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?

I’m mildly paranoid – and fully aware of it.

For example, when leaving a windowless room with the lightswitch inside (typically a bathroom) and entering a lighted corridor/passage/room/whatever I always switch the light off before opening the door. Why? Well, if there was anyone out there out to get me, this could give me a considerable edge. First, I wouldn’t be occupied with switching the light off, and more importantly, you always want to be in the dark with the other person out there in the lighted area.

I’m also slightly paranoid in other ways, but it’s not as funny as the above example and I don’t want to tell because you guys would abuse the knowledge to poke fun at me. ;-)

No, not another Pink Floyd post…

It happened that I changed schools again. Faculty of business management at vutbr was real crap (so crap I’m not even giving them a link). Easily the worst school I’ve ever seen. While I think that educashion is very important, I’m not a fan of schooling. One can educate (or should that be “educash”?) oneself watching google’s educashional videos (thanks to keo for pointing it out), reading books (some of which are even available online, like SICP), or listening to podcasts (I’m not really into that, though).

Currently, I study cca 8 hours a day and I’m learning a lot. Although it consists mostly of selfstudy, if I face a hard problem that I can’t solve or just get stuck, there are teachers to help me. Also, there’s free water and they even pay me money for studying there. All in all, can’t complain.

As some of you might have noticed, I’ve been writing this blog in English exclusively. My “official reason” was for it to be accessible to more people. While I’m happy that more people can read my blog, it certainly wasn’t the main force behind my decision.

I spent my highschool days writing papers in Czech, and I always found it very difficult. For some reason, it never felt comfortable. Although Czech is my native language and I’m certainly much more proficient at it than at English, I definitely prefer English for writing any kind of prose (haven’t tried poetry yet ;)). I am not sure why I prefer English, but I think the language just suits my style of thinking better. The idioms are also quite different, and I like the English ones better.

Writing in English is a joy for me, while writing in Czech is a nightmare. Isn’t that enough of a reason?

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine
Staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught
Or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone
The song is over
Thought I’d something more to say

Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
And when I come home cold and tired
It’s good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells.

Probably my favourite Pink Floyd song. The lyrics are slightly related to certain events that happened in my life recently. ;)

It all started about a year ago, at a go tournament in Blansko, where I played a game called “fujtajblíci”. I enjoyed it a lot, so I thought I could create online version. But as you might know, it is quite a huge leap from thinking about doing something to actually doing it.

Anyway, now I really couldn’t resist anymore… And I thought “fujtajblíci” might be a bit difficult for a lot of people to pronounce or remember, so I rewrote the name as “fuytayblees” (insert fanfares here).

There’s much more info (including the rules, for real) at the fuytayblees site itself, so just visit it, register and start playing. ;-)

After a more or less forced break last year, I didn’t think I’d play the championship this year either. I played just one qualification tournament, and I messed it up. But somehow, many people couldn’t (or didn’t want to) play, so I ended up playing.

First two rounds were reasonably easy wins, but the third round against fido was a disaster. I messed up several times in the opening, then had a dying group, and even when I miraculously escaped, it was still an even game. In the end I got a lucky win. But that was about to be the end of my good luck…

On Thursday, I had two not too strong opponents and was determined to win both games. The first game was a bit strange, with nothing really happening for a very very long time, but it got interesting in the endgame. Well, there I made a horrible blunder which cost me about 4-5 points, and finally lost the game by half a point.

The second Thursday game looked more promising, as my opponent made a very silly mistake. But I was impatient and so I gave him a chance to catch up. Then I messed it up several times, among those giving up about a 30 point group which could have lived through a ko (or where I could have got at least 6 points in sente endgame), and – surprise – lost the game by half a point. After losing both games by half a point, I was just aimlessly wandering through the dark and cold streets, angry and subdued.

On Friday I played against Vladimir Danek, who is the only strong Czech player whom I haven’t beaten yet (though I had some close results against him). The game didn’t start well for me, but during the middle game an enormous fight emerged. Basically all the groups on both sides were simultaneously dying. I somehow came ahead of this fight, but then missed a rather easy tsumego, and lost by about 10 points. Anyway, it was a cool game and I enjoyed it a lot. In the afternoon we went to a swimming pool, which was a neat break from all those go games. And we had a party with lots of food and wine in the evening.

Saturday morning I played against Jan Hora, the game started very well for me, but then I made a totally insane invasion, which I also managed to missplay, so the game ended rather quickly. After this I was already almost giving up, I had two more difficult opponents and considered it rather probable that I’ll get no more points. However, afternoon game brought a nice surprise as Radek Nechanicky managed to attack his own group, moreover in a way which helped my huge potential to become a solid territory. After his magic endgame (I was rather scared because I saw I was winning) I survived by 1.5 points.

This result gave me the necessary willpower to come to the last game against Jan Simara with the intention to win it. After making a very bad mistake in order, which killed my own group, my opponent was generous enough to make a blunder of his own, which practically undoed my blunder. After that, the game was still a bit worse for me, but he made several inaccurate plays, which cost him the game.

So in the end I got the 4th place, which is quite ok.

And btw, you can download all the games (the page is in czech but if you search for my name, you’ll find my games easily).