Chris Worfolk's Blog

For my birthday, we headed out to Cattle Grid for some steak.

There was a total of fourteen of us, making us not only the biggest group in the restaurant, but also bigger than all the other groups put together lol. I was particularly honoured by the attendance of Katie Barr, Sarann and Moz, who attended despite their vegetarian and vegan lifestyles!

As with my first visit, I went for the ribs which were excellent, but overall I was a little disappointed – the food took a long time to arrive and it didn’t arrive all at once. Jonni also had to send his steak back. Never the less, I had an enjoyable meal and finished off with their strawberry ice cream, which is delicious though suggests I didn’t order enough meat.

Last week, I reached middle age.

Most people wouldn’t consider themselves middle aged, but when you lead the kind of lifestyle I do, 50 seems a good innings to reach. That said, most people consider middle aged to be above what it is anyway – average life expectancy is 78, that means middle age is 39. So if you’ve hit 40, you need to stop kidding yourself 😉 .

I spent most of my birthday lounging around before finally getting up at 2pm, having done some extensive research as to whether UK Border Force is as good as Nothing To Declare: Australia’s Front Line. Turns out, it isn’t even close.

I would like to thank everyone for their birthday wishes, cards and presents, it’s all very much appreciated!

Last Tuesday, Atheist Society showed the documentary film, Jesus Camp.

We showed it back when I was involved in the society back in 2008 and it contains some amazing quotes. With a fresh set of faces watching it, people were once again shocked and appalled, with some Christians who attended voicing their shock to James at the end.

Luckily, of course, it isn’t representative of a lot of Christians, but it’s worrying to think many evangelicals across the United States could share similar views.

I’m sure that most of you have, by now, heard the news with Sir Jimmy Savile has passed away. Not just a larger than life character, Jimmy was also a true inspiration in his tireless devotion to the charities he supported. Not to mention that his death now leaves us with Chris Moyles and Scary Spice as the biggest names to come out of Leeds.

Still, at least we can remember him by supporting the campaign to name the Leeds Arena the Jimmy Savile Arena. That will show Scarborough and their silly statue.

With Elina back in Leeds, I decided to take her out for dinner and despite my general dislike for Italian food, with Jamie’s Italian being one of the few restaurants in Leeds I haven’t eaten at, we settled on that as a venue.

You can’t book, so you just have to turn up and wait. We were told on arrival that the wait was around 20-25 minutes. We were handed a pager and sent to the bar area, which was too small for the number of people waiting, but otherwise fine.

The wait ended up being around 15 minutes and we were soon seated and ordering. The food was good, and served fast, but I felt we were generally a little rushed so they could turn over the table. Overall, it was a perfectly pleasant dining experience, but nothing special.

I recently updated my MacBook Pro to the new version of OSX, Lion.

So far, I’m not overly impressed. Firstly, when I upgraded Finder totally broke itself. It added a number of documents to the devices bar on the left, which I couldn’t click on, but because they had a long filename they would expand the devices bar all the way over, so every time I opened a Finder window I had to drag it back.

They’ve also got rid of Spaces which allows you to have multiple desktops. They’ve replaced this with Desktops, which is basically the same thing, except that you can only tile them horizontally, whereas before you could set up a grid and scroll each way. Desktops is quite good because you you can gesture from one to the other, but I Miss my grid.

They’ve also taken Dashboard and moved it onto it’s own Desktop which is annoying because the only time I use Dashboard is when I need a calculator, and I need it as an overlay because I want to input some figures which I’m currently looking at.

Some of the new gestures are quite nice, but I now need to use five fingers to show my desktop, which is quite a difficult gesture to perform. I’ve also noticed that it’s just not quite as fast as Snow Leopard and the new full screen apps system just isn’t as seamless as it is in Microsoft Windows. Finally, there are just a few bugs too that need working out, especially with the new scrolling system.

Other than that, it has some quite nice features. I haven’t used Launchpad or Mission Control so I’m not too fussed about those, but gesturing between Desktops is good and being able to turn wi-fi on and off without being prompted for the admin password is good. Unfortunately, if that is all I have to say about a brand new version of an operating system, it’s a bit of a poor show.

Last week, myself and Elina headed down to One Life for their session on Ethics, to explain to all the young people why they are wrong. As expected, most people there argued that morals were subjective, so I put forward the case from Sam Harris’ excellent book, The Moral Landscape, which I will be blogging about shortly.

We’re pleased to announce a brand new open source project which we are launching, SocietasPro.

SocietasPro is a community group management system which allows you to easily manage your society or community group. It’s currently under development and once finished will feature a members database, mailing list, events system, blog, content management system and more.

The project is open source meaning that anyone can see what we have done and take inspiration from it. We’ll be supporting the project with financial investment, technical resources and developer time. You can keep up with the project’s process here, and you can also follow the project on Twitter, @SocietasPro.

Last month, we announced the Worfolk Lecture 2011, as the second annual event since we established an annual public understanding of science lecture last year.

This year’s talk was delivered by Dr David Jenkins and was entitled “From Rutherford to the LHC”, looking at the last one hundred years of atomic research.

Last week, Sheffield Skeptics invited me down to present a talk on Ray Kurzweil, and his book The Singularity is Near.

I’ve been to the group before to see Richard Wiseman speaking and they’re a really nice group. They’ve now become so popular that they’ve taken over the main bar at their arena and have a great projector setup and sound system.

The talk went quite well from the feedback I gathered, I took out a lot of the more technical site that was originally in the talk when I delivered it to Nottingham Skeptics in the Pub in July, so I think I’ve got it about the right level between factual and not too technical now.