The other day I was catching up with one of my friends who was in Leeds for the weekend. I fancied a drink so I went into the McDonald’s on Briggate and ordered a medium coke.
We went just outside the restaurant and continued chatting, while I was drinking my coke, though after about half the cup, I had had enough, so I gave the rest to my friend.
As he started to drink, the restaurant manager came running out of the restaurant and yelled “what do you think you are doing? If you want a drink, you have to buy your own! You can’t have the rest of his!”
That story isn’t true.
Of course it isn’t true, that would be mental. And yet, when I parked up in a car park in Sheffield city centre last week, I was asked for my car’s registration number, to make sure that I couldn’t pass the parking ticket on to anyone else.
In other words, Sheffield City Council were deliberately preventing me from passing on parking time, which I had already paid for, and of which they offered no refund for the time I didn’t use, to someone else. But how is that any different to sharing a coke?
Last night we headed out to say goodbye to Craig, as well as welcoming a few new faces to the company. We started off at Cuthbert Brodrick which was crazy busy but awesome as always before heading to Red Hot World Buffet.
Even though our table wasn’t booked until 9:30, they didn’t get us sat down for over twenty minutes and then once we were sat down, they had the cheek to tell us ten minutes in that they would be closing the buffet at 11! Despite the food being excellent, this kind of service simply wasn’t on so after a quick chat with the manager we also found ourselves with a free round of drinks, which went quite a way to making up for it.
Afterward we hit Selabar followed by Smoke Stack, both great bars that I had never actually been to before and thanks to Rebecca’s contacts at Smoke Stack we managed to miss the queues and get some amazing drinks too – it’s quite nice having some Old Money in the office 😀 .
On Friday, the first session of Perspective 2011 took place with Robin Fishwick talking to us about the Quakers.
On Tuesday, James delivered the first Leeds Atheist Society talk of 2011, on alternative medicine.
Last Sunday I spent five and a half hours in meetings. I think that has to be somewhere near a new record for a Sunday.
The day started with a Reason Week planning brunch, which was productive, though didn’t actually include any food which was disappointing. Things are starting to fall into place for the week, which is promising given how close we are to it lol.
The second meeting was a Foundation trustee meeting which produced some interesting results – more on that will be announced soon, I’m sure.
Earlier this evening Jonni dragged us out to Eccup so we could have dinner at a pub named the New Inn which he had been raving about for a while.
It was a bit of a mission to find. Having headed up Scott Hall Road I ended up on some windy country lane which was only one car wide and had trees overgrowing, entirely blocking out the sky making it feel like the Forest of Fangorn. Having got through that we eventually found what I can only describe as being similar to Westfall at night with no lights and just the occasional rustic farm signpost.
Never the less we eventually found the place and ordered ourselves up a couple of 16oz t-bone steaks. The photo really doesn’t do them justice, we spend a good 30 minutes going at them and what was left at that point still looked like an entire meal. Ignore the massive onion rings, compare the size of the plate to Kat’s meal behind. Needless to say, I was eventually defeated (which to be honest, I’m quite proud as, as I actually managed to tell myself to stop eating because I was full lol).
On Monday, we headed down to Sheffield Skeptics to see a talk by Richard Wiseman. Despite struggling to see the screen, which is a little annoying in a talk mostly about optical illusions lol, it was a really enjoyable evening and managing to get a quick chat with Richard I can see it was well worth going down for.
On Tuesday, Atheist Society began it’s regular Tuesday night meetings (See You Next Tuesday 😉 ) with a screening of the Chris Morris film, Four Lions. It’s an awesome film and well worth a watch. Though it did take us ages to get the film working despite bringing it on four different formats! So you can’t say we didn’t have a backup plan lol.
On Wednesday, I headed up to York for a York Brights meeting. It has been a while since I last saw them and could be a while again with Perspective Citywide starting so it was good to see everyone, and interesting conversation was provided aplenty as always.
Finally, on Thursday I was at a Humanist Society of West Yorkshire committee meeting which was great because the meeting was both efficient and productive – which tends to make a change from most committee meetings I’m in lol.
Next month, we’re launching Perspective Citywide, here in Leeds.
Perspective has been running on campus at the University of Leeds for several years now, starting it’s third run at the end of this month. It’s proved exceedingly popular and led us to us publishing the Perspective Leader’s Guide last year.
However, with it being based on campus it was somewhat limited in the audience we could get and so we really wanted to take it off campus so that everyone could access it.
As a result, we’re launching Perspective Citywide which will be taking place each Wednesday, starting 2 February. Running for 8 weeks, each session will see a different religious speaker joining us to talk about their faith and then open the floor up to a “no question off limits” Q and A with the audience. So if you have a burning question you want to ask, don’t miss out!
You can find out more information on Citywide on the Perspective Course website.
At last Saturday’s meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub we discussed the idea of “designed for the dump” as presented by Annie Leonard and her band as part of The Story of Electronics.
The premise is that manufacturers design for the dump – they build products which are designed to be thrown away after a year so that we have to buy new products and therefore generate more money for the corporations.
There could well be a lot of truth behind this, but as Tim Minchin’s The Fence says, “it’s not quite as simple as that.”
Products don’t just have an 18-month life cycle. If you’re anything like me you won’t have binned those old phones, you’ll have passed them down to friends or colleagues who just wanted an old phone because they’re not bothered about having the latest gadget. I can personally testify that the CWF office is fully kitted out with hand me down electronics.
The idea of the evil corporations is always a contentious one too. Corporations are by their very nature amoral – neither moral nor immoral, because they’re not living creatures and don’t think for themselves.
It’s somewhat naive to think that electronics used to be modular and replaceable and aren’t anymore. Desktop computers are a great example of this – you still upgrade and swap in and out components, and indeed can do with laptops too (less adding stuff, but certainly replacing specific broken components). But the fact is that back in the day computers had valves in that you would just swap out, these days the transistors on your computer’s CPU are too small for the human eye to see.
Luckily though we are already moving towards greener electronics. Compared to a decade ago there are all kinds of greener ways of doing things – all your components go to sleep when they’re inactive for example, cutting power consumption and therefore saving energy. In part, some of this innovation has been driven by designed for the dump – when you replace your electronics every 18 months, it means the companies have to come up with something smaller, lighter, more powerful and more green in a year and a half.
