I told F yesterday that I am going to Moldova for a couple of days.

He asked, “Are they going to split up?”

(We had had a number of conversations earlier in the year about my visits to Montenegro and Kosovo.)

He already knew that Moldova had split up from Russia, and so did Ukraine and “Blerrus” and “Lativia”.

I explained that indeed there are people in Moldova who want to split it up and join their bit onto Russia, but the problem is that Russia is now quite a long way away from Moldova, and anyway I don’t think the people who want to split up Moldova are very nice people.

He’s only seven. I suspect we will have more conversations like this, at least as long as I stay in this line of work…

The clue is in the icon…

So, Captain Jean-Luc Picard was having an affair with Magenta (of Rocky Horror), until he was arrested and killed by Gimli…

Well now, the result of last week’s competition when we asked you to find a derogatory term for the Belgians. Well, the response was enormous and we took quite a long time sorting out the winners.

There were some very clever entries. Mrs Hatred of Leicester Said ‘let’s not call them anything, let’s just ignore them’ … (applause starts vigorously, but he holds his hands up for silence)

… and a Mr St John of Huntingdon said he couldn’t think of anything more derogatory than Belgians. (cheers and applause; a girl in showgirl costume comes on and holds up placards through next bit)

But in the end we settled on three choices: number three … the Sprouts (placard ‘The Sprouts’), sent in by Mrs Vicious of Hastings… very nice ;

number two….. the Phlegms (placard) … from Mrs Childmolester of Worthing;

but the winner was undoubtedly from Mrs No-Supper-For-You from Norwood in Lancashire… Miserable Fat Belgian Bastards. (placard; roar of applause)

Very good – thank you, Carol. (Carol exits)

Spent much time yesterday looking around two day-centres for children with learning disabilities. B is finding school too much for her, won’t participate in group activities and comes home bruised from banging herself against walls in frustration. I thought they were both nice places; one only a few km away, but I thought its facilities marginally inferior (apart from the garden) and anyway they don’t have any vacancies; the other about 20 km east of here, with a nicer interior atmosphere but not as much outside space (oddly enough, within spitting distance of the church of Our Lady of the Stone where the local saint consoles those with mental disorders). The second place does have a vacancy, so if we take them up on it, poor will get to know the motorway between here and there rather well as their bus service doesn’t run this far west.

I spoke more Dutch yesterday than I do in the average month (also when I finally got into work had to go straight out again for a meeting with a Dutch MEP) and was musing on one or two words or phrases which are particularly pleasing in that language. We were asked at both daycentres to give them our gegevens. The word gegeven is the past participle of the verb geven, “to give”; but in English you don’t ask people for their “givens”, you resort to Latin where the verb “to give” is do, dare, dedi, datum and the plural of datum is “data”. Wouldn’t it be nicer to talk of “givens” than “data”? Also there was much discussion of the prikkels which would be experienced by our daughter at each place. Although the word is pronounced identically to the English word “prickles”, in Dutch it has a wider range of meanings, including in this particular case the concept conveyed by the English word “stimuli”, which of course comes from Latin stimulus, meaning “goad”, the diminutive of stilus meaning “stick”. On the one hand, the English language has been enriched (as has famously pointed out) by its use of vocabulary from many sources. On the other, it does mean that we can lose touch rather easily with the resonances of what words actually meant originally.

Also after almost eight years here I am still getting used to Flemish rather than Dutch. The use of ge rather than U or jij to mean “you” still throws me – when I learnt Dutch a quarter of a century ago we used gij and ge only to address God. Not so different, of couse, from the use of “thou” in rural Yorkshire, but I have never spent much time in rural Yorkshire. Also I noticed, more than previously, people not pronouncing the letter “h” at the start of a word – is this a general Flemish thing, or something more restricted to areas within spitting distance of the taalgrens? And of course the diminutive form of nouns being -ske or -ke rather then -tje or -je. I wonder what else I miss because people are trying to speak clearly to us foreigners, rather than talking as they normally would?

