Chris Worfolk's Blog

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.

I tried out my new lens at the pre-party. Unfortunately, I had to be in Donington the next day, so I was getting my coat out of the cloak room as people were still queuing to put theirs in. Never the less, good times were had.

Last week, we went to The New Conservatory for lunch. Apparently, they serve deserts, and even have a special “desert of the day.”

Everyone knows that the new Apple Maps are rubbish, and we all want Google Maps back. This is still the case, but there is one area where Apple Maps is actually really good – “turn by turn directions”, aka the sat nav feature. George informs me that this is actually just TomTom, which probably explains it.

I don’t know if I would replace my sat nav with it – it presumably downloads maps on the fly, so what happens if you lose signal on the motorway, and how much cellular data is it using? But for getting around big cities, it looks very useful as I found it a lot better than my actual sat nav, for directions and clarity.

The Swarthmore Centre have clearly tried to remove Paul’s poster from the notice board. But so great is the power of Humanism, and the glue Paul used, that they failed.