Archive for November, 2012

We spent the first weekend of November over in Preston, where North West Humanists – a umbrella group composed of Humanist groups from Lancashire, Liverpool and Manchester, were holding their second annual conference.

The speakers included Professor Richard Norman, Professor Callum Brown, Julian Baggini, Pavan Dhaliwal and Martin Poulter. The talks were highly interesting, but even more importantly, it was great to meet other Humanists and really get fired up about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

The theme of the conference was “Humanism for a Better World” – getting away from the critical parts of our beliefs and looking to what positive changes we can bring to the world. Lots of food for thought and the discussions we had throughout the weekend will contribute to the rich variety of inputs that go into our policy making going forward.

Well done to everyone at North West Humanists for organising an excellent conference!

If you’re trying to run PHPUnit from the terminal in Mac OSX Lion, you may get an error similar to the following.

File/Iterator/Autoload.php failed to open stream

You can resolve this by running the following commands.

curl http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar > go-pear.php
sudo php -q go-pear.php

PHPUnit should now run without errors (or at least, without errors in their code 😉 ).

More photos of me shamelessly abusing selective focus.

I’ve just finished reading The Real Deal: My Story from Brick Lane to Dragons’ Den by James Caan. He is a dragon (now former dragon I assume, as he isn’t on the latest series) who started by building up several recruitment companies, and now runs a private equity firm that invests in SMEs.

Was it an interesting read? Certainly. Was it a useful read? Yes, I think it probably was.

The same themes come up across books by different entrepreneurs – invest in the right people and it will pay dividends, work hard and make sure you understand your business inside out.

I actually really like James’ way of doing things. For example, at the end of a meeting, he’ll take time to double check whether the other party has any concerns. So often, you’ll walk out of a meeting already resenting the deal you have just done, and so James’ final check allows him to resolve issues there and then.

He also argues that he is actually risk adverse, and only really pursues an opportunity once he has minimised the risks – investing isn’t about taking risks, it’s about taking smart risks when you know the odds are in your favour – think of it like poker pot odds, you might have some losses, but if you play the right game, you’ll eventually turn a profit.

Turns out, it’s reasonably easy to remove windows, in Photoshop.

I used my birthday gift vouchers to buy a new 50mm f/1.4 lens for my camera. It’s excellent for doing very shallow depth of field, although, on reviewing the photographs, I’ve realised I went far too far with the shallow depth – sometimes it was narrower, even than the object I was actually trying to photograph! Looking forward to playing around with this lens a lot more.

David Cameron unveils his new proposal for structuring government.

At my birthday meal, we managed to eat our way through £557.54 worth of meat :D.

If you are using the Sinatra framework in Ruby, and you want to embed one ERB template in another, you can do this simply by using the ERB template tag like you can in your regular Ruby code.

<%= erb :welcome %>

Replace “welcome” with your template name as you usually do.

The Division E competition took place at Donington Park racing circuit, which wasn’t a very good venue as it was difficult to find (we got sent to the wrong part of the circuit) and very cold inside their buildings slash sheds, but on the plus side we did get to look round the Formula One museum section.