I ought to look at Language Log more regularly. alerts me to Roger Shuy’s coverage of the fact that the FBI now has all of 33 agents who speak Arabic.

One can get by in management of a team where much of the input material is in other languages. I do this myself: my Serbo-Croato-Bosnian is at the level of a keen tourist, and my Russian very much that of a beginner. But my team members working full-time on the relevant countries are fluent in the relevant languages, or I wouldn’t have hired them. OK, we’re a specialist outfit, and can afford to hire specialists rather than rotating members of a large staff in and out of different positions every year. But still, Arabic is the fifth most widely spoken language in the world (after Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish and English – when I were a lad, English was firmly in second place) and has 600,000 speakers in the United States of America…

Not me, but Gerald Ford after a few days in hospital, for the fourth time this year. Wishing him a speedy recovery…

The author of this quotation:

Belgium!  name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce.  Belgium!  I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight.

is in fact Charlotte Brontë – but not in Villette, where she refers to the country as “Labassecour” rather than Belgium, and the eponymous “Villette” is pretty obviously Brussels (the boarding school is on the site of what is now the Palais des Beaux-Arts/Paleis voor Schone Kunsten). However, in her earlier novel The Professor she uses much the same plot without bothering to change the names of the setting. I found the quote in Chapter 7, online hereREADER, perhaps you were never in Belgium?  Haply you don’t know the physiognomy of the country?  You have not its lineaments defined upon your memory, as I have them on mine?

And no sneaky googling to find the answer, now:

Belgium!  name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce.  Belgium!  I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight.

It’s obvious once you know the answer…

3) Confessions, by St Augustine

The end of my reading project is nigh. I have to admit I skimmed quite a lot of this; eloquent and heartfelt pleas to the Lord are all very well but get a bit samey after a while. Also Augustine’s misogyny is really rather repulsive; by his own admission, he abandons his partner of fifteen years to make a socially convenient marriage (though he keeps custody of his son) – this at the behest of his mother, who is exalted throughout as an exemplar of saintliness.

Having said that, when on form he was a very good writer. His self-consciously funny line about his youthful flings, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet” is one that I have used and adapted for many speeches. I found the passages on memory, and on the nature of time,well-expressed, though I doubt if they actually included any new ideas. Given my own past interests, I was very interested in what he has to say about astrology: his arguments against it are basically sound. Not surprising, in a way, that Augustine was one of the first Christian writers to insist that if science contradicts the words of the Bible, we should not take the Bible literally.

Anyway, I wish (and this is not something I often say of a book) that he had written less about lust and more about philosophy.

2) The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

I started off not really liking this book, and understanding why so many others haven’t read it. Some reviewers somewhere commented that its saccharine concept – the narrator is a girl who is the victim of a horrible murder in the first chapter, and hangs around in spirit to see her family cope, or not cope – is just too gooey, and, frankly, it is. I guess that a book which carried the assuring message that people who die horribly, pointlessly violent deaths stay around in a happy afterlife and watch over us was bound to sell well in America just after 2001.

However, I actually came close to liking it, once the murder victim began to recede and the ordinary dramas of her family and schoolmates came to the fore. I was on the verge of concluding that despite an unpromising start it was a rather good book, when my confidence was destroyed by the ending.

At the end of the book, Susie, our narrator, is granted (quite outside the bounds between living and dead which the book seemed to have established) a few hours in the body of one of her classmates so that she can make passionate love to the boy she kissed shortly before she was raped and murdered by one of their neighbours; and then she moves on to the next stage of the afterlife.

The message seemed to be that the only remedy for bad sex is good sex, and it made me feel very uneasy. I have to admit that Alice Sebold knows a lot more about what it is like to experience being raped than I do, and she has every right to tell it like it is for her, or for the characters she invents. But I didn’t like it at all.

