Chris Worfolk's Blog

As we know from the whole religion business a lot of us have been involved in over the past few years, it is very difficult for someone to change their mind. It really takes a lot, especially when you’re emotionally invested in something.

I’ve been a champion of the Firefox cause for many years now and I think the Mozilla Foundation have done some great work.

But I can’t champion its name anymore.

Let’s face it, it’s just rubbish these days. Their rapid release cycles have brought around faster versions, but this has just made them increasingly unstable and still trailing the competition.

Firefox uses up more memory than anything else on my computer. Anything else! I run Zend Studio. That is based on the massively bloated Eclipse Studio, and then Zend came along and added a lot more bloat, and it still uses less memory than Firefox!

So, unfortunately, I’m cutting my ties.

I’ve already replaced my Firefox/Opera combination at work with a Chrome/Opera combination, and plan to do the same on my laptop as well. The only thing I have held out with on Firefox for this long was Firebug, and Chrome’s Developer Tools and Opera’s Dragonfly do just as good a job, once you get into them.

Farewell, Firefox, you broke my heart :(.

Last week, we headed over to Trio for a bit of a work social. Despite making it clear that partners were invited, but not welcome, it somehow quickly turned into a bit of a couples-fest and as a possible first for Buzz, actually ended up with an equal gender balance.

The drinks were good. Their Rekorderlig was a bit of a rip-off, they had a “special offer” of bottles for £2.50, but it wasn’t the kind of bottle you would expect if you got a bottle of Kopparberg, it was a small beer style bottle.

Far more importantly, however, we were there for the two for one cocktails.

These started well, they had a menu but the first bartender we got was willing to mix up anything and I was soon sipping on an apricot martini. The second bartender we got was far more disappointing, however, despite working at a cocktail bar, he had never even heard of a sloppy joe, let alone being willing to mix one. Service was at least reasonably speedy, however.

The restaurant was far more of a disappointment. Despite charging almost £20 for a fillet steak, it couldn’t even compete with the likes of Brooklyn Bar or The Restaurant, let alone Blackhouse or Cattle Grid, all of which are cheaper, despite being in the city centre!

All in all, a good place to go for cocktails, but I can’t recommend eating there.

Last week, I took Elina for a romantic night’s food shopping. Came back from Marko with 16 steaks, 30 bottles of Kopparberg and a box of chocolate bars. Job done :D.

Last week, Atheist Society hit the Cuthbert Brodrick for steak night. Having left in favour of Stick or Twist last year, it was great to spend some time in the always loved Cuthbert, especially given it was the Summer Cider Festival. I was a little disappointed by Addlestones Cloudy, but the Strawby Cider was fantastic.

Another great thing about meeting Elina’s mum was she had even brought me some presents over from Finland! Apparently, each year the reindeer shed their antlers, and then people collect them up and turn them into useful things like bottle openers, stopper and cork screws. It’s the cycle of nature beautiful.

Great video from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, discussing how quickly some individuals can be at associating actions a different religion, but rather slower when it comes to their own.

Having had to make a last minute cancellation of my trip down to London to attend the BHA AGM, I decided to head down to Leeds City Museum to attend the HSoWY summer social. Given how many people are away over summer, especially for HSoWY, it was quite a respectable turn out, and the city museum is always worth a visit.

Last week, the Space Shuttle Atlantis returned to Earth from it’s final mission. The Space Shuttle programme was over.

Arguably this is another step backwards in the exploration of space. We haven’t put a man on the Moon since 1972 (39 years ago now), and now we’re not evening flying Space Shuttles. Did we just get really lucky in 1969, when we first walked on the Moon, and now we can’t replicate that success?

Actually, according to Dr Jim Wild, it was a good job that they missed some of the solar activity around at the time, which between some of the Apollo missions, reached fatal radiation levels. But that isn’t really a problem for quote unquote simple Earth orbiting.

The problem with the Space Shuttle programme was it was just too big, complex and expensive to run. Each mission cost around half a billion dollars and required an army of over 6,000 people to prepare for it. They also weren’t the safest of things – of the 135 missions flown, two of them didn’t come back – Challenger and Columbia.

I would probably argue that such a record isn’t too bad – we are still pushing back the boundaries of scientific exploration when it comes to space travel and the unfortunate fact is people die in accidents in the common workplace from time to time, let alone when exploring new frontiers.

However, despite its huge cost and army of safety engineers, the Space Shuttle can’t live up to the standards of its rival – the Soyuz. Russia’s Soyoz spacecraft has been in service since 1966 and in the entire time has only suffered four fatalities in a combination of two accidents.

Indeed, the Soyuz is now the sole manned space shuttle which will continue to send people into space to allow crew rotation of the International Space Station. So it’s not hard to see why the Space Shuttle programme is being brought to an end so a cheaper, easier craft for putting man into space can be developed.

But the one thing that the Soyuz has failed to do (this could be entirely inaccurate, I’m writing from a Western perspective and maybe millions of people elsewhere have been inspired by Soyuz) in the same way is to become an icon of space travel that has inspired a generation during its 30 year service.

I remember watching a Space Shuttle take off from Kennedy Space Centre in 1998 and remember thinking it’s magical. Actually, I thought, “wow, we sat in the boiling heat all day to see a little spec in the distance,” but I’m sure you can appreciate that would be a far less dramatic ending to this blog post.

Last Saturday, the Leeds Slutwalk took place. Slutwalks are protest marches which assert a woman’s right to dress how she wants without being blamed for getting raped because she was somehow asking for it. Unfortunately, the Leeds event suffered from a somewhat poor turn out but was a worthwhile event in any case.

As usual, the red flags of Revolution also turned up to cloud the message too. Still, at least it added to the numbers.

It was a rather all-star turn out for our poker night last week with myself, Elina, Jonni, Kat, Norm, Casual Dave, Happy Matt and Jason all eventually turning up.

Nobody dressed up this week, which was a little disappointing, but never the less it was a good night with Jason and Happy Matt eventually walking away with the prize, after just managing to knock out Kat the Card Shark.