Chris Worfolk's Blog

Back in May I read I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan. It was well worth a read and so James recommended I listen to the audiobook as well.

I was good, but not amazing. Steve Coogan did a good job of providing the Partridge voice for so many hours (though his normally voice is very similar anyway) but I would have liked it to be even more annoying. It’s not quite the emotionally-charged whining that I remember from the TV show.

After a great time last year, we returned to the North West Humanist Conference last weekend to represent our work in Leeds.

Organised by Greater Manchester Humanists and Central Lancashire Humanists the organisers do a great job of putting together a programme. This year featured a keynote by David Pollock, Sara Passmore talking about the BHA, Robin Cross talking about Humanism in the Armed Forces, Amy Walden talking about Humanist chaplaincy in prisons and the inaugural performance of the North West Humanist Choir.

Videos of the talks will be available via Worfolk Lectures at a later date and you can see the full set of photos on Flickr.

Last week we held the second meeting of Anxiety Leeds, a new self-help group for people living with anxiety.

We got off to a great start with the first meeting in September and this month’s meeting built in that success with even more people turning up and giving us positive feedback. We saw some returning faces and some new. There was such much discussion going on that we actually had to interrupt to bring the session to a close after it ran over!

It’s great to see people getting benefit from the group and we’re hoping to reach even more people. If anyone is willing and able to distribute some flyers for the group, get in touch and we can send you some.

Our next meeting takes place on Monday 11th November.

Having taken on the role of Table Topics Master at last Thursday’s meeting of Leeds City Toastmasters, I got the chance to use my new TableTopics box. This is a cube full of conversation starter cards – take a look here. Most of them turned out to be really good topics and made for a very lively session.

For the October meeting of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire, Brian Quinn presented a talk “why does god hate women?” It was delivered in Brian’s usual eloquent style, with plenty of very dry humour and well-researched well-sourced information.

Last weekend I headed over to Manchester for PHPNW13.

I really enjoyed last year’s event and came away having learned a lot from it. This year was also quite interesting, though on returning home and reviewing my notes, there is only really one new thing that I want to look into.

I recently stayed at the Arora Hotel in Manchester. Given I paid £220 for a room, I have to say I was very disappointed. Especially as that was room only, breakfast was an extra £28. Things I didn’t like about it:

• There was no manual in the room explaining things like breakfast times, how the room worked, how to use the internet, etc
• The room was very warm and the cooling system didn’t seem to do anything
• Despite this, the cooling system continued to make a noise all night
• The windows didn’t open very far
• The wifi didn’t work properly as far as I could tell. I was supposed to get 30 minutes free (there was a charge for using it longer) but when I connected to the wifi network, it wouldn’t let me select hotel guest and any other option required me to login
• There was no 3G signal, so I couldn’t hotspot on my phone
• The heated towel rail did not work
• The shower was very weak

The “Cloud 9” bed was okay, but nothing amazing. It did have some nice features – there was a bidet in the bathroom and the breakfast was good. Overall, I was quite disappointed though.

Through the Looking-Glass is a sequel to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

It was certainly strange, though I didn’t enjoy it as much as the original as it didn’t read quite as much of interesting nonsense. Some of it seemed to drift off into James Joyce style ramblings that seemed a little out of place in what is really a children’s book.

Recently I spent a good twenty minutes tearing my hair out over a JavaScript unit test I was trying to write. The answer turned out to be a difference in the way our Mocha-based DOM differs from how it would running JavaScript in a browser.

For example, let’s say you have a select field.

<select name="test" id="test">
	<option value="">Select an option</option>
	<option value="1">Option 1</option>
	<option value="2">Option 2</option>
</select>

In a browser, the top option would be selected by default, so if you had the following code:

jQuery('#test').val();

It would output a blank value as you would expect. However, run this in Mocha and you will get an undefined or a null. The reason is Mocha doesn’t select the top option by default unless you manually specify it to. So your HTML would have to look like:

<select name="test" id="test">
	<option value="" selected="selected">Select an option</option>
	<option value="1">Option 1</option>
	<option value="2">Option 2</option>
</select>

In which case, it would then return the value as it should.

Photos from around Granary Wharf and the canal.