Chris Worfolk's Blog

Having seen out 2010 in style, I began the year, in January as usual, by explaining I didn’t care what happened to me, after I died. At work we launched our website and I finally said the L word – to my iPhone. Meanwhile, CWF announced the Perspective Citywide course, open to the general public and running alongside the campus version.

The month after was of course February which began with CWF launching the Galileo Day pack for societies, giving them hints and tips on running a great event. Feeder were a little underwhelming, but Super Bowl XLV wasn’t. The Humanist Society of West Yorkshire launched its new logo and Michael Bramham delivered the Galileo Day Lecture and festivities followed. It was also the first ever month we ran Fry Up Club (I think).

I delivered a talk on the history of atheist charity in March and paid a visit to Hope City. With me and Elina now officially being a couple, we celebrated her birthday meanwhile James took the helm for Reason Week 2011 which finished with the traditional All Night Debate. CWF began building it’s library and I attended the AHS national convention.

I also kicked off April with a talk, this time to Hull Humanists while Michael and John were giving a very similar talk at LAS. The final Perspective Citywide was given by Nicola Jackson and my life was changed forever when I finally got my hands on an iPad 2. We got Rebecca in a Batgirl outfit and Humanist Community returned due to popular demand. The Humanist Action Group launched their guides and we finished the month by hitting the beach.

It was a busy month at work in May as we launched cricket and we voted for and against the alternative vote. I wrote to my MEPs about ethical meat and Sainsbury’s refused me service even though I had ID. I complained. James was elected president of LAS, I went to see Uncaged Monkeys and West Yorkshire Humanists had a very interesting discussion about animal experimentation. The month was finished off by the Secular Ball 2011.

The EDL were causing trouble in June, meanwhile I was still in love with my iPad. We had a McReunion while CWF announced Leeds Transhumanists and its partnership with Daily Motion. I proposed Try Vegetarianism Week and we celebrated our anniversary as Row One.

In July I met Matt and finally gave up my paper diary. I proposed we introduce equal opportunities in sport and took Elina down to London for the weekend. We got Elina and Kat dress up as bunny girls for our poker night, Jenson Button lost a wheel and I spoke at Nottingham Skeptics. I met Elina’s mum, Atheist Stock moved out of beta and leeds Slutwalk took place. We also said goodbye to the Space Shuttle programme.

I left Firebox for Chrome in August while CWF launched the Atheist Stock API and later launched Worfolk Lectures too. We also announced Sunrise 2011 and cooked a crab and played my first live poker tournament. We attended Leeds Pride 2011 and CWF held its AGM. I also cooked a fish and inspired by Franklin & Bash, we held a Margarita Mondays.

It was a big month for CWF in September with Sunrise Conference 2011 and I took Elina to Roundhay Park, Ilkley Moor and the Leeds Liverpool Canal before she flew back to Finland. I continued my poker exploits and we headed down to Sheffield Humanists for a talk on paying for sex. I lifted the ban on family being friends on Facebook and it was proved that atheists are smarter than religious people. We celebrated Norm’s birthday, twice and we introduced to the dangers of shot roulette before hitting up the Zombie Prom.

Skeptics in the Pub learnt about cults in October, Steve Jobs passed away and it turned out all freshers are morons. I chaired the first One Life with a discussion on the meaning of life but having waited ten months for my chance to see Rihanna – was too ill to go! Elina returned for a week and I spoke at Sheffield Skeptics in the Pub. Dr David Jenkins delivered the 2011 Worfolk Lecture and CWF announced SocietasPro. Meanwhile in inaugural Leeds Transhumanists meeting took place, I reached middle age and we held a kick-ass Halloween party.

There was a sad start to November with Sir Jimmy Savile passing away, to which I later launched several campaigns to have things named after him. I had more problems with Sainsbury’s, this time trying to buy alcohol free wine and read Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape which is well worth a read. CWF announced SocietasPro v0.1 and the 2011 Holiday Food Drive and after two and a half years of genius, Row One was brought to an end. By the end of the month, SocietasPro v.0.3 was out too! Unfortunately, I was in the country to see Evanescene, though the gig itself was great.

