Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

Does anyone else remember the Jonathon Creek episode where Adam Klaus is doing that reality TV show in which he has to live like a pig?

It was called “Animal Farm” and appeared in the episode “Gorgons Wood”, originally broadcast in February 2004.

I don’t know about you but I found it very amusing. The parody of reality TV, imagining our television programming would ever stoop so low was simply hilarious. I mean who would even make, let alone watch, such a ridiculous and interlectually bankrupt programme?

Anyway, it starts next Thursday on BBC Three.

I’m really feeling the stress and strain at the moment so I’m trying to take it a bit easier. Hence it’s only 11:15 and I’m in bed already. With I hope only about 30 minutes of work to finish off before I can go to sleep I am hoping to be out by around midnight and almost get my full 8 hours in!

I feel this is somehow giving in though, normally I would have just had some red bull and kept going for a while longer, while I could do given my detox doesn’t start until Sunday (and to be honest it will probably be fairly flexible). I feel it might do me some good almost getting the required amount of sleep in for one night though so I’m going to give it the old college try.

Yesterday saw a total of 87 arrests by police in London related to the protests surrounding the G20 summit currently going on.

Of course, none of us are suprised. It would have been far more of a shock if the events had have passed peacefully. Indeed it was perhaps a suprise that so few people were arrested given the protestors broke in to a brand of the Royal Bank of Scotland and continued to ransack the building. Because that is what the banking system could really do with right now.

It seems somewhat ironic that a group generally consisting of socials and tree huggers who would traditionally have been considered pro-peace (or at least that is what they would claim) have become the blight on society that they have replacing football hooligans as the unwanted trouble making element of our society.

Well, sort of. AJaxian wrote a very interesting post about display: table CSS and how after all this time of moving away from table layouts to CSS layouts we are now putting it all into CSS so we can essentially use table layouts again. It’s about time.

We’ve all spent years moving over to CSS layouts and support has gradually been getting better but we still can’t do a lot of basic stuff that you can do with tables without lots of hacks and crazy implementations that shouldn’t be there.

Take for example creating columns. We’re still using faux background images to create the column backgrounds and then putting a clear: both div below everything which shouldn’t really be there in semantic mark-up because it has no meaning, it’s just a CSS hack. These are things we could do with ease using tables.

While I’m on the subject there is also an interesting article on TJK Design about building layouts without using floats, the site being built entirely using lists which degrades beautifully if you turn off CSS.

Sunday, it snowed. It snowed quite a lot.

Monday, it snowed. That is quite a lot of snow, for us.

I gather the south had it even worse though to be honest, I think this is much of a case of it snows every year in Britain, why aren’t we prepared for it?

Not that I think we were overly unprepared for it up in Leeds, it remains to be seen as to whether we will get a second downfall that will really cripple us but on the whole things managed to keep moving, everyone in our office managed to make it in despite several of them living in the middle of nowhere.

For anyone in urban areas there was no real reason why those who live and work up north could not get to work on Monday. And given the roads were entirely clear by Tuesday there is certainly no reason why anyone would skip work by then.

In search of a good meal I headed back home yesterday as I also needed my dad to fix my car 😀 . Thankfully both services were provided so my car is once again oiled up and I’ve had a proper meal (as much as I love my sandwich dinners on the go) so it was well worth the trip.

It is certainly a sign I am getting old though, we ended up clearing out a lot of my old crap that I still have stored at home and there is so much stuff that I had as a child, all on it’s way to charity shops or landfill sites. Thought provoking times.

Lenovo have just announced a dual-screen Thinkpad laptop which is rather cool indeed. Inside the main 17″ screen is a 10″ slide out screen which gives you extra space on your desktop which is becoming increasingly useful these days.

While I agree that at the moment the extra weight, cash and loss of battery life may not make it worth it, you have to remember that this is the first of it’s kind and five years down the line when the technology has developed a lot more this could be amazingly useful.

