Get a new laptop — this one still has problems with angle brackets (<, >) and (semi)colons, which makes writing HTML a bit tricky. I could type “<” for < in the last sentence, but the semicolon at the end still has to be cut-and-pasted. The computer is also falling apart in other ways — I had to borrow a different one for the last event of 2012 and it did not have all the right hardware drivers.
A number of county and national events coming up in the first few months of the year, in between I have to fit in a trip to Bad Honnef – Germany for the EBL Tournament Director's course.
The EBU is planning to revise the Tangerine/Orange/White books this year. The obvious areas to be addressed are regulations for alerting/announcements and permitted conventions, but they also want to ensure that the documents only contain material that is accurate and relevant. I am helping by reviewing some of the material in the write book — to see if some of the material can be reduced by a third (or a half).
Last year, I responded to the open invitation from the WBF LC and sent in suggested changes for sixteen or so laws, all from issues that had come up in this blog. In many cases I was just suggesting changes to the wording of the laws to enable the law to operate as intended (this was the sort of changes WBF LC said they were looking for); but I did suggest changes to completely change the law, so that it could operate at all (for example, law 27).
To an extent the motivation behind the blog has been satisfied by the responses to the WBF LC, and there has been less to say on the “new” (2007) laws as the years have gone by. I intend to continue to document the ups and downs of being a TD and some of technical and practical issues. I am constrained by avoiding maligning or embarassing players or TD colleagues whose actions I might describe unfavourably. The EBU TDs have a new code of conduct which requires that internet discussion does not disclose identities. The problem is that incidents that are interesting are rare, and in the small world of English bridge it is difficult for the events and the partipants not to become known.
