It’s not the end
Not the kingdom come
It is the journey that matters
– Wanderlust by Nightwishes

I think I know why I’ve been happy recently – I found the meaning of life.

And the funny thing is that I found the meaning of life without actually realizing I found it. The trigger to my realization was a video called Music and Life (by Alan Watts) (it’s short enough, I promise).

Zen … does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Alan Watts – The Way of Zen, pt. 2, ch. 2 (1957)

I think I’m starting to like this Zen thingy.

As it’s the journey that matters, and not the end, being an inquisitive type, I of course started thinking about the end of the journey. And I found out I’m not really scared. When I’m dead, there will simply be void. The same one there was before I was born (or, before I was conscious (btw, this post is not big enough to contain a discussion about abortion)). It’s actually quite consoling… no matter how bad I fuck up, the worst there can be at the end is void.

The only people who have a reason to be afraid of death are followers of various religions that believe in afterlife. Also, life itself is not the ultimate fun for them, as the eternal afterlife is far more important. Oh well, I just couldn’t do without a little trolling, could I? 8-)

Friday: I couldn’t sleep well, sweating and waking up all the time. In the morning I didn’t feel any better plus I had a horrible headache. After measuring my temperature and finding out it was slightly over 38˚C, I knew I had a problem. A big problem.

Decisions, decisions… First thing, I’m not going to go to work, that is completely out of question with my head spinning at about 180 rotations per minute. The big decision was whether to take vacations or become officially ill. If I became officially ill, I obviously couldn’t go to France in the afternoon. So I decided to risk it, called my boss, explained the situation and asked him whether I could take Friday off. He wasn’t too happy but he actually didn’t have much of a choice…

Then I slept for few hours and after that went to visit the doctor. After explaining my symptoms, I got the expected “no way you are leaving anywhere today” response. I let her know that I’d really really like to go there, and after some tests (urine, blood, etc.), none of which ended up well, she concluded that maybe I could try it.

Off to buy Paralen and Smecta. Temperature jumping back and forth between 37 and 38˚C. Funny how it was completely in sync with my headache.

After getting diarrhoea, drinking smecta (I bet I could get some clay way cheaper than this) and sleeping through the whole afternoon, I was facing a decision: should I stay home, get healthy in three days and regret it for the rest of the week, or should I leave and die far from home? Opposed to advice from almost everyone, I decided to leave.

Those 24 hours in the bus weren’t so bad, I just kind of sat there and waited. Both high temperature and headache were practically gone, all I was left with was a diarrhoea. And smecta for the rescue (it really tastes like mud). I think I ate about one roll during the journey.

We arrived at Tignes a bit earlier than planned, so we had some time to just enjoy the sunny weather and look around the town/village.

Sunday morning was rather sunny. There were ~30 centimeters of fresh snow, which was, uh oh… very nice… at least for those who were able to ski in it somehow. As for me, I never was any good at skiing in deep snow. I think I fell about 4 times. Moreover, stale rolls + smecta did not exactly give me much strength to fight all that snow. Luckily, the weather got substantially worse in the afternoon, so I just stayed home and slept through it all.

I don’t remember much of Monday, except stale rolls, smecta, and bad weather. I slept through the morning and only went skiing in the afternoon, but I don’t recall the details too well.

Tuesday was the turning point: The diarrhoea stopped (well, almost), I tried some new food like rice and even had two squares of chocolate. Weather was perfect, there was no new snow (ie. the pistes were groomed) so we went exploring the surroundings.

You might want to consult the map, as I’m going to present some otherwise rather boring names:

After skiing on Tichot for over an hour, while my sister was getting her snowboard repaired, we went up from Val Claret through Tichot and Col du Palet to L’Aiguille Percee (2748), then went through Sache piste all the way down to Tignes les Brevieres (1550). Over 1km vertically down in one go. It was very nice and there was plenty of nature around, so we had a nice lunch in the forest. Then we returned to Tignes 2100. As there was still a lot of time left till the evening, we went over Toviere (2704) down to La Daille (1785) and then by “funiculaire” up to Rocher de Bellevarde (2827).

Wednesday was also great. The weather was excellent, so we headed straight over Col de Fresse and Rocher de Bellevarde to Val d’Isere (1850). Then up to Solaise (2560) and down to Le Laisinant. From there to the fifth (!) and (as we thought) last valley. There we went down to Le Fornet (1930) where we had lunch (mmm, cheese). “Signal” was possibly the steepest red slope I’ve ever seen. We were rather surprised that Glacier de Pissaillas and the slopes on it were in yet another valley, it certainly didn’t look so on the map. And boy it was cold in there. So, after going Cascades once, we headed back using Leissieres Express, which is a silly chairlift that takes you up on one side of the hill and down on the other. Alas, it was the only way to get back. We returned in basically the same way from here (Solaise, Val d’Isere, Rocher de Bellevarde, Col de Fresse). As there was still some time left, we went to funiculaire Grande Motte, and then to the huge cabin (they call it “cable car” in English, but I don’t think that describes it well, “fucking huge cabine” describes it much better, imho). At 3456m, this was the highest point we reached in Tignes.

The weather worsened significantly on Thursday. We spent the morning on Lanches, with the occasional funiculaire not to get bored. As the weather was so-so, we lunched back in our appartment. After the lunch we went to Tignes 2100, where we spent the rest of the day.

Friday morning, clouds and fog everywhere. Plus 20cm of fresh snow and still snowing. First few rides were an ordeal, I tried skiing the way I’m used to (long turns accross the whole piste, mostly carving, sliding slightly on steep slopes to keep the speed under control). After getting no answer from my dad, I watched others and noticed most of the people who seemed in control of the situation were doing very short turns. I think it almost trippled my speed when I discovered (almost simultaneously) two very important things about skiing in deep snow:

• It is vital to only have your weight on one leg at a time (I used to be very precise about this, but with carving I kind of forgot, since there it is not very important). If possible, try to have the other leg high enough not to get it stuck somewhere.
• To greatly increase your stability, you should try to move your body in a constant direction at a constant speed. Make extremely short “turns” just with your legs. These slow you down considerably, while constant direction and constant speed of your body provide perfect stability.

Actually I didn’t fall at all on Friday, which is very good considering the zero visibility and huge amounts of snow (which got irregularly scattered during the day). There were many (dozens) cases where I almost fell down, but always somehow miraculously prevailed.

We spent the afternoon on Bollin and Tichot, as all the other lifts were closed.

The journey back home took a bit longer (slightly over 24 hours) as we got stuck in a traffic jam, but otherwise it went ok.

All in all, it was a great week, I further improved my carving skillz, and I finally learned to ski in deep snow. :-)

I think I have a drinking problem.

During all of my life, it was enough for me to drink 4-5 glasses (slightly over a liter) a day. I was never thirsty and often had to force myself to even drink at all.

Recently, this has changed tremendously – I drink over 4 liters a day. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I drink water almost exclusively. I used to drink a lot of sweet carbonated water, but now I can’t stand it. It leaves a very annoying aftertaste (funnily, I used to think exactly that about pure water). I am not sure when I started drinking water so much, but I think it was around last summer. I usually drink just tap water, and at work there are big canisters with water kind of similar to tap water.

Think think think… There must be some kind of a point at the end… Or just something…

Does anyone have any idea what could have been the cause of such a dramatic change in the amount of water (or liquid, if you prefer) I drink daily?

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.