Archive for February, 2012

If you want to put custom entries in your computer’s DNS (for running addresses for a local server for example) you need to edit your system’s hosts file. On Unix systems this can be found at:

/etc/hosts

On Windows systems, you need to go to:

C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

To add a custom entry, first enter the IP address (if you’re running a local server you’ll want to set this as 127.0.0.1), then put a tab and then the host name.

Received this text message.

Heya! Is this Chris? Its Charlie here, I Just wanted to know whether you got started with Dianetics? What did you think of it? Let me know! Lv, Charlie (Dianetics & Scientology Life Improvement Centre

My question is, how did they get my number?

Do you have any old gloves lying around in the back of your cupboard? If so, we would really appreciate it if you would be willing to donate them to the Humanist Action Group. Here’s why…

Earlier this evening, we were out on a HAG homeless run. Discussing it beforehand, myself and Katie agreed that given how bitterly cold it was outside, we hoped we wouldn’t find anyone at all out on the streets tonight.

Unfortunately, we were wrong. Dead wrong. We found loads of people. We found so many people that we first ran out of food and had to go fetch some more, then we ran out of coffee and had to go back and brew another batch up!

By this point we had been out for hours and we were metaphorically frozen to the bone. So I can only imagine how those who had been out there all night felt.

In fact, you didn’t even need to imagine – you could see their hand physically shaking as you handed them something.

No wonder, given many of them didn’t even have gloves. This isn’t the first time we have come across this problem – I’ve seen it a few times before. Yet, it seems a problem we can easily solve.

I mean, so many of us have two many pairs of gloves. Given that one is all you really need. Maybe two at a stretch – I have my touch screen compatible gloves and my “it’s really, really cold” gloves. But why do I have a third pair? There is no reason; I just never threw them out.

There must be more than me in this situation. A pair of old but otherwise perfectly in tact pair of gloves sitting at the back of the cupboard that you don’t wear any more. If so, we would love it if you would be willing to donate them, so that we can hand them out during HAG homeless work!

So, if you get chance, please check the backs of your cupboards. It won’t cost you anything and makes a world of difference to people who are out in the bitter winter’s night. Any donations will be gladly collected by Katie, myself or any of the CWF trustees. You can even post them to us – and if you want, we’ll even refund the postage to you. Get in touch for more details.

Thanks for your support!

Chris

Recently, I received a letter from Lloyds TSB saying they had begun charging the charity a fee for its bank account. This seemed strange given we had a fee-free small charity account. So I phoned them up to find out what was going on.

Turns out, they hadn’t actually set it up as a charity account but had instead set it up as a regular business account. This meant they needed to transfer the account to a whole different area of the bank – something which is apparently quite complicated as when I phoned back to check two weeks later, the action which I was told I didn’t need to check up on because it would just be done, had not been done.

I gave it another few weeks and then I decided to log into my internet banking to see if I could see if it had been fixed. This is no small task because Lloyds TSB require you to use a card authentication system. But, because they don’t give debit cards out to small charities, they have to send you a special card, which isn’t a debit card, but which can be used in the card carder.

The card reader is massive btw, it’s not the kind of thing you can keep on your keyring, like you potentially could with the HSBC one, if you had seriously big pockets anyway, it’s not like theirs is tiny either.

So I arrived at the Lloyds TSB website and selected logon to business banking. First, I had to enter my user ID. This wasn’t easy because my user ID isn’t a memorable username as you would expect – it’s a string of nine random digits.

Luckily, they send you out a card to remember this. Though it isn’t a card with it printed on, it’s just a piece of cardboard with a white box that you can write it in yourself and hope that it doesn’t get rubbed off on the gloss finish.

I finally found my card and punched in my user ID. Step one was complete! Next I had to input the security code generated from the machine. So I dropped my authentication card into the authentication machine and typed in my PIN. It rejected it.

I tried again. It rejected it again.

So I clicked on the “I am having trouble logging in” link and it began asking me more questions about myself, for security purposes of courses. After four times of it telling me I didn’t exist, it finally let me through – only to tell me the only thing I could do was to phone the call centre.

I did phone the call centre and the nice woman at the other end of the phone said that she would have to get a new PIN sent out to me, and this would take a week to arrive (they can’t give it out over the phone to allow me to access my account now or anything). so I asked her to do that.

Next question, she needed two of the digits from my telephone banking password. I gave her those digits. She said they were incorrect. So now I can’t use telephone banking either apparently.

We eventually managed to bumble through, involving a shot in the dark guess about the year that I set up the account and a new PIN has now been dispatched to me in the post. As soon as I get that, I will be able to log into the account to check if they have changed it to the correct account type yet and refund the erroneous charge they put on the account. Wonderful.

Last week, one of my friends posted on Facebook about the depression she had been suffering from. I found it rather inspiring and so have been meaning to post an update on my own mental health issues with anxiety. Her command of the English language allowed her to put it very eloquently. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for me, so here is a rambling mess about the whole situation.

Of course, now you’re thinking, “Chris, surely you can’t have any problems – you’re my hero, the person I idolised most in the world, the closest thing we have to a human archetype.” You’re right of course, but clearly in order to achieve that I need to possess some characteristic that makes me more relatable so that the rest of you mere mortals can identify to me. It was a choice between this, or changing my name to Chris Every-Man ;).

