Interesting article on the Guardian Books site about comments made by John Sutherland, the Chairman of the 2005 Man Booker Prize Panel:

The newly announced chairman of the 2005 Man Booker prize has admitted that the judges are unlikely to read all 130 books in contention, while describing his fellow judges as “light on the minorities” and the process as like a “world federation wrestling match”.

John Sutherland, an emeritus professor of English at the University of London and a Guardian columnist, said: “It takes six or seven hours to read a novel, and a judge is being paid about £3,000. You don’t have to read the whole thing to know it doesn’t qualify.

The journalist and occasional Tory politician Boris Johnson yesterday posted the following on his blog:

January 19, 2005
Calling /attention all bloggers

It’s quarter to four and I’ve got to write a column.

which shall I do? Any ideas

1. euthanasia in Clint Eastwood’s latest movie

2. Grammar in schools

3. the Airbus 380?

4. The coming elections in Iraq

Posted by boris at January 19, 2005 03:42 PM

What’s this? Interactive journalism? Boris had plenty of suggestions, looking at the comments.

In the end he plumped for the Airbus idea. I’ll reproduce the article in full here, because the Telegraph site is tricky to link to:

European dream and American reality
By Boris Johnson
(Filed: 20/01/2005)

Incroyable! Unglaublich! What a triumph for the European dream. What a stunning rebuke to all of us Euro-sceptics, with our acned teenage insistence on the dogma of the free market.

In less than two months, the first of our runways will rumble to the thunder of the new plane’s payload, 40 per cent heavier than that of a 747. In a couple of years, they will be circling in midge-like cones over Heathrow, except that they won’t be midges so much as aerial whales, Moby Dicks of the sky, each capable of taking 555 passengers, rising to 800 or even 1,000 as new models come on stream. In a decade, they say, the Earth will be cats-cradled with their vapour, as air travel passenger numbers triple in response to the inflated capacity of their bellies, holding 30 per cent more seats than a jumbo.

For a generation, the technocratic elites of France and Germany have dreamt of taking on that mighty Boeing, a plane that emerged in the 1960s and came to symbolise the easy commercial dominance of America; for years, the filing cabinets at Airbus in Toulouse have contained secret folders saying “avion tres grand de l’avenir” or “superkolossalluftwagen”; and here it is, at last, the Airbus 380.

Airbus – did someone say “bus”? Bus is too modest a vehicular analogy. This is not a bus, or even a tram or a train or ship. It is an Airvillage. Already Richard Branson is planning to fill his 380s with casinos and gyms and coffee parlours and double beds – nudge, nudge – and I predict that this plane is just the prelude to a new age of stratospheric gigantism, comparable to the emulation between the great ocean liners of the 1920s. It won’t be long before Branson will be offering orchestras and swimming pools and deck quoits, and they’ll be staging Aida complete with elephants in the Upper Class lounge. And it will Europe that launched this tin Zeppelin, Europe that showed the way.

Admittedly, the 380 has yet to prove that it can actually fly, and I seem to remember that some other Airbus models had quite a high prang rate, something to do with the fly-by-wire system being not quite right, but Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder are certainly entitled to gloat.

The German Chancellor gave a figurative two-fingered salute to Donald Rumsfeld, when he boasted that the 380 was above all a victory for “Old Europe”; and as I say, we Euro-sceptics, we who deplore state subsidy, must take it on the chin. When I joined this paper 17 years ago as a leader writer, there was barely a week in which the late Lord (Jock) Bruce Gardyne, our economics expert, failed to offer an editorial attacking Airbus. It was a scandal, he said, that so much taxpayers’ money was being forced down the gullets of these flightless Toulouse turkeys. How, he demanded, could you expect a plane to be a commercial success, when it was assembled from parts all over Europe, the fuselage from France, the wheels from Spain, the wings from Britain, and so on.

It was all political, he argued; it was putting the political imperative of European integration above good business sense, and we should have nothing to do with it. Well, the best we can say for Jock’s editorials on Airbus was that they were right in principle. A huge amount of British government money was pumped into Airbus over the years, and the 380 alone has attracted £500 million of subsidy. Boeing, by contrast, was able for decades to be the dominant force in air passenger travel, without a cent of direct state subsidy.

And yet we must look at the world as it is, and not at some idealised universe of Thatcherite economics. It may not have been an entirely fair fight, but Airbus is now beating Boeing, not least because of serious errors of strategy in Seattle. This derided European consortium is now, on the face of it, a triumphant success, a success for state subsidy, and for the 400 British firms that will supply more than 50 per cent of the 380’s components, including the wings, landing gear and engines.

