Archive for July, 2009

I attended the York Brights meetup on Wednesday. You’ll never guess what we talked about.

Oh my god, why, why can’t the debate just stop. It’s endless. It doesn’t matter what we call ourselves. Of course it actually does matter but it’s not the most important thing in the world, we have far bigger problems as a movement.

The seperation does fall into the category of a major problem but it would cease to be one if we could just all work out it doesn’t really matter that much what we call ourselves as long as we’re pushing the same agenda.

Can we please, please, stop talking about the name.

Got home last night to find my exhaust was hanging off the bottom of my car.

This is the new exhaust I had fitted a month or two ago so I wasn’t overly amused. After having duct taped it back in place this morning I phoned my local branch of Alba and explained one of their other branches had put me it on and it was now hanging off and could they fix it.

They said no.

Apparently they also use different suppliers and have to go through those supplies so if I took it down there, they would then phone the branch that did the work and get them to order the part then once they had it it would be sent to the branch I was now at before they could do the work.

So I phoned up the branch that originally did the work who said bring it down and they would get it looked at.

This is where it all goes a bit wrong for the blog post really because shock of all shocks – I had a good experience with a garage! I took it down there on my lunch break and though I spent ten minutes just waiting for them to get round to me once they said they sorted it out for me and didn’t try to charge me either.

It kind of ruins the whole tone of the blog post really as I wrote the first half this morning before taking it down to them expecting to have loads more to rant about, but I don’t. Well done Alba, I guess.

If I did want to continue the rant however I could easily point out that these victories shouldn’t be so rare in modern life. I seem to spend most of my lunch breaks running around trying to fix one thing or the other – the extended blog post about housing that should hopefully arrive in the next few weeks (I’m waiting until it’s sorted so don’t hold your breath) is testament to that. Life shouldn’t be full of all these problems. It shouldn’t be a fantastic day when something is actually sorted as it should be. Still, that is the modern world I guess. Today was a good day.

In preparation for a more formal launch of my foundation, ChrisWorfolk.com is being redesigned to be a bit more appropriate for incorporating the foundation’s website into it. Also it was finally time to move up the world – the days of 800×600 resolutions are gone and it just looks silly on the 22″ monitors the kids are knocking around with these days. As such the new design is expanded to fill more space.

The new site is now available for feedback before the final steps such as validating the HTML and doing browser compatibility are done, you can check it out here.

Tonight saw the usual Tuesday night Atheist Society social which again delivered a fairly recent turnout given that it is the summer holidays and nobody is around. More importantly they managed to put some dressing on my burger this week which was most welcome 😉 .

Headed out to The Library for Sunday lunch today, ended up staying there for most of the afternoon before heading down to Oracle on the canel. We ended up finding the Waterfront Festival which had a live band on so we ended up spending some time sat in the sunshine on the waterfront watching the band.

Walked past the Subway in the St. Johns Centre today. You can tell we had just had a Saturday night in Leeds – they hadn’t had time to clean the blood off yet.

I was driving to work yesterday when I saw a land rover with the A-Soc slogan on the back. I can only presume they are a big fan of the society 😉 .

Today is an anniversary. It’s been five years since I made my first blog post. Back in the day it was on Nerd Federation and I’m not even sure if I really knew what blogging was but since then I’ve go on to write over 1,700 posts on my personal blog alone as well as for dozens, maybe even hundreds of other blogs.

It’s interesting to see the generational shift between us and the previous generation. I, and I’m sure people like Will and Kieran feel similarly, love my blog as it is a fantastic opportunity to share our thoughts, opinions and adventures with the world. And besides, who needs privacy anyway ;).

There only being a few of us by 6pm we headed over to The Box for a few drinks. It made for interesting conversations with Rob being the boss, Lachlan leading the PHP development and Matt leading the Flex development as well as discussions of a global nature with Rob being Irish and Lachlan being Australian.

I really enjoyed by time at Open Door but I really do appreciate the geek that Buzz has – especially when you’re boss comes to work in a Squeezebox t-shirt.

Thursday saw Moz and Sarann come on their first HAG outing. While it wasn’t the best of nights with it having poured down a few hours before there were at least some people out and about so it wasn’t a wasted night. Better than Sophie & Jon’s first time!