1,000 visitors

Visitor 1,000 was Bev Trayner, on-line collaboration guru, mountain biker and fellow Setúbal-based Brit. An honourable mention for her...

Navy Blues

So the long arm of the law has finally caught up with corruption in the Portuguese Navy. Everybody knows it happens, but it has never been convenient to look too closely. After all, who would volunteer to investigate people who have unlimited access to arms and explosives.

The question is whether this is just scratching the surface, or if the can of worms is now open. One of the captains had just bought a Mercedes (wow!), which is too ostentatious for his salary level. But there are many more, mostly quartermasters staff, who don't necessarily have Mercedes, but have a nice house, cars for all family members, frequent holidays. Postings to those positions are highly sought-after and involve severance payments to the previous incumbent.

Of course, the charges may be unfounded. In five to ten years we will find out. In the meantime, I wonder how many people on the south side of the river have been sleeping badly this week.

Blogger beta

Beta is definitely the word here. A whole evening, just to update my template:

1. Standard templates are still 800*640 pixels though very few of my visitors use that resolution. So I had to stretch the template again, just like I did with the old one.
2. Nothing can be placed above the post body, so it is impossible to take Google's own advice on their AdSense advertising site and place the ads top and centre.
3. The footer only allows a left-justified column of modules, not a centered line of icons like I wanted.

Serves me right for not sticking to my golden rule: NO BETAS.

Copyright, or copy wrong?

Well break out a new criminal record for me. I realised today that to put the music clip on the CD of the Week post below, I broke copyright law.

As my computer is usually off, I uploaded an MP3 track that I had ripped from the CD (for my own personal use) to Fileden. That's not a music sharing site, as such, but if you let the music play through, you end up with the whole MP3 file in the browser cache on your hard drive.

If they come and arrest me, I'll let you know.

Blunted knives

Having been on the wrong end of a piece of journalism last month, I now feel slightly uncomfortable about anonymously being rude about public figures.

As I said to the journalist at the end of my interview, when asked if she could quote me, "Quoting me is the least of my worries. What matters is the way that you quote and the context that you put it in." Sure enough, the quotes attributed to me in the published article were selective, taken out of context, and inaccurate.

As a result, I feel more sympathy for the people in the news who see their words taken out of context, like poor old Benedict XVI (okay, maybe not!) and may put away my sharpened knives for a while.

In fact, I may do a 180º turn and support somebody occasionally, such as secretary of state Castro Guerra, who appeared in very poor light on the TV this morning because of the Johnson Control factory that will close in Portalegre. It's not his fault. In my contacts with him when he was Chairman of IAPMEI he came across as an honest, concerned manager, not as a politician. He used all the tools available to him to secure foreign investment and Portuguese jobs. If globalisation means that once the State benefits expire the multinationals move to cheaper locations, he's not to blame.

Season's End

I never really took much notice of the Portuguese habit of stating that the seasons begin and end on the equinoxes and solstices, perhaps because in England it can snow in April, rain all of August and get unbearably hot in May. But this week has put and end to summer with a vengance.

I spent a merry afternoon clearing drains, in the rain. Very prudent, you may think, but it was a reaction to the flooded garage during Thursday morning's downpour, due to lack of maintenance. Then I get in the shower and find my so-called tan rubbing off. I hate it when that happens. Will anybody notice I'm cleaner, whiter (pinker!)?

The coincidence of the week was swapping CDs in the car. What came up? "Season's End" by Marillion...

Circular reference

Somebody in Brazil asked Google to automatically translate my blog into Brazilian Portuguese. To see what happens, click the link in the title. I could hardly understand anything, especially the title (which is, of course, already in Portuguese).

Made me laugh anyway...

CD of the week

Sting: Ten Summoner's Tales

Strangely enough, this album, which is always difficult to replace once it reaches the CD player, actually contains eleven tracks, including the epilogue. That epilogue is important, as the album's only hit single: "Nothing 'Bout Me".

The tracks cover a mix of styles, with tones of The Police, plenty of story telling, touches of blues and classical music textures. While not dazzling, Sting produces intelligent ballads with often intriguing lyrics and complex, richly orchestrated music - just right for a music snob like me! A CD that I just can't put down.

Hard sums

While trying to keep up with the financial calculations given as examples by my foundation course lecturer, I discovered that the awful calculator on my PDA (Palm Treo 650) has heaps of advanced features, including advanced mathematical, trigonometrical, financial and logical modes, with the exact functions he was revising - HOORAY!

Today, when reviewing what we did on Wednesday, I came to the appalling conclusion that, though the functions exist, they give inaccurate answers in some cases, such as when dividing by the square of a number, confirmed using Excel - BOO!

