Leeds Atheist Society

Next week is a crazy week for the society – we have 5 events! Yep, count them, 5 of them. That’s crazy. Actually don’t count them as only 4 are listed on the events page as we don’t explicitly mention our weekly social because it’s just implied by now.

We have two debates on Tuesday, a talk on Thursday and social on both Tuesday and Thursday. So seriously, you have no excuses for not coming to at least one of those events!

You think you have it intense but think of us poor committee – we have 7 events to attend as we also have at least two meetings to go to. A-Soc doesn’t half keep you busy!

We’ve just made our lunch time talks even better! Tomorrow’s talk, “Evolution – it’s a fact” will now feature free food so you really have no reason not to turn up :p.

If you missed the details it’s 12-1 in the ARC conference room at the top of the union building and the speach will be about how evolution can fit into both atheistic and theist world views and so it shouldn’t really be the big argument that it is.

I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who came down and made the intro meeting quite a success. We welcomed quite a few new members into the society and I’m looking forward to a great year.

I’ve now posted a page about the weekend away in November where we will be going down to London this year.

The page contains information about the weekend, an outline of the schedule (which we are still putting together) and a few other details on the trip. It will be updated as we get more information sorted.

If you haven’t heard about the weekend away you’re missing out – it’s a bargain weekend in London, we have a train booked to take us there and back and accommodation right in the centre of the city.

It’s open to everybody (though members get a big discount) so you can bring your friends along as all the A-Soc activites we are organising are optional.

Just a reminder (or notification if you have somehow missed it that our 2007/2008 intro meeting event is tomorrow evening. It’s at 8pm in Meeting Room 3 up in the ARC at the top of the union building.

At the meeting we will be talking about the society, the committee will be introducing themselves and we will be discussing some of the events we have upcoming over the next few months (so it’s a good meeting for existing members to come along to too).

If you haven’t joined the society yet there will be an opportunity to and you can also sign up for our weekend away. After the meeting we will be heading down to The Terrace for drinks and a bit more of an informal chat. And if you’re still with us by the end of the night we even have discount entry to a club sorted too.

I’ve just added loads of events listings. And I mean a lot! We’ve now got 14 upcoming events on the events page.

And this pretty much represents the events we are running in the first term. Some of them are for next term but then I haven’t finished adding all the events we are running this term – there are still a few talks to confirm and I haven’t added any of the socials yet.

When we said we had a busy year for the society planned, we weren’t joking. I’m hoping this year will really live up to everyone’s expectations so head over to the events page and take a look. If not, drop me an email and complain! .

I was going to blog live from the societies fair in the Riley Smith Hall today but we got a bit busy so I didn’t have chance.

Unlike previous years, this year each society only gets one day in the Riley Smith Hall and Tuesday was the day for faith and culture which includes us.

Having got to bed just before 4am, I’ve now been up since 7:30am this morning (well technically, yesterday morning now) to get everything ready. So as you can imagine, I’m rather tired now :p.

The day didn’t go too badly, we got quite good conversation rates in terms of signing up paid members rather than just mailing list subscriptions but perhaps that is due to the lack of people who joined the mailing list . We talked to a lot of people though so I’m hoping for a good turn out at our intro meeting next Tuesday.

If you missed us today, don’t worry, you can come down and talk to us (and sign up too!) at the intro meeting. See the events page for details on that.

While this is probably fairly boring news, I’m going to post about it anyway :p.

The events page has now been tweaked so that it only displays the first paragraph of the events details. This is because previously it would display the entire details which could sometimes be an awful lot of text and it didn’t display with any paragraphing – it was just one mass of text.

Now it just displays a quick description and you can click on the event name to get full details. The description has a [More] indicator if there is more text to be read when you view the full details of an event (which there almost always is).

Well, that didn’t work very well did it :p.

The site is now back online while we try to figure out what went wrong with the migration.

We are planning to move the site to a new, more stable server tonight. There should be little to no downtime if things go well but in these sorts of events, things often do go wrong.

More updates will be posted on what’s happening and when it’s done. I’m quitely hoping that that my next post will be in about 20 minutes saying everything went fine to be honest .