Chris Worfolk's Blog

More photos of me shamelessly abusing selective focus.

I’ve just finished reading The Real Deal: My Story from Brick Lane to Dragons’ Den by James Caan. He is a dragon (now former dragon I assume, as he isn’t on the latest series) who started by building up several recruitment companies, and now runs a private equity firm that invests in SMEs.

Was it an interesting read? Certainly. Was it a useful read? Yes, I think it probably was.

The same themes come up across books by different entrepreneurs – invest in the right people and it will pay dividends, work hard and make sure you understand your business inside out.

I actually really like James’ way of doing things. For example, at the end of a meeting, he’ll take time to double check whether the other party has any concerns. So often, you’ll walk out of a meeting already resenting the deal you have just done, and so James’ final check allows him to resolve issues there and then.

He also argues that he is actually risk adverse, and only really pursues an opportunity once he has minimised the risks – investing isn’t about taking risks, it’s about taking smart risks when you know the odds are in your favour – think of it like poker pot odds, you might have some losses, but if you play the right game, you’ll eventually turn a profit.

Turns out, it’s reasonably easy to remove windows, in Photoshop.

I used my birthday gift vouchers to buy a new 50mm f/1.4 lens for my camera. It’s excellent for doing very shallow depth of field, although, on reviewing the photographs, I’ve realised I went far too far with the shallow depth – sometimes it was narrower, even than the object I was actually trying to photograph! Looking forward to playing around with this lens a lot more.

David Cameron unveils his new proposal for structuring government.

At my birthday meal, we managed to eat our way through £557.54 worth of meat :D.

If you are using the Sinatra framework in Ruby, and you want to embed one ERB template in another, you can do this simply by using the ERB template tag like you can in your regular Ruby code.

<%= erb :welcome %>

Replace “welcome” with your template name as you usually do.

The Division E competition took place at Donington Park racing circuit, which wasn’t a very good venue as it was difficult to find (we got sent to the wrong part of the circuit) and very cold inside their buildings slash sheds, but on the plus side we did get to look round the Formula One museum section.

Having previously won the club competition and area competition, I travelled down to Donington to take part in the Division E humorously speaking competition. Division E covers an area from Royal Leamington Spa and above – the North of England and Scotland.

I got flattened at the competition, I didn’t even place. This was disappointing as while I thought I was well beaten for first place, I thought I might have done enough to get in the top three. But live and learn, the next competition starts in March, and that one ends in the World Championship of Public Speaking.

Recently, Brendan O’Neill wrote an article for the Huffington Post, entitled “If You Were Abused by Sir Jimmy Savile, Maybe You Should Keep It to Yourself“.

He argues that there is no reason for people who claim to have been abused by Jimmy Savile 30 years ago, to now come out and talk about it. It doesn’t make the victim feel any better, as they’re essentially just having horrible memories splashed across the media for everyone to see, not to mention that they are then fitted into a neat little box of victim, rather than the fully-rounded human being they probably are.

It doesn’t do justice any good, because Savile is now dead, and therefore cannot be brought to justice. The unfortunate reality is that it genuinely is too late – if he did do what he is alleged to have done, and it’s looking like he probably did, then he has now got away with it, forever.

Thirdly, it doesn’t do any good for society either, as it simply increases the paranoia that there is a sexual predator lurking in every corner and continues the slide to where, as Chris Morris suggests, we will reach a time when even a simple conversation between mother and daughter, will be carried out at gun point.

As a consequence of the whole incident, they’re probably going to dismantle Jimmy’s charity, because if there is anyone that should be punished for Jimmy’s actions, it is almost certainly the beneficiaries of a charitable foundation, many of which weren’t born when the alleged incidents took place. In fact, the idea of it being Jimmy’s charity is nonsense, because he’s dead, it’s actually our charity, it belongs to society, so I’m not quite sure why we are smashing up our own things in some form of mob justice against ourselves.