So I tried Documents to Go, which allows manipulation of Word and Excel documents in Palm OS. Result: rebooted PDA, no documents - double BOO!

Work around: I sent myself an Excel spreadsheet by mail, with the required formulas already inserted. Opening the document directly from the email application allows me to use the formulas in full, with no precision errors - HOORAY! Shame that once I switch out of the email application, I can't get back to the spreadsheet without a number of clicks - BOO!

Looks like I'll have to buy a financial calculator - double BOO!

My first video post

Further to my last post....

Elton John comes in from the cold

I hadn't willingly listened to Elton John's music for 6 years until yesterday, following his disgraceful behaviour in walking (running?) away from a concert at Casino Estoril, which I just happened to have been invited to. (That said, the dinner was superb. The escaping act would have easily been excuse enough to start a blog, if Blogger had been around at the time. I did complain on Usenet. As somebody there said at the time, "He was off like a rocket, man.")

What made me change my mind? I still think he is a horrible, selfish little man, but he has, in fact, written a huge amount of great music to accompany Bernie Taupin's wonderful lyrics. The event which reminded me was watching Moulin Rouge, which is a great film for lyrics addicts, featuring "Your Song" prominently throughout, and huge numbers of other well-known songs where only the Madonna references feel out of place to me.

So I no longer have to skip Elton's CD's when I'm deciding what to put in the car, the only place I usually get to listen to my hundreds of albums and classical discs.

Technorati Tags : Music

Whose funds?

I threatened that I might get academic, so here goes (not that this is directly related to my course)!

As resident "bife" and financial boffin, I am frequently called upon to translate business documents, including financial statements. Knowing the technical equivalents in English and Portuguese, I had never really worried about the literal meaning of the phrases I translate - literal translation very rarely works.

So it came as some surprise when I realised that "Capitais Próprios" (own funds) is not a literal translation of "Shareholders' funds". In fact, it appears to reveal an underlying difference in attitudes: is a company an autonomous entity or does it belong to the shareholders?

In UK accounting, we are taught that the difference (hopefully a surplus) between assets and liabilities is arithmetically equal to the cash contributed by the shareholders plus their undistributed return on that investment, or accumulated net profits. The Portuguese version implies that the undistributed profits belong to the company itself, until the management decide to distribute those profits. This, in my view, is a fundamentally different attitude and may explain (chicken and egg problem here) the frequent lack of correlation that I have noted, over the years, between management actions and shareholder wishes in Portuguese companies. My sample is small and necessarily unrepresentative, but it's food for thought.

In fact, the "own funds" concept may be better suited to the wider definition of "stakeholders" that prevails today, including shareholders, staff and suppliers. Could I have found subject matter for a bit of research here, or has someone already done it?

Back to School

It's that awful time of year when we have to drag the kids off to the supermarket to stock up on stationery, to later go rushing back to pick through the remains of the stock when school clarifies exactly what will be required this year.

But that's not what this post is about.

17 years since I last did any serious studying, I have been pushed into signing up for a post-graduate course, mostly just to see if the grey matter still works. So this morning I got up early (for a Saturday) and went off to the second foundation session where I found, to my relief, that I am not the oldest student and that I appear to have sufficient basic knowledge to start the course.

As for blogging, the effect could be to have fewer posts, due to less time, or, hopefully, for this blog to take a decidedly academic turn as I find something interesting in the coursework to blog about. Then I will have to try to make economics and accounting interesting for readers - a real challenge!

(At the same time, I have upgraded to Blogger Beta. Now if I could only find the promised "Tag" function...)

It's not that I have had nothing to blog about over the summer. In fact, I reached the point where there were so many potential topics that it was easier to watch a film or bury my head in a book than to choose which one to write about. But tonight's ordeal stands out: Refuelling the car.

Firstly, thanks to the company for giving me a Galp Frota card. With my love of monopoly operators, I was overjoyed, considering that all my usual Galp filling stations are generally packed. Tonight, at the Encarnacao filling station, leaving Lisbon, there were queues for all pumps, two of which were out of order but only one visibly so for the queuing motorists. Then I chose a card payment pump, but the card reader didn't work! Changing pumps was a marvellous experience. After finally filling up, the staff who took my payment were surly; three cashiers but only one accepting customers.

We are so used to bad service that this seems trivial, but this is the second consecutive occasion that visiting this filling station took more than 15 minutes just to fill up. My alternative, near Alvalade XXI, is just as bad.

The grumbling customers will be back for more bad treatment, such is the power of having a majority market share and the right contacts with the fleet operators. I just wish I could change.