Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Our office car park is located down a side road in Headingley. This makes it difficult to pull out to head into town on an evening as the amount of cars going away from town down Otley Road quickly pile up at the traffic lights.

This shouldn’t be a problem, if people were considerate enough not to stop right across the junction and instead leave a space for those of us that are turning right into the far lane, but often people don’t – sometimes people just block the junction, usually people in Audis (the new car of choice for your garden-variety wanker).

So, on the first of November I wrote to Leeds City Council highways department, asking them to paint a keep clear sign on the road so that people to remind people that occasionally, just occasionally, other people like to use the road as well.

They prompted responded to me saying they would need to investigate and said they would respond by 22 November. They didn’t quite make this, but after a chaser email they responded to me on the 19 December, stating they agreed it was a problem and that they would arrange for a keep clear sign to be placed on the road!

I’m very pleased with the outcome. It might not be world peace, but it just goes to show you that you can bring about change for the better, with a relatively small amount of effort.

To make Christmas feel a bit more like Finland, Elina and I made a ginger bread house.

As part of working out what gym we wanted to join, myself and Elina headed down to the Crowne Plaza Hotel to check out their Spirit Health Club.

It was pretty disappointing. The cool was 15m in length, which is shorter than The Marriot, and it had kids in as well. Most annoying, was the depth – which went down to one mentre at one end which made it almost impossible to swim properly.

Other than that, it was perfectly nice, but not quite up to standard with the other places we’ve tried.

If your insert statements are not time critical, you can use insert delayed in your SQL to speed things up. The syntax is as follows.

INSERT DELAYED table (col1, col2) VALUES ('a', 'b');

Insert delayed can be used with MyISAM and Memory, but cannot be used with InnoDB.

The advantage of using insert delayed is that the MySQL server returns a success message straight away so the script can keep going, without it actually having to do the insert. This allows the MySQL server to carry it out when it isn’t busy, and do several at the same time.

It’s appropriate for tables such as logs tables where it doesn’t matter too much if they don’t go in straight away.

Recently, I decided it might be good to join a gym. Not because I had any intention of doing some kind of work out or using any of the gym equipment, but because gyms often have pools and I quite like to go for a swim.

So I phoned up the closest gym with a pool to me and asked how much it would be to join. Apparently though, that isn’t how it works, you have to go down there and check it out and only then will you be given a price list. Normally, that means it is really expensive.

So myself and Elina headed down there to see what it was like. The staff were very friendly and the pool was a reasonable size (15m was our estimate), though it was disappointing that it was a constant depth of 1.2 metres. The hot tub was also out of order, which was very irritating. Never the less though, it seems like a nice place and is reasonably priced for a gym (that means it’s really expensive, but no in comparison to other gyms). Might see what the others have to offer first though.

They also have a rule against using phones in there, which is really irritating as I was planning on getting a waterproof case for my iPhone for when I’m on call.

Having seen out 2010 in style, I began the year, in January as usual, by explaining I didn’t care what happened to me, after I died. At work we launched our website and I finally said the L word – to my iPhone. Meanwhile, CWF announced the Perspective Citywide course, open to the general public and running alongside the campus version.

The month after was of course February which began with CWF launching the Galileo Day pack for societies, giving them hints and tips on running a great event. Feeder were a little underwhelming, but Super Bowl XLV wasn’t. The Humanist Society of West Yorkshire launched its new logo and Michael Bramham delivered the Galileo Day Lecture and festivities followed. It was also the first ever month we ran Fry Up Club (I think).

I delivered a talk on the history of atheist charity in March and paid a visit to Hope City. With me and Elina now officially being a couple, we celebrated her birthday meanwhile James took the helm for Reason Week 2011 which finished with the traditional All Night Debate. CWF began building it’s library and I attended the AHS national convention.

I also kicked off April with a talk, this time to Hull Humanists while Michael and John were giving a very similar talk at LAS. The final Perspective Citywide was given by Nicola Jackson and my life was changed forever when I finally got my hands on an iPad 2. We got Rebecca in a Batgirl outfit and Humanist Community returned due to popular demand. The Humanist Action Group launched their guides and we finished the month by hitting the beach.

It was a busy month at work in May as we launched cricket and we voted for and against the alternative vote. I wrote to my MEPs about ethical meat and Sainsbury’s refused me service even though I had ID. I complained. James was elected president of LAS, I went to see Uncaged Monkeys and West Yorkshire Humanists had a very interesting discussion about animal experimentation. The month was finished off by the Secular Ball 2011.

