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:
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.
A few weeks ago we headed up to Skipton for Yarndale – a festival of yarn. It was huge. They had rented out a sheep auction warehouse and most of it was full of people selling wool and wool related products.
This notice was in a broken lift in Manchester. It was clearly broken due to the number of signs around it and the fact that the doors were held open. But they also felt the need to post an “urgent” notice.
I’m not quite sure what was urgent about it. Though they have put it in quote marks, so maybe they don’t know either.
