Chris Worfolk's Blog

The 2013 NFL Draft starts tonight! Prior to the actual draft, a number of people produce a mock draft, showing their predictions as to what teams will draft what players, including Kiper, Scouts Inc and ESPN bloggers.

While I won’t claim to be an expert in NFL drafting, I have produced a mock of my own, showing what would happen if franchises were allowed to draft Chuck Norris. Obviously, being Chuck Norris he would be able to play every position, for all teams simultaneously, and thus this has been reflected in the mock.

If you’re trying to create an SSH tunnel, you may find that running the command just logs you into the remote server.

ssh -L 27017:somehost:27017 user@examplehost.net

To solve this, you need to use the -N flag.

ssh -L 27017:somehost:27017 -N user@examplehost.net

This will then just set up the forwarding, and not run the command.

Photos from the bedroom tax protest that took place in Leeds.

Earlier today, new figures for the UK Peace Index showed that murder and violent crime rates have fallen significantly over the last decade.

The figures, reported on BBC News, show that the murder rate has almost halved since 2003, and violent crimes have fallen by a quarter too.

Obviously this is good news. It’s easy to become demoralised about the state of society because an ever increasing global news coverage can sometimes bring out the worst. But the reality is that every year progress is made, the world gets better and people live longer and happier lives.

After an extensive hiatus, in which it was basically ended but then it turned out that none of the actors really had much to do, Red Dwarf returned with a ninth series in 2009 with Back to Earth. It was disappointing.

Thankfully, when it returned for a full six episode series in 2012, it was much improved. Instead of trying some kind of clever, existential plot, they just made six episoded of The Dwarf, as if nothing had changed. The result is that it worked! Six more classic episodes added to the series, without ruining the legacy.

The letter campaign starts here.

To Whom It May Concern:

I have long been a fan of your restaurant, which I believe to be the finest Thai restaurant in Leeds.

One of the reasons I have enjoyed your restaurant so much is that you had a dish which consisted of Thai curry sauce, in a Yorkshire pudding, on a steak. As you’re no doubt aware, this is a dish that consists of the three most awesome foods in existence, and was therefore the greatest dish ever.

However, while dining at your restaurant in February, it appeared that the item had been removed from your menu.

If indeed it has been removed, I believe this to be a grave mistake, and one that I would implore you to reconsider.

Your restaurant created what is almost certainly the greatest dish that ever has existed and ever will exist, and for it to be lost forever to the annuals of history would be a great tragedy.

Please consider reintroducing it onto your menu.

Yours faithfully,
Rev Chris Worfolk

Since sending this, I received a very nice reply from Chaophraya saying my feedback would be considered at their regular menu reviews.

Time lapse video from the International Space Station. Thanks to David Peterson for posting this, you can find a commentary for it on the YouTube page.

Last month saw White Rose Speakers hold our 2013 international speech and evaluation contest. Actually, we held a speech showcase rather than a contest as I was ineligible to compete due to already having won at Leeds City, so we elected Erik is our club representative to take our club to the area contest.

Meanwhile the evaluation contest was more hotly contested, and I was worried that running out of time hurt my evaluation, but it seems everyone suffered from a little of that and I ended up taking first place. I’m looking forward to learning from these lessons and moving on to the area contest.

Having recently read the first two books in the His Dark Materials trilogy, Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife, I moved onto the final part (as is traditional with trilogies – unless you’re Douglas Adams!), The Amber Spyglass.

While I found the previous book a bit hard going in terms of maintaining my interest levels, I had no such problem with this one. Pullman’s description of their voyage to the Land of the Dead kept me riveted, at least as much as I can be to a book. I also found the end heartbreaking and am very glad that Elina is from the same parallel universe that I am (as far as I can tell anyway).

I would say it’s well worth a read, though you do need to read the whole trilogy for it to make any sense. But if you’re a Harry Potter fan, this is worth a read as well.

Lets say you are trying to create an SSH tunnel.

ssh -L 27017:somehost:27017 you@examplehost.net

You may get the following error message.

ssh: Error resolving hostname \342\200\223L: nodename nor servname provided, or not known

This is caused by using the wrong kind of minus symbol. If you have copied and pasted the command from somewhere, this is probably the case. This is easy to fix – simply paste the command into your terminal, then go through it, remove the existing minus symbol and put a new – in.