While Boeing’s new 747-400 has won only a few orders, 14 airlines have already signed up for the gyms and double beds of the Airbus 380; and the political significance of this will not be understated in Brussels, Berlin and Paris. It is no longer the Americans who will provide the essential tools of globalisation; it is no longer an American machine that will claim pride of place in the aviation section of the Guinness Book of Records.

And as the people of Hounslow – and South Oxfordshire – prepare for this vast shadow to pass above them, they may wonder why Europe cannot rival America in other ways. If the EU can build the biggest commercial planes, and dominate the skies, why is America still the military master of the planet? The answer, of course, is that aeronautical success is no clue to political and military clout. The Russians had enormous Antonovs and Tupolevs, and where are they now? If Europe really wants to be a superpower, and if Chirac and Schröder really want to cock a snook at America, they must do something that no European government is prepared to do, and spend vastly more on defence.

Everyone complains about American management of this unipolar world, and, as one looks at some of the Pentagon’s recent miscalculations, such as post-war Iraq, one can see why. But at present the Americans can and must make all the relevant decisions, because it spends easily more than twice as much as all 25 EU countries on defence, and that is with the dollar at a deep low. If Europe wants the kind of political influence that goes with supplying the world’s fattest aircraft, it will have to do more than out-subsidise Boeing.

Europe will have to build the choppers and the fighters that go with world leadership, and there is no sign of that whatsoever. The most that can be said is that Americans will buy the Airbus 380s to ferry their troops around the world.

• Boris Johnson is MP for Henley and editor of The Spectator

Shame he didn’t acknowledge the input of the commenters, though…

How’s this for a stupid idea: I’m going to run a poll among Palimpsesters to decide what to read next. I’ll give a shortlist of 5 books, and whichever garners the most votes I read after the Greene.

Which books am I going to choose for the shortlist? Don Quixote? Ulysees? Yeah, right. The exact right moment has to be struck to get those read – no leaving that to chance. How about:

• A Prayer for Owen Meany
• The Unfortunates
• Alma Cogan
• Status Anxiety

…and one other. Need to consult the cupboard before I finalise the list. Still, it should be interesting…

edit: The final book will be The Great Gatsby

Sick Puppy was a good read. Funny and violent, it brought me much enjoyment.

Trouble is, I can’t think of much else to say about it. On my Palimplist I gave it 4 out of 5 stars, but I think I need to downgrade it to 3.

Three is still a good score, right? And just about right for a fun book that doesn’t really stay within your conciousness for long. On finishing it, I thought, “That was great. Now what’s next?”

Answer: The End of the Affair by Graham Greene.

I bought the new Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote.

It’s a beautifully bound hardback, and will be a pleasure to read, when I get round to it…

F**king Word!!

There are some things Word is good at. There are some that it is completely crap at. One of those is the classic mistake of using it as a DTP package.

The thing just doesn’t work! I’ve been handed a report to complete which is full of text boxes, shaded backgrounds for text, slightly complicated headers and other bits and bobs. It took me half an hour to stop the header printing on the first page, but on every page after that. ‘Easy!’ most people would cry. ‘Just set the first page to be different in the page setup dialogue!” Yeah, it would be easy, but doing that meant that pages 5 and 17 wouldn’t have them either. Confused? I was. In the end I had to go through the entire document with the formatting tags turned on deleting all the ‘Section breaks’ Word had so kindly inserted. After all, if you have numbered heading you are bound to want random formatting and headers being included all over the place, wouldn’t you? Jesus Christ.

That’s nothing compared the the problem I am still yet to solve though. Chapter headings are shaded across the whole page in black. On one, though, the line on the previous page, where the page break is, is black too. Remove that shading, and it goes from the heading. Insert a new line, delete page break and a new page break and it works, but the heading is a line space too far down the page. Delete line space. The page break line becomes black again. Hit head on desk and through mouse at screen in disgust. Ask boss if future reports can be written in Notepad.

Seriously, if offices invested in the right software, this wouldn’t be happening. Equally, if Word didn’t try and spoon feed the user it probably wouldn’t happen either.

It still leaves me with a report to sort out for publication this week, and I haven’t a clue how to fix the damn thing. At least this year’s will be designed entirely by me, and I’ll only have myself to blame…

Update: Richard, the report’s original author, has just informed me that the same problem was the bane of his life too. His fudge, in the end, was the do it with the extra line break and then reduce the eight of that line to the smallest possible, thus making it appear that it (almost) isn’t there.

