Chris Worfolk's Blog

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.

The Atheist Society has a long history of running annual Winter Solstice meals, and this year was no exception. Despite us being unable to get in to Red Hot World Buffet, or be able to get karaoke going at OK Karaoke, it was never the less an enjoyable evening.

Best of all, I achieved the impossible – I think I am probably the first Yorkshireman ever to manage to stop eating when he was full and not keep going until he felt like a short walk over to the hospital on the other side of Millenium Square would be a strongly advisable course of action, in an attempt to squeeze every last penny of value out of the all you can eat buffet. I knew it was going to be a challenge, so I’m quite pleased with myself :D.

Snapz really annoys me because I paid money for what is supposed to be the best product out there, but it’s actually incredibly hard to use because every time I want to take a screen shot I have to google for the shortcut key. By default, it’s this.

Cmd + Shift + 3

Having been quite impressed by the Leeds Salon event I attended, and I decided to head down to their next one – Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder at which Rob Lyons made the case that we all need to chill out about what we’re eating before being cross-examined by a panel of experts.

The key points in Rob’s talk were that people now eat a more varied, nutritious diet than ever before. One hundred years ago people didn’t have freezers, microwaves or even cookers, so the idea that until recently everyone had eaten warm home cooked meals is nonsense.

Supermarkets have only come round in the past 50 years, and before then you simply couldn’t get the variety you can access now. Let alone a thousand years ago, or ten thousand years ago as the species was evolving (not that it’s stopped). Only as far back as 1914, people simply couldn’t afford the fuel to run their cookers, so would often only cook hot food once a week for Sunday lunch. People would be eating junk food all the time – they would often by down the fish and chip shop three or four times a week.

In 1930, food made up 30% of your household budget, it now accounts for 10%. It was only in the 1970’s that freezers became affordable to everyone. In short, food today is cheaper, easier to store and easier to cook than ever before. The result is that people benefit from a more varied, more nutritious diet than ever before. Even if you’re eating takeaway every night, compared to what people were eating a hundred years ago, you’re doing pretty well.

While the panel didn’t buy into the talk wholesale, there was a lot more agreement than I expected. Generally, the consensus was that Rob was speaking a lot of sense – but there still was a healthier way to live, if only by ensuring you have different coloured foods on your plate each night.

I always knew that one day I would be able to prove it! While trawling through my old websites, I came across a website that is essentially FaceMash. Now, where do I write off to, to get my money?

Quick command for listing locally modified CVS files.

cvs -Q status | grep -i locally