Chris Worfolk's Blog

Having written a long and winding post about the various problems I was having last night I’ve decided to be a bit more upbeat. I’m playing around with my new boxes at the moment. They are both running Ubuntu so not much good for doing anything other than programming or running services but there is plenty of fun to be had there.

I’m also quite pleased with my monitor array that allows my to dual screen my main desktop and have a seperate screen for one of my new Linux boxes. I’m sticking with one keyboard and mouse given I have such a monster sized keyboard so I’m hoping my KVM arrives ASAP.

Having failed to find ABC1 when flicking through the cable channels last night I stumbled across God TV (aka The God Channel). It’s a Christian channel which as far as I can tell consists mainly of televangelist style preaching. What kind of generic sterotypical event would you then expect to be on such a channel? Pledge drive of course. What did I find? Pledge drive of course :p.

I watched it last night for about half an hour which had two different people giving speaches, mostly talking about how you need to “sow a seed” because everything you need is right here on Earth already for the taking. So you shouldn’t pray to God for a need – you should pray for a seed. Thus explaining why you need to donate to God TV.

Apparently this isn’t the normal schedule though. It’s because they are currently doing Missions Week in which they raise the $12 million they need to keep running over the next year. However they seem to be a little confused as their Missions “Week” lasts 12 days. Also these 12 days ended several days ago. What they are currently broadcasting is the hightlights of Missions Week. It will be interesting to see what they are broadcasting at 3am next weekend.

Disney have closed down ABC1. Having been flicking around for it last night and failed to find it I checked their website this morning to find the following message…

We regretfully announce that Walt Disney Television will no longer be transmitting abc1 on any of the UK TV platforms (Freeview, cable or satellite) after September 2007. Walt Disney Television would like to thank its viewers for watching the channel and interacting with the website. It’s been a great few years and we appreciate your viewership.

According to the company the reason it closed down was because they were unable to generate enough advertising revenue. ABC1 broadcasts 24/7 on cable and sky but could not get any of the limited broadcast space during primetime on Freeview so only broadcasted 6am-6pm.

I’m at DEC-10 at the moment. It’s 2pm and I’ve been here for over an hour. And it’s been dead. There are like a dozen people here at most. Other than when a lab session is on, this seems to be fairly normal these days. Kind of removes any come back we have for them cutting down on labs and computers when nobody actually uses them.

Today’s A-Soc meeting got a decent turn out. Gerry Hannant’s “Scientific standards: does religion measure up?” didn’t attract a massive crowd but it brought in a larger one than usual and one that if we could attract to every meeting would probably make running the society worthwhile.

Let’s hope so anyway as I feel like I’m going A-Soc crazy at the moment. Next week I have like 6 A-Soc events! We’re putting together a faith and belief survey, we’re getting the stage production planning underway, we have two debates, a social and a lunch time talk.

People are finally signing up for London too. We took several hundred pounds in today from people reserving their places so if you are looking for a bargain trip to London I would hurry up as places are going fast.

Got two interesting pieces of news at work today.

First of all, my long, long awaited (and some would say long overdue :D) promotion to staff trainer is finally official. I scored a rather disappointing 42 out of 50 on my exam but given, a) you only need 40 to pass and b) I beat Neil by one mark, I guess that will suffice. So I should finally be on a half decent rate of pay which will be nice. Ha, I’ll need it with the amount of time I’ve booked off work over the next few months.

Secondly, today I had “the talk” from Kath. It was in the rumour mill that myself and Neil were going to be offered it which I’m quite glad about as it gave me a little time to think about what my response would be even if it was only for a hypothetical situation. Basically, I’ve been offered the job of shift running manager.

I told her I would need a week to think about it but to be honest, I think I have already made up my mind.

I’ve finally made some changes to my blogroll. With Raby getting his blog started I decided it was finally time to make some changes. So I took a few blogs off that I either don’t read any more or people simply weren’t posting on them anymore which annoys me as the way I read blogs is to go to my blog roll, hold ctrl and click every link. I’ve also added a few more blogs.

The A-Soc intro meeting having been a mixed result, I couldn’t really help thinking about the poor turnout. Sure we had an amazing conversation rate and now have enough members to constitute a society as well as a bit cash too but it was a struggle to even get what we did. I put my faith in a better turnout for the lunch time talk on Thursday, after all, people will have gone home by 8pm whereas they can spare an hour of their day.

Turns out, they can’t.

We got 5 people, including myself and Norm. Maybe there was a lack of promotion. Though it did go out to the mailing list, was mentioned at the intro events, put it on LUU Online and handed two dozen flyers out (that really isn’t that much to be fair). Maybe people had lectures – Sarann and Jack both spoke to me later saying they couldn’t come because of lectures and several people gave the same reason on Facebook.

The fact could well be though, that nobody cares. Atheism is a magnet for apathy. Maybe it’s time to finally accept Jesus Christ as our lord and saviour.

My mouse having given up on my recently I’ve ordered a new set of peripherals. It started with my getting sick and tired of not being able to play WoW in the dark so I was umming and arring (what, those are real verbs!) over getting a backlit keyboard. I narrowed it down to the Logitech G15 or the Microsoft Razer Reclusa.

So when my house packed up on me I decided I might as well get a decent one and replace my keyboard while I was at it. In the end I went with the Reclusa as although the G15 has the cool LCD screen and better macro programming, the Reclusa is a bit more comfortable and better suited to non-gaming applications. Add to that the Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 3000 and I have a nicely branded package :D. I’m interested to see if the 4-way scrolling feature is any use. Probably not but I don’t feel that detracts from it’s coolness.

Finally, I also threw in a Logitech 2.4Ghz Cordpress Presenter for when I am giving speeches and presentations (which with A-Soc’s timetable this year is a lot!).

Hmm, I need to blog more about this (and life in general) in length. 1:30am when I need to be up at a reasonable time for uni is not the time to it. But I wish share my preliminary thoughts with you.

Tonight was the A-Soc launch meeting for this academic year. Basically, nobody turned up.

That’s not really true. But turnout was poor. At the Film Making Soc intro meeting last year we got like 100 people. You can put the A-Soc turn out down to the fact the meeting wasn’t until 8pm, the fact that we were only in the Riley Smith Hall for one day plugging the society or the fact that nobody wants to be part of A-Soc, any way you look at it, I was ready to cry at 8:15 when only a handful of people had turned up.

We ended up with a little over a dozen people at the meeting, a far cry from what I was expecting and indeed what most other societies get. Never the less the talk was delivered in full. And people signed up. We got an amazing conversation rate. Something like 86% of the non-members at the meeting signed up to become paid members. Given the turnout that isn’t that many members but it is amazing conversation rate – given normally you would expect sometime like 10-20% at best.

We ended up in the pub with the usual suspects and a few new members as well. Hopefully we will pick some more up on Thursday and a few more in the coming weeks too. Hopefully we will pick up enough to actually make it worth the effort that goes in.