So, there is no actual deal for restoring devolved government in Northern Ireland, but there is an agreed choreography (see Guardian, BBC, and the actual agreement). Nothing very surprising, especially if you have been following the remarks of the key DUP and Sinn Fein players over the last few months. I did grin at Reg Empey’s comment that the St Andrews deal is the Good Friday Agreement for slow learners – this is, of course, a riff on Seamus Mallon’s line in 1998 that the Good Friday Agreement was Sunningdale for slow learners, Empey himself being one of the slow learners to whom Mallon was referring.

One aspect that is of considerable interest to me is the ambiguity of the third last step, from the timetable on page 14 of the Agreement:

March: Endorsement by the electorate of the St Andrews agreement.

Apparently the not unimportant question of whether this means new Assembly elections or a referendum was not resolved at St Andrews. And the option of elections actually has a certain ambiguity; the 18 old parliamentary constituencies, drawn up in 1995, are on the verge of being replaced by a new set, but it would be a pretty tight squeeze to force through the legislation changing the boundaries starting now (or rather, starting whenever the political decision is made to do it) in time for an election in early March. So I reckon that if there is to be an election, it will necessarily be on the existing boundaries.

I also think that a new Assembly election is more likely than a referendum. Holding a referendum on what is essentially minor tinkering to what should theoretically be entrenched constitutional legislation is a bit excessive. There is also room for tedious and potentially destructive debate on precisely what parts of the St Andrews package could or should be subjected to referendum, and what the wording of the question (or, I suppose, questions) should be. It’s different from 1998, when we had been told for years that the final package would be endorsed by referendum and it was accepted by all parties that this was part of the deal. Also, there will have to be a new Assembly election some time.

There is a possible argument that the current electoral boundaries are so out of date that any Assembly election on that basis would be pretty dubious. Actually I see this an opportunity here to put right one of the flaws in the Belfast Agreement. It rigidly assigned six Assembly seats to each of the 18 Westminster constituencies, a last-minute arrangement made to satisfy the Women’s Coalition, who aren’t around any more, and anyway I doubt that if they were they would seriously object to my proposal, to wit: that for a March Assembly election, the current (ie old) Westminster boundaries should be used but with the number of seats varied from five to seven. Here are the figures (crunched backwards from the Boundary Commission’s current proposals) showing the electorate for each of the current seats, and the divergence from the average, as of 1 December 2005:

East Belfast                55098	-14%
North Belfast               51209	-20%
South Belfast               52126	-18%
West Belfast                54205	-15%
East Antrim                 58794	 -8%
North Antrim                75332	 18%
South Antrim                63178	 -1%
North Down                  60108	 -6%
South Down                  74230	 16%
Fermanagh and South Tyrone  67411	  6%
Foyle                       68848	  8%
Lagan Valley                71952	 13%
East Londonderry            59109	 -7%
Mid Ulster                  63015	 -1%
Newry and Armagh            72876	 14%
Strangford                  67400	  6%
West Tyrone                 60186	 -6%
Upper Bann                  72564	 14%

Pretty clearly, you will get a more proportional allocation of seats if you take a seat off each of the four Belfast constituencies, and add an extra one to North Antrim, South Down, Upper Bann, Newry and Armagh, and perhaps also Lagan Valley – which would give you 109 Assembly members not 108, but is that such a big deal?

I don’t think this makes a huge difference on the ground. Probably the party it is least favourable for is my own, the Alliance Party, but there’s not really a lot in it. There is also a precedent: when the 1982 Assembly elections took place, once again the old boundaries drawn up just after the 1970 election were on their last legs, and so the number of seats per constituency then varied from four (in West Belfast) to ten (in South Antrim). My proposal for a variation from five to seven is rather modest in comparison!

