While I didn’t have any spectacular results recently, my results were stable and I reached my all time high GoR of 2454 (I came close to 2450 several times but never actually reached it).

What a pity I don’t live in Poland, I could already boast (undeserved) 5d rank. ;-)

To sum up my go career so far, I reached 2d after two years, then 3d in under a year and then 4d in a year and a half. I’ve been stuck there for almost 3 years now and I don’t see it changing anytime soon (partly because I just don’t want to sacrifice my life to go). Sigh.

I am not going to talk about excuses about why you came late, why you didn’t do your homework, why you broke your promise, etc. These excuses are necessary, if you omit to explain why it happened, you will face unpleasant consequences (you will face unpleasant consequences anyway, but you can at least lower them by having a good excuse).

Then there is another type of excuse – an excuse no one is interested in. Why you scored bad on an IQ test: “126 but I got bored and quessed some of the later ones”, followed by: “oh and I had 20 min left at the end”, why you lost a tournament game (talking about go) against someone – I know a person who “has had a flu” everytime he loses against someone weaker.

As you can see, these excuses are unnecessary and they make the author seem like an… well, you choose what it seems like. ^^

Please, no one is interested in these excuses. You might be just lazy and/or not care about the IQ test at all. Fine, in that case you are happy with your suboptimal results. If you weren’t happy with them, you would have tried harder. (If you spotted the logical fallacy, you get one point. If you realised what I wanted to imply, you get ten points)

You might have made a blunder which cost you the game – in that case, feel free to point out that you lost the game by a blunder. But please, omit the unnecessary (and often imaginary) details about what led you to make that blunder. Or how huge advantage you maintained during the whole game (this applies even if you are a pro… being a pro doesn’t mean you can say you were winning by 30 points when in fact it was almost even and the situation was changing all the time… but sure, saying that you were winning big can improve your image and save your face (that is, if the game record is unavailable (ooops))).

And what is worst – I also make those unnecessary excuses that no one is interested in. So, while I usually don’t make any New Year’s resolutions, I will make a September the 16th resolution: no unnecessary excuses!

I am now officially a registered vim user.

There are several reasons:

I greatly admire Bram Moolenaar, the creator of vim and founder of ICCF Holland. Bram sends all the vim registration fees to Uganda to help local children.

I can now vote on vim feature requests.

And last but not least – I had some money stuck in paypal (it is stuck basically because paypal is stupid). If you need to pay something by paypal, you can send me the money by bank transfer (or simply give it to me) and I’ll pay it for you. :-)

I write with my right hand.

I sleep on my left side.

I hold spoon in my right hand.

When I walk in a circle I always turn to the left.

When I walk next to someone, I prefer walking on the right side because I want to have the person on my left side.

When I walk alone, I prefer to walk so that there is something on my left.

When I listen to just one earphone, I put it in my left ear.

I chop wood with my right hand on the nearer the axe head.

I saw with my right hand.

I play floorball with my left hand near the blade.

When using a knife, I hold it in my right hand.

I hold mouse in my right hand.

When writing on a keyboard I use my left hand for about 65% of keypresses.

When swimming crawl, I always breathe on the left side.

When putting leg over leg, the left one is on top.

When putting my hands as if to pray and bending the fingers (is there one word for this?), I always end up with my left thumb on the top. Doing it the other way requires a lot of concentration and then it feels very unnatural and alien.

When crossing hands, the right one is on top.
When using a telescope, I look with my right eye.

I hold the shower head in my left hand and use the right hand to handle the soap or shampoo.

I hold the phone in my left hand (this might be so that I can write something down using my right hand when calling, but I hold the phone in my left hand even in the middle of the woods with nothing to write on).

Am I weird to even think about this? Is it strange that I use right hand for actually doing most of the stuff but the left side somehow feels more special (leg over leg, earphone, walking next to someone)?

To continue my previous post about films…

A Fish Called Wanda, 1988, 8/10: It’s a comedy, a reasonably good one too. Undeniably Pythonesque.

A Hard Day’s Night, 1964, 7/10: Something between a comedy and a documentary. Maybe documenting a comedy.

Citizen Kane, 1941, 10/10: Classic, well worth watching (some people said that they expected too much and were disappointed afterwards; well, I don’t expect anything anymore (I still remember “expecting” before watching Pulp Fiction, no thank you), so I was more than satisfied).