I’ve just taken my first beta blocker. It’s a new type of medication I’m trying, after SSRIs proved to be ineffective for me. I’m now experiencing quite a wide range of side effects. None of which are listed in the list of side effects in the booklet. They’re almost certainly not caused by the medication. But that’s one of the odd things about the placebo effect, it has its good side and its bad side.

Actually, as I continue to work through my issues, I often feel like I’m learning loads about what anxiety is, and nothing about how to control it!

I also sometimes feel like the anxiety itself is also undervalued. For example, any therapist you speak to will describe it as difficulties and feeling uncomfortable. I don’t classify anxiety attacks as uncomfortable, I classify them as painful. In the same way, I would if I cut myself – it, in itself, is what I want to avoid, not just the consequences I am worrying about that are causing the anxiety in the first place.

Still, that’s just my 2p, and that’s worth a lot less than when I was a kid and you were 20% of the way to a Fredo with that. The moral of the story, it does very gradually get better. Here is some anecdotal evidence (you know, the singular form of data). So, as Professor Farnsworth would say, “keep your chin up.”

“OW! My chin!”

I attended Leeds Atheist Society last week. At the event, they were screening the Intelligence Squared debate, “Islam is a religion of Peace”, which is available to stream online if you haven’t seen it.

Overall, though, I’m not sure I would bother. The arguments weren’t put particularly well on either side, although perhaps slightly better for the side against, which swung the audience from being slightly for the motion, to significantly against. I get the feeling that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, as great as she is, is primarily on there because she is an ex-Muslim who isn’t afraid to speak out, rather than the cogency of her arguments. Douglas Murray was a better speaker for against, but didn’t say too much. Despite the victory, I cannot help but feeling that if the late Christopher Hitchens had been with us, he could have delivered a simple unbeatable defence.

What was far more interesting was the discussion afterwards, in which I thought the arguments put forward were far stronger than those featured on the debate. I find arguments such as The Qur’an being directly the word of Allah and the fact that it’s very hard to misinterpret all 524 verses of intolerance in The Qur’an far stronger arguments than anecdotes about how a small minority of Muslims blew up the London underground or the Twin Towers.

Because of course, this is a very small minority. Yes, they were clearly Islamic extremists who perpetrated 9-11, but this was a handful of people in a country which has millions of Muslims – the majority of Muslims are peaceful people.

But it clearly isn’t because of Islam, it’s in spite of it. To understand this, you can’t judge the entire world population of Muslims by the actions of a small radical minority. You can only say this is accurate because when you go back to the core of the faith, you find facts like The Qur’an having 534 intolerant verses, and only 75 verses containing good stuff. Or look at Sharia law states which still have appalling treatment of women, homosexuals and non-Muslims.

It’s important to remember that when discussing such topics, we’re not talking about whether Muslims are peaceful. That is obvious – the overwhelming majority of them are, and although there is a radical minority, this is true of many groups. But the question of whether Islam is peaceful is a question and answer that is detached from the attitudes of the people that identify with it. Unfortunately, the answer here is far less reassuring.

We’re very pleased to simultaneously announce the launch of the SocietasPro website and version 1.0 of SocietasPro! We’ve been busy over the past few weeks preparing SocietasPro to be a deployable application – tidying everything up, getting rid of the bugs and creating an easy to use installer.

We’ve also launched the SocietasPro website which contains an overview of it’s features, videos, support forums and more. You can also find documentation for using the software on the project’s GitHub wiki.

Having been invited for a surprise dinner party by Chris & Cara, we headed over to The Greenhouse – a large apartment development located in Beeston.

If your not familiar with Leeds, you might have heard of Beeston anyway – after all, it’s where the 7-7 bombers came from. It’s also where the football team Leeds United are based, and their accompanying Leeds United Service Crew, often described as the most notorious football hooligans in English history. That explains the two metre high security fence that runs around the perimeter of the complex then.

The idea behind the development is that it is supposed to be eco friendly – which is basically an excuse not to provide any of the tenants with a dishwasher or even a microwave, or anything useful like that.

But enough of bashing where they live. The food itself was outstanding. Individual Beef Wellington’s are always going to work because however much pastry you wrap something up in, you’re still basically serving us steak and there is simply no bad way to do that. Add chocolate cake to the end of that and you have a winning combination. Thumbs up all round.

Having had a long debate about what time Panic would come on, I decided to head down there for 9:45. Kick out is at 11, so they will probably finish fifteen minutes before that and based on an hour set, that means they will come on at 9:45. Seemed sensible.

As it happens they actually came on at 9:30 and I didn’t get there until 10 🙁 . Still, this did have the advantage that I got to piss most of their new stuff and arrive safely in time to hear I Write Sins Not Tragedies and their cover of The Darkness’s I Believe in a Thing Called Love, so I’m going to chalk that one down as a win 😀 .

One utility Mac OS X seems to be lacking is a simple text editor such as Notepad for Windows. It comes with TextEdit but the problem is that this uses rich text format (RTF) which is very annoying when editing system files or code.

Thankfully, you can reconfigure it to use plain text.

Simply go to TextEdit on the menu bar and hit Preferences. The top option should allow you to toggle between Plain Text and Rich Text.