Blog of Norman Ralph

Secular Portal has just opened its new blog aggregator to collect all the blogs from its users and constituent societies. If you are a follower of the student free thinking movement or are just interested in things like Humanism, atheism, agnosticism, free thinking or consder yourself a secularist then it is well worht heading over an checkeing out the new site.

Also, check out the latest BHA bulletin as it includes a short piece on the inaugural meeting of the parent group of Secular Portal, the AHS. Hopefully we will have this organisation constituted in November and have us up and running in no time at all.

Believers beware!

I’ve never been to one of the mainstream festivals before - Leeds/Reading, V Fest, Glastonbury etc. This is for several reasons, firstly the cost - £150 for a festival is too expensive, secondly there is the fact that they are massively ovwercrowded - 30000 people is just too many, finally there is the stigma. I usually don’t see myself as a music snob, but it seems that the sort of music fans that attend the mainstream festivals are the sort of music fan that pisses people off.

Having said all that, Muse were playing V Fest this year and, for those of you that don’t know, my girlfriend Liz is obsessed with them. The moment she heard they were playing she booked two tickets for the day they were headlining at the Staffordshire version of the festival. This mean attending one of the festivals I never thought I would, especially since the escapades of last summer!

We got up early on the Sunday, leaving about 9am to drive the 130 miles from Leeds to Weston Park, near Cannock, Staffordshire. The drive was pretty uneventful and there were no jams getting into the venue. The queueing wasn’t too bad to get into the actual arena either - maybe 20 minutes. Once in the arena we headed over to the main stage area to try and camp out for the headliners so we would be near(ish) the front. We managed to get to the first few rows right in the middle for the first few acts - The Futureheads, Alannis Morrisette, Lostprophets and Maximo Park. Unfortuantely, as mentioned above the sort of music fans that attend these festivals are prats, so after about 5 hours of getting squashed, beaten, crushed, kicked and being generally uncomfortable (and the fact that I had managed to lose my mobile telephone for the first time in nearly 10 years) we abandoned our position and fled the main stage area. We rustled ourselves up ome food - which considering the fact we were at a festival was not too over priced. We managed to find a place that did a giant Yorkshire pudding filled with sausage, mash, onions and gravy for a fiver! We also managed to find somewhere to sit amongst all the mud.

After queueing for a while to use the “toilets” and having missed The Kooks’ set. We headed back for the headliners. We didn’t go so deep into the crowd, but found ourselves a nice little spot not too far back where we could enjoy the music and see the stage without fear for our lives. The first headline act were the Stereophonics. They were absolutely awesome live. Kelly Jones really knows how to work the crowd and their back catelogue is impressive. I know it’s a festival and bands play their singles but I really had hoped they would play a few of the album tracks! Muse were the second headline act and they know how to put ona show. I am not the world’s biggest Muse fan - most of it is just noise - but they are good live, if only for their light and special effects show! Six giant satellites mounted with lasers and spotlights aodrned or surrounded the stage!! All in all a fun day, except for the hour or so queue in the mud to get out of the car park - but even that wasn’t as bad as I had expected.

Pleasently surprised is probably the right phrase. I wouldn’t pay to go back again, but if the chance arose to attend for the day again for free then I would probably think about and it would depend on who was playing.

Keep an eye out for more detailed reviews of the sets people played.

You may or may not be aware that Mozilla have recently launched their latest offering from the Firefox web browser series. Version 3 contains, according to the official website, over 15,000 improvements on its predecesser. Now I haven’t really got under the hood of it yet, but I have noticed a few of them - namely the interface is quite different. It doesn’t strike you straight away, but when you go to click where you are used to clicking and either a) nothing happens or b) the wrong thing happens can get quite annoying. After a little while when you get used to the new interface then things start looking up. Chris, on his flashy new website, mentions in his review about the fact that Firefox 3 doesn’t leech all your memory and other system resources. Now although I never experienced this with Firefox 2.x, I have noticed that the overall memory footprint is reduced as well as seemingly making fewer demands on processor and hard disk space too. It is still a little early to make proper judgements on it and no doubt I will in the future.

On the whole though, here is to another decent product that is available as open source (which will keep Kieran happy if nothing else)!

The summer time blues, of Eddie Cochrane fame, have been something that many people I know have experienced and is a phenomenen that I am personally familiar with. I have always found it bizarre that so many people, especially in Britain, suffer from this highly oxymoronic state of mind. Most British people spend all year waiting for the sun to come out and as soon as it does they all get depressed! How silly is that?

On a totally different note I am currently experiencing a massive increase in workload. Planning for the upcoming Atheist Society events in fresher’s week is now in full swing. Membership cards and committee hoodies are in the pipeline, events are being nailed down, room bookings being made and equipment sourced. It is quite scary that we are only six weeks away! Then there is paid work, O2 is going swimmingly. I have just completing my second week in ‘grad bay’ so should be fully live soon enough. I am hoping that I impress enough over the next few months to get up the ladder a bit. The biggest news is the fact that I have just been given my first freelance software development contract! Designing and implementing a user interface for a university research department. More on that as I get into it.

I am quite enjoying this new found level of activity. I have been busy before, of course, but it was usually the hectic kind of busy where you don’t get chance to breathe or sleep or eat. This is the kind of busy that keeps you occupied ten hours of the day solidly, but that doesn’t feel that much like hard work. Whether I am still saying this when A-Soc gets into full swing and Rationalist Week is upon us again I don’t know. In the meantime though, I am going to enjoy it and hopefully see my bank balance rise into the positive numbers for the first time in several years too!