Sling Blade, 1996, 10/10: Absolutely stunning film, wonderful atmosphere, great plot, and fitting end.

Black Cat, White Cat, 1998, 7/10: Romantic village comedy… a bit too many characters, but otherwise ok.

Taxi Driver, 1976, 3/10: The main problem here was that I couldn’t associate myself with the hero at all. After a while, I started actively hating him. It got a bit better when he had a good chance to bang a 12 year old girl and chose not to do so. The four points are solely for the ending, which was rather good (but the ordeal of the first three quarters of the film is not really worth it, me thinks).

Seven Samurai, 1954, 9/10: Great movie, many interesting ideas and good points. Moreover, the ending was just marvelous.

You can expect more posts like this, I guess… :)

Helium Vola is a German Darkwave or “Electro-Medieval” band, at least that is what wikipedia says. But the article is a stub and there isn’t much more info. There is a bit more on last.fm, but nothing special. Amazons has a few good comments on the album.

After searching for half an hour or so, I even managed to find Helium Vola lyrics. This page has no pagerank and I am not sure anymore how I found it, anyway, I am pretty sure it’s about the only page with complete Helium Vola lyrics (as you will see if you search for snippets of the text). Quite funny that the main page of something as wonderful as Lyriki (they have shitloads of lyrics and no ads whatsoever, as opposed to all the lyrics sites which are virtually cluttered by ads) has only PageRank 2. Gotta share some google love…

And now for something completely different: my impressions. My first most favourite song was of course…

Omnis Mundi Creatura

Omnis mundi creatura
quasi liber et pictura
nobis est in speculum.
Omnis mundi creatura
quasi liber et pictura
nobis est in speculum.

Nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis
nostri status, nostrae sortis
fidele signaculum.

This is not the full lyrics, just a highlight… The melody is very catchy but it can get on your brain a bit after a while…

Les Habitants Du Soleil

Les habitants du soleil jettent sur nous un regard impassible
Nous appartenons définitivement á la Terre
Et nous y pourrirons, mon amour impossible
Jamais nos corps meurtris ne deviendront lumière

I completely love the atmosphere of the “sun inhabitants”, especially the male voice “nous apartenons definitivement a la terre” contrasted with the female voice… extatic.

Je Chante Par Couverture

Je chante par couverture
Mais mieulx plourassent mi oeil
Ne nul ne scet le traveil
Que mon pouvre cuer endure

Very captivating song, repeating the title over and over, yet it never gets boring. :-)

Next great song is Do Tagte Ez, however, it’d be a bit difficult to pick up part of the lyrics (it has no refrain), definitely the most “magical” song of the entire album (where most of the songs are rather magical). And I can’t omit mentioning Selig, which is the last song of the album, and has an extremely catchy and merry melody.

And in case you are now wondering how comes that some lyrics are Latin, some French, and some German… all the lyrics from Helium Vola are based on various medieval texts (feel free to google them to find out more).

This post is not about math, it is about how I perceive the world.

I know, fourth dimension is easy, for example you can easily create vector v=(1, 2, 3, 4) … but somehow, this is just numbers and tricks, I can’t really feel the fourth dimension. I recently had some free time to think about random stuff, and, well, I thought about this:

Let’s start with: 1 = x² + y². As we all know, this equation draws a circle.

The next step consists of substituting the one for another variable: z = x² + y². Now we get one more dimension. Although it might not be completely clear on the first sight, this is paraboloid. If we assume z is a variable that we can set to anything we want, different values of z create different circles (z is the height at which we cut the paraboloid to get that particular circle).

We had a circle already, so let’s bring the circle to the third dimension and make a sphere: 1 = x² + y² + z²

Now, what do we get when we make the transformation we made in the first step – substituting the one for yet another variable?

w = x² + y² + z²

I don’t know about you, but I can finally feel the fourth dimension within my reach. ;-)

While I don’t know what exactly this “w = x² + y² + z²” looks like (neither know what it is called, for that matter), I can see that there is precisly the same relation – the same way circle is one “slice” of paraboloid, sphere is one “slice” of w = x² + y² + z² (for some concrete set value of w).

I use the internet all the time. About 20% of my internet usage involves searching for some kind of encyclopaedic info (dictionaries included). Another 20% consists of mostly random funny or interesting things, like reddit, digg, links from friends. And finally, communication with other people makes up around 60%.

