Chris Worfolk's Blog

So I finally did my first session of taekwondo today (today being yesterday now as it’s past midnight). It was interesting. Myself and George got tuition by ourselves by one of the instructors, Andy given that we were the only new starters there which was good as it means we can learn a lot fast but it does mean that we didn’t get the gentle introduction I was expecting, we just got straight to it.

George’s status as a newbie I would contest as he soon revealed that he was a green belt in karate and so was able to pick things up quite fast. I on the other hand, just sucked. It was all like contacty and stuff. And we didn’t even get told to run around. The one thing I could do and we didn’t get to do it.

Afterwards we hit The Fav for food and drink. Although at the prices The Fav charge for drinks it literally was drink singular. Still the food was as cheap as the Llama’s and while it wasn’t quite as good it did arrive in quite a decent time and wasn’t bad by any means, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

So yeah, day one. Now I need to have a mull over and decide whether there should be a day two. I’m hoping they are going to announce free membership and fees and such within the next day or two so I don’t have to shell out like £100.

I got talking to Rich in the laundry room who was saying we went to the Christian Union‘s Alpha course last night and they were talking about who Jesus was. The possibilities they came down to was he was a) a nutter, b) some evil dude or c) he actually was the son of God.

But how about this for an idea – he was an alien. H2G2 fans might want to consider him a teaser. Think about it. If an advanced alien race sent someone to Earth, perhaps he came of his own accord or perhaps it was some kind of investigation into our primative species or an experiment to see how we would respond to this whole God thing (again, relating back to H2G2, Earth was an experiment).

The alien would surely be advanced enough to be able to do tricks we percieved as miracles such as turning water into wine and healing people due to the technology. We got scared and nailed him to a cross. Just like if you walked into a medievil village and turned a torth on (or “flameless torth” as they would perhaps refer to it) you would be burned at the stake for witchcraft.

So even if you accept that Jesus exists (despite the lack of historical evidence outside the Bible which consists of absolutely no primary evidence what so ever, the best we have is people’s writings based on hearsay long after Jesus was dead) and did all the things he claimed you have to look at what is most plausable – was he the son of a God or simply an alien lifeform?

McDonald’s have recently introduced some new small cups. They are far less tall than the old ones but much thicker. Basically they are now as wide at the top as the medium and large cups so they can all use the same lids and so therefore not as tall as the older small cups which used smaller lids.

There is a more important difference between them however – the new cups have the same generic design on them as the medium and large cups. Prior to this they had a kids design on featuring Ronald McDonald and the other kids characters that McDonald’s use.

Why is this important? Because it makes small an acceptable choice for adults. Previously, small was clearly marked as a kids drink – the kids design said “this is for kids, adults should not be drinking this” and a lot of people were embarassed to be walking down the street with a cup with a kids design on the side. The new uniform design is saying that it’s a perfectly viable choice to go for small which is one of the biggest problems causing obesity – portions getting larger in restaurants and takeaways. Maybe McDonald’s are serious about this whole not killing people with unhealthy food thing.

Part two I guess. I’m blogging live from the societies fair again as I think it’s “hip” that I can blog wirelessly at something approximating a convention as if you go to the proper tech conventions about such topics as Web 2.0 everyone is just sat around blogging on their laptops. It’s quite cool to see there are plenty of laptops here anyway, give it another few years and everyone will have laptops in here I recon.

Today has been a little more dead than yesterday but we’ve had a few more mailing list sign-ups and I’ve given my contact details out to the C.U. with the hope of inspiring some debate. I’ve also signed up to the Assassins Guild which should be fun.

It’s now a matter of hours until the launch party, it’s going to be fun.

Life is tiring.

Very tiring.

I got a lie in on Saturday morning at least. Probably my last decent night’s sleep until next Saturday morning. Before another two weekend closes at work. Interestingly enough my store has applied for extended opening hours – till 1am Sunday-Thursday and till 5am Friday and Saturday.

We’re not sure why. Apparently they didn’t tell our store manager, head office just phoned him up and told him to stick a sign in the window. I don’t see the point really, we do hardly any sales last thing at night. And how are we supposed to staff the place throughout the entire night? We have enough problems now. Plus if we are open until 5am and open again at 6:30am, what’s the point in closing? We might as well go 24 hour.

