Chris Worfolk's Blog

A few weeks ago Oli was in Leeds so we decided to hit the town for a meal. Having meaning to get myself over to Cafe Guru for quite a while I suggested it would be a great lace to grab some dinner.

We entered the restaurant just after 7pm, which being a Saturday night I expected them to be quite busy – especially as last time I had tried to get a table on a Thursday evening and had been turned down. However, we walked in to find we had the entire restaurant to ourselves.

It certainly wasn’t what I expected. In my mind I had somehow conjured up a small cosy traditional Indian restaurant, based on what I had seen on their website and that it was based at Brewery Wharf. What we actually found was a modern, possibly even futuristic style restaurant, almost entire open plan and capable of seating over a hundred people. It didn’t fit with the Indian food.

The food itself was good, though it isn’t the best Indian I’ve ever had. The spicy starter I had was rather more spicy than I had anticipated which would have been fine but unfortunately they weren’t particularly fast bringing us our drinks, which at this point I was still waiting on despite the only other people in the restaurant by this point being one other couple who had only just arrived.

The wine was horrible. And by that I mean, even worse than the high levels of tolerance you usually extend to house wine.

In the end, the restaurant simply lacked the atmosphere and character I was hoping for. The staff were friendly and the food was nice, and severed promptly (though again, you would expect so given we were the only people in there), but there was a real sense of charm distinctly lacking from the place. At least we got mints with the bill though 😉 .

This evening has been rubbish. I got home, exhausted and haven’t really done anything. I’ve done a bit more work on some grant applications, answered some emails, done some more planning. But by 8:30 I was already giving up on being productive and went for a power nap.

I’m now fueling up on chocolate and Red Bull so I can get something done, but I wonder if there is just a better way.

For example, I always really enjoyed working nights at McDonald’s. There was actually something really satisfying about working twelve hours until 4am, then (after a quick picnic in the Tesco car park) heading home and just going to bed, knowing that you didn’t have to be up again at some irritatingly, and quite frankly painful, hour in the morning.

Of course, that isn’t really achievable in the real world because of the whole 9-5 office thing, even with the flexitime we have at work it still doesn’t grant me that kind of flexibility. But how about a whole different approach. What if we should shifted our day pattern to accommodate this?

So, let’s say that I sleep seven hours a night. I’m at work from approximately eight until six including travel time, so that takes up ten hours of my day. That gives me seven hours per day of free time. Instead of getting up at eight and going to work, I could get up at one in the morning, spend the morning doing productive stuff while I’m still in the mood for it, go to work at eight, which doesn’t matter how tired I am because it’s work so it’s inherently self-motivating (because it’s not voluntary so you don’t have to choose to do it, you just do it), come home at six and go to bed.

Of course there would be lots of problems with this strategy, notably that because society is geared to holding evening events, half the time I would need to be up when my new schedule says I should be asleep. It also means being awake in the middle of the night when it will be dark but then during winter it’s dark in an evening anyway.

The former I think it really an insurmountable problem in the long term, though I do think it would be fun to try for a fortnight. If nothing else, it would probably make an interesting YouTube documentary.

A few weeks ago, myself and our office manager Rebecca were engaged in a casual conversation about life, the universe and everything. We ended up on the topic of universal justice and how the only way we could really ensure that was to have some kind of vigilante system, like Batman.

She agreed, so I asked if we were to get her a Batman costume, whether she would wear it to work. She launched and said she would, if it were a Batgirl outfit.

So half an hour later I arrived in the Snooty Office (that’s the other side of the building where the business development team sit who are far too above coming to the pub for lunch) with a tin full of money – it’s amazing how the office really come together in donating to a good cause.

At the end of March, we headed over to The Original Oak for Simon G’s leaving do.

Unfortunately, what we hadn’t factored in was the amount of end of term Otley Run’s which would be in there. Still, as time went on they moved on to later pubs and actually gave us chance to get somewhere near the bar.

It was disappointing to see Simon go as he had really come out of his shell since handing in his resignation and was actually a treasurer trove of interesting stories – not nearly as entertaining as those told by Disco Dave but then you get the sense that when Simon was telling a story, it was actually true (not that I’m saying Dave didn’t have a gunfight with a drug dealer in Nottingham…).

