Biddlecombe updates profile page shock horror

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Announcement
At long last, I’ve amended our profile page (the “About this blog …” link above) to reflect various changes in our blogging team and changes recieved from some contributors.

While I’m in the mood for this, let me know about any other changes needed …

As noted below, ages have now been replaced by years of birth (sometimes vague) to make maintenance easier. As I feared, one contributor had never made it onto the list, but you can now read about all of us. I’ve also added indications of all the blogging responsibilities outside the set of 15×15 puzzles covered by our main rotation.

10 comments on “Biddlecombe updates profile page shock horror”

  1. A couple of typos: (1) all in London so farm, (2) “View Subjects[“] links.
    In the “Reference Books” section, how about adding ODE (not to be confused with OED)?
    And yes, why not update the ages?
    1. Typos fixed. Where people gave a numeric age, I’ve taken an instant decision and amended it to state when they were born, with the kind of accuracy implied by the previous statement of age.
      1. …did you calculate the birthdates based on the out-of-date ages?  I’m just going by one data point here: Neil Talbott, who was born in 1981, was previously down as being 25 and is now down as having been born in the mid-1980s.
        1. I used my best estimate of what the stated age implied. But I can’t remember which ones were amended last time – which is where we came in. I’ll change Neil’s now – I sent an e-mail to the current bloggers to tell them, so other dates may change too.
  2. Interesting read (the profile page). It’s amazing to me how many programmers there are. What’s EV?
    1. Reaction from former xwd ed John Grant when I first qualified for a Times final:

      Back then that was enough for a brief mention in a report in the paper, so he went through the list of details: Name, age, where I lived, … “Job?”
      “Computer Programmer”
      [Audible sigh] “Not another one!”

      EV = “Enigmatic Variations” – the Sunday Telegraph’s thematic barred-grid puzzle.

      1. Thanks – Google showed nothing. And there was I thinking the average solver was an Eng Lit or a History man. Perhaps he was when non-vocational degrees were still common. Or, perhaps, the average solver is different from the Supersolver one gets here!
        1. There’s probably some bias towards techies in our selection of contributors – to get the formatting used in most reports, we use an HTML template and although this is not very difficult, techies are probably more likely to be confident about it.

          In general though, problem-solving is more important for solving cryptic crosswords than knowledge, and I reckon that was still true back in the 1950s. (And earlier if you think back to the tales about wartime code-breakers.)

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