New British political leader doesn’t believe in God

by

This was originally a guest post at Stupid Evil Bastard, re-posted here following that site’s demise.

The Liberal Democrats, who are a left-wing party in the United Kingdom and rank third after the Conservatives and incumbent Labour Party, have elected a new leader named Nick Clegg. And, in a radio interview with BBC Radio 5 Live, he said that he didn’t believe in God:

New Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has answered “no” when asked on BBC radio if he believed in God.

The rapid-fire question and answer format on 5 Live meant the 40-year-old did not have the chance to elaborate.

He later said he had “enormous respect for people who have religious faith”, that his wife is Catholic and that his children are being brought up Catholic.

“However, I myself am not an active believer, but the last thing I would do when talking or thinking about religion is approach it with a closed heart or a closed mind.”

Both the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and the previous PM Tony Blair are Christian but they have said little about how their religion affects their roles as leader. Based on my personal knowledge it is rare for a politician to be an outspoken non-believer, especially a leader of a party, though some politicians are outspoken about their beliefs. There are a number of non-Christian members of parliament, including Jews, Muslims and Hindus.

Richard Dawkins says he’s a ‘cultural Christian’

by

his was originally a guest post at Stupid Evil Bastard, re-posted here following that site’s demise.

Professor Richard Dawkins, author of the book ‘The God Delusion’ and one of Britain’s most well-known atheists, has described himself as a ‘cultural Christian’. The comments come about after Mark Pritchard, an opposition member of Parliament, accused politically correct people of undermining Christmas and other Christian festivals.

Dawkin’s response was thus:

“I’m not one of those who wants to stop Christian traditions.

“This is historically a Christian country. I’m a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.

“So, yes, I like singing carols along with everybody else. I’m not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.

“If there’s any threat these sorts of things, I think you will find it comes from rival religions and not from atheists.”

Pritchard, meanwhile wants a parliamentary debate on “Christianophobia” and is complaining that ‘Christian heritage was being undermined by secular officials and public figures’.

Hindu gods get summons from court

by

This was originally a guest post at Stupid Evil Bastard, re-posted here following that site’s demise.

It’s not easy being a God. You’re omnipotent, so you have to be everywhere at once, and answering everyone’s prayers 24-hours a day, 7 days a week, with no rest. And just when it couldn’t get worse – you get summoned to a court in India:

A judge in India has summoned two Hindu gods, Ram and Hanuman, to help resolve a property dispute.

Judge Sunil Kumar Singh in the eastern state of Jharkhand has issued adverts in newspapers asking the gods to “appear before the court personally”. The gods have been asked to appear before the court on Tuesday, after the judge said that letters addressed to them had gone unanswered.

Apparently two temples have been built on land that is claimed to be owned by the temple priest, but the locals claim that the land belongs to the two gods.

We’ll have to see whether they show up in court or not.

Islamists call for the death of a British teacher over a teddy bear

by

This was originally a guest post at Stupid Evil Bastard, re-posted here following that site’s demise.

One of the big news stories over here in Britain at the moment is the jailing of a British schoolteacher in Sudan for ‘insulting Islam’. Her crime is that, during a classroom exercise, she asked her pupils to name a teddy bear, and the children chose the name ‘Muhammad’. As well as being the name of one of the pupils, Muhammad is also the name of the Muslim prophet and in Islam it is frowned upon (to say the least) to create idols or images of Muhammad – you may remember the furore surrounding the cartoons that some European newspapers published last year which depicted the prophet as a suicide bomber.

Though it’s obvious to most sane people that the teacher didn’t intend to cause offence when the bear was named (and she has apologised), complaints were made, she was arrested, and has now been jailed for 15 days and will be deported upon release.

That’s bad enough, but now at least a thousand of Sudanese people have demanded a tougher punishment – some going as far as demanding death by firing squad.

The reaction in the UK has been of almost universal condemnation – from Muslim leaders to politicians – and the government is trying to intervene where possible. But should the Sudanese judiciary give into the protesters’ demands, we could see a woman shot to death, over a teddy bear.

