Chris Worfolk's Blog

I’ve recently finished reading Richard Wiseman’s new book Rip It Up.

If you’re not familiar with Wiseman, he is a psychologist based in Edinburgh, and the man that showed expensive wine doesn’t taste any better.

It’s an excellent demonstration of Wiseman’s brilliant business skills. The book encourages you to change your actions and this is done by literally ripping the book up – you are supposed to tear pages out. This was somewhat difficult on my Kindle but means if you really want to get the most out of it – you have to buy a new copy every read. Genius.

Beyond that, the book looks at the As If principle, first proposed by William James, that suggests that rather than our thoughts influencing our behaviour, it is actually our behaviour that influences our thoughts.

Take this example – we often assume that we smile because we are happy. But the As If principle suggests that it is actually the other way round – we are happy because we smile. The book goes into hundreds of examples of this, but if you want to test it out now, why not spend a minute or two smiling and see if you feel any different?

Assuming that for the moment we put some stock into this, why does it mean? Well, there are lots of real-world applications.

For example, if you’re dieting, and you have a chocolate bar on your desk – try pushing it away from you. According to the theory, this will create the idea in your mind that you like it less, and so will less tempted to eat it. I’ve often done this anyway, though I’ve often attributed it to getting it further away from my eye line.

Another example, get over procrastination by allocating a few minutes to starting a task. This should be easier, as you can just tell yourself you’re going to do 2-3 minutes and then take a break. But once you find yourself doing it, it will be easier to continue.

In any case, it certainly makes for an interesting read. You can find out more on the book’s website.

Over on the Know Leeds website, I’ve written a review of Gaucho, the steak restaurant on Park Row. I don’t want to duplicate too much of what I have written here, but it is amazing! If you love your steak, you must pay it a visit, it is easily as good as Blackhouse and they even bring out a meat board, with their various cuts on to show you!

Flying to Dublin we had to go with Ryanair as I couldn’t find anyone else doing the flight times we wanted.

I think it’s quite an expensive airline in comparison to Jet2. We wanted to sit together on the flight, but to reserve seats cost us £10 per person, per flight, so that was £40 down, and just to pay for the flight (on my Visa as they don’t accept American Express) cost me £6 per person, per flight, so that was £24 as well. Altogether that is an extra £64 added on top of the price, which is a lot.

The outgoing flight was then delayed by almost an hour, which is basically the entire flight time.

Thanks to a legal requirement to have emergency exits on planes though, I did get enough leg room to stretch out fully.

What kind of monster would do this…

The 2012 Annual Report for the Chris Worfolk Foundation is now available to download from our website. Find out what we’ve been up to over the past twelve months.

Lets say you are running Mac OS X Lion and you have installed Scala to /usr/local/scala. To access scala from the terminal you need to do the following.

cd /etc/paths.d/
sudo vim scala

Add one line with the following in.

/usr/local/scala/bin

Save the file and restart terminal. You’ll now be able to use scala from the terminal.

I couldn’t be bothered to take my camera to last month’s Wendy House. But we did enjoy a few drinks beforehand under threat of extermination.

While in Dublin, we stayed at StayCity Serviced Apparents, so I thought I would share my thoughts on them.

When I originally tried to book online with Laterooms, it told me they had run out of available rooms and I had to call the Laterooms call centre. I did, and they confirmed there were no more rooms available, but suggested they could book me in at another StayCity just a few minutes away – and offer that I accepted.

Having turned up at said location, I was then told that we had actually been put in the original location. They were very nice about it and put is in a free taxi to the original location, where we found they had allocated a two bedroom apartment to us (couldn’t make use of it though as Elina insisted on sleeping in the same bed).

It was a bit run down, but when the serviced apartments I have to compare against it are Warwick and Oxford, you probably can’t expect the same standards. I can’t help but feel they were falling a little too much into stereotypes though by not providing any tall glasses, yet providing several types of wine glasses.

It was rather cold at first too as they had most of the windows opened when we arrived, so it took a while to warm up (and was never overly warm). It was also rather nosier than I was expecting when it came to trying to sleep.

The location was fantastic though – it was literally over the river from Temple Bar, so for the price and location, it still comes up as a good deal. Their wifi was good too. You do need a pass per device, but I had no problem streaming high-quality video.

To make the most of the bank holiday weekend, we headed over to Dublin. Despite having been all round Europe, I had never been to Ireland, so it seemed like good choice for somewhere to visit.

While there we made it round the Tall Ship Festival, Trinity College and the Book of Kells, Christ Church, Dublin Castle, the Wax Museum and the National Library. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the National Museum or Natural History Museum as they are closed on Mondays (it wasn’t a bank holiday in Ireland).

We also took in the nightlife at Temple Bar with a few different restaurants and pubs around that area, as well as the street artists. We eventually settled in at really cool place named the Bison Bar that had saddles for stools and bison and dear heads on the walls, as well as a superb range of whiskey (not that I benefited from such a collection).

Best moment? Definitely meeting SpongeBob at the wax museum!

It’s a great city, and well worth a visit, though given it has a flight time comparable with Paris, and I found Paris more beautiful and about the same price, I think I would opt to head back to the continent for a short break.

jQuery has an amazing set of selectors, but what happens if you don’t have access to jQuery?

It happens, especially if you’re writing the automated tests or working within an existing framework and don’t necessarily have control over the content of the page. Luckily, you don’t actually need jQuery!

All modern browsers support the use of querySelector. When I saw all modern browsers, I even include Internet Explorer which added basic support for it in 8 and full support in 9. You use it like this.

document.querySelector(“p.introduction”);

This works just like jQuery – selecting all paragraph tags with the class introduction.