Yesterday was my first day in O2’s Home Broadband call centre. Now, although I have worked in a number of call centres before, doing a variety of jobs, this is the first time I have been a little nervous walking onto the floor. The reason for this is that all the other call centre work has been relatively mindless - selling, or data entry etc, whereas this one actually requires some technical knowledge and real problem solving skills. luckily it is also the world’s quietest call centre. Just over 2000 calls in a day! I have worked in places where that is less than an hour’s work!

After a welcome meeting fromt he grad bay manager, we went out and took real calls. Luckily (or frustratingly) most of the calls I got were relatively easy, mainly sales enquiries and package info. Although there were a couple of trying calls which took a little while to solve.

All in all it was a good first day, i can’t wait to get my teeth into some real problems and hopefully impress enough to move up a grade to 2nd line!

I was reading Facebook today and an AHS colleague of mine from Oxford Secular Society had written a note based on a blog post from God Be Gone and the follow up.

It cracked me up. Seriously, how crazy are some people?

For those who can’t be bothered going to the links, here is the the content mercilessly ripped off and reposted…

‘Proof that evolution is wrong’

i saw on your blog that you like to talk about the religion of evolution and trick people by using big words and pretending that science actually proves evolution. I dont know any science or anything and even i know evolution isnt real. for one it isnt in the bible the bible said god made everything in 6 days, not millions of years. second, when we go to the zoo we cant talk to monkies, if we used to be monkies why cant we talk to them? three, how could a monkey become a person over billions of years when they dont live that long? AND why are there still monkies if they turned into people? five, even darwin said he was wrong. on his death bed he converted to christianity and said evolution was a hoax. If there is any science that makes it look like evolution is real then it has to be either a hoax by EVILutionists or put there by god to find out who believes in him.

I hope that after reading my questions you will see that evolution cant be true and people dont come from monkies. i will pray to god asking him to make you think like me.

—

From: GBG
To: kevin

You are joking, right?

—

From: kevin
To: GBG

firstly i didnt give you permission to put my email on your blog. teh email copyright is owned by me and i will talk to my solisitor about making you take it down.

And no im not joking, you know im right thats why you didn’t answer. If we used to be monkies we should be able to talk monkey. its like if a french man becomes american he can still talk french, its called logic. also on tv a scientist says crocodiles havnt changed for million of years. if evolution was true they would be able to fly by now or talk or grow fur or invent things. if evolution happens why didnt it make crocodiles better?

the devil tricked you into believing you are from mud to take you away from god. Why would you want to be from mud and monkies when you have the option to be from gods hand? If you just stop thinking the bible makes sense and you dont have to worry about anything. If you just stop trying to find things out and accept gods word jesus will forgive you.

i thing you should watch expelled by ben stein. It shows how science is from the devil and good christians are being fired from jobs because atheists know they have the truth. evolution believers know its evil and from the devil, and thats why they are frighetened of christianities real sciense

DONT PUT THIS EMAIL ON YOUR BLOG!!! SERIOUSLY! I DONT GIVE PERMISSION!!

I have tidied up some of the permalinks and some of the back end bits and pieces. I have also added a Links section which will start to get more populated as I sort out my favourites list on Firefox!

Friday night saw two landmarks.

1) I finshed my O2 training, so I am allowed to talk to real people about real problems from Monday!

2) We had our housewarming party.

The party was pretty good, it started really slowly - 5 people when I got home from work at 10pm - but it picked up nicely by the end. I was a little worried that it wouldn’t as we do live some whay away from the rest of the gang and the majority of students cannot be bothered to make the two buses to get to our house. The only disappointing thing was that a couple of mates from work flaked on me and didn’t turn up. Kudos to Dan for turning up and staying even though he didn’t know anyone! James and Mike suck!!

I was suitably drunk by the end of the evening as were most people, which is always a good sign. We also had a full house as most people stayed over.

Spent a lot of the night arguing about politics which was very grown up fo us, except the topic was socialism which is very studenty. Most people grow out of socialism when they get a job!

All in all though, a good night!

I am coming to the end of my O2 training, hence the lack of posts over the past few weeks, and we are focussing on the more difficult aspects of the job this week. Namely, IP Stream - or home access - broadband. This is the slowest of our packages and is offered to customers more than 9km from their local exchange. It is the hardest package to deal with due to the fact that BT still control their lines and not us which means a lot of faffing about. Our regular trainers can’t teach us this as they haven’t done the course themselves so we had to get a specialist in.

Her opening line was “I don’t really know anything about broadband and I am not an IP Stream expert…” and that was the start of the end!

By the end of four hours of ridiculous training, that had no logical progression, little relevance to our role and and incompetent trainer we had questioned and debated her to tears.

Now whilst I feel bad about that, it wasn’t entirely her fault - a lot of the the problems we highlighted to her had started in the previous weeks, but I didn’t feel bad about letting her know what I thought about the training and her delivery.

Yesterday, was supposed to be the second day of this two day course but she didn’t come back and we were informed that we were not going to receive any further IP Stream training before going live next week and we would have to learn on the job!

A couple of weeks ago Chris, Michelle, George and I went across to Manchester to see Avril Lavigne live on tour. I had a few reservations about the trip when Chris first approached me with the idea. Avril is not everybody’s cup of tea and her target audience is definitely not the twenty-something year old male!

The gig was awesome. She is really good live. Her set was a little predictable, but with five albums now there are not that many variations she can make. The encore epitomised the predictability as she sent out dancers before she appeared, removing any hint of spontaneity. The music was good though and Avril commands the stage like few others. She may only be my age but she definitely is a star.