The EDL were causing trouble in June, meanwhile I was still in love with my iPad. We had a McReunion while CWF announced Leeds Transhumanists and its partnership with Daily Motion. I proposed Try Vegetarianism Week and we celebrated our anniversary as Row One.

In July I met Matt and finally gave up my paper diary. I proposed we introduce equal opportunities in sport and took Elina down to London for the weekend. We got Elina and Kat dress up as bunny girls for our poker night, Jenson Button lost a wheel and I spoke at Nottingham Skeptics. I met Elina’s mum, Atheist Stock moved out of beta and leeds Slutwalk took place. We also said goodbye to the Space Shuttle programme.

I left Firebox for Chrome in August while CWF launched the Atheist Stock API and later launched Worfolk Lectures too. We also announced Sunrise 2011 and cooked a crab and played my first live poker tournament. We attended Leeds Pride 2011 and CWF held its AGM. I also cooked a fish and inspired by Franklin & Bash, we held a Margarita Mondays.

It was a big month for CWF in September with Sunrise Conference 2011 and I took Elina to Roundhay Park, Ilkley Moor and the Leeds Liverpool Canal before she flew back to Finland. I continued my poker exploits and we headed down to Sheffield Humanists for a talk on paying for sex. I lifted the ban on family being friends on Facebook and it was proved that atheists are smarter than religious people. We celebrated Norm’s birthday, twice and we introduced to the dangers of shot roulette before hitting up the Zombie Prom.

Skeptics in the Pub learnt about cults in October, Steve Jobs passed away and it turned out all freshers are morons. I chaired the first One Life with a discussion on the meaning of life but having waited ten months for my chance to see Rihanna – was too ill to go! Elina returned for a week and I spoke at Sheffield Skeptics in the Pub. Dr David Jenkins delivered the 2011 Worfolk Lecture and CWF announced SocietasPro. Meanwhile in inaugural Leeds Transhumanists meeting took place, I reached middle age and we held a kick-ass Halloween party.

There was a sad start to November with Sir Jimmy Savile passing away, to which I later launched several campaigns to have things named after him. I had more problems with Sainsbury’s, this time trying to buy alcohol free wine and read Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape which is well worth a read. CWF announced SocietasPro v0.1 and the 2011 Holiday Food Drive and after two and a half years of genius, Row One was brought to an end. By the end of the month, SocietasPro v.0.3 was out too! Unfortunately, I was in the country to see Evanescene, though the gig itself was great.

Finally in December we hit the Christmas market several times and spent most of the rest of the time watching Nothing to Declare. I finally got round to attending Leeds Salon and we celebrated George’s birthday. I said goodbye to my trusty hosting company of eight years and CWF delivered food to local homeless shelters. I managed to prove I invented Facebook and went to my first meeting of Toastmasters.

With Wendy once again rolling around, we headed out for some good music and good times.

With my auntie in Leeds for the weekend, we headed out for a family meal at the Queen’s Arms, which has since been taken over from it’s former life as a generic food-serving pub and become a Toby Carvery.

Overall, it was a mediocre experience. The staff were reasonably friendly, but they got one of our drinks orders wrong – a dilute orange arrived instead of a fresh orange, but my Gran not wanting to make a fuss bless her, just accepted it. That is until she tasted it and realised how weak it was.

The food was enjoyable, the meat was very nicely cooked, but the Yorkshire puddings really let the entire event down. To say we are actually in Yorkshire, they were the worst Yorkshire puddings I’ve ever had. The only comparison I can really make of them was that it was like eating a giant prawn cracker. Also, their strawberry ice cream turned out to be regular ice cream with a bit of strawberry sauce on, but the chocolate fudge cake was excellent.

Overall, I would rate the experience as acceptable, but below par. Maybe they just had a bad day with the Yorkshires, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Yes, you can update views in MySQL! A lot of people seem to be under the impression that you are unable to, but this simply isn’t the case. There are a lot of restrictive rules, which can be found in the MySQL manual, but as a rule of thumb, you can update them, but only one table.

For example, lets say you have a view which links table A and table B.

You can run an update on this view, but only if you are only updating the columns from one table. So you could run a query that updates a number of columns from table A, or you could run a query which updates columns from table B – but you can’t run a query which updated columns in both table A and table B.

If you need to accomplish this, you need to use a join instead.

Snapz really annoys me because I paid money for what is supposed to be the best product out there, but it’s actually incredibly hard to use because every time I want to take a screen shot I have to google for the shortcut key. By default, it’s this.

Cmd + Shift + 3