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.
December 29th, 2011 |
Tech
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
If you are using Flex Builder on Windows, you may run into an error where Flex Builder says it is unable to find the executable for Flash Player. The error will look something like the one below.
Flash Builder cannot locate the required version of Adobe Flash Player. You might need to install the FLash Player or reinstall Flash Builder.
Do you want to try and run your application with the current version?
This will give you an attempt to continue dialog with a yes or no option. If you click yes then you would get another error similar to the following.
Cannot run program "C:\Users\chris\Desktop\flashplayer_11_sa_debug_32bit.exe": CreateProcess error=2, The System cannot find the file specified
You can fix this by following the steps below.
1. Go to the Adobe website and download the standalone Flash Player Debugger edition.
2. Open up Notepad and insert some text (literally, anything).
3. Save the file as dummy.swf on your Desktop.
4. Open your Desktop and right click on the file. Select “open with…”
5. Browse to the location of the Flash Debugger you downloaded and select it, making sure to tick the “always open these types of file” option.
From now on, you should be able to run the application from Flash Builder.
I’m currently digging through old websites, so there will probably be a few posts similar to this. I don’t know whether that is good or bad, they will hopefully be slightly amusing, though I’m sure will primarily be nostalgic for me rather than of benefit to others.
It turns out that, when I was nine years younger, I started an anti war campaign with a few friends. I don’t really remember it lol, but apparently I build a web page for it. My written English seems to have been as bad back then as it is now.
Despite the cold and the train, December’s Humanist Community meeting was well attended and enjoyed by all. After all, the colder it is outside, the more a good Sunday Roast is appreciated! Conversation continued long into the night with this month’s topics including foreign policy, education and what everyone’s holiday plans were.
Over the years, the Worfolk Online network has run a lot of technical websites. Dozens and dozens of them. Each one had a selection of interesting and useful content, which for one reason or anther has since been closed down.
So, we decided to rescue them.
The result is that we’re currently working on importing articles from a number of old websites from our network.
It’s stretching our remit a little further than we already do – most of the articles are about web development and programming, but we thought it would be better to put them on here then for them to be lost forever – though that’s probably a big claim given how old the content is in some of them – it’s things we haven’t been doing for a decade!
Never the less, you may notice that our archives now date back to before the site was even founded in 2005. This is as a result of the new content we have brought on board and with articles dating back to 2002, we are now pulling together resources from the past decade!
