tasuki’s blog

When asked by someone about my chance of beating you in go, you said it’s “basically zero”. And as if that wasn’t insulting enough, when asked about the exact number, you said “probably 1 in 40″ (for the curious reader — no, this is not Lee Changho we’re talking about, he’s not even a professional).

I’m not sure whether it was before or after, but the same person who asked you also asked me the same question, and I said 1 in 5. After rethinking it, I admit it might have been a bit on the optimistic side (not nearly as much as you though), but I’m not going to change it for following calculations.

Now that we have some numbers, we can find a fair middle value… x/5 = 40/x gives us x=14.142135624, so each of us is getting 2.828427125 times better deal than they wanted. And because I like you, I’ll make it 14. Sounds fair, doesn’t it?

You choose the time settings (I’m open to various possibilities, thought I probably wouldn’t like any of the extremes).
You choose the size of bets (when you win, you get 1, when I win, I get 14 — that’s fixed). Again, I’m open to various proposals, but it shouldn’t be ridiculously low (at least 2€ per unit) and it shouldn’t be ridiculously high (my budget for this experiment shouldn’t exceed 2k€).
I’d like to play at least a dozen games (possibly many more, basically as many as you want, as long as I’m within my budget )

Also, I can assure you that since then, I haven’t studied go for more than 2 hours a week and I do not plan on increasing that.

There are several ways out for you (sorted by lameness):

• pretending you haven’t read this post (lameness factor 100%)
• saying you were joking (come on, there were people around and everyone saw you were being serious, lameness 95%)
• trying to bargain a better course (look, I’m not a businessman and I’m not going to bargain, if you win just one third of what you claim you can win, you’ll be fine; lameness 90%)
• coming up with an excuse (lameness ranging from 80% to 110% depending on the excuse)
  • not enough money (first, you are going to win big, so this is not an issue, second, if by some chance you lost, I can wait and you pay with inflation corrected interest)
  • not enough time (come on, as we all know, you are too smart to be able to get a job, so you have plenty of free time)
  • any other lame excuse
• admitting that you were wrong AND that you are an arrogant asshole (lameness factor 50%)
• accepting the challenge (lameness factor 0%)

With love, always yours,
tasuki

PS: Feel free to respond here.

I have to deal with unreasonable KGS users all day long. They argue about totally insane things ad infinitum. I try to be patient and understanding, as far as it’s possible. I am even trying to be nice to people who complain about escapers.

I got used to KGS users being unreasonable, but I at least expected a bit reasonable behaviour from admins.

tasuki: if I say pretty please, will you move “Photography” room to social? (yes, I know I own way too many rooms, but there’s no photography-related room on KGS and I think it’s a pity)
anonymousadmin: ok, what other accounts do you have?
anonymousadmin: … gotta put you through the hoops
anonymousadmin: yikes… tasuki owns several rooms!
anonymousadmin: how did you get allowed so many??

Haha, good one (you know, admins like to tease each other a little bit). After some more discussion, I check the room and it’s still in “New rooms”. Well, turns out this wasn’t a joke after all.

To explain what’s going on: there are various arbitrary rules on KGS. My theory about these rules is that whoever invented them thought “our admins are pretty dumb so I have to create very concrete rules for the admins to be able to follow them and not to have to apply their common sense”. Unfortunately, the inventor probably wasn’t much mistaken.

One such rule is that for a room to be moved from “New” category to any other, it must have a description and the owner must not own any other rooms. Nice rule. Except that you can circumvent it by finding someone who has no room yet to create this one for you. Or you can simply stop being owner of your other rooms and only own this one.

In my humble opinion, these rules are being misused. For example, this particular rule was obviously designed to prevent certain individuals from creating many meaningless rooms. It was not created to prevent someone from creating a perfectly valid and useful room about something many people are actually interested in. But “we have to follow the rules”. Oh btw, the admin in question also owns several rooms. So sue me.

PS: Take this as an invitation to join the “Photography” room, under Social.

Do I spend too much time at work?

Let’s see:

First, I work eight hours a day and I sleep eight hours. That means I work half of my waking time.

Second, I only work two out of three days (counting weekends, public vacations and paid holidays adds up pretty close to one third). This means that I spend one third of my waking time at work. Not too bad.

Third, I’ll probably work around half of my life (I didn’t work during my first 20 years here and I won’t work when I’m old either).

That means I am going to spend about one sixth of my life at work (awake life, that is). That definitely doesn’t feel like “too much”, does it?

Oh, plus I got some tesuji up my sleeve… but more on that next time.