Finally in December we hit the Christmas market several times and spent most of the rest of the time watching Nothing to Declare. I finally got round to attending Leeds Salon and we celebrated George’s birthday. I said goodbye to my trusty hosting company of eight years and CWF delivered food to local homeless shelters. I managed to prove I invented Facebook and went to my first meeting of Toastmasters.

Aaaaawwww yeah.

With Wendy once again rolling around, we headed out for some good music and good times.

With my auntie in Leeds for the weekend, we headed out for a family meal at the Queen’s Arms, which has since been taken over from it’s former life as a generic food-serving pub and become a Toby Carvery.

Overall, it was a mediocre experience. The staff were reasonably friendly, but they got one of our drinks orders wrong – a dilute orange arrived instead of a fresh orange, but my Gran not wanting to make a fuss bless her, just accepted it. That is until she tasted it and realised how weak it was.

The food was enjoyable, the meat was very nicely cooked, but the Yorkshire puddings really let the entire event down. To say we are actually in Yorkshire, they were the worst Yorkshire puddings I’ve ever had. The only comparison I can really make of them was that it was like eating a giant prawn cracker. Also, their strawberry ice cream turned out to be regular ice cream with a bit of strawberry sauce on, but the chocolate fudge cake was excellent.

Overall, I would rate the experience as acceptable, but below par. Maybe they just had a bad day with the Yorkshires, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Yes, you can update views in MySQL! A lot of people seem to be under the impression that you are unable to, but this simply isn’t the case. There are a lot of restrictive rules, which can be found in the MySQL manual, but as a rule of thumb, you can update them, but only one table.

For example, lets say you have a view which links table A and table B.

You can run an update on this view, but only if you are only updating the columns from one table. So you could run a query that updates a number of columns from table A, or you could run a query which updates columns from table B – but you can’t run a query which updated columns in both table A and table B.

If you need to accomplish this, you need to use a join instead.

However you dress it up, Christmas starts with Chris.

I actually gave in this year and put some Christmas decorations up. What is the world coming to?

With it being that time again, we set about having the work Christmas party. It was the worst one ever. Not that it was a bad event, but last year, the Buzz Social Committee (myself and Jason) were consulted and we suggested murder mystery dinner. The year before, we saw a great night of karaoke. This year, we weren’t consulted, and so the end result was a standard meal, without any theme. Good, but not as good as if Row One had been consulted as they should have.

The dinner started at 12 noon, and we were sat next to a table from RBS, though they wouldn’t officially admit they were from RBP for fear that they could get a load of abuse given they were enjoying a rather expensive Christmas lunch at our expense (our referring to use, the tax payer).

After that, it was Row One to the rescue (along with Average Matt), trailblazing the path to the German Market where we enjoyed good times, stein’s of beer and the live band. Finally, we finished the night at Shooters, were Wendy took a bit of a sleep. I ended up going home just before 10pm which I’m pretty proud of given we started at 12 and I’m still off all alcohol and caffeine!

The next release of SocietasPro. Here is what we’ve changed:

• Implemented a password recovery system
• Location is now shown on the events listings page
• HTML Purifier is now used for filtering
• Custom columns are now supported by import members
• Custom columns now supports select boxes
• The control panel now has a version checker
• You can now change a member’s password
• Custom columns are now included in exports
• There is now a high contrast stylesheet for better accessibility
• Improved visual editor
• System pages have now been styled
• Added a calendar view to events

Last month, myself and Elina headed down to the Crowne Plaza hotel for a meeting of Leeds City Toastmasters.

Toastmasters is an international organisation that organises local public speaking clubs, where people go to increase their speaking, presentation and leadership skills. It looked pretty interesting so I decided it was worth checking out, just to see what it was about.

The meeting itself was very enjoyable. People presented a number of talks to which they were given up a topic and then asked to talk on it for two minutes, without any preparation. Everything was very regimented – the agenda contains exact times of when everything should happen and there was even someone assigned to make sure we kept to those times.

It was also quite inspiring to see people who had speech impediments or were clearly very anxious about public speaking, getting up and giving fantastic talks. It’s very intimidating to be honest, especially knowing that my talks are literally riddled with “erms” and other bad habits. Never the less, it looks like a great organisation and I am planning to attend on a regular basis, starting next month.