I’m very pleased to announce the launch of the Humanist Action Group’s 3rd annual Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters!
For the past few years, we have staged a food drive to bring some holiday cheer to those less fortunate. You can read all about last year’s event here and 2010’s event here. This year will be no exception, and we want to make it bigger and better than ever!
We need…
- Food (that lasts)
- Toiletries
- Warm clothing, gloves, blankets, etc
You can also donate financially, allowing us to buy in bulk, and indeed donate your time too to help us collect more donations and reach more people. If you want to get involved – get in touch!
We also have a Facebook event up and running, and you can find out more on the website, including how to donate!
Back in July, I wrote about Wing Commander, a little library I had written to draw together the very awesome Flight PHP framework and Mustache.php template library.
Times have changed though and everyone is using Composer now (you are using Composer, right? 😉 ), not to mention that even at the time, Wing Commander was using a slightly dated version of the Mustache library. So I decided it was time for an update.
Said update was then completed in a lunch break (and a bit of an evening too) and is now available, and listed on Packagist, which means you can easily install it via Composer.
{
"require": {
"xmeltrut/wing-commander": "dev-master"
}
}
That is all you need in your Composer configuration file, and it will install Flight, Wing Commander and Mustache – plus, it’s now even easier to use than it was before. Full information can be found in the readme.
Last week, myself and James went to the MEN to see Evanescence. They played a very similar set to the one I saw last year in Leeds, but with a few changes, taking out some of the stuff from their new album in favour of a few classics.
Photos did not turn out well though lol.
For this month’s Humanist Community meeting, we met at The Reliance, for dinner.
We spent the first weekend of November over in Preston, where North West Humanists – a umbrella group composed of Humanist groups from Lancashire, Liverpool and Manchester, were holding their second annual conference.
The speakers included Professor Richard Norman, Professor Callum Brown, Julian Baggini, Pavan Dhaliwal and Martin Poulter. The talks were highly interesting, but even more importantly, it was great to meet other Humanists and really get fired up about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.
The theme of the conference was “Humanism for a Better World” – getting away from the critical parts of our beliefs and looking to what positive changes we can bring to the world. Lots of food for thought and the discussions we had throughout the weekend will contribute to the rich variety of inputs that go into our policy making going forward.
Well done to everyone at North West Humanists for organising an excellent conference!
If you’re trying to run PHPUnit from the terminal in Mac OSX Lion, you may get an error similar to the following.
File/Iterator/Autoload.php failed to open stream
You can resolve this by running the following commands.
curl http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar > go-pear.php
sudo php -q go-pear.php
PHPUnit should now run without errors (or at least, without errors in their code 😉 ).
November 9th, 2012 |
Books
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.
