Hello from Edgy Eft!
Recently I got a new disk and I decided it might be a good idea to make a clean new install (I had the previous system through warty – hoary – breezy - dapper). I didn’t want to upgrade the old system to something which is still unstable and I thought it might also be good to get rid of all the trash that I don’t use anyway… (well, yeah, I copied my whole home directory with a lot of trash, but at least I got rid of the programs that I don’t use).

And the first time experience? Magnificent! I encountered no serious problems, almost everything “just worked” out of the box and the things that didn’t were pretty easy to fix.

List of “nice and surprising”:

• sounds: the default intro sound of gnome was so horrible it was almost unlistenable, the new one just rocks, gaim also has different sounds, it will take a while to get used to it but they are better I think (and now gaim also has a volume control, w00t)
• new artwork: nothing spectacular, a bit better than dapper (which was pretty good, at least compared to previous “shit brown” themes)
• firefox: 2.0beta is just better (it has one small mistake that when I search by / it doesn’t let me highlight the words, which sucks, but maybe I can set it somewhere…)
• gaim 2.0beta… it simply rulez (hey, why is everything 2.0beta?)
• a lot of things stayed the same and 95% of my ~/.something configuration files work so I don’t have to reconfigure everything.
• many problems that I expected didn’t occur at all… wifi (which was borken in the 2.6.15 kernel), nvidia, wine (particularly fonts), X server, java, etc.

But that was a clean install, I will see what an upgrade looks like when they release the official version and I will upgrade my sister’s system, but after such a pleasant experience I don’t expect any problems either.

There is something really weird about abandoned places. I personally find them very scary for several reasons. First is that they don’t necessarily have to be as abandoned as they might seem, and if someone lived there it would probably be weird enough person to kill me. The second, less childlish, is that it just seems scary to see a place that used to be full of people abandoned like this. This is also the fascinating thing about these places.

I found a few interesting sites, one with pictures (and some additional info) by a girl riding her motorbike through the Chernobyl area. One made by Polish guys is called opuszczone (click “gallery” at the bottom), it contains mostly Polish buildings, but there are photos from other places too. And I couldn’t possibly omit a great site that goes by the name abandoned places, made by a Belgian pilot who seems to spend quite a lot of free time on abandoned places; although the design is a bit, errrm, original… just click around a lot and you are bound to get to occasionally see all the great photos.

Is there any website about such places in Czechia (particularly Brno)? I couldn’t find one, and I was trying quite hard.

I went to the tearoom to play go the other day and one very talented and promising 7kyu (he’s been playing for half a year I think, that’s a very good result) asked me to play an even game with him… I offered him a handicap, and he declined, saying that he wanted to “see the gap”. It made me a bit angry… of course there’s a huge gap, duh. So I played a bit unorthodoxly to crush him as much as possible and I was winning by more than 150 when he resigned.

I also always wanted to play an even game with a strong professional playing at his full strength, to see the gap. A few times I was even quite close to asking for it but luckily I never did so. And I think I’m never going to make fool of myself in this way, now that I can imagine what it feels like. Also, I am not sure if I really want to see the gap…

Now you might think that I’m just slacking off, but actually it is not so…

I spent a busy week in Bratislava, playing two go tournaments.

The first tournament was European Team Go Championship, where the Czech team placed second, just behind the ultrastrong Romanians. Third place was taken by Hungarians, who were about same strength as us, but we got lucky and won against them. Other teams weren’t really even competing about placing in top three…

The weekend tournament was quite big (more than 100 players), my results are not so great, but I somehow got the best 4dan prize, which was definitely a neat surprise.

Concerning my games… it was just strange – I won many games that I should have lost and I failed to win some games that I should have won, but I guess that in the end it’s more or less fair anyway. :-)

As a side note, I won 500svk (~13eur) in the casino (did I mention that the tournament is played in beautiful Reduta Casino and that each participant gets a 100svk chip. You can’t cash it, you have to play it, of course. So I put it on 1/6 to win (you have to use more valuable chips for betting on more probable things like 1/3 and 1/2), exactly 31-36… and… voila… 31 fell. So I took the money and cashed it out. But they were looking a bit strangely at me cashing out this ridiculous amount of money… :P

I thought it would be fun to try to find polish words that have funny meaning for czechs. I started with writing it by hand, asking people and it took me at least an hour to find out that lists like this one already do exist and that such words are called “false friends”. Nevertheless, I think this list contains some words that no other (easily findable) false friends lists contain (at least nozki, nozyczki, plywac and prawie).

