Bridge in the East Anglian Daily Times
I have been writing an article, at first bi-weekly but for many years now every Saturday, in the EADT since 1988. I hope to eventually bring all the material here for amusement and access but also for safety (as a back-up) and to establish a historical context for Suffolk bridge.
The current year is updated generally a few days before the Saturday the article is printed. Other years converted to HTML are to the right.
I'm always on the look out for information about Suffolk players, table tales and interesting or amusing hands. You can always email me at .
Updates
Saturday, 8-March-2008
The first article I wrote for the EADT appeared on 3-March-1988 and to celebrate the anniversary, I transferred the whole of 1988 into web format and posted them. Quite nostalgic - almost brings a lump to the throat.
Thursday, 3-January-2008
2008 - new year, new look - I hope it makes the content easier to read.
Wednesday, 3-January-2007
Happy new year! - 2007.
Monday, 2-January-2006
Another year, another new link - 2006.
Thursday, 30-December-2004
A new year is upon us - 2005 - remember where you saw it first.
Saturday, 24-July-2004
I started placing these articles here as I write them in 2002 and until now I have made scant progress in getting the back years up, however, 2001 represents a step in that direction.
In connection with that I have been honing the system I use to transfer the documents from their Microsoft Word format into HTML. I know there have been some systemic failures in the past, most noticeably the appending of text to hand-diagrams (such as dealer, vulnerability, 'Room 1' etc.) that has caused the suits to misalign. This has not been that easy. The template I use houses code in VBA to do this but though I have dabbled extensively with Excel VBA, the inconsistencies I find frustrating there, are nothing to those in the Word model. If anyone is interested in how to make bridge articles into reasonable HTML then I'd be happy to tell them (note however, that there is an element of CSS and some personal customisation about what I have done).
Unfortunately I am not out of the wood yet with mis-formatting and I'm beginning to have considerable sympathy for the type-setters of the EADT for their occasional faux pas. The pages now look great to me but I use Firefox which is a strongly compliant browser. There seems to be a problem with Internet Explorer 6 (at least) for the colgroup and col tags and the colspan attribute for the td tag. I'm aware that IE6 is the most used browser so I'll seek some fix for this. Fortunately it leaves hand diagrams alone and is principally seen in results and where I've listed bidding sequences (not auctions).
Tuesday, 30-December-2003
As I iron out the mechanism for pain-free conversion from the original Microsoft Word documents, I will bring more on-line. Some of the mis-formatting you see here was in the original, some in the transfer to a web-readable file, I hope it will get better over time but it least it allows me to strike a sympathetic chord with the setters on the Newspaper: it's not as easy as it looks.
Further to that, I've revised the formatting and I think the suit symbols should appear on all browsers. That said, they may not actually look as good on IE as the used to - an effect of moving from the Symbol font and the hard-coded character codes to the entity codes '♠' etc. together with a regular font (I chose Courier).
Thursday, 30-May-2002
There are some problems with browsers not being able to recognise the Symbol font. Though this is on (virtually) all PCs, only Internet Explorer 5.0+ seems to render it prettily - Opera 6.01 and Mozilla 1.0 release candidates certainly don't, providing the reader with the familiar paragraph and copyright signs that appear in the printed newspaper from time to time.