I’ve always wanted to see how succesful players on littlegolem are in overall.

So after waiting a year or two, I decided to create it myself…

And thus (haha, “thus” is such a lame word) Little Golem Monster Ratings were born. There’s a thread on littlegolem where Monster ratings are being discussed – feel free to join.

I feel that I should write something more and/or something more interesting, but I’m just too tired at the moment…

PS: I am currently fourth in the overall ratings, which is not too bad. But I’ll start playing more games to hopefully improve my position. :)

You often hear people complaining about how much money someone else makes. They talk about politicians or football players or anyone else who makes a lot of money (actually, politicians don’t really get that much money). They are envious and want to have that much money too.

But when was the last time you heard anyone complaining about those buddhist monks who achieved happiness? Surprisingly, most people are not envious of them. I’m not really sure why that is so, but I think that it’s because people don’t really want to be happy. They want to have a big house, luxurious car, and many other things, but they don’t actually care about happiness.

Don’t get me wrong here, money is very important for one’s happiness. People who completely lack money are likely to become unhappy as a result. Complete lack of money makes it difficult to get food, place to sleep at and other important things like that. But as long as you have enough money to survive comfortably (ie. not permanently stressed about where you are going to sleep tomorrow and what you are going to eat), getting more money is not going to increase your happiness nearly as much as you might think it would.

I think the key to real happiness lies in consciously and fully enjoying small joys of everyday life. I won’t suggest anything particular, as each of us has to find their own, different small joys.

Why oh why do native speakers suck at spelling so much?

English people are notorious for making the most basic mistakes. Your/you’re and their/they’re/there win shared first place for the most annoying and stupid misspelling. It twists the meaning and shows that whoever wrote that can’t even grasp the absolute basics. Also, if your keyboard features the apostrophe, please differentiate between its and it’s.

Another pearl is when people use “of” instead of “have”. Not in “I of a dog” (surprisingly, no one writes that), but much more in “could of” or “would of” (makes me feel like poking my eyes out).

Except/accept, where/were, loose/lose (if you ever “loose a game”, something is seriously wrong with you), principal/principle, quiet/quite… wtf…?

Sadly, English speakers are not alone. I’ve just seen someone repeatedly saying “żucił” (instead of the correct “rzucił”) in certain Polish chatroom. Luckily, I knew the correct spelling and readily corrected that horrendous mistake. But what if I hadn’t known…?

Sincerely, I don’t care about your spelling. What I do care about is my own spelling. And I learn to spell from – you guessed it – native speakers. So, when they fail, I do, too.

After you of read this post, I think your definately not going to make those grammer misteaks again.

PS: Having written that, I expect to make a very serious Czech spelling mistake during the next 24 hours… Karma is a bitch. :-/

…at least from my point of view.

Typography (or whatever you want to call it; the way letters are handled)

If it’s unreadable, your visitors will not be able to read anything, the more readable your website is, the more they will be able to read.

One of the most common cause of problems is “liquid layout”. Say what you want, but having 150 letters on one line is no good. Wikipedia is guilty of this. They try to make up for it by having short paragraphs, which usually works rather well (or you can resize your browser window, but I like to keep it fullscreen), but it’s far from optimal.

Another common problem is “designers” raping the letters by setting unusual letterspacing. This can be excused in titles and such, but having longer text with any letterspacing but default (be it lower or higher) should be a prisonable crime.

Wisely choosing linespacing (line-height) can also significantly help improve the readability – the longer the lines, the bigger linespacing you should use.

It’s usually a bad idea to set text-align to “justify”. That’s because today’s browsers can’t break words. I use justified text here, because I think it looks a bit better, but maybe I should drop it (comments are welcome! ;-))

And one more thing… the letters should be in a colour that is readable on the chosen background… which brings us to the next part:

Colours

Colours are very important, as they are the first thing your visitor will notice. What colors you should use depends largely on your audience, but you should just use common sense (don’t be like the wackos who use completely black background surrounded by the shiniest green you could imagine :-P).

Whitespace

I consider whitespace (the empty areas that are not filled with anything, they don’t necessarily have to be white ^^) to be the most important and most overlooked aspect of webdesign. If you need to separate two elements, inserting some white space is the most natural and effective thing to do. The more of it, the more separated the elements become. It’s actually amazingly simple.

I have always hated public transport.

I prefer walking or going by bike. Alas, bike is not always feasible – sometimes the weather is not good, or there’s nowhere to (safely) park the bike, or I am somewhere where I don’t even have a bike. On the other hand, walking is always available.