A few remarks concerning polish pronunciation ((mainly) for czech people): ć and cz – č, ó – u, ł - english w.

Feel free to write more in the comments. :-)

~~~

A side story:

Finding out how “edit html source” window in wordpress behaves
Will pressing escape close the window?
Nah, probably not…
Well, let’s try it to make sure…
@%#$^&{€¶ŧ→ø@#°’&ĐŁ

One line corresponds to aproximately one second of thinking. Of course, the table with all the words was gone. I couldn’t even believe I did something this stupid for no real reason.

It all started the previous night. I thought I should go to sleep early so I had a shower before midnight. Then I thought I’d read just a few pages of Small Gods by Terry Pratchett (thanks Merlijn :-)) and suddenly it was one o’clock. Well, time to sleep. But somehow my body didn’t agree, so I stayed awake untill half past two (that’s the last time I remember taking a peak at the clock).

Waking at six, five hours earlier than I am used to, and after only three and half hours of sleep, sucked hard. But I managed to get to the math lecture in time (2km walking, 10min tram, almost 1km walking). After the lecture I learned from the bulletin board that my next lecture started in 15 minutes and was in a place reachable in no less than 30 minutes (unless I’d have a car). I came half an hour late, but it didn’t really matter. The english teacher Ken is from Canada and he seems to be a very friendly and always happy person. I like happy people.

After this lecture I have to get back where the math lecture been… of course, I have 15 minutes for that (I’m getting used to it already). My impression from other lectures is that there are way too many windows machines and no other ones, but I always manage to break windows very quickly so I am not really afraid that much.

I took a walk back home, it’s slightly less than 6km long (at least judging from 55 minutes it took me) and it’s nice (add one point for every tree and substract one for every car, this one has positive value on almost any interval you choose).

Tomorrow I’ve got to be there at seven again. o_O

Set is a wonderful game. Read the official rules, then download TatSet (it’s Dutch, but you’ll get used to it).

I got only 1800 so far (just a very few games, didn’t have much time yet), I am sure you can beat it (feel free to brag in the commentaries :licknose:).

PS: I forgot to mention: it runs flawlessly under WINE.

When I was returning from the Mikulov tournament, I followed a bike path for last fifth of my travel. The path is about 3 meters wide and made of asphalt.

It was sunday afternoon, so the path was crowded. There were basically three types of people – walkers, roller-skaters and bikers. Bikers moving around 20-30km/h, roller-skaters 10-20km/h, and walkers 0-5km/h. The path is wide enough for 4 walkers next to each other, for 3 bikers and for 2 roller-skaters. It is used in both directions simultaneously, I guess that you can imagine the mess.

The worst were roller-skaters, who really like to ride in pairs next to each other, one taking up half of the path, so there’s no space left for anyone else. The only positive thing about them was that 80% of roller-skating girls are really pretty (I don’t know whether it’s the cause or the effect). On the other hand that makes it even more difficult to concentrate on manoeuvering through the crowds…

Okay, this will be boring:

First there was Toyota Tour in Brno, where I scored 3/6 but only lost to 6dan players (and two of the games already looked rather good for me…), somehow ended up winning “best 4dan”.

After one day break there was ESGC (European Students’ Go Championship), a six round tournament where I started pretty well winning first four games (the only notable win is against Antoine Fenech, but I am not sure whether the game is notable too). After this, there were only two of us with four wins, but ex-insei Pal Balogh crushed me in his favourite moyo style game. In the last round I played Merlijn Kuin, it was basically a game for the second place (which means going to Japan). The game started by Merlijn making a mistake followed by about three of my mistakes. After having played endgame in the fuseki in such an important game I was angry with myself and started some wild invading. The group got quite big and it could have lived easily in many ways but I somehow managed to die. Painful…

Yep, they are all gone.

3, 3, 3, 11, 15, 15, 7, 6, 8, 8, 1, 1

That’s (approximately) the number of people staying at my place at a given day from 28.8. to 9.9.

We had no major problems and nothing too bad happened, which is definitely very nice. :-)