Friday saw the launch of our new course, Answers. The idea to help people who aren’t too confident in how to talk about their beliefs or who maybe haven’t thought that deeply into it and want to understand and express their opinions better. It well very well I thought.
This was followed by Perspective which this week saw an Islamic speaker take the floor. The event was packed as usual, we had 10 of us sat around at the back or on the floor because we had so many people there. So I was quite pleased with how it all went.
Wednesday saw us head down to London for the launch of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies, better known as the AHS. We managed to get ten of us down there from Leeds – a number unmatched by any other society with the closest competitors only achieving five (not that I’m bragging of course 😀 ).
The day itself went quite well, we eventually managed to get the technical sorted and all of the speeches were very good. We got some good pictures too which will do very nicely for publicity not to mention the endless angles we got video from.
I met Richard Dawkins, I said “what kind of microphone would you like?” and he said “a lecturn will be fine.” That is my Richard Dawkins story 😀 .
The hotel was alright, we had quite a big room for the amount we paid. I think I managed to spend as much money on taxis getting to and from the train station I did as my train tickets which I found quite amusing but the important thing is, I actually made my train (unlike certain other people who had to go via Manchester at 4am to get down there).
All in all if the AHS can continue like this, we’re going to do very well. Congratulations all on a victory well deserved.
February 18th, 2009 |
Life
A lot of stuff went wrong Tuesday. By 1pm there had been so many things go wrong I was ready to give up for the day but in the end a few things pulled themselves round and didn’t end too badly.
The evening saw us take up a debate on Scientology looking at whether it was a cult or not. Attendance was fairly good though we had been moved into the resource lounge (which was better than the original plan of just not having a room).
After this we headed down to The Old Bar to join the Christian Union’s barn dance. Not that we did that much dancing, we had drinking to do, but it was fun never the less.
Sunday being Galileo Day we decided to celebrate in the traditional way with a Galileo Day Feast. Sunday would have provided far too much time to prepare so we held it on Monday night on which I didn’t get home until 6:30 so eating at 8pm wasn’t bad at all.
Well, sort of. AJaxian wrote a very interesting post about display: table CSS and how after all this time of moving away from table layouts to CSS layouts we are now putting it all into CSS so we can essentially use table layouts again. It’s about time.
We’ve all spent years moving over to CSS layouts and support has gradually been getting better but we still can’t do a lot of basic stuff that you can do with tables without lots of hacks and crazy implementations that shouldn’t be there.
Take for example creating columns. We’re still using faux background images to create the column backgrounds and then putting a clear: both div below everything which shouldn’t really be there in semantic mark-up because it has no meaning, it’s just a CSS hack. These are things we could do with ease using tables.
While I’m on the subject there is also an interesting article on TJK Design about building layouts without using floats, the site being built entirely using lists which degrades beautifully if you turn off CSS.
Sunday evening saw us head down for a nice meal at Bella Italia.
Which was closed. Balls. It being rather late and the other Bella Italias being a bit of a mission away we decided to head to the Flaming Dragon which was also at Xscape and offered a taste of the orient in some kind of mega buffet.
To be fair it delivered quite well, the range of starters was quite impressive, indeed I spent most of my time there as it was probably better than the choice of mains (which was also good) and the dessert selection included crunchy nut corn flakes and an ice cream machine so the hybrid mix was obviously.
I got through quite a random mix of stuff including sushi, squid, seaweed, some kind of pork belly thing and a large selection of other dishes that I at least vaguely recognised. The quality of the food itself was buffet quality shall we say but that is to be expected, given it was a buffet and all.
Afterwards we still ended up at KFC because it’s like, the law. Plus it provided as a nice place to sleep the food off as my missing Twitter update indicated last night. Good times.
I headed out to the Deer Park with Si this lunch time for Sunday lunch, perhaps somewhat in celebration of beating Charlotte by a good two hours on our closing race last night and because there is never a bad day to go for a pub lunch.
The real shock of the day is that having sat down and pretended to look at the menu before going for the same thing I always have, I actually choose something different this time! Sure I went for a burger rather than a steak but still, I think it’s big leap to actually alter my usual selection.
I really enjoyed today to be honest, it was nice that it was just the two of us, it’s an excellent chance to be cynical without someone dragging the mood up. Sunday lunch is about relaxed chat, a nice meal and then heading home for a nap, none of this hyper talkative nonsense. Just a relaxing lunch so I can drift off and pretend for an hour or two that I don’t have a pile of work to get through.
Friday saw the Christian Union come to Perspective to talk to us about their faith. It was an interesting event shall we say.
While so far Perspective has been fairly restrained so far there were some rather heated discussions on Friday and behaviour on the A-Soc side was quiet frankly not up to scratch. We persevered though and at least the feedback I got from Joe from the CU when chatting to him afterwards was that people were at least asking geniune questions which is what Perspective is all about.
The food was a bit of a disaster too, the catering plans feel through and so I had to be dispatached to bring in pizza which resulted in there not being much food to go around. All in all, not the most successful session but at least the discussions kept going long into the night.
Last Friday saw the first planning meeting for Rationalist Week 2009. While the event is still over two months away things are finally starting to fall into place and we’re about half way through our fundraising drive for it so we need to keep the momentum going on.
The first meeting was really just to throw around ideas but the week is starting to take shape now, at least as outlining the events we want to do. Exciting stuff!
Last Thursday saw A-Soc’s Darwin Day 2009 celebration in the union. Thanks to the hard work of Nicola and Sophie as well as the baking of Norm and Michelle, it was an all day party which ended up raising us some cash for Rationalist Week too.
