It occurs to me, as of last Friday, I’ve now been blogging 4 years.
Over that time I’ve clocked up a total of 1,328 posts. That works out as a little under one post per day (4 years is 1460 days). Looks like my posting average is slipping :p.
Camping having been cancelled, it was down to Chris the wonder kid to throw together some kind of A-Soc event to ensure we did something over the weekend. So, us now having a dining room and all we throw together a dinner party for those of us that were still around over summer.
In the end it turned out rather well – we managed a full seven courses as well as offering people a choice with several courses and best of all, nobody died. Nobody at all. There was a turn up for the books indeed. So given I haven’t really cooked for like a year or two now, I’m going to chalk it down as a victory.
It also presented some interesting experiences. I gave the port a try, which I didn’t find very drinkable but there you go, it wasn’t particuarly good port anyway, and some of Norm’s fancy Brazilian coffee which I did manage to stomach. I think that is a sign of me getting old. But should be good for all nighters I guess. Not that anyone is going to be pulling out a cafetiere during such times.
Despite things having been slowly coming to an end for months now, it really started to bite home that we have graduated and university is over.
That’s huge. It’s been like my entire life for the past 3 years. I can barely remember life before university now and suddently it’s all been taken away. The last 3 years have been the best years of my life and I’m sure other people feel similar, Kieran said the same to me yesterday and could possibly be the best 3 years of my life that I’m ever going to have.
I mean, how many people are we going to lose contact with now? It’s a lot. Let’s not kid ourselves. Most people we’re never going to see again. How many of the people I currently consider close friends and I going to know in 10-20 years? How do you really know when you have made a friendship strong enough to stand the test of time?
Furthermore I no longer have university to hide behind. There is no, “well I’m finishing my degree before I make something off my life.” The wall has come down, now I’m just undefensibly failing to do anything with my life, to chase my dreams and achieve my goals.
I don’t think it helps that with it being summer, lots of people who would otherwise be around have gone back home or on holiday but Leeds feels so empty. I’ve gone from living with 6 other people, near the city and campus where all my friends live to living with 2 other people with everyone living miles away from each other.
Still, not everything has changed. I’m still broke. My pre-tax income has tripled but I’m still broke. I’m still working every day (though I did rather enjoy my weekend off this weekend). I’m still not used to mornings. It’s good to know there are some things you can rely on to be constant in your life.
Anyone else having a similar experience? Open up, share…
The idea of intellectual arrogance is something that gets thrown around a lot in theological debates. Recently though I’ve really noticed in branching into other areas of discourse. There is something nice about being humble enough to admit when you’re wrong but some people will insist to the end of the Earth that they are right.
This came up recently when it was pointed out to me by 6Music’s George Lamb that nobody knows the difference between a sheep and a goat.
For example, sheep have wool. But if you shave a sheep it doesn’t. Goats have horns. But then again sheep can have horns. They have an almost idential facial and body structure, at least close enough that you couldn’t tell if it was simply a different species of sheep or goat or whether it was indeed actually a whole different type of animal. The more you think about it, the more you realise that you cannot infact tell the difference between a sheep and a goat.
Having raised the issue with several people since however I’ve found that most people simply outright refuse to consider the possibility that they can’t tell the difference. Arguments like “well I could just tell” get thrown around a lot – anyone for a “well I just know god is there” argument?
Really, I don’t see what the big deal is about the fact you can’t tell the difference between a sheep and a goat. It doesn’t make you any less of a person because nobody can tell the difference. That’s just facts, animal facts.
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.