This month saw the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first of part of Don Quixote. I’ve never come close to reading it, but it sounds like one of those books which deserves to be read. As it is one of my Reading Resolutions to read Ulysses this year, maybe I could make it Don Quixote next. One hard giant classic a year – seems fair.

The Guardian have a range of interesting articles about the book:

• Harold Bloom argues that only Shakespeare comes close to Cervantes’ genius
• AS Byatt considers the influence of Cervantes’ masterpiece on the development of the modern novel
• Literature’s favourite knight errant turns 400
• Sean Clarke on why Don Quixote wouldn’t have made it out of the stable without his long-suffering retainer, Sancho Panza

I’ve been playing Nation States for a month or so now. My nation, Wavuncular, is now classified as a ‘Father Knows Best State’, apparently. I’m not sure how this happened.

The People’s Republic of Wavuncular is a very large, safe nation, remarkable for its compulsory military service. Its hard-nosed, hard-working, cynical population of 122 million are ruled by a mostly-benevolent dictator, who grants the populace the freedom to live their own lives but watches carefully for anyone to slip up.

The enormous government juggles the competing demands of Defence, Law & Order, and Commerce. The average income tax rate is 30%, but much higher for the wealthy. A powerhouse of a private sector is led by the Beef-Based Agriculture, Uranium Mining, and Book Publishing industries.

The nation is ravaged by daily union strikes, corporations cut costs by taking away safety-features on their products, drunk drivers are sentenced to death, and traffic jams are a common sight due to construction work from a massive overhaul of the nation’s freeways. Crime — especially youth-related — is well under control, thanks to the all-pervasive police force. Wavuncular’s national animal is the gabbidon, which is also the nation’s favorite main course, and its currency is the wavunc.

Wavuncular is ranked 2nd in the region and 68,478th in the world for Largest Public Sector.

Feedreader worked perfectly last night, but when I booted up this morning to check my feeds, it hung twice. Annoyed, I uninstalled it.

I then tried the commercial alternative, FeedDemon from Bradsoft. I have a 20 day trial before coughing up the $30 (ie about £15) but so far it is looking good. It appears more stable, and seems to be more fully featured that the open source alternative. I guess I am going to be stumping up the cash soon.

Nick Bradbury, the guy behind the software, has a blog here. One to subscribe to, I feel.

Feedreader is an offline RSS feed reader (duh…) which means you can log on, spend a couple of minutes downloading messages and then read them at your leisure. It’s free!

Excellent!

I’m really getting into the whole blogging thing now. Part of this has been my use of Bloglines and the increased number of blogs I’m reading. As I am more exposed to new blogs and new ways of using them, I’m more and more excited by the concept.

Most of this is down to Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and their Red Couch project. Two people writing the same book over a blog, with constant critiques coming in from commenters. It’s like a writing reality TV programme. Only interesting. As well as these two, philb is another who has excited my interest in the topic.

I’ve had a personal blog for a year or so now. I get fed up with the system I’m using so I chop and change a lot. I guess I didn’t really know what I was meant to be doing with it. That changed with the Closed Circle, where some of the stuff I posted was half decent and even worth hanging onto. Maybe I’ll look into importing some of that stuff into this blog.

I also use Blogger for the Graham Parsnip blog, a collaborative writing project with my friend Al Kitching. It suits because a slightly amateurish image is what we are after there. But my frustrations with Blogger (largely connecting to the damn server) mean that I couldn’t use that as a longterm solution for a blog I am working on regularly.

I’m pretty interested in a Scrutiny blog, specifically a collaborative one. I’ll try and grab stuff together for this blog, but it simply won’t have the range of one being put together by the whole county. We’ll see how receptive the other Scrutiny officers are at the next meeting – I’ll hold off sending that email till after that.

What would I like to see to improve Blogging? Better integration with images than I have seen so far. With Blogger you can use Picasa which I downloaded yesterday and haven’t yet decided what I make of it. That then links with another service call Hello which enables you to post pictures onto your blog. What if you don’t use Blogger? Tough, I guess, though I haven’t looked into it too deeply.

What I would want to see is a program that allows me to organise all my digital images, cut and crop them, reduce the filesize (v. important when a digital camera is involved), then ftp directly to my webspace, and then take me into my blogging application to post on that image.

Does this application already exist?

