My name is David and you also may know as Master001. But now I am Sempai001 because I am goint to be superior over anyone who stands in my way until i get to a better level. I love go and if anyone ruins or disrespects the game they should be ashamed of themselves. Anyways I hope that I get to face all of you and I hope you find it a teaching and a fun experience because i am not weak anymore i am slowly getting up to a very high level so i hope this encourages you to play me, thank you for reading my profile notes and i look forward to playing you and showing why i am called Sempai001 because i will be very superior at go.

This is KGS info of a random player, the info of his other account mentions his ambitions to become a pro. While I find it all very entertaining for some reason (the reason might be that I just looked at the game he was playing and he played several non-working ladders and more than half of his stones were dead, a solid 30kyu), it also led me to some reflective thoughts. Ain’t I a bit like him? It’s the dangerous attitude: “hey look, I’m very high level”. Very high level 30kyu? What a joke. Very high level amateur 4dan? Pretty much the same…

The key to getting stronger is your ability to doubt. People who never doubt are never going to improve. When one very strong amateur (and I mean really strong, of professional strength) got asked why he was so strong, he replied: “I’m always surprised”. I think there’s something similar about it…

Yeah, I’ve been away for four weeks… o_O

I spent the first two weeks in Rome playing EGC2006. I almost missed my plane due to the train being late, but a taxi saved me. In the main tournament I was doing really well during the first week, my only loss was against Dragos Bajenaru (and it was because of coming late to the game because someone told us to change the train, which wasn’t a good idea, finally we had to take a taxi and arrived about two minutes too late… not saying that I’d win otherwise, just pointing it out ;-)). Our team called “Lordi” (Antti Tormanen, me, Antti Holappa and Ilkka Mattila) managed to get second place in team tournament, which gained me a really nice thing which is difficult for me to describe (it consists of metal and blue glass and is quite heavy). The second week was not so succesful, I only won one game out of five. I have a lame excuse that my opponents were strong, but I think I could have done better.

After returning I spent one week cycling and canoeing in south czechia and the other week at czech go camp near Polička.

Today I woke up with headache and fever. :cursing:

The Littlegolem’s disk crashed. :(

The owner’s notebook with backups from last week… crashed… :(

So the last backup is from May… sigh…

I have to play some games (that I already won) for one more time, and a lot of games have been lost due to the crash. The positive thing is that they arranged a RAID that should prevent further problems…

Thanks for the good job!

Yesterday I was talking with myszcz (it’s not important what we were actually talking about… or… maybe you don’t even want to know…). He sometimes uses very zen-like sentences, but this was probably the best one:

Myszcz: maybe I’ll go to sleep, and after sleeping my mind will have the answer

But myszcz denied being a zen monk, he even said he didn’t know anything about zen (like I believe him, haha).

I’ve just returned from LSG, saying it was great would be an underestimation. If I have to decide between LSG and EGC I definitely choose LSG.

Przystanek Alaska is great, the lake is great, weather was great, beer was great, parties were great, but most of all – the people were great.
Thanks to everyone – kabu, lapkom, suska, ajka, comboy, sosna, martyna, basia & tomasz mroczek, nexo, hitech, fetkaa, rams, wieczorniczek, dominika (dorota), piotrek, ela, przemas, emtom, lobo, iskierka, yapee, sh, yebi, soui, sad, kamyszyn, radziol, kamyk, seok-bin, tommell, gertzu, quasigoose, azael, myszcz, przemek and everyone else that I can’t remember now because it is too late and I’m tired).

But my most special thanks go to: benerit, juggler, grasiu, vertigo, method, anka, ola, fisz, cichaczem, and last but not least – kotasia (if she hadn’t told me I wouldn’t have even gone there).

I’m going to Polish “Letnia Szkola Go (someone said it meant”Letnia Szkola Gwaltu"…):

I wonder whether I’ll manage to get there… :sweatdrop:

Anyways don’t expect to hear from me much… well, there will be internet connection but probably not enough time to write to my blog.

Have a nice holiday season. :laugh:

Computer programs should be user friendly, it should be always easy and intuitive to do what you want.

I like userfriendliness of firefox, various stupid pop-up windows have been replaced by information bars that fit nicely into the application (such as search bar at the bottom when you press / (some people insist on using ctrl+f but any unix user knows that / is the true way to search :P) or the bar at the top informing you about a blocked pop-up window).