Hospital visit

by

I had my first ever emergency admission and overnight stay in hospital on Monday night. Basically it was an asthma attack, but one that was so serious that my own medication couldn’t tame it, so Hari and I took a taxi to the A & E department at Bradford Royal Infirmary, where I was nebulised and stabilised.

I ended up spending the night, and most of the following day, at the hospital, and for a lot of the time I was on oxygen. But thankfully by yesterday afternoon I was good to go home and was discharged in the evening. I’m now feeling much, much better and my asthma symptoms have subsided dramatically, so I’m all well again.

As this was my first hospital visit, here’s the good and bad things about my visit:

Good:

  • A lot has been said about hygiene in NHS hospitals. All the rooms I was in looked very clean, and there were anti-bacterial handwash dispensers quite literally everywhere you looked. Hygiene is obviously taken seriously here.
  • The staff were, for the most, part very friendly and helpful – the A & E staff especially.
  • Food wasn’t bad – better than I expected at least.
  • All the beds had Patientline terminals, so a payment of £5 for the day got me my own personal phone number, about 20 Sky TV channels plus some radio channels, and internet access. It certainly helped to pass the time and let me update my friends via Facebook.
  • And this is the NHS so all of my treatment was free. When you’re hyperventilating and waiting to be seen, at least you only have to worry about getting better and not whether you can afford the treatment, or whether your insurance will cover your treatment. We’re very fortunate to have the NHS in this country and I don’t think everyone appreciates just how lucky we are to have it.

Bad

  • There was a shortage of beds, so when the decision was made to keep me in at about 1am, it wasn’t until 3am that I was on a ward. And then I got woken up by the ward doctor at 4:30am to go through my symptoms, and with all the beeping machinery and people being moved around I didn’t get an awful lot of sleep while I was there.
  • There were about 25 people on my ward, all in the same room, and it was a mixed ward. I’m not too worried about this but there was a patient who was being quite loud and abusive, which isn’t quite what I wanted. But hey, it’s free treatment – can’t have everything.
  • It took about 3 hours from the doctor saying I could be discharged to me actually being able to get my coat on and leave. Admittedly the staff were busy, but it would have been nicer to be back home at 5pm, not 8pm.

Still, on the whole I had a good first hospital experience, and I’d like to thank all the staff there who helped me get better. Especially the A & E staff who were very friendly and helpful. And thanks to Hari who was very supporting during my time of need.

Not quite there

by

Last week, I said:

So, with a bit of luck, within the next couple of weeks I could have a full driving license and a proper, decently-paid full-time job on the cards. We’ll see.

Unfortunately, I failed my driving test (although I dispute my score) and came ‘a close second’ in the job interview. Which isn’t much when there’s only one job position available. So I’m still a learner driver with part-time casual work.

Missing .vxd files

by

I mentioned back in June that Hari and I inherited a spare computer, which until now has been sat in our house serving no purpose. However, I now have a reason to use it – I joined a new guild in World of Warcraft and need to run Ventrilo 2.1 to be able to take part in raids, and I can’t for the life of me get it to work properly on my Mac using Crossover.

I mentioned that the computer lacked a network card so I bought one today, and fitted it. Alas this machine is not running a nice operating system like Windows 2000 or XP, but Windows 98SE which doesn’t ship with the relevant drivers. Worse, as this machine had never been used on a network before, it was missing all of the Windows network components. Worse still, I didn’t have the Windows 98 CD, and even worse than that, the relevant files were not saved somewhere on the hard disk. Big problem.

Of course I was busy installing the network card drivers by this point and so upon rebooting I received a series of errors to do with missing .vxd files, namely vnetsup.vxd, vredir.vxd and dfs.vxd, the latter of which gives me a mental image of a double discount sofa sales. Anyway, I found a forum post on some site which I can’t seem to find again which pointed to these technical support files, namely ‘Directory Services client for Windows 95/98’ which includes these files and will happily install them for you. You can then get rid of the program through Add/Remove Programs and it’ll be nice and leave the .vxd files there for you.

Alas, these were only some of the missing files needed for networking, so while they did remove the horrible errors I was getting they didn’t actually get me on the network, so I’ve had to resort to downloading some files from a shady torrent site in the hope that I can get things going.