Not a great weekend for Forest. A 2-1 home defeat against Millwall leaves us further in the mire. The usual cliche about a new manager bringing with him a few points clearly isn’t a truism as well.

I was disappointed with Megson’s appointment for about 10 minutes. After that time, the plus points made me delighted to have this man in charge.

He’s a born motivator, a man who managed to get West Bromwich Albion (West Bromwich Albion!) promoted to the Premiership twice. Clearly a man who can get the best out of mediocre players. And boy, are the players at Forest mediocre. Sure, he plays (ahem) direct football, but if that’s what it takes to pull ourselves out of the relegation zone then that’s fine too.

Plus he favours 5-3-2 which puts you at an immediate advantage in the Championship. This is because teams in that division hardly ever stray from straight 4-4-2. Being confronted by something different might just make teams a little more wary of us.

But the squad does need strengthening. There’s talk of Baggies’ central defender Darren Moore joining the club. A big and strong (and slow) centre-half, he should add a bit of experience to a dangerously young back line. The other need is for a goalscorer. David Johnson is looking more and more like a crap striker who had one lucky season for us. Marlon King has the look of a player who will never be the finished article. Gareth Taylor is a plucky target man, but no-one in their right minds would rely on him for goals. Neil Harris is yet to prove himself – but I would like to see him given a chance.

There are plenty of players at Premiership clubs who aren’t getting a game. Not just WBA, though Megson’s links makes it difficult to think that players wouldn’t be willing, like Moore, to drop down a division. Geoff Horsfield is a big, uncompromising centre-forward who, unlike Taylor, scores goals. Rob Hulse is another, who hasn’t really had a chance in recent times, but who has proved himself at this level.

On top of a couple of Moore, and a couple of strikers, I’d like to see one more centre-half and a left back or wingback.

A good question.

I’m liking this so much I think I’m going to make this my main blog. The WikiBlog can remain just that – blogging the updates and new pages on the website.

Here is where I will do all my main blogging, on work, life, books, the ‘net and everything else. Hopefully it will entertaining for anyone who comes across it.

You never know- stranger things have happened (Probably).

On my Wikiblog, I posted thoughts on a possible website for the Norfolk Scrutiny Network.

I’ve put together an email to the two people that run the Network:

Karen, Mike

Without wishing to go over old ground, I have been giving a bit of thought to the website idea for the Network which I mentioned last year sometime. I didn’t take it any further at the time, as I thought Karen’s points were valid and would mean that it would be unlikely ever to get off the ground.

However, I’ve become interested in this again following discussions in and around the Conference, when various topics, like inter-authority working, were talked about and I think a website might be a great way to facilitate these sorts of projects.

Recently, in a non work related capacity, I have come across a bit of free software which enables websites to be setup and maintained quickly and easily, and where pages can be edited and created by any registered user. This would obviously alleviate the problem of who would update the site: everybody would. It’s remarkably easy to use and something that would literally take me half an hour to set up.

Stuff I thought of that could go on the site:

* NSN Admin stuff – a permanent record of minutes, agendas etc

* Individual Authorities’ pages – to be used as much or as little as necessary. For example, Norfolk County have a regularly updated, useful Scrutiny webpage and so little more than contact information and a link might be required. But for those authorities whose Scrutiny websites are more limited – possibly for technological reasons – (such as us!) this could be a really useful way of making information available.

* Library of reviews undertaken by member authorities.

* Collaborative Working – as mentioned above. This is what could be really interesting, and innovative. Using the website to conduct a County-wide review: maintaining lines of communication, sharing research and bits of data, inviting the public’s involvement. Rather in the same way (though obviously on a much smaller scale) that the Hutton enquiry put all evidence gathered on a website, this has the potential to do something similar – using IT but being very open at the same time.

* We could have a Scrutiny ‘blog’ – again, maintained by everybody. If someone comes across a piece of news which might not merit a large piece being written it would be possible for them to post a quick message on the blog, with a link to wherever that news first appeared. Occasional commentaries on work being undertaken could also be posted, inviting comment and suggestions from other members.

* How about an electronically maintained library of documents, booklets and articles about Scrutiny issues? There must be a wide range of documents which each authority has but which no-one else knows about or has access to. By maintaining a list of who-has-what and how to get hold of things, it might be possible to share this information around more easily.

* The advantages of having a site held off a Council server also means that all member authorities could use the site as a means to using the internet to gather information, such as by holding online questionnaires, for example.

