On Saturday night I attended the annual BBQ of the North Yorkshire Humanist Society (so don’t get confused – it wasn’t a BBQ where we cooked North Yorkshire Humanists 😉 ).
The BBQ itself was good although I feel I was mis-sold when told it was in York as it was in a village just outside named Haxby – not a problem when you’re coming from York but on the far side when driving up from Leeds.
It was interesting to see the demographics in North Yorkshire, the age range is much better than West Yorkshire although this could have been disorted by the fact it was a bit more of a social event than a regular meeting.
They seem an active enough society though, they hold 11 meetings a year (just missing out August) which is more frequent than a lot of societies which take extensive summer breaks and they seem to have quite a bit of committee rotation going on.
Yesterday saw the July meeting of Skeptics in the Pub with a talk by myself entitled “Swine flu – will anyone survive?”
The basic conclusion of the talk was no, unfortunately not. We are all almost certainly going to die. The good news though is that most of us probably won’t die from swine flu, which is a bit more of a positive outlook.
After a bit of a shakey start were Carpe had forgotten to reserve us the room we got going with quite a few new faces which was good to see.
Headed down to London for the AHS meeting on Thursday.
The station car park was full which resulted in me parking literally a mile away. Still cost me £3 as well because the parking ticket machine ate half of my money. I scribbed on the ticket though “I have this machine £3!” and didn’t get a ticket despite it expiring so one way or another I got an almost fair amount of parking (I should have only paid £2 really). Interestingly, if you phone the help number on the parking machine, you get a modem on the other end.
Got the train down fine and found my way to 1 Gower Street which was very irritating as I came from King’s Cross so I started at something like 137 Gower Street. That is one of the very annoying things about London – just because you’ve found the right road doesn’t mean you’re anywhere near where you want to be!
The BHA offices were nice enough, they were very much old converted houses with many small floors over about four different levels. We finished up there and headed round to the College Arms for a pint which again was small but nice enough.
Myself and Andrew were both getting the train back from King’s Cross so we headed off not long after though unfortunately by this point it had started raining. Having already got a coat I offered my umbrella to Andrew who hadn’t brought anything. This turned out to be somewhat of a mistake as the heavens properly opened and it began pelting it down, I was not impressed by the time we finally reached the station. Especially because earlier I had thought to myself “should I switch to my walking boots in case it rains?” and decided against it in the end.
It was also rather irritating how many people were on the train back to Leeds at 9:30 at night though it gradually thinned out as we headed northwards from an almost full carriage to an almost empty one.
It wasn’t the most pleasant journey back, I hadn’t brought a jumper because I was trying to travel light and I thought I could just put my coat on if I was cold but it having been soaked right through that wasn’t really an option so it was rather cold, especially with me not being overly dry. I did manage to get a discounted hot chocolate from the snack cart though which was most welcome.
By the time we reached Leeds I was ready to give up for the night (though I still had to drive to Halifax and back, but that is a whole different story – coming soon) so I gave in and jumped in a taxi back to my car. Well worth not freezing to death on the talk back to my car and more importantly, my beautifully warm Wikipedia hoodie.
I attended the York Brights meetup on Wednesday. You’ll never guess what we talked about.
Oh my god, why, why can’t the debate just stop. It’s endless. It doesn’t matter what we call ourselves. Of course it actually does matter but it’s not the most important thing in the world, we have far bigger problems as a movement.
The seperation does fall into the category of a major problem but it would cease to be one if we could just all work out it doesn’t really matter that much what we call ourselves as long as we’re pushing the same agenda.
Can we please, please, stop talking about the name.
Got home last night to find my exhaust was hanging off the bottom of my car.
This is the new exhaust I had fitted a month or two ago so I wasn’t overly amused. After having duct taped it back in place this morning I phoned my local branch of Alba and explained one of their other branches had put me it on and it was now hanging off and could they fix it.
They said no.
Apparently they also use different suppliers and have to go through those supplies so if I took it down there, they would then phone the branch that did the work and get them to order the part then once they had it it would be sent to the branch I was now at before they could do the work.
So I phoned up the branch that originally did the work who said bring it down and they would get it looked at.
This is where it all goes a bit wrong for the blog post really because shock of all shocks – I had a good experience with a garage! I took it down there on my lunch break and though I spent ten minutes just waiting for them to get round to me once they said they sorted it out for me and didn’t try to charge me either.
It kind of ruins the whole tone of the blog post really as I wrote the first half this morning before taking it down to them expecting to have loads more to rant about, but I don’t. Well done Alba, I guess.
If I did want to continue the rant however I could easily point out that these victories shouldn’t be so rare in modern life. I seem to spend most of my lunch breaks running around trying to fix one thing or the other – the extended blog post about housing that should hopefully arrive in the next few weeks (I’m waiting until it’s sorted so don’t hold your breath) is testament to that. Life shouldn’t be full of all these problems. It shouldn’t be a fantastic day when something is actually sorted as it should be. Still, that is the modern world I guess. Today was a good day.
In preparation for a more formal launch of my foundation, ChrisWorfolk.com is being redesigned to be a bit more appropriate for incorporating the foundation’s website into it. Also it was finally time to move up the world – the days of 800×600 resolutions are gone and it just looks silly on the 22″ monitors the kids are knocking around with these days. As such the new design is expanded to fill more space.
The new site is now available for feedback before the final steps such as validating the HTML and doing browser compatibility are done, you can check it out here.
Tonight saw the usual Tuesday night Atheist Society social which again delivered a fairly recent turnout given that it is the summer holidays and nobody is around. More importantly they managed to put some dressing on my burger this week which was most welcome 😉 .
Headed out to The Library for Sunday lunch today, ended up staying there for most of the afternoon before heading down to Oracle on the canel. We ended up finding the Waterfront Festival which had a live band on so we ended up spending some time sat in the sunshine on the waterfront watching the band.
Walked past the Subway in the St. Johns Centre today. You can tell we had just had a Saturday night in Leeds – they hadn’t had time to clean the blood off yet.
I was driving to work yesterday when I saw a land rover with the A-Soc slogan on the back. I can only presume they are a big fan of the society 😉 .
