day job on Friday at Open Door Design which is about managable but this Friday I was also doing a close that evening so I headed straight off from Open Door at 5pm to start my close at 6pm. That finished at just gone 3 at which point I dropped my Tesco to pick up some essential supplies and home to pick Norm up before heading down to the station.

By 4:45 we were sitting on a train about to head down to London for an AHS exec and trustees meeting at Conway Hall. This lasted most of the day though I had to leave at 2pm so I could be on a train by 2:30 to get back up to Leeds in time to start another close on Saturday evening. I ended up getting home from that at 4am Sunday morning. Crazy.

I couldn’t really sleep on the way down there as the train was too noisy, on the way back I was far more tired but was on my own by this point so I didn’t want to have any real sleep given I had my laptop and DSLR camera on me.

Most impressive of all, I managed it on like two cans of Red Bull compared to the several litres I would normally be on. That’s only slightly very unhealthy 😀 .

Thursday saw myself, Rich and Nicola head out for our usual Thursday night jaunt and once again it would seem we’ve been so amazing we’ve done ourself out of a job. We ended up seeing like three people all night thoiugh this is certainly a good sign once you put aise personal efforts.

In any case it resulted in us being able to head to the Victoria Hotel for a pint with everyone else – except that once we had arrived everyone was leaving! So we headed up to The Old Bar for a quick drink which turned into a few pints of Rich and so in the end I didn’t end up getting to bed until well after midnight – not good for the day I had ahead of me tomorrow :S.