Amused by this BBC story, I had a look at the Ulster Unionists’ blog of the talks. I must say it reminds me very much of the extraordinary combination of tedium and tension that was my experience of the Stormont talks chaired by George Mitchell ten years ago. The latest entry is a true compilation of cliches trying to make it look as if the delegates are doing something:

We have been here for a couple of hours now and meetings between parties and government are fairly frenetic at this stage. We have also had an internal discussion about the possible outcomes. The pressure cooker seems to be on and is ratcheting up. It remains to be seen however whether government will throw down the gauntlet. Many are walking about the hotel with long faces. We appear to be moving towards a conclusion to these talks one way or another and as i write the media are arriving for a government briefing…

I’m sure everyone is doing their best, but I think it would have been better to let the public continue under the illusion that the political process contains some elements of excitement!

… and got it right; there was a lot of media speculation yesterday as to what would come out of Oslo this morning. But in the end I think the Bangladeshis very much deserve it.

Today is not a ‘dress-down Friday’ in our office. Can you guess why?

Probably those of you who knew him will have already heard the sad news. His most recent blog entries didn’t give much cause for optimism, but I guess we all hoped he would pull through. I last saw him in Dublin in March, when  persuaded the hospital to let him out for the afternoon; and a month later he very kindly emailed me some pages from a military history book he was reading which mentioned some of my ancestors, though I narrowly missed him in Brussels in May. He’ll be sadly missed.

…for reasons which will eventually be revealed, I need to get hold of some distilled vinegar. Any suggestions as to where I might buy it, with particular reference to shops in Brussels or Leuven, would be very welcome.

On the Today Program this morning – hear them here.

We’re watching “I CLAVDIVS” on DVD at the moment, and have got up to episode 4. Part of the series’ immense charm is spotting actors you know from later roles at the 1976 stage of their career. This evening, I was struck by the lovely Livilla who seemed strangely familiar. And lo, come the closing credits, it turns out that she was played by Patricia Quinn, who of course lives forever as Magenta in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, filmed the previous year.

By weird coincidence, another one of the stars of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Susan Sarandon, played the same character in a 1985 TV series called A.D.. Though I’d be interested to know exactly how they fit the character into a dramatisation of the Acts of the Apostles…

1) The Syſtem of the World, by Neal Stephenſon

It is no doubt the Caſe, that this Book will be bought – indeed, has already been bought – by thoſe Readers whoſe Habit it is, to peruſe Works of that Genre known to ſome as Scientifick-Phantaſy. Yet (ſaving one Perſonality, barely mentioned in this Volume, who may be an Immortal, though moſt unlike the Struldbrugs encountered by GULLIVER in Dr SWIFT‘s Tale of his Voyage from Laputa to Japan) there is naught here that is Phantastickal, or reliant on counter-factual Advances in the Technologickal Arts. My own Belief is that the late Mr KNIGHT hit the Nail upon the Head, when he ſurmiſ’d, that the Scientifick-Phantaſy Genre is “what we point to, when we ſay it”. I point to this Book, and its two Fellows in the Baroque-Trilogy, and Cryptonomicon which though written earlier is ſet two and a half Centuries later, and I ſay that I include them in that Genre. Does any-body diſagree?

Cyprus briefing points

President Talat:

Born in 1952, engineering graduate (Ankara).

Developed his political career via Turkish Cypriot trade unions and student politics in opposition to Rauf Denktash.

Leading pro-settlement voice in the April 2004 referendum.

Became Prime Minister after his party won the most seats in the January 2005 election, in coalition with the more hard-line party led by Serdar Denktash.

Won the April 2006 presidential election in the first round (55.6% of votes cast).

Broke coalition with Serdar Denktash in September 2006 and formed new coalition with defectors from Denktash’s party.

Prefers to be referred to as “President of the Turkish republic of Northern Cyprus“. Customary international usage is to call him the “leader of the Turkish Cypriot community”.

The Finnish proposals:

As we understand it, these were developed late last month and are presumably the subject of Talat’s meetings today and tomorrow:

1)      Turkey opens (?some?) ports to Cypriot vessels (thus implementing the Turkey-EU customs union with Cyprus which is the formal blockage on progress)

2)      Greek Cypriots agree direct trade regulations for Turkish Cypriots to trade with the EU without having to go through the Green Line.