Walking enables you to feel the city/town. You will see many interesting things apart from the usual tourist attractions. You will see what the city really is like. And you will be surprised how much you remember after walking one path only two times, there and back. Even for someone with a pretty bad memory (me :-)), it’s basically impossible to forget (you will forget some parts, but when you return, you’ll remember them instantly).

“You walked all the way from there???” accompanied by a puzzled look is the usual response of inhabitants of almost any city I walk in. They have lived there for dozens of years, yet they have never walked from the train/bus station to their home/school. They always use tram/bus/subway – “it’s faster and more comfortable”. Well, I have to admit that public transport is often faster. But the difference is usually minimal. Or at least much lower than they think.

Plus the time spent walking is not wasted – walking is healthy. I don’t have time for sports (’cause I have to sit at the computer and write this post ;)), so walking kind of substitutes that. A bit. I hope.

And finally a real-life example:
I used to walk slightly over 5km to school (and then 5km back), which took 40-60 minutes depending on how much in a hurry I was. Going by tram and bus instead took about 35 minutes. There was a guy who went to the same school, but lived closer to it – by about 1km, which made it 4km distance for him. Going by tram, he had to go through the center, so it also took him about 35 minutes. He could have easily walked instead without losing any time. And he’d be healthier. And save some money, too. Yet when I asked him about it, his response suggested he never even considered walking, it never occured to him that it was a viable option. And he definitely thought I was being weird…

To sum it up: Walking as a means of transport…

• …is actually much faster than people realize
• …is healthy (and safe)
• …enables you to see what the city really is like
• …saves you money (at least enough to buy a nice map!)

I didn’t plan it. I just woke up today and knew I’d have a new blog in the evening.

As for colours, a great deal of thinking went into that. Yesterday I read a lot about readability on the web. I think it’s something very important that many people completely miss. First, Verdana and Georgia, that’s a no-brainer. Almost everyone has them and they were designed for screen, are very readable, and also look good.

Then I read some controversial posts about white on black versus black on white. Well, I personally strongly prefer dark background and light text (it’s simply less tiring on the eyes). But somehow my experience from “green is cheesy” with #999 text on #000 background wasn’t good – at least on my system, the fonts didn’t get hinted properly. The “silhouette’s” #CC9 text on #443 background is a completely different story. The contrast is good enough (should be good enough even for people with crappy monitors) and hinting works great (ymmv, though).

As for the picture at the top – the right guy’s back looks kinda weird, I might have to change that. And the curly thingy is stupid, I know. I might change that, too (if anything it should curl outwards, but that would be much harder to do).

And finally: a competishun! Who are the guys in the picture? When was the game played? First to write the correct answer into comments gets a beer. :)

Fear not – this post is not gonna be in German.

I left work early on Friday and headed for the Student Agency bus. The movie Corpse Bride was pretty good and before I knew it, I was in Vienna, just few hundred meters from the famous Prater. Buying a “Stadtplan” was an ordeal, but I finally managed after about half an hour, and the old lady who sold me the map even spoke English.

After nearly two hours of walking (an hour of which was the historical center, where I visited Stephansdom (St. Stephen’s Cathedral) and really enjoyed the whole Rotenturmstrasse (it pwns Graben, too) I arrived at Wombat’s hostel (the “The Lounge” one). I was really impressed. It’s all rather new in there, all their staff is fluent in English, and one night is just for 17€. An all-you-can-eat breakfast (with various meats, rolls, breads, juice, yoghurt, cheese, …) for only 3.5€ (I’d bought a smallish square of cheese + 4 rolls for 5€ in the supermarket that afternoon). Oh and in case you forget your towel (like I did), you can buy Wombat towel for 6€. There’s also free wifi access, and for those of us without a laptop, internet-connected computers are available for 1€ for 40 minutes.

The next day I arrived at the go club (GO7, arguably the best go club in Europe: huge playing room with many nice table boards with slate&shell stones, floor board, every English go book about 5-10 times, portraits and pictures and many pro players’ signatures hanging on the walls, kitchen, two extra rooms just in case, a wonderful 3-dimensional 777 board (crap, I didn’t finish my game against Lothar), and perfectly located on Mariahilfer strasse (warning: only Deutsch and Norsk versions available atm, someone plz make an English version)) just in time.

