Archive for November, 2014

I am pretty sure this is how horror movies start…

You’re never too old to run out of bread.

Last month we went to see Alan Davies at Leeds Town Hall. We were quite looking forward to it because he is very toned down on QI, so it should have been a good chance to see him a bit more raw. Elina noted that the mature middle-class audience of QI watchers that surrounded us might be in a bit of a shock.

Unfortunately, it didn’t turn up. Davies has got old and started doing dad jokes. That is jokes about being a dad. I couldn’t really relate to them. He was pretty funny, but I think a lot of the humour was probably lost on me.

I recently had to upgrade my iPad because a lot of the apps have stopped working on it. It has had a good four years, but that is all you get out of a tablet, so I felt like I was forced to upgrade something I didn’t really want to upgrade.

This was also my first experience of iOS 8 (until then everything was running iOS 6).

I do not think it is Apple’s finest release. Getting started on it was a pain. I was prompted for my iCloud password at start-up but it refused to accept it (even though I could log on to icloud.com with the same password repeatedly). Therefore I had to turn iCloud off at first and then re-enable it once I was up-and-running. Except it then prompted me for the password over and over again.

It then prompted me for the passwords to all my email accounts and worse, wouldn’t let me switch out to 1password to copy and paste it in. I had to open 1password on my phone and manually copy the passwords in, which is a massive pain when you use log and complicated ones.

After that the App Store kept insisting it had 11 updates even though I had updated everything, and most of the apps, including Apple’s own settings app rapidly crashed.

Apple are having a bad year. One bad release you could overlook, but Yosemite, the new version of OS X is preforming very poorly too. It took me 8 hours to complete the upgrade and since then I have found my Mac has crashed numerous times and there is a bug which causes file dialogues to continually grow so big they disappear off the screen that Apple does not seem to have any plans to fix.

The hardware on the iPad Air 2 is quite nice. It is a lot lighter than my old iPad 2 and I do really like the touch ID.

Google Chrome is not the only application struggling with OS X Yosemite’s file dialog. When saving files in Coda, the dialog will continually fall off the bottom of the screen.

Currently the only known workaround for the issue is to switch to the simple view by clicking the up arrow next to the file name box, and then click it again to re-expand the dialog and then it will be probably sized again. However, you need to do this every time you save a file.

Huffington Post recently commission Survation to conduct a survey on religion in Britain. The results were quite promising for the humanist community. Here are the highlights:

• 60% of people described themselves as non-religious
• Over half believe that religion does more harm than good
• 13% of people said atheists were likely to be more moral, compared with 8% who said atheists were likely to be less moral

Read more in the Huffington Post article and the BHA press release.

The Abbey Dash is 10km race that takes place in Leeds each year. It is in aid of Age UK and you literally run out to Kirkstall Abbey and back. It is also older than I am – just. This was the 19th annual dash.

I decided it would be less depressing to start right at the back this time and found it easier than the Run For All. I had enough energy to pick up the base for the last kilometre or two, rather than wondering whether I would live to see tomorrow.

That said, I came in at a slightly slower time of 01:07:36, which put me 8,459 out of a field of 10,000. Mostly retired women in my speed category. I don’t know how everyone else does it…

On October 20th I had an appointment with a specialist. He prescribed me a new medication and told me to hand the form in at my GPs (Colton Mill). I duly did this.

Unfortunately, having a job and all, I had to be at work the entire time the surgery was open, and so asked them to send the prescription to their sister surgery, The Grange, who had a 7am start on a Monday.

Having BT turning up at my house on the next Monday, meant that I couldn’t actually get there that Monday, so I had to go the Monday after, which was then the 10 November. When I got there, they said it had been sent to the wrong place, and I had to come back a different day.

This meant that I had to wait until 17 November to go back. At which point they said they had sent it to the wrong place again. This time I put my foot down and told them they had to sort it out. After a lot of messing about, they eventually got a doctor to write out a new one.

Finally I had my prescription 28 days after I was actually prescribed it.

Of course you could argue that had it been more urgent I could have taken emergency time off work and gone there every day. And you’r right, I could, and this would have got me it faster.

But is this the healthcare system we deserve? A healthcare system where you have to choose between being healthy and being unemployed? Such a system would be damaging to society because it would mean you would have to choose between being unhealthy (high costs further down the line for the NHS) or being unemployed (high costs for society paying out in unemployment benefits).

We had a Halloween party (as usual) this year due to popular demand (two people asked for it). Good effort with the fancy dress team.

Earlier this month we did a stall for West Yorkshire Humanists at Summat New.