3)      Famagusta port (Magosa in Turkish) to be jointly administered by EU, UN and Turkish Cypriot chamber of commerce, for two years

4)      The ghost town of Varosha (Maraş in Turkish) to be refurbished by the Turkish side and (?some?) Greek Cypriots allowed to return (not clear if this is under UN control or continued Turkish Cypriot control – we recommended the latter in our report).

5)      Both sides continue with the UN process.

Turkish objections:

1)      No mention of allowing international flights to Ercan airport

2)      Any territorial readjustment should be part of the comprehensive settlement (not clear that Finns are proposing any interim change in administration)

3)      Not clear what happens to Varosha/Famagusta after two years

4)      Negotiations are being held with Ankara, not with Turkish Cypriots (though presumably Talat’s visit to Brussels will make )

5)      This is an attempt by EU to wiggle out of its commitments to Turkish Cypriots while holding Turkey to the customs union condition

6)      “If we give them this concession they will only make more demands.”

See also statements by Talat from last week (separate attachment).

Famagusta

(this is a Turkish Cypriot map – spelling not great but boundaries are clear)

There are two geographical areas in question:

i) The port facilities (Magosa in Turkish), which are already heavily used for Turkish Cypriot trade with those countries who aren’t under the EU ban. These could be run, by EU regulation, and UN permission, by the European Commission with the assistance of local parties. The Greek Cypriots obviously want to be one of the local parties. As we understand the Finnish proposals, they would not be included; it would be the Turkish Cypriot Chamber of Commerce. Also as we understand the Finnish proposals, this is to be a temporary, two-year arrangement, renewable if there is progress on finding a comprehensive settlement in the meantime.

ii) The abandoned holiday resort of Varosha, immediately south of the port area (between it and the Green Line). Under the Annan Plan it would have been among the first parts of territory handed over to Greek Cypriot control by the Turkish Cypriots. Apparently Talat (when Prime Minister) offered to hand it directly to the Greek Cypriots in return for the EU passing the direct trade regulation, an offer which the Greek Cypriots refused.

There is a great deal of haziness about the current Finnish proposals on Varosha. It is clear that they anticipate refurbishment of the abandoned and derelict buildings; not clear a) who pays (Turkish Cypriots, Turkey, EU, or other bilateral donors), or b) who is in control of the area while this refurbishment takes place. On that point, we recommended that the Turkish Cypriots should stay in charge and supervise the return of Greek Cypriot civilians. The Greek Cypriots want to put their own armed forces in immediately. The Finns may have proposed (but this is not clear) that the UN buffer zone be extended to include Varosha, so that it is under international control.

The UN process:

In July the two leaders, Papadopoulos and Talat, met three times under the auspices of the UN (in the person of Under-Secretary-General Ibraim Gambari). They agreed on the following:

Set of principles

1. Commitment to the unification of Cyprus based on a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation and political equality, as set out in the relevant Security Council resolutions.

2. Recognition of the fact that the status quo is unacceptable and that its prolongation would have negative consequences for the Turkish and Greek Cypriots.

3. Commitment to the proposition that a comprehensive settlement is both desirable and possible, and should not be further delayed.

4. Agreement to begin a process immediately, involving bi-communal discussion of issues that affect the day to day life of the people and concurrently those that concern substantive issues, both of which will contribute to a comprehensive settlement.

5. Commitment to ensure that the “right atmosphere” prevails for this process to be successful. In that connection, confidence building measures are essential, both in terms of improving the atmosphere and improving the life of all Turkish and Greek Cypriots. Also in that connection, an end must be put to the so-called “blame game”.

Decision by the two leaders

The Technical Committees on issues that affect the day to day life of people

will commence by the end of July provided that, at the same time, the two

Leaders will also have exchanged a list of issues of substance and its

contents to be studied by expert bi-communal working groups and finalized by

the Leaders.

The two Leaders will meet further, from time to time as appropriate, to give

directions to the expert bi-communal working groups as well as to review the

work of the Technical Committees.

