KGS was founded in 2000 by William Shubert.

The first Czech on KGS was probably makov (registered on 3.9.2000).

I registered on 2.12.2001, I’m not sure how I got to know KGS, but I think I was told by makov.

I have no idea when I founded “Český pokoj” (the Czech room). It was probably later than in 2001 and definitely earlier than 2004. But all else remains unknown… I am not even sure who were the first people in it. If anyone knows the details, tell me! :)
I became owner of the rengo room around the end of 2003
The next big thing was summer 2004 – Czech version of CGoban (translated by me). That’s also how I became an admin (actually there was one more reason for me to became an admin – several of my friends were already admins).

I spend a great deal of time chatting and idling on KGS, I have many friends there (most of whom I’ve met in real life), but also many that I only know online.

This must have been a boring post for you (at least it was rather short), but it was very enjoyable for me. ^^

I’ve just spent a wonderful week in Risoul (their web sucks big time, but I feel compelled to link it anyway).

It was a great trip, the weather was nice (mostly sunny but some clouds too, which was good because the snow usully kept bellow zero even in the afternoon).

Out of the six days of skiing, I fell three times:

The first one was classical – I was trying to do a left turn, but my left ski got stuck in a pile of snow. Subsequently, the binding let go and I fell in a magnificent way, providing entertainment for the few onlookers.

The second one was just plain stupid and boring. I was trying to brake by making a 180˚ turn at a very low speed (always a bad idea). Of course the heavy snow layer was a bit thicker than I expected, so I fell over.

The third one was nasty, I was just practicing carving skiing and was inspecting my last carved turn (carving turns usually throw you out at a fairly high speed). It was in the morning, the pistes were groomed and there weren’t many people. I thought it was all clear and easy, but apparently I missed the fact that the piste was going quite a bit uphill. As I approached this uphill at a fairly high speed and completely unaware, it cought me by surprise and threw me on my back. I managed to stand up without losing much speed, but after stopping, I noticed that my right thumb was really hurting.

After that, the thumb was growing for about an hour. It grew so much that removing my glove showed impossible (in the evening I somehow managed, but it took a lot of effort and it was rather painful). Now (after more than three days), I can move my thumb and use it for simple tasks that do not require much power.

I spent the first three days skiing the boring same style I’ve practiced for all my life. It’s quite elegant, but not quite as enjoyable. I just go down the hill, letting the ski slip vertically. I think I got quite good at it, but it requires quite a steep slope to reach a good speed, and I was always really bored on the less steep pistes, waiting for a place to gain some speed.

Carving style, on the other hand, is much more dynamical. You retain your speed, because by doing the turn using the edge of the ski, you effectively avoid skidding.

So I spent the other three days trying to learn carve turns and I think I succeeded. Because of the hurt thumb, I got rid of the poles and I found out that they were in fact quite useless.

Mhmm, this post is getting quite long, so I’d better stop it soon… anyways, if you have read this far – have a look at my photo gallery from Risoul!

Well… where to start?

The other day I read a complaint on Keoblog that all the wordpress blogs look the same: Kubrick theme. Well, I used to use it too. With that dark image in the header which didn’t fit there at all.

So I thought it was time to do a redesign… I did some search and found a template containing the functions that I need to call in proper loops. Needless to say, I’d hate it if I had to explore all the wordpress functions just to make a different design. I started writing the css from scratch and editing the template files. The design was created in the Chaotic Way (tm). I had no idea what I was about to create, I just knew that I wanted the header image to stay where it was and that I would like to have some light green (CF0, more exactly) in it.

I couldn’t get the colours right (as usual). It was looking real awful, until I tried to make the whole background (which was previously white, black, and all kinds of grey) green. Suddenly, I got a surprisingly good looking contrast. The rest was a piece of cake… Well, in fact it all took me about 10 hours and that’s without the bubble strip (which I added today) and smilies. ^^

Oh yeah, smilies… you know the gorgeous looking smilies I used to have here? They are gone (and I also broke the backward compatibility, so some of them will not be displayed and you will see text instead). They were way too big and broke the text flow, so I basically stopped using them in the text. And they were transparent gif’s. Ooops, as we all know, gif has no partial transparency, so the borders of the smiley are just fading to white. If you put such a smiley on a black background, it is ugly. So I took the small invision smilies (16x16 pixels) and had some fun with GIMP (normally I don’t link to such obvious things, but I think I should at least share a little bit of google love).

How to make full transparent images in GIMP? First, you have to convert the picture (if it is indexed) to RGB (use menu Image > Mode > RGB). Now you just choose Layer > Transparency > Color to alpha. Then you have to repaint (or copy from a backup that you had made) the places which really should be white (like eyes). There is one drawback to this method: the light parts are semi-transparent. You can either copy these parts from the original smiley or just let them be semi-transparent (it usually doesn’t hurt to have the smiley a bit darker on a dark background and it will look exactly the same as original on white background).

Oh well, that’s it… no more writing for me… now it’s your turn to write your remarks (noticed the “be the first to comment”? ;-))

“Little Feather McAbony” (the Czech title is “Dál než východ slunce”) is the title of a book written by Eran Kroband.

I got this book for Christmas, back in high school, a few years ago. And now comes the queer part – I don’t know who gave it to me.

