Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Where better to celebrate a birthday than Blackhouse?

I’m pleased to report that White Rose Speakers experienced great success with our Open Meeting last week!

The agenda finally came together, albeit with only one prepared speech as the other speaker dropped out on the morning of the event and included lots of our regular members returning as well as a visit from our Area Governor Shelagh, who it is always a pleasure to have along.

More importantly however, we signed up two brand new members and one-relapsed member, giving a positive boost to our numbers. We have lots more exciting plans in the works too, so the future for the club is looking bright.

A big warm welcome to Chris and Martin!

Last week, we attended BettaKultcha for the first time.

It’s an idea that seems to have sprung up across the UK – the idea is that you have lots of speakers, usually at least a dozen, and they each get to speak for five minutes. They have twenty sides, and these automatically transition every 15 seconds – so you have to fit your talk around that!

This event was the first one they had held at Leeds Town Hall, and an audience of 100-150 people were probably there. Talks included competitive dominos, fashion blogging, things you can do your body in the name of art, pet psychics (mocking of) and many others. All in all, a really good night of entertainment.

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 week, we headed up to Headingley for the Finnish Christmas Carols concert.

It was held at the Lutheran Church in Headingley, and there were around twenty people there, mostly Finns. Mixed in with the hymn, which had an organ for the first time this year (in previous years, they have just sung, without music), they had a short play as well, about how you should be dishonest in order to achieve personal gain (not quite why you would include a play with such a message, but there you go).

I’m not sure about the idea of getting a nation of people famous for being rather introverted to sing, but Elina seemed to enjoy it, so job done I guess.

After, everyone headed into the church house in which there was some Finnish food laid on. There were also feedback forms, in which I suggested it would be great if the church could get wifi installed.

This year, I attended GRAM – Group Representatives Annual Meetup, first the first time. GRAM is an event organised by the British Humanist Association, that brings together the leaders of affiliated groups to talks, discussions and ideas.

The event was held at the Quaker headquarters on Euston Road, which turned out to be a really nice building. I was expecting it to be someone bare, given Quakers are often minimalistic, but it was actually very well furnished inside.

While a lot of the talks weren’t that interesting, it was certainly inspiring to hear other group leaders talk about what they have been doing in their group – something like what we used to do at the AHS, where each group would deliver a quick update, would have worked really well.

There were also some heated discussions between some of the BHA representatives and some of the local groups, regarding the much tighter restrictions being placed on local groups by the BHA. For example, if you try to search for your local humanist group, some groups are now excluded from the map.

Overall, it was reasonably useful. It’s somewhat different to how I imagined, and how we run things like Sunrise Conference, but was useful for catching up with the latest developments on a national level.

As part of my push to attend more conferences this year, and get out into the real world, I recently attended PHPNW12, a PHP developer conference that took place in Manchester.

I arrived on the Friday night and checked into the hotel across the road from the conference, the Britannia. With it’s sweeping balconied staircases it felt like I was in a 70s horror movie. The floors creaked and the light in the corridor outside my room flickered on and off constantly – indeed, it rather ruined the mood when they fixed it.

The Friday night featured a hackathon, though not feeling too well due to the tail end of a cold, I spent about 20 minutes hacking, then ate my pizza while I checked my emails for an hour and headed to bed, not to emerge until 12 noon the next day when I felt a bit better.

The talks were on the whole good – there was a real range in there, some had really interesting topics but due to their lack of experience presenting talks, where rather dull. Others were confident and entertaining speakers who despite presenting quite dull topics (caching is not going to be mega interesting) presented brilliant talks. On balance, I would certainly prefer them to focus more on speaker quality over topics next year.

On the Saturday night there was a social including dinner, at which I spent quite a bit of time getting to know some of the other people at Sky – I didn’t realise they were going as I hadn’t gone with Sky, but it was great to see some familiar faces there.

Overall, I found I learned a lot from it. If I can bring back just a few ideas to my own business then it will have been worth the expense.

Staircases in the hotel. I also tried the new panorama function on iOS6, on it’s side:

Photos from this year’s Pride event. As ever it was an enjoyable day, though the parade was disappointing. I commented last year that there were a lack of floats, and this year there seemed to be even less effort. Still, that should only provide motivation to have a great parade next year – I’ve even got it in my calendar this time, would be great to have a humanism float.

Also, let it never be said that we weren’t doing our bit 😉 .

It’s been a while since I last stopped by York Brights, so I decided it was high time to turn up to a meeting. It was a somewhat intimate affair, with only six of us there (usually there are loads of people these days), but the conversation was never the less it’s usual excellent standard. We also noticed an item on the menu we hadn’t seen before.

The mega mixed grill burger as it is known is just that – a mixed grill in a burger. They start off with a huge burger, was at least half a pound, if not more – I just don’t really know how much a pound is but it was definitely at least as big as two McQuarters. They then put a fried egg, a gammon steak, a chicken fillet, a pineapple ring and a sausage, wrap it all in the world’s largest bread bun and surround it with chips. Amazing.