Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

This time last year I was running eight community groups. Anxiety Leeds, Leeds Tornadoes, Leeds City Toastmasters, White Rose Speakers, Humanist Action Group, Sunday Assembly Leeds, West Yorkshire Humanists and Leeds Skeptics.

I have been gradually cutting that down over the past year. I moved on to being a Toastmasters area governor (so looking after five clubs rather than two) and that too has now come to an end. Leeds Skeptics is now in the capable hands of Trevor and I’ve moved to Leeds Samurai, so I can train without the organisational hassle.

All in all then I am a now mere civilian in four of those groups and can attend as and when I have time.

I’ve cut down on my personal commitments too. Last year I was having regular lessons for guitar, singing and Finnish. Now I am down to Finnish and piano.

It’s an interesting experiment, not cramming far too much into my life and hoping it all gets through the doorway. So far, it’s working out okay. It’s still a lot of groups, and I won’t say I have much unscheduled time, but I am now finding more time to revise, and even a bit of timing to garden (luckily this only requires limited attention when all you have is a balcony). Besides which wedding planning quickly turns into a full time job…

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.

Before you get married, you have to give notice. This means going down to your local registry office (as it has to be your local) and saying you want to marry. They then put a notice up for 28 days to allow people to object. How people object I don’t know, because I have never checked their notice board to see if anyone is trying to marry twice, but apparently they can.

Currently, it costs £35 each. However, as UK marriages are strictly limited to no more and no less than two people, why it costs £35 each rather than £70 per couple is unclear.

When we went down they checked our ID. We took passports and driving licences, which is all we needed both being EU citizens – no other documents or passport photos or anything were required.

After checking the ID we were then separated to ensure neither of us were being forced to marry. This is fine except she never actually asked either of us if we were being forced to go through with the marriage. Neither of us are, but it seems the whole point should be to ask us. Instead we just had to confirm each other’s full names, date of birth, address and occupation.

Just your average dinner of roast pork, Yorkshires, ratatouille, refried beans, new potatoes, mashed potatoes, three types of vegetables, Asian inspired coleslaw, seafood platter, cheese and tomato tart, salad and five different types of bread.

The real achievement was that we managed to eat almost all of it. Or at least will have by the time this is published…

For anyone attending my talk at Atheist Society tonight, here is the suggested reading list I will later be promising to post on my blog:

• Michael Shermer – The Believing Brain
• Duncan J. Watts – Everything Is Obvious
• Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Noreena Hurtz – Eyes Wide Open
• Nate Silver – The Signal and The Noise

The problem when you don’t just plonk your holidays on top of existing Pagan festivals, is that they are not as nicely spaced out. Three days after the special West Yorkshire Humanists Darwin Day event then, we’re doing our Galileo Day events – organised meals between society members.

I don’t have any photos from ours yet, because it hasn’t happened yet, but here are some from previous years.

I’ll report back on how it went. Probably painfully given I have American football training this morning…

Happy Darwin Day!

We had a party. It was good. So good that I have only just recovered enough to blog about it.

Another year has flown by. One of the things that shocked me while summing up 2013 was that I used the phrase “celebrated ten years” more than once. This was the year I failed to make it into the 27 Club, so time really is ticking on.

In January I started working with full time with Knight Analysis. When I wasn’t playing Rocksmith that is. Almost all of the time I wasn’t working, I was playing the guitar. The lovely Sherlock returned and we visited Tropical World, which is not big news but something we do not do enough. Meanwhile Google started displaying ratings for the Leeds Restaurant Guide.

There were the usual holidays of Darwin Day and Galileo Day in February. I was still spending all my time playing Rocksmith, but finally finished the 60 day challenge at the end of the month. I was also saved from suicide by the addition of a dishwasher. There was lots of sport too with Super Bowl XLVIII and Leeds Tornadoes practices.

After working my fingers to the bone on guitar practice I got a well-earned reward in March in the form of a Fender Telecaster. I also won the Leeds City Toastmasters speech contest. There were some old school times with a post-Wendy fry-up and my speaking at Leeds Atheist Society. I also hosted a Sunday Assembly Leeds that nobody came to. The Foundation launched its new website.

In April I was elected the Toastmasters Area 15 governor. Duncan Dallas sadly passed away and the Leeds Restaurant Guide published its second edition. Louis Theroux returned to our screen and we celebrated Fonze’s birthday.

Conchita Wurst stormed Eurovision in May. There was some kind of other vote too. I earned my Competent Leader award with Toastmasters, ran 10k and started seriously doing Parkrun too. Toastmasters held their division contest with me as Chief Judge and a large part of Leeds burned down. Craig and Zoe got married and Worfolk 18 celebrated a decade of publishing by holding a porn party. I also put together a photo montage of the past ten years that I was rather proud of.

That brings us to June, a month in which the Leeds Restaurant Guide published its third edition and Britain was ranked as having the best healthcare system in the world (by a probably biased source, but who cares). I correctly predicted the demise of Wendy House which turned out to be the last ever one. The results of the British Social Attitude survey came out and showed that the non-religious now outnumber of all the religious put together.

It was an insanely busy month in July. I ran the Leeds 10k and fixed HSBC’s website. We celebrated Higgs Day and Leeds hosted the Grand Depart. I began my year as Toastmasters area governor and held my first area training. Having achived Competent Communicator and Advanced Leader Bronze that also earned me a trip crown. We visited Darlington to see my sister’s new house. I wrote about the best places to live in Leeds, independence days, and published the first Finn-Global Development Index. We went to the park to play mölkky and my blog turned 10 years old.

After all that is was nice to spend some time relaxing in August. With relatives visiting from Canada we visited Whitby and Temple Newsam for the Finnish picnic. There were also trips to Warwick and Cardiff. We partied for Leeds Pride and I ate a bear. Robin Williams sadly left us and we remembered 100 years of Tove Jansson. More research came out showing that wine tasting is nonsense and I even spoke up in defence of social science. I finished the month by handing over Leeds Skeptics after five years at the helm.

It was all about Norman’s birthday celebration in September. We went up to Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands for a week, where we saw stars and dolphins and managed to convince the Scots to remain part of the Union. I also got engaged to Elina. Back down south there was an area speech contest and we visited Flamingo Land to see the hippos. Gijsbert and Weili became parents when baby Samantha arrived. Isaac was christened, Michael Mosley tried to eat himself to death and Google decided I was a woman. I also decided that if I was going lead a truly evidence-based life, I had to start drinking. We visited Llandrindod Wells in Wales for the Loony Party conference and attended Yarndale 2014.

In October I completed probably the greatest achievement of my life by finishing War & Peace shortly before turning 28. Anxiety Leeds moved venues to the LGI and began fortnightly meetings. James became Dr Murray, we partied for Halloween and I launched a new website for guitar strumming patterns.

We felt like we were in a horror movie in the November fog. Luckily it did not decent until after we had seen Alan Davis. Huffington Post published the results of their survey on religion in which “60% of people described themselves as non-religious” and “over half believe that religion does more harm than good”. I ran the Abbey Dash and finally arrived in the future as fibre was rolled out to Leeds city centre. West Yorkshire Humanists hosted a stall at Summat New.

Most of December was taken up by the Humanist Action Group’s Holiday Food Drive which raised nearly £5,000 worth of donations for local homeless shelters. The holiday season takes up time too, but not too busy to see The Who rock out at Leeds Arena. As usual, we finished the year out with a party.

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.