Chris Worfolk's Blog

So Wednesday was graduation. I want to talk a little more about the general concept later but for now I thought I would offer a run down of what happened as it’s certainly an experience even if it is one that you can happily live without.

Heading out from home we took no less than 4 cars down there and somehow managed to stay together as a convoy which is quite an achievement in Leeds given there is so much traffic, lights and junctions. We even made it out too despite them locking the car park barrier and forcing myself and Kieran to drive over the grassy embankment designed to keep cars out which was rather wet and muddy. Go Astra.

The experience of picking up our gown was an experience in itself, not only do they provide you with one but they also having a robing room where they dress you in it.

The ceremony itself was your standard pompous and boring event. The vice chancellor opened procedings with a speech and then the degrees were presented and we filed up to the stage one by one to collect them.

Later in the day our head of school, Roger Boyle was to say to Kieran

You know, someone told the Vice Chancellor they were going to do drugs

Or at least something to that affect. He also added, “I hope it wasn’t one of our lot.”

Wishful thinking Roger. I mean seriously, who do you think it was? Just, and this is a purely off the cuff suggestion, the same kind of person that would put a lolcat in their FYP ;).

Ok, let me explain a bit more. I arrived on stage and shook the Vice Chancellor’s hand. He then asked me “so, what’s next in your life?” I could have explained to him my plans for my start up, my extensive vision of conquering the business world, finding love and founding the Chris Worfolk Foundation to solve the world’s problems, or even the fact that I’ve already moved on to the next stage and am now happily working in a job.

But he didn’t have time to hear all that. And right now all I could think about was the amount of caffeine and alcohol I was planning to consume when I finally get some time to celebrate (or in my case, commiserate) my graduation. So I gave him the short snappy answer he was looking for – drugs.

Anyway, afterwards we stopped by the school for some of Kieran and Norm’s hard brewed GLPale which went down an absolute storm and then headed off to Loch Fyne in town for a celebratory dinner. Taking no less than 29 people I was rather pleased with the amount of people I managed to get down there, though Graham is also owed just as much credit.

I was less than impressed with the food to be honest and it didn’t help that I felt rather ill during the meal but everyone else fully enjoyed the meal and once I got round and talking to people I felt much better. We also met Rachael, the new Ms Wharton who seems very friendly and outgoing – but I’m sure they make a good match none the less :P.

Finally we finished up with a few drinks in The Terrace and then headed home. I can’t say I particuarly enjoyed it but I’m glad my parents did, mainly because I made them pay for most of it and having spent most of the day with Kieran I could see he enjoyed it which I was glad of (even if I could physically feel the smug radiating off him and burning my skin) as it really was well earned on everyone’s part.

The central locking is finally working again on my car!

It has been a bit of a mission though. I got a phone call from Evans Halshaw to inform me that the part that had been on order was finally in so I booked it in for a service to take place this morning. Phoned my dad up to see if he could give me a lift to work once I’d booked it in.

Turns out, he had his car booked in for a service at the same time.

I mean seriously, what are the odds? Let’s assume that the car goes in twice a year, that means his car is going in once every 150 days meaning that the probability is like 1%. Still, we worked in some kind of plan as he was picking up a curtesy car.

I was 15 minutes late down there because a lane of the inner ring road was closed off and there was an accident down near Hunslet road combining to some rather large queues. Then we had to navigate our way back to Evans Halshaw Nissan to drop my dad’s car in and finally get me to work. By the time I got to work I felt like I’d done a days work :P.

If you want to allow access to SVN via Apache, it’s actually nice and easy to install and configure it on a blank system. First, install Apache.

yum install httpd httpd-devel httpd-manual

Next, install Subversion.

yum install subversion

Now we need to bridge he two.

yum install mod_dav_svn

Once you have done this, we have everything we need. So we can go ahead and edit the Subversion configuration to add the Subversion directory to Apache.

vim subversion.conf

Finally, start and reload Apache, then go about creating your SVN repository.

A-Soc rules.

