Teams Release

Release

We started the day knowing that to keep the project schedule we needed to get the first pre-release out today. At 10 we met and agreed there was no reason we could think for not getting it out. During the day we found a few bits and pieces, but managed to iron them out. Everything fell into place and it was out at 4:30 which meant Angela and I were free to go and play Interclub teams.

Teams

After giving up in 1998 I've been playing bridge again since July, but until today only pairs. We were asked to substitute for another pair that couldn't play tonight. It was my first attempt at teams for seven years, and Angela's first attempt ever. I wasn't expecting it to go well, and it didn't, but not for the reason we expected. When we swapped tables to play against the other pair we ended up sitting the same way as our team-mates, immediately invalidating the result. The format was a 24 board swapping opponents after 12 boards. We ddn't notice the wrong seating until after the first 12 boards, wiping out the result. At least we sat correctly for the second half so half the match counted.

When we left the table after the second round I felt we had done badly. Luckily for us the opponents did worse, so we had quite a tidy win.

Truth: Pravda Lives

Remember Pravda, the newspaper of the Comunist Party of The USSR? Despite its name meaning "Truth", for seventy nine years it was the boring parrot of whatever its totalitarian masters wasnted to say. Somehow it survived the break-up of the Soviet Union, although it did split between the hard-line comunists who now run the paper edition and a more pro-Russian faction that created the Pravda.ru news service.

Pravda.ru now sports Google ads and other signs of on-line capitalism, and recently published an article on a group of Americans who met for a weekend of fish-hook suspension.

The article was originally written in Russian the quaint translation requires careful reading which reveals more a whiff of the old communist dissaproval of western trends.