Nigel Gordon

Unfortunately these are the backup copies. Thanks for the offer. the problem is not with the disks, they are standard CD-RWs, it is with the file format. Unfortunately the files were backed up using some unidentified backup software which not only compressed the files but also encrypted them. The backup was actually made by a third party who has since died and no ones knows what the program was or what the key is, though I might be able to make a guess at that. Fortunately I have been able to recover, from another source, all my early drafts, so things are not totally lost. Anyway they probably would have needed re-writing.

If you have a chance have a look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJkQZNjQFFE It is the Olympic Diver, Tom Daley coming out to the world on YouTube. It takes guts to come out like this and one can only admire him.

That is a very good argument for paper copy, as I know from experience. I have a book on software design, two novels and about fifty short stories on some disks that can no longer be read. Wish I had them on paper, at least I could scan that back in, which incidentally is what I did for Waiting. It is one of the stories on the disks but I had sent a copy to a friend in Holland. He scanned it for me and the scan back to me. After that it was case of OCR and into the WP to redraft it before it came to AD.

I've tried both ways and I would not say one is better than the other, they are though different. Writing longhand forces you to give careful consideration to your words. Using a word processor means you can play about with them in ways you probably hadn't thought of. I tend to do most of my writing on a word processor but when I am faced with some particularly difficult technical concept to explain (I a lot of technical writing) I often find it best to write it longhand. I don't write poetry but a friend who is a poet tells me you really need to write that longhand, you run away with yourself if you try it with a word processor, which may explain why I failed all the poetry assignments in my Creative Writing course.

The first programming job I had was in an office that had a 10lb lump hammer in a glass fronted box on the wall. Underneath was the notation "Ultimate Debugging Tool, for Emergency Use Only". There have been many times since then when I wished other organizations had one available on their wall, especially international banks. By the way there is no Cosmic Interference from Evil Elves, there is only malignant computer intelligence. Only an intelligent system could possibly work out how to crash in the most embarrassing way at the most inconvenient time. First law of computers, the size and effect of any computer crash is directly proportional to the importance of the observer who is available to observe the impact of the crash. You have the office junior watching and the program will run perfectly, have the Head of Finance who is paying for it and there will be problems, have the CEO of the client and you might as well not switch the system on.

Sorry if I am taking this topic a bit off line but it is the closest I could find to post what I have to say without starting a new topic. Today (Sunday 1st December 2013) is World Aids Day. Yesterday, as I do each year when I can, I made a donation to an AIDs charity and got a Red Ribbon. This I was wearing when I walked back to my car. Just before I got to the car park I had to pass a parade of shops and there were a group of youths lounging about smoking and drinking. As I past them I got spat on and verbal abuse about being gay. One youth shouted at me about wearing 'The Gay Badge' and pointed to the Red Ribbon. It is disturbing to find that even now people still think of AIDS as a gay disease. It's not and never has been AIDS had been present in areas of the heterosexual population before it became established in the gay population. The only thing that the gay population contributed to the disease was to make it noticeable through the high incidence of the disease in a relatively identifiable and affluent population who had access to medical treatment. People need to be aware of AIDS as a disease in their own community, the youths who abused me where Afro-Caribbean in origin I were rather shocked when I told them that they were more likely to get AIDS than most gay men in this country were. What was worrying is the fact that they clearly did not know that they could get HIV infected through heterosexual sex and were unaware that the majority of HIV infected people are within the heterosexual population. The red ribbon is not a gay badge, it is a sign that you are aware of AIDS and are joining the fight against it.

I did my Masters dissertation on the use of C++ for Safety Critical Programming, during my research I had to look at a number of safety incidents which involved computers, more than half were caused by the fact that the programmer had not understood the mathematics of what he was trying to do and did not realize that the capacity of the maths processor was not sufficient for the mathematical operation being attempted.

If he does I might be tempted to chip in to send you over to unblock him. Can't wait to read the rest of this story.

There have been a number of articles published about recombinant virus strains, they always seem to be more virulent than the strains that give rise to them. There was a paper published a few years ago which put forward some research suggesting that the most deadly flu viruses were recombinant strains rather that mutations from existing strains. I'm not too worried about the occurrence of a new HIV recombinant strain as there have been a few discovered so far, what I do find worrying is that this news is given prominence on a Muslim News Site. It is all to likely to be picked up by some parties and used as an argument for the anger of Allah against gays.

It's surprising but there are still times when all the computers and calculators I have around me are still outdone by pencil, paper and a set of log tables. Not often but every once in a while I find myself turning to the old ways in desperation when my latest calculation has sent whatever machine I am using into terminal lock down due to a memory leak.

I think a lot of us owe a great deal to Mary Renault, her books opened a whole new view of things for me.

I would not say that they we better for research, I would say that the quality of research you got was different. Personally, and this is a very personal view, I think the combination of the Web and a good library is the best. I'm lucky as I have access to two university libraries where I live and have another seven within easy car ride distance, so I use libraries a lot. At the moment I'm working on a book about Environmental Ethics and Paganism with a view to submitting it for a PhD by publication, I tend to do a web search on a topic, end up with a pile of information often containing references to books then I go off to the library and read the references in the books. That's where I tend to find a lot of the information which is important to me but was not in the web based articles. By the way people need to be careful not to confuse the Web with the Internet. There is a lot more out there on the Internet than the stuff that can be accessed through the Web. I was at a conference in Paris last week and two different speakers gave estimates for the amount of the Internet content that can be obtained via the web, on said 20% and the other 25%.

