Chris Worfolk's Blog

It was a big we had been waiting for, for 15 months.

Why? Because I bought tickets in March last year, for a July gig. Normal enough. But a few months later, Blink cancelled their tour saying they needed another year to finish their album. So here we were a year later, finally on our way to see them.

As a bonus, You Me At Six had been replaced by All-American Rejects, who’s lead singer may or may not have been heavily intoxicated while performing. Blink-182 themselves were excellent and only played five of the twenty odd songs they did from their new album. Stick with the classics, that’s what we’re all there for 😀 .

Plus, they seemed very happy to be here. “We come for your women. And your Nando’s,” commented Tom DeLonge.

Following the recent launch of our first Swedish language site, Worfolk 18 is pleased to announce the launch of its first Finnish language site too – Alastomat Kotirouvat.

Reading this on Facebook? Why not click the like and share buttons, and share it onto your own wall to get even more people involved.

Anyway, I’ve previously written quite a bit on Facebook and Twitter about Kiva.

It’s a microloans charity – people in the third world ask for loans, usually around $1,000 to help them work their way out of poverty. We then come along, donate $25 each and between us raise the money for the loan, and it’s given to the person in the 3rd world. They then improve their business, take another step to working their way out of poverty and then pay us back. We can then lend the same money to somebody else!

It’s a superb idea and one that I am proud to say I have been donating to for several years.

But here is why you should get involved now. They’re currently offering free money to people who sign up – thanks to an anonymous donor, the first $25 loan you make to someone in the third world doesn’t even come out of your pocket!

Not just that but you can sign in with your Facebook details (though you don’t have to, if you would rather register separately) – so it only takes a couple of minutes to make a $25 donation to help someone in the third world without it costing you a penny.

Given that then, I don’t see any excuse for anyone not to get involved. Seriously, just follow this link. Do it! Do it now! I literally don’t see any reason why anyone reading this shouldn’t get involved.

P.S. You can also access the site directly at kiva.org. However, if you follow one of the links above, it will record a referral for me. I don’t get anything out of that beyond the warm feeling inside that I’ve helped spread Kiva a little further, but that is still nice to have.

P.P.S. You can also allocate your donation towards a community team – these are just groups you can join, like a Facebook Group. The biggest and best is the atheists, agnostics and non-religious, but you might also want to consider the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Even CWF has a team.

For my second speech at Leeds City Toastmasters, the “Organize Your Speech” project, I spoke about drug decriminalisation.

It is something I have blogged about several times before because there really is no case for arguing that our current drug legislation is either helpful or sensible. I was a bit worried the talk wasn’t really coming together while preparing it, but I must have done something right as I ended up winning best speech of the meeting.

Edit: Five days after I had given this talk, the IDPC published their new report, “The War on Drugs and HIV/AIDS: How the Criminalization of Drug Use Fuels the Global Pandemic”, so if the topic interests you, you may want to have a read. There is also a good blog post about it by Richard Branson.

For the June meeting of Leeds Skeptics, Rob Lyons, deputy editor of Spiked and author of Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder, joined us to discuss his book.

I had invited Rob up after seeing him give a similar talk at Leeds Salon and have previously blogged about it. It’s an excellent book and I highly recommend giving it a read – grab yourself a copy from Amazon.

For the June Wendy House we had planned a mascarade ball for Michelle’s return. However, it turned out she didn’t get in to Leeds until way after it would have ended so it turned out to be some far more relaxed drinks before Wendy House. Not that that isn’t the start of a very enjoyable evening.

We finally made it into Wendy House just before midnight at which Fonze began partying the night away.

However, within 15 minutes of getting in the door, we were heading back out again to meet Michelle. Also Michelle is back! Hurray! Although by the time this actually gets published she will have actually gone again, but it was fun while it lasted.

It’s great news to see the Supreme Court have upheld Obama’s healthcare reform, which puts the US a step closer to providing a proper universal healthcare system. Now if they could just introduce social welfare, a living minimum wage, workers rights, reduce the amount of gun crime and religious adherence and give their citizens back their civil rights and repeal the Patriot Act, they can finally be classified as a developed nation.

While you’re enjoying that humour, here is what Yahoo Answers said.

Sometimes, it’s easier to create an alias when working with the Unix command line. Having to create these every time seems to defeat the point of having a short alias though. Luckily, you can make them persistent.

Lets assume that we are using a user called mike. We need to be in our home directory.

cd /home/mike

The .bashrc file should be in there, but hidden.

ls -a

You should be able to see it listed. Now lets edit it.

vim .bashrc

And add a command in, for example, to save our usual CVS update command.

alias upd='cvs -q update -P -d'

Now save and exit. After that, every time you log onto the box you can use the upd command to run the CVS update.

Recently, I gave a speech on drug legislation, pointing out that tobacco is a far more dangerous drug than ecstasy is. Which is true. To add a bit of colour to my speech, I included in it the use of a bottle of alcohol and a pack of cigarettes as props.

Obviously, being a non-smoker I didn’t have any cigarettes and Ryan having disappeared for the day, I had to resort to going out and buying some. This wasn’t a big deal, they were only £3.95, but it then put forward an interesting question – what to do with the pack of cigarettes after I had used them.

My first instinct would just be to give them to a friend who smoked, so they wouldn’t go to waste. But then, maybe they should go to waste. I had just given a talk on how dangerous cigarettes were after all, and so it seemed that the best thing to do would just be to throw the pack of cigarettes away so that nobody could smoke them.

This seems to undermine freedom of choice though. I don’t want to restrict what people can and cannot do. As both a libertarian and a rationalist, the ideal world for me is one where everything is allowed but people make sensible decisions – so doing heroin would be legal, but nobody would do it because everyone makes rational decisions.

But then, by throwing them away, I wouldn’t be preventing people from smoking. I just wouldn’t be supporting it, which is all I can really do.

In the end, though, I decided to give them to a friend. The decision came down to this – the cigarette company already has my £3.95 from the sale. Now if I throw them anyway, my friends are unlikely to smoke any less, so they’ll just go out and buy some as normal and the cigarette company has got £7.90 out of us. But by giving them away, it avoids the need for them to buy cigarettes and so effectively the tobacco industry hasn’t got any money out of me. This seemed the most satisfying solution.

Worfolk 18 is proud to announce the launch of our first Swedish language site, Nakna Hemmafruar. The content is not unsuitable for anyone under the age of 18.