I sometimes do write emails, but mostly just use various forms of instant text messaging to talk to my buddies. I have tried voice over ip (skype, to be concrete), and I have to admit that it is very useful… that is, if you don’t need to talk to more than one person at a time.

Which brings me to my main point: when talking to my pals using instant messaging, I often talk to many (more than five) people simultaneously. Although this sometimes leads to delays (errm, nope, my 6 hour delays are not caused by communication overload but simply by me not noticing you ;-)), it is still quite manageable once you get used to it.

It is technically impossible to achieve the same level of paralelity in voice based communication. Sure, you could receive the voice messages one after another, and respond them, but it would break the flow. In instant messaging, you can see the last few lines of a conversation, which reminds you about what was going on. Also, in case you need to retrieve some info from the past, skimming through chatlogs is much easier than listening to all the voice messages.

Simply put, I don’t want to receive voice messages, I want to receive text messages.

Now how about the input? This is where many posibilities arise for the future. Voice input (transformed into a text message) seems to be the easiest and the most viable option for the near future. However, it does have some pitfalls, and I personally feel more comfortable using my keyboard.

Another option would be controlling input by thought. Or… maybe not. Imagine you are talking to a girl or… oh well, that was definitely a bad idea.

So to sum it up, I think the future of text messaging is still rather bright. I can’t imagine anything replacing text output. The input part is a bit unclear, but I don’t really care about it all that much anyway.

Discuss.
[…]

Please?
[…]

Pretty please?

I started the trip in Warsaw, where I came to participate in a tournament. I played against Seok-bin in the first round, and only lost by 7 points, which is probably my biggest go-achievement as of yet ;) In next two rounds I have beaten two 4d, and after that I lost to a 2d by half a point. That kinda sucked, but it still didn’t stop me from winning a 2gb iPod nano. So overall, the tourney was a success for me. I’d also like to thank vertigo and the sushi girls.

The following day, Azael took me and spirit to Warsaw Uprising Museum. It presented the war in a very raw way, which was rather frightening but interesting to experience.

After that we (with spirit and Azael) moved to Lodz. We stayed there shortly so I’ve just seen the center of the city and Jewish cemetery, but overall it left a good impression on me.

I don’t feel like writing about LSG events chronologically, so here are a few things in more or less random order:

• During the first week, the weather was horrible, it mostly rained and it was damn cold. :/ The second week brought a significant change, so we could spend a lot of time by the lake (and in the lake). :)
• I got drunk (vodka) to the point where I wasn’t able to walk or even stand up. :x This has never happened to me before, it is cool to have experienced it.
• I won the main tournament at LSG (Memorial Jerzego Sacharzewicza) by winning 6 out of 6. I got lucky several times, including the win against Merlijn by half a point. I won the Haengma book and it got lost/stolen >:-| (I know exactly on which table I left it and it just wasn’t there the next day).
• The latest time at which I went to sleep was quarter to seven.
• I might have smoked something illegal and I might have liked it. ;)
• I’ve seen several people jumping full clothed into the cold lake late at night for just three beers. o_O
• I played pairgo championship with a 24k and we beat a pair consisting of a 5k and a 1d. Pairgo sometimes really is unbelievable. :o
• I experienced something which hurt me very deeply, but managed to recover in about three days. I’m getting close to becoming an emotionless robot. B)
• Together with spirit and fiszu, we won the team tournament (handi -2, so it wasn’t that difficult for a strong team to win). I won Korean Fuseki book (the large red one).
• I went on several walks with several different people during the night. Night walks (and night talks) for the win. Somehow people are much more sincere and there is a better atmosphere, at least that’s how I perceive it.

My thanks to everyone who attended these events. Biggest thanks go to vertigo, Azael, Ela, Spirit, method, kotasza, Dorotka, fisz and soui.

PS: Photos so far: kamila (great photos, but just a few), kotasza (mobile photos: quality = 0, size = huge), sh/yapee (many photos, good ones) and finally great photos by ignus.

PPS: Oh yeah, in case you didn’t know: Spirit is totally NOT interested in underage girls. ;) :P ^^

PPPS: LSG 2008 starts in about 350 days, hope to see you there.

I’m going to spend afternoon with my ex-classmates, watching photos from Australia. After that I take overnight train to Warsaw. There I will attend a tournament during the weekend. The week after that is going to consist mostly of sightseeing Poland and just having fun. And then next two weeks on LSG.

Ideal vacations.

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