Chris Worfolk's Blog

With Elina gone, I’m now relying on Jeff to keep me warm at night.

Recently, I headed over to the West Yorkshire Playhouse, where my sister currently works, to have dinner with my parents and one of my grandmothers.

They have a restaurant in there, though they don’t offer table service, it’s more of a cafe slash restaurant, and to be fair to them, that is what they sell it as. The food was, however, rather disappointing. It was well cooked but it wasn’t very warm, probably a result of the excessively long wait in line to be served.

I could have understood this slightly more if they were busy, but with accelerated dining experience being my area it was obvious what they were doing wrong and how with a few simple changes they could quickly clear such problems up.

While my experiences had been positive enough to make it worth joining Virgin Active’s gym in The Light (previously Esporta), subsequence experiences have been disappointing.

First off, it was busy on an evening. This is contradictory to what Jen from the membership department told me, who said the pool was quite on an evening. Of course, she is from membership and so is going to say this, but you expect a little bit of truth, even if it is heavily moderated.

Secondly, the changing rooms where just dirty. Discarded towels lying around, a few chocolate bar wrappers on the floor and the floor was in need of a good mop. Their second hot tub was also still out of order and has been since last year. They still have one, so it’s not critical I guess, but still it has been two weeks now. The hair dryers are also quite underpowered.

Add this to the fact that the water makes Elina feel sick I think I’m settled that The Marriot is the gym for me. I wouldn’t say I had a bad experience at Virgin Active, because it’s been fine and the staff have been friendly. But The Marriot is a definite winner for me.

What is nine times seven? Did you know it was sixty three before reading this far? You probably did, but don’t pat yourself on the back too hard yet, as it could well have been that your brain was already reading ahead and the buffered information hadn’t reached your consciousness yet (if that is a thing, I think it is but I’m not a psychologist). Although, being a reader of my blog, you probably could do the math that fast anyway.

But not everybody can. Not because maths might not be their strong point but because they don’t use the same technique we do.

I mean, working out nine times seven isn’t nine times seven really is it? It’s ten times seven, minus seven. Because that is way faster. Because you can almost instantly tell that ten times seven is seventy, then all you do is subtract seven and you have your answer.

This was always obvious to me. But then, maths was always a far stronger side for me than English was. Hence why I can easily do such maths, but why there will almost certainly be parts of this blog post which make no grammatical sense at all. But it was brought to my attention when someone told me they had been learning about little techniques like that, that for some people it isn’t obviously, but you can teach them it and their maths skills get a lot faster.

In fact, it’s almost always faster to do it that way. Take six times seven for example. If I didn’t know that off by heart I would do seven times ten, seventy, divided by two, because again that is easy maths, thirty five, plus seven, gives you forty two. That would be way faster than counting up seven, fourteen, twenty one, etc, etc, even though it’s actually three different multiplications.

It’s like the i++ of the human brain.

Is there anything worse than when you just can’t remember a word no matter how hard you try?

Yes. Yes there is. Cancer. Smallpox. TB. Disease in general. War. Crime. Guns. X Factor. Poverty. Death, taxes, earthquakes, hard to open packaging, etc, etc.. Ok, so there are many things worse than not being able to remember a specific word, but it’s still quite annoying.

So I thought I would share my experiences, to see if others (ie, you, the reader) had similar processes or maybe even some better suggestions.

The biggest problem I find is that I will get a specific sound stuck in my head. I have the sound “an” stuck in my head, but the word I’m trying to think of begins with a “sh” sound – and no matter how hard I try, all the word I can think of keep beginning with an “an” sound, and even when I deliberately think of another word, I just find myself drifting back to the same sound, even though I’ve tried all the possibilities and it clearly doesn’t start with that (I’m 95% sure…).

The problem (I imagine) is that my brain is stuck in a particular pattern, and I need to get out of that pattern.

The way I get round that it to just start thinking of other random sounds, and indeed making that sound in my head. Not actual words, just the sounds. “be…”, “du…”, “re…”, over and over. That is all I usually need my conscious mind to do, and the rest of my mind will then suddenly make the connection, and I think of the word when I hit the right sound.

Anyway, the moral of the story is, the brain is pretty cool.

Wondering if you’re running i386 or x84_64? No problem, there is quick command which will return this information to you.

uname -i

I’m pleased to say that after much blood, sweat and toil, we have finally launched ZonePlay live with one of our internet partners, PlanetWin365. It’s been a tough couple of months with plenty of late nights, early mornings, but it’s very gratifying to see the product go live in a brand new outlet. Full credit to Russ and Andy who have worked their metaphorical socks off to get it there.

She left me roses by the stairs. Surprises let me know she cares.

Which reminds me, I’ve now been waiting almost a year to see Blink-182 and the gig is still months anyway…

Audi drivers are definitely the new BMW drivers. There is a parking space literally less than a metre to the right of this shot.

Earlier this month, I attended a Flying Without Fear course.

It consists of a morning session which looks at both the theory behind flying and why it is safe, and the psychology of anxiety and how to control your mind. After lunch you head over to the airport and actually take a flight.

The theory part was brilliant. Captain Dom explained the basic physics which keep you in the air, the various sections of the flight, what he does on take off, the backup systems they have in place – this was absolutely fascinating. Unfortunately it didn’t calm my nerves as I know a lot of the science behind it and I’ve never been worried about whether the plane is going to fall out of the sky or anything like that.

The psychology section was rather disappointing though, which was rather a let down as I was hoping this section would actually be useful to me. Unfortunately, the course uses Neuro-linguistic programming which has now been almost entirely discredited. Why? Because it’s all nonsense.

That isn’t to say their hearts weren’t in the right place. All of the course leaders (most if not all were volunteers who had given up their time to help out!) were incredibly supportive and that is the real benefit of the course. I’m incredibly grateful for the support I received from Sarah, Jill, my dad and everyone else on the course (if you’re reading this, thank you SO much!). They got me here:

Smiling and everything. Because the irony is that I love the idea of flying. I mean, it’s really awesome right, being so far up in the air, watching everything down below like you’re living all those hours spent on Google Earth. If only I didn’t feel ill every time I got near a plane, it would be a magical experience.

Still, I’m now one step forward in the battle for Los Angeles.