This weekend, I was at a tournament. Saturday was not nice, I got just one win out of three, in the first game. Second game was a loss against Vladimir Danek, in a position that was impossible to lose. So third game was an automatical loss too (you know, totally demotivated). Then I didn’t sleep much, so I was pretty tired on Sunday morning.
I came ten minutes late to the game, and mercilessly removed ten minutes from my opponent’s clock too (with assistance of the referee). I was tired, I needed the win and I didn’t feel like playing. Moreover, I didn’t know where he slept. So, I didn’t go to wake him up, I didn’t really care, I just checked the game room regularly to see if he arrived. The hour passed without him arriving and I won on time.
Later it turned out that he was sleeping in the same gym where I slept too…
I can understand it if some people are angry with me. I can understand it if they despise me. But did I do anything wrong by not doing anything? To be sincere, I’m not sure.
Here, let me defend myself:
- I was tired and didn’t feel like playing.
- I didn’t know where he was and didn’t feel obliged to try to find out.
- Losing on time like this has happened to me too.
- Few months ago I lost a game to this very guy because of ING time – I had to pay 2 points for time and lost by 1.5 … I think that ING time is flawed and it shouldn’t count towards EGF rating… this was kind of a compensation.
Who am I explaining this to? Probably I’m explaining it to myself too… I’m not sure I believe my explanation though…
EYGML stands for European Youth Go Masters League. I’ve been creating (official) EYGML 2007 pages. I have learned a lot of new things, and I have refreshed some that I knew already…
I’ve…
- …discovered some xhtml/css tricks (like using double divs right inside each other to avoid weird margin adding).
- …learned to work with GIMP (using layers religiously) when creating logos and favicons.
- …finally learned to use (My)SQL.
- …wrote almost a thousand lines of php, including:
- highly automated registration, logging in/logging out, possibility of changing personal info
- choosing a random quote from a file formatted as a standard ‘fortune’ file
- showing nearest three birthdays (actually you can call the function with a paramater like 500 to learn that Lacour will be 31 years old on 10.10.2016 (poor guy))
- automatic info updating from the official EGF database
- sgf uploading and parsing of the result
- (members only) voting for a logo
- and last but not least: GD – it completely rocks, now you can see GD generated graph on the logo voting page, and if I ever get a possibility to create something else with GD, I will
The pages are a bit of a mess, but when I’m done with all the features (I still need to create the league playing system, for example), I will try to make the interface more comfortable for users.
I’ve completed an official Mensa IQ test a few years ago. When one of the organizing guys was telling us the results, he has taken me aside, which suggested something special – I scored 144. That means that I should be able to solve IQ tests better than about 99.8% of people. I considered it a pretty good result back then. I was even proud of it.
During recent years, I talked about IQ with several people. Turns out that all of my friends that I talked to have IQ 140+ (some even 150+). It was at least ten people, from different countries, but all of them (reasonably succesful) go players.
There are three possibilities (or combination thereof):
- Coincidentally, I am a genius and my friends too (and many of them even more so than me).
- There is a very tight connection between being good at go and being good at solving IQ tests.
- The tests are simply flawed.
I’d really like to know the truth, so please share your results in the comments (you can do it anonymously if you prefer).
PS: I don’t enjoy individually asking people what their IQ is, it makes me look like a complete idiot… the problem is that I really want to know the truth about IQ…
I’ve just returned from a four day cross-country skiing trip. It was great.
Although the snow was rather wet (temperatures above zero all the the time), the weather was nice and I hope we all had a good time (I did). We played various (mostly silly but funny) games, we talked a lot (there were some people with whom I haven’t talked for quite a while), and we were generally just having fun not having to do anything.
I was also happy to find out that I’m still able to survive a few days without the internet (actually I don’t miss it, it’s just a bit overwhelming to be back online and have dozens of people trying to talk to me).
Now I’m seriously tired and heading to bed… No, I’m not tired from skiing, I’m tired from talking to 3-4am (usually about religious or other quite difficult topics) and then getting woken up early (ie. before noon) by a guy who went to sleep before midnight (every day). Good night…
PS: Photos hopefully coming soon.
The creators of Amarok say “rediscover your music”… and I did.
I always thought that having playlists and just opening them with any simple player was enough for me, but now I thought I might try to use something more sophisticated. I tried Rhythmbox, it was simple, clean and working but nothing astonishing. On the other hand, I competely fell in love with Amarok.
Although Amarok is a qt application (I strongly prefer gtk and I don’t use any other qt ap, but Amarok is so good that I don’t care), I fell in love at the first sight. It’s a bit slow, but it has many nifty features like grouping/searching by various criteria, album cover preview, complete lyrics and info about author/album (it downloads all that from the internets, very kewl) just one click away. It can also pop up a small window with info about the coming song. The window is transparent and you can choose where it pops up. It will disappear after a short interval (set by you, of course).
And they get bonus points for this message:
One of Mike Oldfield’s best pieces of work, Amarok, inspired the name behind the audio-player you are currently using.
Go ahead and rediscover your music too!