Chris Worfolk's Blog

I’ve been listening to quite a bit of Pet Shop Boys recently, if only so I know how to keep Rich happy on Wednesday. Anyways…

After a moderate days work and having done my technical wizardry to help my uncle sort his network problems out, I headed off to meet everyone for the usual Sunday jaunt. Tension aside it was the usual night of good fun though because it’s holiday periods Xscape was rather busy – it took us 30 minutes to get a lane, we could only get one between the nine of us and only get one game in. But I don’t care too much as I don’t really go for the bowling.

Afterwards things got a little crazy though. Becky went for KFC! Not McDonalds, but KFC! I mean, that’s just insane. That’s now how Sunday nights work. These are crazy times we’re living in, crazy times…

As you probably noticed, yesterday was Christmas Day.

I quite enjoyed it to be honest. For the first time in, well, possibly ever, I didn’t have to get up that early. When I did I headed round to my parents for Christmas dinner which was excellent as always. I spent a few hours with the family which is perfect in terms of a managable amount of time and then headed off back home in the evening for Christmas dinner at my house.

Norm wasn’t working after all so had very kindly agreed to cook the dinner which made things even easier as I pretty much just rolled up, did a bit of tidying and that’s about it. In the end there were six of us which is a good number in terms of being able to cater easily enough while still having a good group there. So all in all, a good day.

So did anyone else see the Queen’s speech yesterday?

Now before I get into this, I want to point out that I am a massive royalist. The monarchy is brilliant, they bring in far more money into our country than they cost us, the Queen is a massive symbol of power throughout the world and still head of the Commonwealth and any alternative system would be equally, indeed far more, flawed.

But I was not amused by her speech yesterday. At least by the end of it. When she first started to talk about Jesus as if he was born on December 25th (he wasn’t, Christians have no idea when he was actually born) I laughed but then she just got offensive.

She basically said that the ideas of altruism and being nice to your fellow man were values derived from Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. That is, of course, complete bullshit, I was being nice to people way before I read to Bible as I’m sure you were too not to mention the historical fact that people had civilised societies well before the Abrahamic religions arrived. Indeed all The Bible in reality detracts from altruism by saying you should be good to win favour with God rather than just because it’s the right thing to do.

I think the philosophy you’re actually looking for Elizabeth is Humanism. Because, dare I say it, “just be good for goodness’ sake.”^[1]

Last night saw the first A-Soc social of the holidays, regular meetings having been suspended until everyone gets back to Leeds in January. Given it was holidays, and indeed the 23rd of December, we did alright for attendance, I think we had a total of eight of us in the end.

I was a good night as I got to chat to Paul about some of my suggestions regarding the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire and we also battled with Facebook to try and sort it out as his new phone is geared towards Facebook but won’t actually let you register or anything.

In a highly amusing situation also, Norm got ID’d. Clearly the big beard is taking years of his look 😀 .

Having arrived at the pub quiz on Sunday after much nagging to get there asap, I was pleasantly suprised to find Zoe was dishing out Christmas presents (no wonder they get coined my real friends 😉 ). I can’t help feeling her mind is a little too devilish though… 😀

Having being partying for three nights in a row, I managed to pull myself out of bed in time for Christmas dinner which had been skillfully cooked by my housemates. It was a nice meal indeed and featured all the expected trimmings laid out with a set of plates and table dressings kindly proved by Norm’s mum.

Having spent three hours eating and a can of 24 later I headed upstairs to squeeze in the normal Sunday workload (which unfortunately is still going but I have some free time to catch up on Thursday lol) before heading out to my mum’s birthday shindig at 7:30.

It turns out my mum is rather popular. I thought I did well getting 19 people out to my birthday do on a Sunday but apparently, I was very much beaten by the 20-30 people that turned up to the pub to wish my mum a happy birthday.

Finally having spent a few hours catching up with friends and family there I dashed over to the Crusader to catch the end of the pub quiz and arrived just in time to find everyone leaving. But no worries as it just meant moving on to get food so all was not lost. In the end, I ended up getting to bed at a reasonable time too, not bad for such a packed day.

Having driven back up to Leeds on Saturday we set about preparing for a house party of our own to celebrate Liz and Sarann’s birthday (to which the latter is today, happy birthday Sarann!). As to be expected it was a night of drunk antics enjoyed by all who attended.

Importantly, the night included chicken. Kate mentioned that her Nando’s voucher, from when she found a brain in her chicken, expired in a few days so we headed over to Nando’s to get some take-out, which it turns out, they do indeed do.

It seems to be becoming somewhat of a tradition to go out and get chicken as our previous house party saw myself and Kieran disappear off to get KFC. I have to say, it’s a tradition I could certainly get used to.

Friday saw myself, Norm and Liz head down to sunny Tamworth just outside of Birmingham for Jenna’s AHS festive party. It turned out (as if we were expecting anything less!) to be a really good night talking to plenty of old faces and some new faces too.

The food was good though I think I got through more than my far share of pigs in blankets (you snooze you loose I guess) and there was much fun to be had with games of Extreme Jenga, which is like regular Jenga but the blocks have sloping slides (rhombi). It was also made more difficult by the fact myself and Norm insisted on taking two of the bottom three pieces out each time 😀 .

It also turns out that Jenna’s dad, Bob Catley is a massive rockstar. Not only does he have a Wikipedia page (as if that isn’t enough), his band Magnum have had 14 studio albums, a top 10 charting album, a Gold Certified album and have supported the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Whitesnake – what a legend!

Having had a good night we headed down to Weatherspoon’s for a recovery breakfast, after all, it’s never too early for a good steak! Big thanks to Jenna for hosting said party, it might have to find it’s way into the AHS annual calendar 😉 .

I love Windows. Windows XP is an amazing operating system. Vista was a bit of a disaster but then it was always going to be when it had to follow XP, possibly the best operating system ever in the history of computing.

If you’re thinking this is heading towards a Linux bashing blog post, you’d be right 😉 .

I mean seriously, all I want to do is play media. The kind of thing you can do fresh out of the box on any Windows install. Let’s ignore the fact I’ve been trying to get Ubuntu to play DVDs for years. Let’s just take a look at what happened on Saturday.

I brought up a computer to use as a media computer to play through the sound system so we could access all the music. Actually I bought two, an Ubuntu box and a Fedora box. Two distros, one of them must be able to play a simple MP3 file right?

Of course, given the nature of my writing, they couldn’t. What was really interesting though was not the fact that Linux can’t even play MP3s out of the box, but how hard it is to get Linux to play them. It took us three, count them, three, computer scientists sat round for an hour to get them playing. So you can’t even use the excuse “oh it’s just you Chris” because there were three of us trying to work this one out.

We managed to get it working in the end, albeit it not very well though I’m not sure if that was Fedora’s fault or not so I’m not holding it accountable for that one. But there you go, XP for the win.

Well, it’s Monday morning. Having done a quick recount I actually had 6 parties in 6 days which has been rather intense but I only have another 3 days of work and then I can catch up on sleep (because I don’t need to be up till almost noon on Christmas Day this year 😀 ).

I will be catching up on everything tonight hopefully, I have loads of photos from the weekend that I have just started processing and plenty of tales to tell too. But for the moment I’m going to put my head down and try and get some kip before my boss notices I’ve got into work 😉 .