For some reason, Miah’s Kitchen had a limo. Bryce wanted a picture next to it, but I couldn’t fit the whole car in lol.
With our most recent meeting being the last of the year, I had organised a meal at Miah’s Kitchen after the meeting, so we could celebrate the festival season at Leeds City.
Last weekend, myself and George headed up to Weetwood to watch the Leeds Celtics american football team play.
It was dry, but never the less very cold and due to what we suspect was the ambulance getting lost, the game didn’t kick off until an hour after it’s scheduled time – a risky move when you have so little day light these days.
By this point, we were too cold to watch the whole manage, but in the first half Leeds Celtics scored two touchdowns, both with two point conversions, against the Northumbria Mustangs.
Having finished chairing the Leeds Skeptics meeting, I sped up to North Leeds on Wednesday to join the end of White Rose Speakers’ final meeting before Christmas, which, for a holiday celebration, was being held at one of the member’s houses (who happens to have a large house).
The reason I was so keen to get there was that the group had very kindly agreed to do a collection and raffle to raise money for the Humanist Action Groups 2012 Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters.
Once there, they sprung a table topic on me, the song title “Merry Christmas Everyone”, to which I talked about how you can’t call an event this time of year a Christmas event as people get upset, so you have to end up calling it about a dozen different things in the title to keep everyone happy.
We came away with bags of stuff, and plenty of money from the raffle too! Thanks to everyone donated, your support is very much appreciated!
A massive thank you to everyone who contributed to the Humanist Action Group‘s 2012 Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters! Last Sunday saw the (almost) final day of what has been six nearly two months of hard work, planning, coordinating and executing the project and we’re pleased so that in total, we raised in-kind donations worth a brilliant…
The donations went to three local homeless shelters, two of which are direct access – this means that service users are able to turn up, often coming in just for a day or two to escape the cold – so being able to give out a box containing food and some warm clothing is invaluable to such organisations.
You can see all the photos from the event on our Flickr page.
This month at Leeds Skeptics, John Wilson, founder of Wilsons Solicitors, presented a talk “do we get the legal system we deserve?”
He argued that the legal profession was in need of a shake up. He used an analogy of the opticians industry, that thirty years ago was hidden away in offices, where nobody really knew how much anything cost, everything was slow and customer service was just shockingly bad. Today, after reform, you can walk into an opticians on the high street, get an eye test and select from a huge range of glasses, should you need them. Shouldn’t be going to see a solicitor be just as simple?
John argues that it should, and I imagine most of us will strongly agree with him! It was a great talk to round out the year, and one that I found extremely interesting.
This month at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire, Simon Wellings presented a talk on Positive Money: A Simple Solution to the Debt Problem. It is a talk similar to the one he had given at Leeds Skeptics, though truth be told, I enjoyed the Skeptics talk a little more.
It was certainly thought provoking as Simon laid out the problems with the monetary system, and much debate followed the talk, though one of the members, who works in a bank treasury, strongly disputed some of the facts in the talk.
Ultimately there were two possible take home messages from the talk – you need to overhaul the monetary system and completely change the way the financial sector operates across the world. Or you need to start a bank.
If you are trying to install YAML via PECL on Lion, you may get an error such as the following.
configure: error: Please install libyaml ERROR: `/private/tmp/pear/install/yaml/configure --with-yaml' failed
Some solutions on the internet suggest installing it via a package manager.
rvm pkg install libyaml
However, although this process will claim to work, when you come to run the command again, it will fail at the same point. Instead, you need to download libyaml, which you can do here, then extract it, cd into the directory and run the following commands.
./configure make make install
You don’t need to sudo. You should now be able to run the install command again.
sudo pecl install --ignore-errors yaml
This time it should be successful.
Today is the day! After six weeks of hard work, the Humanist Action Groups 2012 Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters ends today. We’ll be gathering everything together, boxing everything up, and delivering it to shelters throughout the day.
If you missed the deadline, you can still support our work by making a financial donation to the group. You can do this via Virgin Money Giving, or see our website.
Photos will be posted after the event – stay tuned.
Last week, we held a fund raiser at Strawberry Fields, to raise money for the Humanist Action Group’s 2012 Holiday Food Drive. A big thanks to everyone who came, everyone who provided baked goods for the bake sale, and the venue for being so accommodating.