The BBC Radio 4 are broadcasting Mary Renault's 'The Charioteer' as the Book at Bedtime to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of this gay novel. If you cannot listen to it live you can catch up with it on the BBC IPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03j9np2

Which usually meant that you did not find the answer to the actual question you had but found hundreds of answers to other questions that you had not yet got round to asking. We are loosing a lot of trivial knowledge because we are no longer having to read through piles of material to find the information we want, now we can go right to the relevant web page. What is worse I have noticed that the youngsters now do not even go to the web page, they look at the extract that pops up in the Google search. Interesting observation: a couple of weeks ago I was at a friends house and their sixteen year old son came back from school complaining that he had been beaten on the research assignment they had been given about Ghandi by a girl who lived on one of the upland farms. He made the comment that he did not know how she had done it as she did not have the internet and had to use books but had come up with piles of additional information that was not on the web sites he had looked at, like Ghandi being forced to leave First Class on a train in South Africa. The Web is useful but it can also be very restrictive at times.

Yes, it creeps up on you until suddenly you find yourself wondering why they are letting young kids be policemen!

Sorry to have to agree with you Chris but I do. I was once advised that the moment a political argument resorts to God or the Bible you know it is fundamentally flawed. I suppose I should add the Quran to that list, not sure about the Torah. It was once pointed out to me that a good Christian or Muslim obeys the will of God, a good Jew argues with God till God agrees with his point of view!

If this is for real then all I can say is God Help America!

No, it's just self-gratification, the guilt is your own choice.

Looking back now I can see that the impact of the assisnation was more than most people realised at the time. I was a 15 year old student in Further Education at the time. The loss made me realise that if we wanted anything done we could not rely on anybody else to do it for us we had to do it ourselves. This led me to protesting about compulsory attendance at Christian worship in our morning assemblies at the college I was at, which had a large number of none Christians in the student body. Eventually I was thrown out of college for my protest but in the end the college had to give in. I was not the only student who started to stand up for what we believed to be right then and I think it is true to say that the change in thinking amongst the youth of the early 1960s that came from the assisnation led to much of the protest movement we saw around the world in the later half of that decade. The death of Kennedy hit everybody around the world it also started something that I don't think anyone expected or realised at the time. It is only in the last five years or so that I have spoken to people about my age (I'm 65) and found that they had felt the same way as I did. Kennedy is no longer there to make the change so we must do it ourselves and we did make a change, every one of us in our small way.

The rule that you use an before a word starting with a vowel is misleading as it does not refer to the alphabetical vowels, in English a, e, i, o, u but to the phonetic vowels, which is dependent on pronunciation. The only good guide is to read the sentence allowed and see if it sounds right, even then there is a problem as what may sound right in one accent is wrong in another. Also remember that fashions change, I have an editorial guide from 1962 which says an should be used before words beginning with vowels or an h. Just remember that English grammar was mostly invented by German tutors during the Victorian period. They became popular because of Prince Albert, when they arrived in England they were horrified to find that English did not have the codified set of rules they were used to in German and so set about to impose them. The only problem is that most of the really great writing in English breaks most of them. So I think it comes down to what my English teacher told me 50 years ago, "first make yourself understood, then worry about if it is grammatically correct." It does not matter how grammatically correct a piece of writing may be if it does not get its message across it is a waste of time and effort.

Well the third chapter has just been posted and I am really enjoying this story, it is Chris at his best and just gets better and better.

Also a good story is well worth re-reading, often you get more out of it the second time than the first. You get even more the third time you read it.

I must say I really enjoyed this. Did not find a problem with the Welsh in it, maybe because I tried to learn Welsh back in the 60s and failed miserably I had a great deal of admiration for Huw.

A thoroughly enjoyable story and one I would recommend anyone to read.

Unfortunately in English law now (thanks to Mrs Thatcher) there is no requirement for any supporting or collaboratory evidence with respect to a sexual allegation. As a result nothing more is required that the word of the victim to convict you. The fact that you are accused means you are guilty unless you can prove your innocence, which is very hard to do when the accusation concerns events that are twenty or thirty years old. It is also quite common for the words of the charges to be so broadly written that it is impossible to put up a defense. For example, between 1973 and 1976 the accused did .... Unless you can prove exactly where you were every day of that period and that you could not be where they say the offense took place you have no defense. The main advice given by barristers to their clients in historic sex offense cases is to plead guilty and get a reduction in sentence on the guilty plea. I am aware of one case where a man was accused of a sexual offense with an underage boy some twenty five years before his arrest. He was in prison at the time that the offense was alleged but the charges were set out with such a broad time frame that he was out of prison for a few months at each end and the prosecution argued that he could have committed the offense in that period and that the victim had been mistaken as to the actual dates.