Having been desperate to avoid work over the holidays and I took an hour out over Christmas to draw up this post leaving me with only the events that took place in the last few days to add. Given this you would think I could manage to get it out on the 1st, but apparently not. In any case, 2008 is now well and truely over and we move another step closer to there being another decade between when I was born and where we are now. So here it is…

Is it really this time again? Actually I don’t remember the end of 2007 so I don’t really know how long it feels like. I think I spent it working after having severe problems on New Year’s Eve. Still, hopefully this year’s festivities will prove to be a bit better, wherever I end up being. In any case, the year’s end seems a good time to ponder over what’s happened this year.

Interestingly enough, nothing happened in January. Jack left which was quite sad and something that is hard to believe it’s been a year since. Still, I’ll make it to Australia one day!

Meanwhile February saw our Darwin Day celebration, amusingly enough just a week or so after Mission Week. Indeed such competition between philosophies (or possibly natural processes) caused an earthquake.

It snowed in March, which Michelle was at hope ironically enough. The School of Computing agreed to rename to the Chris Worfolk Institute of Computing Excellence and Fonze drank himself into A&E. Good times.

Of course, things really got interesting in April. The main reason, obviously, was the massive festival of free thought that was Rationalist Week 2008. What a week, what an amazing week. Though there was also the small matter of finishing my FYP.

In constrast, May was a month of fun. I did the Summer Ball, Atheist Society Ball and saw Avril Lavigne live at the M.E.N. It wasn’t all fun though, I found out I failed my FYP and started interviewing again though that would be the job I would eventually go on to take.

There were ups and downs in June, I found out I failed my degree and started work though I also bought my car and travelled up to Edinburgh to co-found the AHS.

Summer truely having arrived, July was a month of changes. We properly moved into our new house and followed it up with a suitable house warming and now that we live in the suburbs dinner party. Many of us went through graduation.

Thanks to summer being rained off, August was a very empty month. Atheist Society continued to do very well and the It’s Only Water campaign was launched but nothing overly exciting.

In constrast September saw quite a bit of cool stuff going on. Freshers’ Week arrived along with my rather successful dinner party for eighteen, Norm came out of the closet, my podcast officially launched and started to grow from strength to strength.

Following on from this, October was a busy month too, I turned 22 during the infamous chicken brain incident, the Atheist Bus Campaign hit the scene, I delivered my first proper talk of the academic year to Atheist Society with out new, suitably enlarged audience, went speed dating, led a church service and held the first meeting of Pro Life Through Pro Choice.

If October was a month of many events, November was a month of big events. Apart from Obama being elected, Atheist Society held it’s very successful interfaith panel and started it’s live webcasts. I travelled to Bradford to meet Peter Cave, Leeds hosted the second national AHS conference and we took 22 people down to London for our annual Weekend Away.

Finally you should really be able to remember December but it included many firsts for Atheist Society including our first sports night and our first Thursday Night Dogging. I also took my first ever sick day from work. Atheist Society continued to do well with 17 people attending our Winter Solstice meal and we even good a good attendance to our Christmas Day meal as well as fun down in Tamworth at the AHS festive party. Things finally came to a close with our New Year’s Eve party.

Well, that’s it, 2008 in a nutshell. Extensively cherry-picked to miss out all the events that really mattered to you and inclusive of events few people really cared out. But there you go, hopefully, 2009 will be even more interesting.

This is old news now but I’ve finally got round to uploading my phone pictures.

In case anyone is struggling to read the headline it says…

They’ve stolen all our jobs
1.3m migrants took EVERY Brit vacancy since 2001!

In all seriousness, surely there should be laws against the Daily Star publishing this kind of thing. I mean, people will read this and some will actually believe it! Anyone else thing the BBC should start a campaign to get loads of people to complain?

Having spent Monday in bed recovering I managed to make it to the outside world on Tuesday which worked out quite well with A-Soc’s end of term no-brainer meeting, a screening of Evan Almighty.

I hadn’t seen it before but it turned out to be a good movie, it wasn’t quite as funny as Bruce Almighty but certainly had it’s moments. It really got me thinking how much I appreciate non-Hollywood movies these days, a break from the standard feature film format really has become something of a treat in this day and age but adds so much to the movie.