I’ve just returned from six hours long go playing session. It was in a tea-room called “Chajovna” (in Brno, Dominikánské náměstí 6/7) and I really liked it. I haven’t been going to Brno go club lately (for several years :-)), but I think I will now start going to Chajovna more often (I’d even dare to say regularly, but that seems a bit too binding ;-)).

Most of go playing people there are beginners, but there seem to be a few single kyuish people and hopefully my presence will also bring in some more serious players. :-D

Anyway, the atmosphere alone was enough to make it a very nice experience.

Huh, well, yeah, I am czech student champion.

I won all six games, but most were against kyu players, so it doesn’t really count…

I was rather lucky in game against Písa (1dan), where he managed to perfectly destroy my moyo/influence, then I beat Hezi (5dan, 2nd strongest czech player) in a crazy game where I played for influence and he played for territory (usually it is the other way around). Another game worth mentioning was against Bróňa (1kyu) whom I’ve beaten by 4 or 5 points after crushing him in the endgame (so I must had been losing before).

For the first place I won 500CZK (cca 18€) – w00t. (yeah, it barely paid travel expenses…)

Another second place on a go tournament in a short time frame, though this one wasn’t such a succes as I was theoretically strongest there (according to the Go rating). But in fact I was rather lucky in some of my games.

The tournament was very nice, with a small and very cheap bar just at the playing place and many pubs near. One could even watch films in the evening or drink vodka with people from Poland :-)

Kudos to Janek for winning the tournament without a single loss and to Tomik for finally getting 1d.

I just finished about half an hour long session of shooting/killing/getting killed. Cube is wonderful FPS (First Person Shooter) written by Aardappel. It is small (30MB but 25MB is just maps ;-)), free and runs smoothly on my old comp even in 1280x1024.

The game is very fast paced, there isn’t much tactic involved, just take the opponents down. :-) I’d invite some additional features like different colours for players and team game and CTF (Capture The Flag), but it seems that the creator isn’t going to implement it (he is not really interested in gaming… quite strange).

Anyway the game is very easy to handle and completely addictive. :-)

Some people comment spam on blogs. There are quite a lot of them. Maybe it would be more appropriate to say that there are still people who actually don’t comment spam…

Most of the comment spam is pretty obvious – usually dozens of pr0n, pills or casino links stuffed in a single post. If the maintainer cares at least a bit, it is pretty easy to get rid of this kind of spam.

However, I’ve recently seen something much more clever. There was a normal comment below a blog post, signed by “Cycate Kobiety”. Even with my poor knowledge of Polish I felt this wasn’t the actual name of the poster. With some help from a dictionary (and also by actually having a look at the site ;-)) I concluded that it means something like “busty girls”. That is truely ingenious. The American owner who barely knows where Poland is (no offence), won’t think there is anything weird about the name “Cycate Kobiety” and will just let it go.

People who spam like this don’t even harm maintainer or readers. And if the comment is particulary enlightening it can even be beneficial for the blogger and his readership.

Now I just hope I won’t rank in SERPs for “cycate kobiety”, that would be awkward ;-)

“I live my life one stone at a time; for that one stone, nothing else matters, not my school, not the disgusting world.”

I thought that this quote just deserved a special post. I found it in KGS’ user info of suilki.

The more I read it the more I like it. Any explanation seems to be just twaddle, you have to feel the same way to understand it.

Googlebombing is getting a certain webpage to the top results of google search just by anchor text in links to it (the page doesn’t have to contain the words (in fact when we talk about googlebomb it shouldn’t contain them at all)). The most well-known googlebomb is search for words miserable failure returning biography of George W. Bush on the first place. Google responded to people who complained about this being unfair.

A friend of mine incidentally googlebombed himself with the word operanda. He accidentally put his “secret” nick into anchor text of a link to his homepage on a PR4 page (which is full of links so this one shouldn’t have much weight). This link alone was enough to make his homepage rank first out of about 600 results (even though all of them contain the word, some even multiple times).

Old people like history. Virtually all of them. Even people who were more interested in technology all their life begin to read books about history and talk about history as they are getting old.

Is it because they no longer care about future? Or is it because old people like sure things and are hesitant to even slightly risk and history makes them feel somehow more comfortable in this way? I really don’t know.

Old people are also generally obsessed with knowledge and don’t really care about cleverness. That makes me feel a bit uneasy as I don’t want to be like that when I get old. Knowledge is always easy to find on the net (and useless to have in your head when you are by the comp connected to the net :-)), however, cleverness is something you have to develop actively by pursuing difficult mental tasks (something old people seem to appreciate much less than knowing when some nobel prize winner was born).

And old people are usually unable to learn anything, which is very sad but rather understandable (but I know some old people who aren’t like that, so I guess that if one tries hard…). But I still can’t understand why my grandma isn’t able to do almost any task with her mobile phone, I tried to explain her hundred times that the two keys just next to display have the function that is currently pictured on the display just above them, but she isn’t able to see the connection (although for anyone younger than 40 this is pretty intuitive even without explaining). She always asks me which button she has to press when she wants to delete the text message – and when I say that I don’t know, that I always have to read the question and see answers on the display (at this point I always repeat that the answers are matching keys just below them), she always seems very surprised. This really drives me mad after calmly explaining it many times.

Guess I should read what I write before posting it, and generally pay more attention to quality than quantity, but I don’t feel like doing it, sorry. (after all it is my blog and I write it because I want to, and you read it voluntarily (I hope) so you can’t really complain ;-))

Finally a good result on a go tournament after very long time :)

It started with tough game against Pavel Sklenak, who played great endgame and I barely survived by 1.5 points. Second game was a huge uncontrollable fight and my opponent resigned because he didn’t see one variation which led to very playable result for him. In the third round I ran into Ondrej ‘AGASSI’ Silt, that was fast and clear, it is enough to only make a relatively small mistake and you are out of game (and I made more than one small mistake ;-)).

Fourth game, sunday morning, I made some slips and my opponent was suddenly chasing my group while making loads of points in the center. Then I had to play rather risky but in the end I entered his center territory from three sides. Last round brought me Jan Hora, strongest 5dan, Czech player #2. The game started rather well for him, but not that bad for me. Just as he entered byoyomi he made a very violent fight, and as I had 25 minutes remaining I was at a huge advantage (theoretically, that is ;-)). During the fight we both had several half dead half alive groups that were chasing each other, it ended in a ko and as he didn’t have much time he made a stupid threat which enabled me to win the ko and gain comfortable lead. The grand finale was when part of my group got cut of and had to fight through a semeai. Lucky me – won by one liberty. :-P

As a side note, my ex-gf’s brand new bf was wearing his shirt half unbuttoned – how über-cool dude he is!

Yay! Today when I woke up I saw a new message on littlegolem – dots.ch.6.3.4 finished. And to my surprise I finished second, which means advancing to 7.2.x, that’s pretty neat considering my poor knowledge of this wonderful game.

As a side note, I am not sure whether I explained clearly what all the numbers mean, but it is indeed very simple – game . tournament_type . x-th tournament . league . group

Well, if that still isn’t clear dots.ch.6.3.4 is dots championship, sixth one, third league, fourth group of the third league (there is one group in the first league, two in second league, four in third league, eight in fourth league, etc., you get the idea :))