The lists of “issue of substance” were indeed prepared and exchanged at the end of July, but no further progress has taken place. UN sources and Turkish interlocutors agree that this is because of a lack of engagement by the Greek Cypriots.

Other points to raise

1) The question of a post-settlement international security presence, raised by Stanley Crossick, with the idea of a new international force (be it NATO, EU or UN) taking over security for the whole island and all other armed groups being demilitarized. Is this worth us pursuing? (Note: despite the widest recruitment trawl I have initiated in my time here I still haven’t identified a suitable consultant for this topic.)

2) The property issue now seems likely to be solved through the courts – the European Court for Human Rights has effectively recognized the Turkish Cypriots’ property compensation system. Are there perhaps other legal challenges that can be made to the Greek Cypriots’ constitutional legitimacy? Substantial chunks of the 1960 constitution have been suspended without due process.

3) The Turkish Cypriots’ advocacy of their own cause in Brussels is under-resourced; Yalçin Vehit, their head of representation, has only three staff, and their activities seem to be concentrated on the Turkish community in Belgium and friendly parliamentarians, rather than attempting to penetrate the EU structures (as we have done in our work). To an extent this is a legacy of the Denktash era (both father and son) – Serdar stated that he was much more interested in developing their links with the Arab world than with the EU. However he is out of government as of two weeks ago, and they should be encouraged to put more resources into their presence in Brussels (and elsewhere in the EU).

NW, 9 October 2006

What I’ve been journaling about!

My colleagues who were recently observing elections in a country which shall be unnamed recently have sent me a note about it. After observing numerous blatant examples of vote-rigging on the day of the vote, they went to the offices of the District Electoral Commission to observe the tabulation of the final results.

“The DEC working room was locked and after several knocks the door was opened slightly, but when the person saw it was us held the door half open and despite me pushing to get in he was pushing back for some time. When I managed to get in the DEC chairman politely asked us to leave the room, since they were tabulating the protocols and did not want others to see the process.

Well, of course, you wouldn’t want observers actually observing, now, would you?

(I repeat my earlier appeals for people interested in dabbling in the practical side of international relations to sign up for election observing missions.)

Months and months ago, on an impulse in the supermarket, I bought an object rather like this. I’ve been using it to cook fish on top of the stove, roughly once a month (maybe not even as often as that). And then yesterday, it suddenly occurred to me – why not cook steaks on it?

Yum.

And then today I thought, why not cook the lamb fillets on it?

Yum yum yum.

It has been a recurring minor irritation that our fitted kitchen, done three years ago, had no proper grilling arrangements. But now I think that gap in my life has been filled.

According to Wikipedia, these are abjads:

أبجدية عربية
אלפבית עברי

These are abugidas:
देवनागरी
อักษรไทย
বাংলা লিপি
ಕನ್ನಡ ಅಕ್ಷರಮಾಲೆ
മലയാളം അക്ഷരമാല
தமிழ் அரிச்சுவடி

And these are alphabets:
кириллический алфавит
ქართული ანბანი
Ελληνικό αλφάβητο

All have their own entry in Wikipedia in their own script. Interestingly only the two abjads are written right-to-left.

1) Thanks, everyone, for your earlier recommendations. Nero is indeed by far the most user-friendly software for this purpose that I’ve seen. Unfortunately it hasn’t solved my problem. I went out and bought some of TDK’s CD-R’s, but they don’t seem to cut it – though the burner is able to write to CD-RW’s OK, so I guess I will just have to trade up in terms of my CD-R purchases. (The TDK-made recordable DVDs don’t seem to work either.)

2) In case anyone interested hasn’t already seen it, the Robert Anton Wilson appeal has been a success. The man himself responds:

To steal from Jack Benny, “I do not deserve this, but I also have severe leg problems and I don’t deserve them either.” …You have all reminded me that despite George W. Bush and all his cohorts, there is still a lot of beautiful kindness in the world.