Ideally I would have liked to have been able to wipe the hard drive and stick Linux on this machine, but unfortunately its primary role as a Ventrilo machine means that it’s Windows or nuthin.

Interesting 2 weeks ahead

by

Well it’s October now (already…) and the first 2 weeks of it look to be quite interesting. On Wednesday this week I have my driving test – my second attempt, after narrowly failing my first attempt back in May – and then next Monday I have a job interview.

So, with a bit of luck, within the next couple of weeks I could have a full driving license and a proper, decently-paid full-time job on the cards. We’ll see.

Bradford good for transport links?

by

According to this article, Bradford is the best British city for business due to its transport links. It’s a little scant on details, but it claims Bradford has good transport links and low levels of congestion.

Now I live in Bradford, and this surprises me. To start with, here’s what is good about transport in Bradford:

  • Roads – Bradford has good links with the M62, via the M606 and the A650/A641, and the bits of the central ring road that have been completed make for a good bypass of the city centre. The signposting is generally good and even at peak times traffic generally keeps moving.
  • Buses – Bradford Interchange is a large, modern bus station with both short and mid-distance bus services and long distance coach services serving a wide variety of destinations, including many airports. It’s also connected to the railway station. Bus services are frequent and reasonably cheap.
  • Trains – Bradford has two railway stations, with trains at least every 15 minutes to Leeds all day and regular local services. A couple of trains run direct to London each day.

But there’s a lot that needs improving.

Roads

The central ring road isn’t finished, and probably never will be. Part of the missing bit requires demolishing listed buildings around the university, or tunnelling underneath it, which would be prohibitively expensive. The missing section therefore uses older roads in the city centre, which makes for a confusing one-way system on roads not designed for the level of traffic they now take.

And while the road connections to the south and to Leeds are adequate, to the north the road quality falls sharply. Anyone who’s ever wanted to drive from Bradford to north Lancashire would testify to this, as you crawl through places like Saltaire and Keighley. Leeds Bradford Airport, for example, is only accessible via a single carriageway A-road, which passes through suburbs and villages on the way. And the outer ring road is mostly a joke – it’s a series of existing roads roughly forming a ring around the city that were designated a number. Most sections are not designed for the amount of traffic they now carry, and so it’s often quicker to use the central ring road rather than try to avoid the city altogether.

Buses

To be honest I don’t have a lot to fault Bradford’s bus services on – compared to other cities they’re pretty good.

Trains

One of the local sayings here is on the lines of ‘Bradford may have 2 railway stations, but you still need to change at Leeds to go anywhere’. Unfortunately this is quite true – the direct service to London is only twice a day, and there are no long distance services, just hourly mid-distance trains which stretch out to York, Manchester, Wakefield, Blackpool and Preston.

To go anywhere else, and you have to change at Leeds or Manchester, and since the trains call at Manchester Victoria and not Piccadilly, you might as well just go via Leeds. Leeds Bradford Airport is one of the few airports in the country that doesn’t have a railway station or concrete plans for one, despite its proximity to the Leeds-Harrogate railway line. Most of the trains which run into Bradford Interchange are at least 15 years old and tend to be handed down from other companies when they get new trains – the only ‘new’ trains running into Bradford are those which serve Ilkley, Skipton and Leeds from Bradford Forster Square.

Bradford’s transport links aren’t bad on the whole, but to call them the best is laughable. There is so much that can be done to improve transport here, especially the railways.

openoffice.virginmedia.com

by
A screenshot of openoffice.virginmedia.com showing folders and files to download.

I know there’s at least one other person here who uses OpenOffice.org as their office suite and Virgin Media as their ISP, so you may be pleased to know that Virgin mirrors OpenOffice downloads at openoffice.virginmedia.com. If you’re a Virgin Media customer, then this is the fastest way of downloading it as it should require the least number of hops.

Virgin also mirror all downloads from Tucows and possibly some other sites so it may well be worth checking out before you download, especially if it’s a big download and you’re lucky enough to have Virgin’s 20 MB broadband offering, as you’ll be able to make the most of your bandwidth.