It really does. We’re like the only people doing anything at the moment it seems.

Despite it now being summer, university having finished and everyone having gone home we are still seeing turns outs of dozens of people for A-Soc’s weekly social event. Take that Buddha!

I have a lot of stuff.

Despite making several trips in my car during the slight overlap period we have I did my main move along with a lot of the house stuff on Saturday morning and managed to pack out my car, Norm’s car, my parent’s Mondeo estate, the trailer on the back of the Mondeo estate and my parent’s X-Trail. Quite an impressive convoy we had going.

Still things are moving slowly. The lounge is still a mass of boxes as is my bedroom and it’s not getting shifted particularly quickly. While I spend most of my time at home sorting through things, when you work 7 days a week, you’re free time is not actually not much time.

Still, I have some days off coming in December, I can use those to unpack.

With the long awaited conference for atheist, Humanist, secular and generally free thinking student societies finally having arrived, myself and Norm headed up to Edinburgh for the conference that would form the foundation of our national federation for such societies.

I feel I was lied to. I was told Scotland had a road network. It really doesn’t. It’s barely motorway up to Newcastle due to roadworks currently going on and after that it just runs out entirely – some of the A1, the legendary A1, is basically just a country lane.

Still we made it up there in one piece and kicked off the Friday night with introductions, a meal and some late night drinking. It was nice to have some fun as basically what followed was two days of talks, debates and lots of Humanism.

Never the less we have all come away from the event with a new national oranisation – the national federation of atheist, Humanist and secular student studies or A.H.S. for short. So all in all a rather successful weekend.

Last Wednesday we headed down to Bella Italia for a form of “goodbye” meal to Mr. O’Shea who is regretably leaving us to take a million-pound-per-day job down in London.

It was a fairly nice place and the good was good and despite me getting called away for one or two very short phone calls the company was excellent too. Not a bad place to spend an evening.

Because we’re all about learning about other people’s beliefs (perhaps so we can ridicule them further) and because it is unfair to judge something until you have really given it a fair evaluation (and we do love to judge), we headed off to church last Sunday.

It was on Sweet Street, the heart of Leeds’ red light district and the “church” was actually an industrial warehouse which seems to be the way to go as far as the new “evangelical” churches go (I use quote marks as they don’t classify themselves as evangelicals, I simply use the term to convay the atmosphere I am guessing most non-Christians would take from that term).

The service was quite good I thought though Norm was less impressed. I was slightly worried when we first walked in as Michelle seemed to know more people than me but that problem soon worked itself out as I began to spot faces.

All in all it was an experiance and I like to think I can offer something in return for the experiance they gave me. So here it is, my golden nugget of information for them – if you’re going to jump around in worship for Jesus, wear a bra that actually gives you some support. It can’t be easy for the guys to be good Christians when you have four limbs reaching for the lord :p.

Before we flee from Burchett Place I thought I would post a few pictures of the current setup at Burchett Place.

The internal network is gigabit, the external is fast ethernet all connected up by Linksys equipment. The first image below shows the internal switches and router which connect up to the main network which is connected to the internet via the routers shown in the second image.

These connect all the servers together of about half of which are racked up as shown below. The rest are just in random locations – the server in the other image is currently sitting in the middle of the floor while it is being setup for example.

These are all kept online by a series of UPS devices.

These are all connected by an endless series of cables. I tried to get some pictures to really show how much cableage there is going on but I couldn’t really achieve the affect I was after. Needless to say though, there is a lot of well organised and structured cabling such as below.

To ensure everything stays cool and the air circulates there is an advanced climate control system as shown below.

Finally this is all monitored and controlled via the NOC, complete with an array of no less than 4 monitors and your choice of both wired and wireless peripherals.

The results seem to have been quite good. Check the router’s uptime – 226 days, that is a little over 7 and a half months and I believe the reason that it came up then was because that was when it was taken offline to install the UPS.

I don’t really feel I can add anything to that title.

Just to pass you on to the BBC website to read more.