Again, it’s possible I’m being a bit pie-in-the-sky over this, and work would have to be put in by everyone to make it work – though not perhaps as many as one might think. But in terms of raising the profile of scrutiny, and more specifically, scrutiny in Norfolk, especially when it comes to the issue of collaborative working, it could be a winner.

Haven’t sent it yet – it’s a good practice to hang onto these things and considers them later on!

So, this is WordPress. I have been looking into different blogging systems, like Blogger and using the wiki on my site, as well as others that charge, like Typepad.

I thought I would give this a try though coz a) it’s free and b) it installs onto my own webspace so I don’t need to worry about slow connections which knackered my experience of using Blogger.

So, far, it’s so good, and there is plenty to find out about – it’s a very thorough bit of software.

Here’s a great new use of a blog to keep an eye on: CrapAuthors.com.

It basically tracks the progress of a whole range of writers that the bloggers deem to be of negligible literary value!

Top journo and Palimpsest resident William Shaw now has a blog: http://singingslowly.ebloggy.com/

Al and I have created the Graham Parsnip blog (http://sliceofparsnip.blogspot.com) as usual with me, using the Blogger system.

Parsnip is a spoof science fiction author, who first appeared on Palimpsest
(http://palimpsest.org.uk/phpBB2) earlier this year. But Al reckons the stuff is good enough to one day be turned into novel form. We’ll see. But having the blog means we can post content more quickly and keep the story rolling along, whilst cross-posting the bigger incidents to Palimpsest as ususal. But how to promote a made up blog by a made up person?

Also, what with it being narrative, people do need to start from the beginning and work their way up through the posts. Maybe we should make this clear somehow.

Good article on choosing Openoffice.org over M$ Office (from http://www.pc-tools.net/comment/openoffice/ ) :

There are some very good reasons to use OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office, and the best reasons have nothing to do with cost of the software.

Although I have regularly used Microsoft Office in the past, I haven’t even had it installed on my system for over a year. This is despite completing a thesis, working with legal documents, exchanging business documents, writing academic papers for publishing as well as creating software based presentations.

I have NOT needed MS Office to do any of these things. OpenOffice.org is adequate – it has all the essential features, including style list functions for real publishing, document comparison capabilities and import/export abilities, a capable spreadsheet, and a presentation program that does its job while importing and exporting PowerPoint.

But it’s not just that OpenOffice.org is “adequate” for the job. As a software developer and long time computer user, I think OpenOffice.org is superior in several important respects. I would like to describe these points, because I think that others will also understand the issues better
when they recognize the implications for themselves:

OpenOffice.org runs on multiple platforms. Currently: Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Mac OS X. This is important because I use several operating systems, including Linux. It is a huge advantage for me to be able to work on the same documents under the same interface whether I have booted Linux, Windows, or whether I am using a thin Solaris workstation.

OpenOffice.org is stable, and runs smoothly. It has not crashed on me under Windows or Linux, and does not do wacky things. MS Word has scared me in the past with some of its flaky behaviour.

I trust the OpenOffice.org software and its developers; I may even contribute to the project myself! The office suite is open source, and the Internet community is heavily involved with improving Sun’s original software. You’re guaranteed to never experience licensing-related hassles (expired licenses, product registrations, lost keys, forced updates) which have occasionally caused much aggravation and lost productivity for MS Office users.

Data longevity: this is an important point, which is often overlooked because it’s really only an issue in the (distant?) future. Microsoft has made it clear that it wants proprietary document formats, and inconsistent ones at that. This may work as long as Microsoft is around and developing software that supports files created by outdated products. Personally, I’m more comfortable with my OpenOffice.org documents in XML format because I know that in the worst case scenario, I can unzip the document structure and easily extract text from the XML components. This is technical, but what it comes down to is: my data is easily accessible in the future. It is also easy for third party developers to write tools for OpenOffice documents.

Data interchange: this builds on the previous point. MS uses proprietary document formats and seems unwilling to allow seamless data flow between different software from independent vendors. It’s just not in their best interest. OpenOffice.org uses data formats designed to be easily interchanged (OASIS specification), and other projects are cooperating with the vision of open document interchange – e.g. Abiword, and KOffice.

Now, given the rapid worldwide growth and popularity of open source software, including OpenOffice.org, do you really think you’re better off locking your documents into an inflexible, non-interchangeable format (MS Word version X)? I would argue that for anyone who values document longevity and interchange, it’s in their best interest to use software based on open
data formats.

After all: software companies die, but information lasts forever. If a company takes the secrets of unlocking your data to its grave, where will that leave you?