Archive for November, 2012

From time to time, I want to quickly find my favourite That Mitchell & Webb Sound sketch, but there doesn’t seem to be an index of them. So, I’ve done one, for series one at least.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

This year, I attended GRAM – Group Representatives Annual Meetup, first the first time. GRAM is an event organised by the British Humanist Association, that brings together the leaders of affiliated groups to talks, discussions and ideas.

The event was held at the Quaker headquarters on Euston Road, which turned out to be a really nice building. I was expecting it to be someone bare, given Quakers are often minimalistic, but it was actually very well furnished inside.

While a lot of the talks weren’t that interesting, it was certainly inspiring to hear other group leaders talk about what they have been doing in their group – something like what we used to do at the AHS, where each group would deliver a quick update, would have worked really well.

There were also some heated discussions between some of the BHA representatives and some of the local groups, regarding the much tighter restrictions being placed on local groups by the BHA. For example, if you try to search for your local humanist group, some groups are now excluded from the map.

Overall, it was reasonably useful. It’s somewhat different to how I imagined, and how we run things like Sunrise Conference, but was useful for catching up with the latest developments on a national level.

A Wendy House without The Fonze? Oh the horror. Somehow, we survived it though, with good memories intact.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that Kirkgate Market, Europe’s largest indoor market, is empty. In it’s lower halls, up to 30% of the stalls are vacant; it’s like a ghost town in there sometimes.

So, Leeds City Council have put some money into trying to work out how to fix it. And indeed, they staged a big public consultation, where everyone was invited to come down and find out what their research had done.

Turning up to it, I walked into a room with one hundred chairs laid out – and one other person there. I was a little late, and nobody else turned up behind me. Apparently, there are only two members of the public that are interested in the future of Kirkgate Market.

They have also set up an information centre where you can pop in to. So, I did that today, asking for basic information like what the footfall levels are and what research they have done on shopper profiles. They didn’t have any. So much for bringing more traders in with a helpful information centre.

I did get one useful piece of advice though – looking at one of the vacant stalls, a trader overheard our conversation and proceeded to talk to us at length about the amount of traders closing down and trying to get out.

Things are looking bleak indeed for the market.

Sometimes, PHP will kick up a fuss complaining about date.timezone not being set. We found this on the Symfony framework and were able to replicate it on standalone scripts.

[Exception]
DateTime::__construct(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings.
You are required to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set()
function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this
warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier.
We selected 'Europe/Berlin' for 'CEST/2.0/DST' instead

Normally, you would fix this by editing your php.ini file and adding a declaration there.

date.timezone = "Europe/Berlin"

But we had already done this and it still wasn’t working! After some further investigation, it seemed that PHP simply couldn’t access the value.

echo(ini_get("date.timezone"));

This doesn’t make any sense, and we never got to the bottom of what was going on, but there are two ways around the problem. Firstly, you could modify your PHP script so that it makes a call to set the system timezone.

date_default_timezone_set("Europe/Berlin");

However, this involves having to modify your code, which is bad as you don’t want to have to set the timezone manually, especially in a piece of code which could be deployed to servers in different timezones.

A better approach is to set it in the vhosts directive in Apache.

php_value "date.timezone" "Europe/Berlin"

This isn’t the cleanest solution but allowed us to solve an otherwise unexplainable error.

Peep Show is a brilliant show. That Mitchell & Webb look is a great sketch show too. But in my opinion, the best work they have ever done, isn’t any of the material they are famous for.

For me, the best work they have ever done is actually their Radio 4 series – That Mitchell & Webb Sound. It must have been popular (for Radio 4 at least) as it ran for four series, and each one of them was brilliant.

Highly recommended.

We went to Leeds City Museum to see the Stolen, Saved, Smuggled? exhibit. It was pretty disappointing to be honest.

For my fifth project in the Toastmaster’s Competent Communicator series, I presented a talk entitled “A Humanist Soup Kitchen?”

This referenced my open letter to David Cameron, inviting him to come and see the Humanist Action Group doing its thing, after he had suggested that no such humanist enterprises existed.

Despite the talk creeping up on me somewhat (mainly due to being ill all the previous weekend), I managed to get everything in shape and took home another Best Speaker ribbon. Good times.

Elina made me a pig. I’ve decided to name it Muhammad.

Take a deep breath in, we’ve done it!

Another four more years. Then my mum can retire! Also, there was something else that we were celebrating four more years of, but it slips my memory. Here is a bad recording to remind us why…