Chris Worfolk's Blog

Recently, we dined at Kendalls Bistro, a French restaurant on St Peter’s Square. They had long candles in wine bottles, where the way had all hugely overflown and run down the bottle, to the level where you can only assume it is some kind of art.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of it, or could find a uncopyrighted photo that looked anything like it, but it looked something like this. Anyway, you can read my review of Kendalls Bistro over on Know Leeds.

Today marks the first anniversary of my 25th birthday. Thanks to the spread bet I placed, that means £100 in my pocket, and an additional £100 for each year after that I survive.

If you’re tired of Facebook inviting you to lots of events you weren’t actually invited to, using a 12 hour time format and starting your week on a Saturday, never fear, it’s easy to fix.

If you go to Events, then select the cog on the right hand side, then select settings, you are able to fine tune your options.

PayPal are quite restrictive over what they think is appropriate and inappropriate uses of their service (ie, they just don’t like certain industries), so if you work in those industries you have to use someone else. Someone like Payza.

Unfortunately, if Payza aren’t a scam operation, they seem to be doing their very best to look like they are.

Earlier this year, AlertPay (the original name of the company) re-named to Payza – because re-naming is always a good sign things are going well. Whenever I have filed support tickets with them it has taken weeks for them to get back to me, and indeed getting verified look literally months!

Elsewhere, there are no shortage of complaints. Google has loads of results for Payza sucks, so much so that the operators of the company even felt the need to start up PayzaSucks.com as a counter site. They also have dozens of complaints registered on the Better Business Bureau .

Then, today, they sent an email round saying that they were stopping all deposits to UK based accounts. It said they would notify us when this was back online, but failed to provide any timescale for this – days, weeks, months, ever? Who can run a business on this? It felt very much like when Fult Tilt poker had their licence suspended and ultimately closed.

If they are a legitimate company, then there are some serious questions that need answering…

• Why does it take them weeks to respond to support requests?
• Why do so many requests for support go unanswered?
• Why have they repeatedly lost their licence or payment processing abilities?

Clearly, you can’t run a business on a payment processor that emails you with 12 hours notice that they will be disabling your ability to receive payments, especially when it comes with no indication when, or even if, the functionality will ever be restored.

No wonder MasterCard shelled out a third of a billion pounds for DataCash, they’re probably the closest you can come to a trusted online payment processing provider.

Viv held her birthday party at Blackhouse, and despite having our photography course, we finally made it down there at 9:30 – still in time to order some steak! We both had the posh surf and turf, which was great, but I wish I had ordered a proper steak with hindsight.

You would think that having come from a photography course I would be able to take a good photo. But you would be wrong.

If you’re running Mac OSX Lion and trying to update your locate db, you may get the following error message.

-bash: updatedb: command not found

You can call updatedb by using its full path instead.

/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

You could also create a symlink in your bin directory which would then allow you to just call updatedb as normal.

For this month’s Humanist Community of Leeds, we went for meal at Miah’s Kitchen. Next month we’ll be meeting at The Reliant for a meal – feel free to join us!

One of the problems with the new AirPort Utility, 6.0+, is that it doesn’t have a DHCP clients table. This is obviously ridiculous, as anything claiming to be a router that can act as a DHCP server needs to have one, so I phoned AppleCare to sort it out.

They first asked me for the product’s serial number. But the problem is, this is genuinely invisible.

It’s below all those big symbols. Can you read that? I certainly can’t. No matter how close I move my face (human optics lacking a zoom function after all) and my eyesight is pretty good. Luckily, I managed to find it via AirPort Utility.

After some digging with first line, and some more with the senior I was passed through to, they eventually sorted it out for me – fair play to them as they basically spent twenty minutes talking me through how to bypass all of Apple’s security lockdowns to get the old software installed that does have the functionality.

Unfortunately by this point I had been on the call almost an hour, at a cost of £10 to myself, but they did at least solve the problem.

A week later, this photo had gone.

This week saw the first meeting of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire for this academic year. We run in academic years due to our venue following an academic calendar (it being an education centre and all, though with it being an adult one, that still seems a little strange).

It was rather manic with me having taken over as treasurer. Lots of people wanting to pay and I’m still not clear on everyone’s name in the society, so we ran out of time in the end and I’ll need to hand some of the membership cards out next meeting. All in all, lots of money collected though, which is the important thing.

The talk was interesting, Dr Bruce Turnbull talking about synthetic biology, but I had heard it before, as he had already given the talk at Leeds Skeptics earlier this year.