Archive for May, 2015

A lot of the Chris Worfolk Foundation websites, such as this one, were already responsive. That is to say that they worked well across any device size. Some of them were not however, but I’m pleased to announce we have now fixed that.

I’ve already blogged about the Worfolk Lectures update but we’ve also upgraded many other sites across our estate too:

• Galileo Day
• One Life course
• Perspective course
• Humanist Chaplains
• It’s Only Water

We’ve just relaunched Worfolk Lectures with a new responsive design. It looks great on desktop:

It looks great on tablets:

And it looks great on phones:

Bread baking is currently in vogue in the Worfolk household. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall assures me that once I start I will never go back. I’m sceptical, because I actually do really like the supermarket bread I buy, but I thought I would give it a try.

This was super-easy to make. I made a quantity of Hugh’s magic bread dough, put it in a tin and baked it in the oven (where else would I bake it?) for half an hour. It probably would have been even better if I had let it rise more in the tin, but I have places to be.

Focaccia has turned out to be a real winner. I bake this regularly now and take it to work in pieces to eat – it’s tasty enough to eat by itself. Pretty simple to make as well.

I’ve had soda bread from the Briggate farmers’ market and it was quite good, but mine turned out rather disappointing. It was too hard on the outside and the flavour inside was too strong.

The jury is still out on the sour dough. I spent a week feeding up my starter so I am reluctant to give up on it but it has far too much flavour. Elina quite likes that, but I like the tastelessness of white bread. I have started feeding it with white flour instead of wholemeal to see if that makes a difference.

I have not been that impressed with River Cottage Every Day. The rabbit stew was bland and the Bloody Mary burgers fell apart. The home-cured bacon chops did work quite well though and mean that you don’t have to worry too much about the meeting going off as you can cure them then store them for another week.

One of my websites that definitely has not been getting enough love over the years is Star Trek: Random Sector. It was really old. It used out-dated hover-over drop-down menus, tags that nobody knew still existed and had no way of easily updating the site.

That is a shame because there is a lot of super detailed content on there, especially round the episode guides.

No longer though is it a relic though! The site has been re-built from the ground up. All the URLs have been replaced by cleaner ones. The spelling mistakes have been corrected. The dead links removed. And best of all, it now works great on mobile as well. On top of that, there is even some new content. Happy days for Trekkers.

One Wednesday I had a hospital appointment, and was given a prescription request form that I was told to hand in at my local GPs (Colton Mill). Which I did. They said it would be ready by Friday.

That’s an annoying long time, but given that last time I had a prescription it took them nearly a month to fill it I thought I would give them to the following Tuesday until I went to collect it.

On Tuesday I went there at 4:30pm to find the place with the shutter down and no sign of life.

On Wednesday I phoned them. No answer. I phoned their partner surgery The Grange who assured me that they were open and they would investigate, asking me to phone back later. I phoned Colton Mill again. Still no answer. I phoned The Grange again. They said there was nothing on my record but when I was able to give them the name of the consultant and hospital department I had been at, said they would ring through to try and get a new copy of the form.

On Thursday I phoned Colton Mill at 9am. they answered, telling me they had no idea about the form I had handed in, but said The Grange had added a note to my file with the treatment request. she said they needed 48 hours for a prescription request so I should phone back tomorrow. I tried to press them on the 48 hours but they shrugged off all responsibility.

Not daring to trust it to a phone conversation on the Friday, I decided I would go down there and I could just stand at reception and moan until they got a doctor to sign it for me. So I raced over on my lunch hour, foregoing my usual sandwich. However, when I got there I was told that the prescription had been electronically sent to Boots, without having asking me, and as such they couldn’t give it to me.

Finally, when I managed to get to Boots on the Saturday they did indeed have it. 10 days after I was prescribed it. It does technically beat last time though.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is James Joyce’s first novel. As a consequence, his literary style is still developing and as a consequence, large segments of this novel are understandable.

It follows the adventures of Stephen Dedalus, later to appear in Ulysses, throughout his young life.

The best bit is the fire and brimstone preaching. I’ve never heard a preacher having a proper go at it, so the description in this was brilliant. It goes into so much detail about how the tortures are so bad, how the flame never cools and how you never acclimatise to the torment. Scary stuff!

Catastrophic Care: Why Everything We Think We Know about Health Care Is Wrong is a book by David Goldhill about the American healthcare system.

Their healthcare is comparable to that provided by the NHS. However we rank better because we spend only a third of the money the US does. Someone told me they spend more tax money than we do, even before the insurance costs, though I do not have a source for that.

Goldhill points out a number of problems, some common across all healthcare systems, others specific to America:

• Holistic care, phsycholical factors in recovery and control of infections are often overlooked – for example making the ward look nice, keeping records electronically and emptying the bins before they overflow.
• Insurance systems do not make sense because healthcare is not a risk, it is an inevitability.
• There are incentives to take medication – you can take statins to lower your blood pressure, or you can lead a healthy and active lifestyle. Your insurance pays for the former but not the latter.
• There is little focus on cost in insurance-based systems.
• 68% of hospital beds in America are provided by non-profit hospitals, yet they do not produce better results than for-profit ones.
• Medical errors, hospital-acquired infection and over-treatment kill as many people as many major medical conditions

His solution is to crap the insurance system and replace it with a loan based system. A typical American will spend around $1,300,000 on healthcare over their life-system so Goldhill suggests giving them that as fund, with a small insurance system for catastrophic conditions that cost more (though he argues nobody would charge more in a market-based system).

On a tangent, he also talks about how state assistance to buy a house actually helps rich home-owners rather than first-time buyers. I blogged about this in June.

Reading it, it made me glad we have the NHS. Of course, it may be a case of the grass is always greener where you live (which is now a thing) as the NHS is proving highly ineffective for me at the moment. Overall, as I said at the start though, we probably get the better deal spending far less on health care for a slightly better life expectancy.

Why Not Eat Insects? is a 1885 book by Vincent M. Holt. Surprisingly enough, it is a book advocating the consumption of insects. And why not? They are nutritious, tasty and plentiful.

He starts off by tackling the prejudice against eating them. We think it is a weird yet people all over the world do it. We worry that they will have fed on the wrong stuff, but this is unfounded. Most insects are vegetarians. Compare this to pigs. They will eat anything. Lobsters too. Lobsters are often caught wild and so you have no idea what they have eaten; putrified dead fish being one of their favourite meals.

He then goes on to suggest how to catch, prepare and cook a variety of insects including snails, moths, woodlice, caterpillars and others. He even concludes with some sample menus you could use for a dinner party!

It’s quite a small book; I got through the entire thing in about 45 minutes. It is also a reproduction and suffers from some flaws in the process, so is perfectly readable.

Ah foot the ball. And is there any better place to enjoy the beautiful game than the beautiful city of Ankh-Morpork? Probably, though the idea of the wizards of Unseen University putting together a football team is definitely not one to be missed. That is the narrative of Discworld 37, Unseen Academicials.

It was okay. The Moist von Lipwig novels have been really good and this was not as laugh-out-loud funny as those. Also, there was some Rinsewind, but not enough. It’s like Pratchett was teasing me.