3) If you’re wondering why I haven’t posted any book reviews yet this month, given that it’s already the 7th, the reason is that in the spirit of this post I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World and it is taking me, er, a long time.

4) I did read Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and came away somewhat unconvinced. It seems to me almost axiomatic that real artificial intelligence, whatever it turns out to be, will be very different from the way humans experience intelligence and consciousness; the Turing test is basically a parlour game. But I really hate “cute robot” sf stories, and perhaps I was biased against Turing’s argument because I feel he bears some responsibility for that particular genre.

5)

del_c

  posted a response to my various crazed rantings about how authors born between 1942 and 1951 have won twice as many Hugos and Nebulas as would have been expected. I think his argument fails even a simple visual inspection of the data he presents, but look for yourself.

fjm

  offers an interesting theory in a comment to my last post on the subject; I should like to be able to quantify it a bit better.

6) The Belgian municipal elections are tomorrow, and voting is compulsory for those foreigners who (like me) bothered to sign up to the electoral register. Our mayor has been in power since the 1976 reorganisation of local government and is running for a sixth term. There’s very little to choose between the parties; the Mayor’s list of candidates is officially independent but unofficially Liberal (the Liberals in Belgian are to the right of centre); he is in coalition with the Christian Democrats, led here by our local MEP; the Socialist Party leaflet had no identifiable policies in it at all; one of our neighbours is standing for the Greens so I will probably vote for her. (The far-right “Vlaams Belang”, formerly the “Vlaams Blok”, have no candidates here.)

7) Thanks to everyone who has posted good wishes on certain entries recently. You know who you are.

8) Good night.

Well, it took a little negotiation over the small print, but I have accepted the new position with Independent Diplomat. The boss took it fairly well; there is a good internal candidate who I hope takes my position (though filling her current position will also be tricky).

Ironically I also got a letter from the European Commission telling me that I have not been called for interview for the job I applied for in May! One less thing on my list.

Help me, oh friends list, you are my only hope…

I’ve been suffering some frustration over the last few days in attempts to burn CDs of the Doctor Who series “The Abominable Snowmen”. Some time back I bought it in MP3 format, which of course I can’t play in the car’s CD player, which is a pity as the only time I really listen to CDs is when I am driving. I have successfully converted all the tracks to WMV format, using Winamp (though I guess I could have used the Windows Audio Converter).

The next problem was that when I tried burning them to rewritable CDs, the car’s player wouldn’t recognise them. WikiPedia informs me that rewritable CDs often cannot be played by audio players, so I went out and bought some CD-Rs.

Now, the fun begins:

1. Right-click on files to copy, use the “Send to…” option to activate the Windows CD Writing wizard – but it refuses to recognise that there is a writable CD in the tray.
2. Try Windows Media Player – says it refuses to burn the files because it cannot detect their length. Says it might possibly be able to burn them if I play through them first; but the whole point of this exercise is so that I don’t hacve to play them through at the compuiter!
3. Try RealPlayer – it refuses to burn any files which are less than ten seconds long, and half a dozen of the scenes in the Doctor Who story are indeed less than ten seconds long. I’m not going to risk missing out on important plot points.
4. Try iTunes – seems to go well much better – all 68 tracks appear to be present on the CD, although the burning process finishes with a baffling error message. But (minor point) annoying brief pause between tracks and (much more major point) the disc stops playing after track 51 has been played, ie half way through episode 3. When I try again (this time with episodes 3 to 5) with another disk, the same thing happens but sooner, getting 21 tracks in, almost to the end of episode 3, before giving up.

So, what do you think?

1. Is there some fantastic CD-burning software out there which will always work?
2. Have I just been buying shoddy CD-R’s, and should go upmarket a bit?
3. Could the CD burner have been damaged? I did dislodge the tray once, but got it back in again without apparent ill-effects, and the fact that it has successfully burnt some tracks suggests that it must be able potentially to do them all.
4. there’s nothing illegal, is there, about my messing around with MP3 tracks that I have paid for to get them into a more suitable format for my own personal use?