Archive for December, 2013

At the end of November we headed up to the Lutherin church in Headingley for Finnish Christmas carols. We went last year as well, which was arguably better as they had an organist, but it was enjoyable none-the-less and the performance pieces were good too. As ever, the best bit was the food afterward.

I also love how organised they are – at that event they gave out the date for the 2014 event!

Being without a proper internet connection I needed to go mobile for a while. I went to O2 and bought a dongle, but it didn’t work, as they never really do. I don’t know if it is the dongle, O2 or a combination of the both, but they are a mission to get working and usually end up never working at all.

So I went to EE and got a 4G wifi hotspot.

My experiences so far have been really good. You literally just turn it on, it connects to the 4G network and you connect it to as a wifi hotspot. The speeds are really impressive too – 20mb down and 10mb up – way faster than you get on a fixed internet connection in Leeds city centre! Unfortunately the data is quite pricey but as a short term solution it has been wonderful.

I also ordered an Asus 6-in-1 router that lets me connect to the wifi hotspot and then gives me a network port to connect my router in. So my router, which has all my wired devices connected into it, was then connected to the Asus, when then connected to the hotspot. Complicated but it got all my devices online with no connection problems!

For our November meeting of the Sunday Assembly Leeds, we actually held it on a Sunday. We were at a new venue, the Belgrave Music Hall, which is a wonderful gig venue and worked well for the event.

You can see all the photos on Flickr.

Earlier this month we were lucky to have Kate Smurthwaite visit us to present her show The News at Kate: My Professional Opinion. She is a comedian but also does a lot of work with women’s rights and generally telling stupid people that they are stupid.

Here is a good clip of her doing that on The Big Questions:

Her event was really entertaining and I highly recommend going to see Kate’s show if you get the chance.

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In November, I travelled down to Colchester to compete in the District 71 humorous speaking contest finals. I lost in the semi-finals which was pretty disappointing. I was happy with the structure and quality of my speech, but I didn’t get the laughs the other contestants did, so more humour is probably needed. Our short stay at the conference was enjoyable though – unlike the Riviera Renaissance conference everything was in the same hotel which made it a lot nicer.

This is me receiving my certificate of participation.

The purpose of these is to fill time while the votes are being counted.

When we were looking for venues for the Sunday Assembly I visited Temple Works. It is located just down at the bottom of town and was once the biggest room in the world. It really is massive. When I was shown it it was like a moment out of Star Trek when you see a huge space station for the first time – it just went on and on! A mega-cool venue that I hope we can work with some day.

For more details, see their website.

Do you like american football? Want to get more exercise? Don’t fancy the idea of a crippling injury? Then flag football just might be for you! Flag is a faster-paced non-contact version of the game in which instead of tackling people you have to strip a flag from their waist. No blocking or kicking either – so you have to move fast!

The Leeds Tornadoes flag football team is starting in January and are now looking for people to get involved, either as players or as coaches, volunteers, cheerleaders and fans. You can sign up to the mailing list on their website or find them on Facebook.

We held off until the Friday to hold out Halloween party, being proper adults with jobs and all. It was of course fancy dress.

In October, we launched Sunday Assembly Leeds with the help of London-founder Sandison Jones. 120 people turned out for the event as well as BBC Look North, BBC Radio 4 and plenty of other media too. We held it in the beautiful St John the Evangelist’s Church next to the St John’s Centre (surprisingly).