After we played one round of a tournament, Takemiya sensei arrived, together with Kenmochi Jo sensei and Kobayashi Chizu sensei. Takemiya sensei commented some of the games, we got problems to solve, and we all generally had a lot of fun. In the evening, mister Kitani, the son of Kitani Minoru, sang a nice English/Japanese song for us. I was very surprised by his advanced English, which was nearly without an accent.

Sunday was more or less similar, but definitely no less fun than Saturday. Too bad I missed the wine drinking in the evening because I had to leave. Also, rumour has it that people were getting fans signed by the professional players on Tuesday. Hell, I’d cut my arm (the left one) off for a fan signed by Takemiya sensei, Kenmochi sensei and Kobayashi sensei.

My journey home was again cheaply, nicely and safely provided by Student Agency.

PS: I got two small presents in Vienna but I didn’t give any. Does it mean that: a) I really rock so people bring me presents; b) I am an asshole because I don’t bring others presents even though they do.

A year ago I predicted that 2007 would be better than 2006, and indeed – it was.

And I have plenty of reasons to believe that 2008 is gonna be even better. :-)

Today I went skiing, and it was grrreat. The slope was not steep at all, but carving skiing makes it plenty of fun even without steep slope. And without poles (pun fully intended :P) it’s even better.

Also, I think I’ve become happy. At least during the past few months I’ve been feeling happier than ever (it’s not as intense as sometimes, but instead it’s a very, very persistent happiness). And I don’t think it happened by chance. I concentrate on my happiness a lot. For example, I eat about 1/3 of an extremely dark chocolate (“Wawel” chocolate, 90% cocoa, made by Poles (see, Poles can be useful, after all ;-))) during each workday. Also, I’m going to take a really hot shower right now, and then I’m gonna get close to 8 hours of sleep (gosh, I’m almost envious… ^^).

Happy new year!

I’m willing to pay money for a good service…

Example: I bought not too large amount of cheese for almost 20€ recently. At the shop, there was a cute girl who spent like 15 minutes helping me to choose what to buy. When I was interested in some cheese, I could try it out to see if I liked it. The cheese was like 5 times more expensive than your “usual” cheese, but it was excellent cheese and the service was just great.

But I don’t want to pay insane amounts of money for a very crappy service…

For example my bank. They send me all kinds of totally useless letters (snail-mail letters, even) all the time. But when I need to bring them a small piece of paper or they charge me 5€, there is complete silence, they just charge me 5€ without even telling me, hoping they’ll be able to do the same the next month. Also, I originally created the bank account to be able to withdraw my money from paypal and to buy things on the internet with the credit card. They gave me a card which doesn’t allow that (how should I have known?). A card that would enable me to do that would cost me 30€ a year. Also, it would enable the companies I buy things from to steal all my money from the account. What I need is a (possibly virtual) credit card that enables me to pay money through the internet when I allow it (yes, that’s actually possible, thanks to vertigo for telling me). But nope, this bank doesn’t have that, and they don’t know whether they ever will. Well, guess what, as soon as I find a bank that sucks a bit less (shouldn’t be much of a problem, anyway), I’m getting outta there. :/

Another good example of bad customer service is Czech railways. They’ll do anything to prevent you from learning when, how and for how much you can travel. I’m going to Vienna in about a week and it took me considerable time to find out that the return ticket Brno-Vienna costs 50€ (no wonder they are trying to hide that information as deep as possible). Surprisingly, going through Bratislava would be for about half the price (although Brno-Bratislava is about the same distance as Brno-Vienna, plus there’s the extra few dozens of kilometers for Bratislava-Vienna). But I’d have to change trains 2 times and considering the usual delays, there’s a chance that I’d miss my next train.

And for a change, a good customer service again: Student Agency buses. They are rather comfortable (I’d even dare to call them slightly luxurious) and take you from Brno to Vienna and back for 10€ (yup, that’s five times cheaper than the train). And if I had a better credit card, I could even buy my ticket on the internets…

To sum it up, big companies that charge a lot of money for nothing are driving me nucking futs.

Short stories are good when you don’t have much time but want to read something (why welcome, Captain Obvious).

Here are few that I really liked:
Isaac Asimov: The Last Question
Terry Bisson: They’re Made out of Meat
Ambrose Bierce: Moxon’s Master
Edgar Allan Poe: The Pit and the Pendulum

I strongly advise you to read at least the first two.

Somehow, I wasn’t that impressed by other short stories such as Nightfall (it wasn’t that bad, but somehow I expected the generally accepted best short story to be better, it was also longer than needed—the shorter the better) or An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge.

And finally, I would like to ask for your advice. Do you know any really good (and possibly short) short stories?