Having miserably failed to get an iPad 2 on launch date, I had back ordered one and quoted a time of 2-3 weeks. I was thus very pleased when I took a phone call the next Wednesday telling me that my iPad 2 was now really to collect.

First impressions have been great – it’s not the lightest device in the world but it is so amazingly thin (at 8.8mm, it’s .5mm thinner than my iPhone 4 – the world’s thinnest smartphone!) and the battery life is excellent. The screen doesn’t have smudge when you’re using it, but you can’t tell when it’s turned on so the display is excellent.

It’s fast – things that I have to weight to load on my iPhone 4 come up almost instantly and the graphics power for something so thin is bordering on witchcraft.

I’ve fallen in love with Garage Band. I can’t play any music instruments, despite trying to play the guitar on and off for five years (mostly off to be honest, I have no commitment to it, on purpose, but that’s a whole different story) so having the “smart guitar” which has the chords pre-defined into it is amazing.

Overall though, I see it more as a practical device than a toy. Being able to check my emails in bed, on a reasonable sized screen is fantastic and it means I can have access to a computer without having to lug my laptop to the pub.

I recently attended a workshop organised by the Community Development Foundation along with Leeds VA-L and funded by Leeds City Council (this was emphasised because of how rare that is 😀 ).

The workshops were useful and interesting though what really struck me is that very little of it was new information – and yet most of us all needed to hear it.

We all know for example that we should have up to date accounts ready, a business plan, a written fund raising strategy, we should read the guidance notes, read the entire application form before starting, the list goes on. We all know all of this. Yet, if you ask people about it, and they’re honest, a lot of us don’t always do this.

Why? Because it’s really hard, and really unproductive. We have a lot of this in place now but every time I spend any time of this kind of stuff it always annoys me. Why? Because I want to be out there doing stuff. Writing grant applications, preparing annual reports, newsletters, etc isn’t an end, it’s merely a means to do the actual good work that as charities we all want to do.

So while it is an amateur mistake to not read though all the eligibility requirements or start filling out a form before they have read through everything, I do at least understand why people do this.

Along this topic, one tip I have picked up which turns out to be a time saver as well, is to be concise. All the experts say a word limit is a limit, not a suggestion. If you can answer a question in a few sentences, keep it short! Just say “we’re going to organise cricket games for underprivileged kids for ten weeks” rather than dressing it up in several paragraphs. Get straight to the point and say concisely what you’re going to do. It’s quicker, and it improves your chances of success.

Atheist Society recently welcomed Leo Dragon for a magic show and talk on illusions.

Leo describes himself as an honest liar in that he is tricking us but it’s ok because we all know it’s an illusion and we accept it – basically, it’s like democracy in cabaret format. Interestingly, along these lines, Derren Brown writes, in his book Tricks of the Mind, that all magicians are inherently bad people because their life is to trick people. Luckily, at A-Soc we don’t tend to subscribe to the idea of inherent evil.

Leo wowed the audience with a range of tricks, even after having appointed Michael to make sure there was no funny business going on – this means that either Leo is genuinely magic, or Michael should be permanently banned from working for the Child Protection Agency.

We recently headed down to Distrikt for Sunday lunch.

It is located just across the road from my apartment which is convenient though it is a bit of dive inside. It’s nicely done out, but it is underground and that comes with inherent implications as well as it being like a sauna.

The bar itself had an excellent range of drinks including several flavours of Belvedere and 42 Below which are some of my favourite vodkas. The food itself was very nice. They do their beef really rare, which I don’t mind, but put some people off a little.

The bar staff were a little surly at first but I think they had just been having a hard time as their kitchen wasn’t working for the first thirty minutes. Things lightened up however, after she heard my ring tone however and discussed whether you would peg me as a Rhianna fan or not 😀 .

For the final session of Perspective Citywide, Nicola Jackson presented a talk on Judaism.

It could almost be Transhumanist Week between my talk the day before and Michael and John’s talk on Transhumanism and The Singularity at Atheist Society on Tuesday.