However, gnome has become way too “user friendly”. Linus was probably right when he said that gnome developers are interface nazis. In the new gnome, the default is to show the location in nautilus (default gnome file manager) as buttons (for each folder there’s a button). That sucks, it’s much better to have a textbox, as then you can also switch folders by writing it there. Luckily, it’s still possible to change this…

What I find very annoying are the pop-up windows at the lower right informing me that there is not enough disk space (it always announces the disk and the percentage that is free). Gimme a rest… I do know that my disks are almost full and I can use “df” too. I really see no reason for this annoying feature which the developers have probably seen in M$ windoze and thought that gnome users should suffer too.

Anyone knows where to turn it off? :x

As a side note, I am not switching to KDE because it is too bloated and I’m not switching to fluxbox because I am not cool enough (but maybe if I grow up to be cool I will switch to fluxbox one day…).

I won second division of third league of thirteenth amazon championship. It really sucked hard, there was only one challenging game (with Cristi… I thought I was going to lose already), all others were pure pwnage. :licknose:

I had a look to see who is at the top of amazon rating list and what was my surprise when I saw myself in 16th place (that’s on the first page – yay) with just 1762. Kind of contrasts with my 17th place in twixt with 1947 (and I think I can play twixt helluva lot better than amazons…).

I also managed to luck out the second place in tenth division of fifth league of ninth gomoku championship (with sonnenborn and some magic working to my advantage).

The Monster of Little Golem tournament isn’t exactly going my way. I have horrible positions in all the amazons games (against ~1500 players, whom I should beat easily) and it all seems just too much for me to handle… :(

On Thursday I went by train to Tesin to meet the Pocsai family with Ondrej Silt. They were two and half hours late due to some complications with finding the right way but we managed to reach Warsaw (and find our accomodation) before midnight. On Friday we’ve done some sightseeing (primarily the Old town) and were the first to come to the playing place.

In the first round I played with Radek and lost by a few points after not really punishing his deep invasion. Second round with Roman Pszonka was a difficult game since I let him make a lot of influence all over the board. However, I managed to reduce rather succesfully and made a super strong group in the middle, then one overplay by him and he had to resign. Third round with Ondrej Silt, I made a good start and captured a few of his stones, but then he made some pretty good invasions and my “influence” turned into a weak group and I got toasted. Fourth round was nasty, I got Wojciech Wieczorek and the game went terribly wrong. He cut my good shape and it worked for him, I almost died. The rest of the game was under his control, and despite me getting a few points here and there I was still 10 points short. I could have let him lose on time though, because his time run out, but I thought it would be unfair because the ing clocks weren’t talking at all (maybe I should have let him lose though, he didn’t show much appreciation for me allowing him to continue (but maybe that’s just my feeling)). Fifth round with Fisz (aka Kamil Chwedyna), he made a lot of influence, I made two dead groups. There was a lot of fighting… to make the long story short, part of his “influence” died in the end. Sixth round with Leszek Soldan started with a fight, which I managed quite well in the beginning but collapsed later when I let him attack me too much.

The tournament was very nicely organized except of one thing – pairing. The pairing was done as bad as possible: in the first round, two strongest players played with each other (which is a very serious mistake) and Tibor Pocsai played with Rita Pocsai (that would be easy to avoid, at least in the first round). Some people were paired up several times (and never down), someone said it was according to sos but I don’t really believe that. ;-) And the last round’s pairing was the worst possible for me (although that was only bad luck, no bad pairing), like the only one that enabled me to fall down to 9th place… which I did, by the way.

BIG thanks to vertigo for the chinese fan he brought me and for organizing the great tournament, to Krzystof Giedrojc for giving me the book “graj jak shodan” (“play like a shodan”) to improve my Polish (juz to jest lepsze? :blush:), to Venca Kijonka for letting me stay at his home when I couldn’t get back home, to Tibor Pocsai for driving me safely, to mama Pocsai for taking care about me as if I was her son, to Ondrej Silt and Rita Pocsai for being such a perfect couple (and to Ondrej for helping me to arrange everything and enlightening me with stories (not only) from Japan), to kotasia and all the others who persuaded me to go to Polish Summer Go School.

I just found out that there are tournaments in rock, paper, scissors. Not only that, they have various official organizations and arrange tournaments (there’s also some not small prize money), there are many strategies, some of which I find incredibly funny (please read the descriptions of the gambits carefully, I almost fell of my chair o_O).

There is also a computer rock, paper, scissors championship, which is much more interesting, but I feel waaay too tired now :yawn: so I leave the rest to curious readers (yeah, my readers are actually more lazy than curious, but whatever…)