I’m still majorly stressing about housing next year. Nobody else seems in any kind of hurry to get things sorted though so I fail to see why I need to lead the charge. Something tells me that next years living arrangements isn’t finished damaging our social circle quite yet.

So today is the day before the Atheist Soc launch party. Well technically it’s now later today. I should be pretty excited. I am. But I’m also very tired. Saturday’s close finished at 4:30 and I got a decent night’s sleep but it was sensible not preferable (as in I got like 7 hours or something, ideally I need a good 11). Did a bit of shopping then went to work last night followed by driving over to uni to drop my shopping off and going home and to bed. I ended up getting to sleep a little after 4 and got up at 8 to get to uni for the societies fair.

I picked up breakfast on the way including a coffee which unfortunatly I still hate but I’m all about trying new things at uni. Spent most of the day at the societies fair except for dropping by a lecture and a lab session. SE24 is going to be a right pain I think. Went to Michelle’s for dinner then went home to check my emails before heading out to the Old Bar. Except that I kind of fell asleep and by the time I set off everyone was leaving so I made a hasty retreat back to my room.

Oh, with regards to the internet outage suffered by those of us in halls this weekend, I was become some ‘tard working on the refurbishment of The Refectory caused a power cut that took out the university’s two data centres. While they do have backup power it is apparently not designed to keep the whole network online.

I’m blogging from my laptop in the Riley Smith Hall in the first day of a two day re-freshers fair including societies stalls. I’m currently running the Atheist Soc stall as well as managing the Jazz and Blues society stall while Kieran is at a lab session. I’m all about the multi-tasking. Even after getting less than four hours sleep last night. But I’ll expand when I have time to blog properly.

It’s not been bad, given I was expecting pretty much nothing we’ve had a few proper sign-ups and a handful of mailing list sign-ups on top of that plus I’ve talked to a few key people so it’s all good. Kieran has been blasting out jazz all day as he was the first to play any music and has just basically kept it going. Too bar for lsrfm.com :p.

Once again I find myself next to LS:TV for some reason. They have a silly amount of staff milling around and an endless parade of laptops to show their stuff on too. I’ve been talking with Andy from J&B along with Kieran for a bit and he seems like a really sorted guy. I’ve exchanged a few words with the Green Action Group as well who, while all being hippies, are pretty cool people none the less.

GoDaddy recently pulled another site for publishing content they disagree with. SecLists.org got a message saying they had “been suspended for violation of the GoDaddy.com Abuse Policy”

Basically, it’s a security site who published some details on one of the MySpace security problems. MySpace weren’t happy about it and had a moan to GoDaddy who, as they now have a reputation for, pulled the domain. At least it’s not the nameservers for a datacenter this time.

I’m sorry but GoDaddy really is a joke. Their terms of use include, and I quote, the forbidding of “morally objectionable activities.” I find it amusing that a country that claims to cling so much to the idea of freedom of speech often so easily abandons it, especially when it contradicts the morals of a Christian nation which is supposed to be prevented from having a state religion by it’s constitution.

Last month Worfolk Online forgot to celebrate five years online.

Five years!

That isn’t even how long I have had been making websites or how long I’ve had websites online – that’s only since Worfolk Online first appeared (December 20, 2001). There are websites of mine in the Internet Archive dating to the summer of 2001 and who knows how long it took IA to crawl them. It gets worse. Later this year Worfolk Corp will celebrate it’s 12th birthday. 12th! I know kids younger than that. I’m now so old that even my projects are old. This isn’t cool.

Let’s kick off with a quick round up of what has happened of recent. After the fun of Saturday night, I ended up getting up about 2ish but given I didn’t have my room to myself it was far from uninterupted sleep. Sophie discovered her returned bag was missing two phones and her money so it turned out to be somewhat of a mixed blessing getting it back. Worked Sunday night, arrived back Monday and went to my first lecture of the second semester. Lectures suck as ever.

Things are not without hope though. There has been a recent insurge into World of Warcraft which has somewhat rekindled my passion for the game. I started a new Dwarf character and have been busy leveling him up with my mage as well as supplying him with copious amounts of resources in order for him to be able to take on enchanting as a profession.

As ever it is somewhat consuming my life however. I managed to log off just after 3 last night and got up at 8 for a quick breakfast before continuing to play it this morning. I’ve managed to drag myself off briefly to do some work now though. I say do work, I mean blog. But I have got some work done as well so it’s all good.