In high school, we used to give each other just very small presents (like funny pencil or something similar). This was a hardcover book, that in itself made it quite special. First I thought it was a kind of game, the person who gave it to me hiding and letting me guess. I read the book, and although I enjoyed it, I was not a bit closer to knowing whom I got it from. So then I went around asking people, but no one knew anything. Someone obviously had to put the book under the tree, right? It’s not like this was ever done ultra secretly…

I’ve had the book for several years, read it several times, and searched for any possible clues (in the storyline, something marked somewhere, etc) to no avail…

This weekend, I was at a tournament. Saturday was not nice, I got just one win out of three, in the first game. Second game was a loss against Vladimir Danek, in a position that was impossible to lose. So third game was an automatical loss too (you know, totally demotivated). Then I didn’t sleep much, so I was pretty tired on Sunday morning.

I came ten minutes late to the game, and mercilessly removed ten minutes from my opponent’s clock too (with assistance of the referee). I was tired, I needed the win and I didn’t feel like playing. Moreover, I didn’t know where he slept. So, I didn’t go to wake him up, I didn’t really care, I just checked the game room regularly to see if he arrived. The hour passed without him arriving and I won on time.

Later it turned out that he was sleeping in the same gym where I slept too…

I can understand it if some people are angry with me. I can understand it if they despise me. But did I do anything wrong by not doing anything? To be sincere, I’m not sure.

Here, let me defend myself:

• I was tired and didn’t feel like playing.
• I didn’t know where he was and didn’t feel obliged to try to find out.
• Losing on time like this has happened to me too.
• Few months ago I lost a game to this very guy because of ING time – I had to pay 2 points for time and lost by 1.5 … I think that ING time is flawed and it shouldn’t count towards EGF rating… this was kind of a compensation.

Who am I explaining this to? Probably I’m explaining it to myself too… I’m not sure I believe my explanation though…

EYGML stands for European Youth Go Masters League. I’ve been creating (official) EYGML 2007 pages. I have learned a lot of new things, and I have refreshed some that I knew already…

I’ve…

• …discovered some xhtml/css tricks (like using double divs right inside each other to avoid weird margin adding).
• …learned to work with GIMP (using layers religiously) when creating logos and favicons.
• …finally learned to use (My)SQL.
• …wrote almost a thousand lines of php, including:
• highly automated registration, logging in/logging out, possibility of changing personal info
• choosing a random quote from a file formatted as a standard ‘fortune’ file
• showing nearest three birthdays (actually you can call the function with a paramater like 500 to learn that Lacour will be 31 years old on 10.10.2016 (poor guy))
• automatic info updating from the official EGF database
• sgf uploading and parsing of the result
• (members only) voting for a logo
• and last but not least: GD – it completely rocks, now you can see GD generated graph on the logo voting page, and if I ever get a possibility to create something else with GD, I will :-)

The pages are a bit of a mess, but when I’m done with all the features (I still need to create the league playing system, for example), I will try to make the interface more comfortable for users.

I’ve completed an official Mensa IQ test a few years ago. When one of the organizing guys was telling us the results, he has taken me aside, which suggested something special – I scored 144. That means that I should be able to solve IQ tests better than about 99.8% of people. I considered it a pretty good result back then. I was even proud of it.

During recent years, I talked about IQ with several people. Turns out that all of my friends that I talked to have IQ 140+ (some even 150+). It was at least ten people, from different countries, but all of them (reasonably succesful) go players.

There are three possibilities (or combination thereof):

• Coincidentally, I am a genius and my friends too (and many of them even more so than me).
• There is a very tight connection between being good at go and being good at solving IQ tests.
• The tests are simply flawed.

I’d really like to know the truth, so please share your results in the comments (you can do it anonymously if you prefer).

PS: I don’t enjoy individually asking people what their IQ is, it makes me look like a complete idiot… the problem is that I really want to know the truth about IQ…

I’ve just returned from a four day cross-country skiing trip. It was great.

Although the snow was rather wet (temperatures above zero all the the time), the weather was nice and I hope we all had a good time (I did). We played various (mostly silly but funny) games, we talked a lot (there were some people with whom I haven’t talked for quite a while), and we were generally just having fun not having to do anything.

I was also happy to find out that I’m still able to survive a few days without the internet (actually I don’t miss it, it’s just a bit overwhelming to be back online and have dozens of people trying to talk to me).

Now I’m seriously tired and heading to bed… No, I’m not tired from skiing, I’m tired from talking to 3-4am (usually about religious or other quite difficult topics) and then getting woken up early (ie. before noon) by a guy who went to sleep before midnight (every day). Good night…

PS: Photos hopefully coming soon.

The creators of Amarok say “rediscover your music”… and I did.

I always thought that having playlists and just opening them with any simple player was enough for me, but now I thought I might try to use something more sophisticated. I tried Rhythmbox, it was simple, clean and working but nothing astonishing. On the other hand, I competely fell in love with Amarok.

Although Amarok is a qt application (I strongly prefer gtk and I don’t use any other qt ap, but Amarok is so good that I don’t care), I fell in love at the first sight. It’s a bit slow, but it has many nifty features like grouping/searching by various criteria, album cover preview, complete lyrics and info about author/album (it downloads all that from the internets, very kewl) just one click away. It can also pop up a small window with info about the coming song. The window is transparent and you can choose where it pops up. It will disappear after a short interval (set by you, of course).

And they get bonus points for this message:

One of Mike Oldfield’s best pieces of work, Amarok, inspired the name behind the audio-player you are currently using.

Go ahead and rediscover your music too!

When you are creating a design in css, you will often run into various problems. The problem is that you often don’t really know where the problem is. That’s where the problem is.

I was using “border: 1px solid red;” to determine where certain element was. This has several drawbacks… first, it adds 1px on each side of the element, which can cause problems, then it is not too easy to work with (you have to manually add it to every element that you want to highlight).

I have found a much better way to debug css. First, they use outline instead of border (duh), then they make very smart use of wildcard characters, so that out-commenting one thing gets all the css boxes highlighted. Priceless.