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 :))

I used to have 240 hours on littlegolem for all my games all the time (they use fischer time there). That is not true anymore, now I try not to get under 50 hours (well, not really succesful). This is very bad attitude, I just press “skip” all the time being too lazy to think about what to play…

On a more positive note I will finish second in twixt.ch.11.2.2, which means advancing to 12.1.1 – first league again… w00t…

Now that I look at it I’ve already played first twixt league five times – that’s quite a lot, also noticed that I’ve played twixt for almost two years… gosh, I am getting old. :-(

It also seems I will win go9.ch.12.2.2, but considering the competition, that is not much of a success…

Anyways, I’d better go and think about some of my games as the time is ticking…

When I first entered the personal agency’s office I noticed it was quite luxurious, they have to get a lot of money from their clients…

I was there on time and had to wait for about ten minutes till the interview. The girl was really nice and friendly, but I guess that is her job. When she asked me about wage and I said 20k czk, she concluded that it was too much for someone without experience. Yeah, I knew that, but if I said less than the offer I would only get ripped off, so we ended on minimum 16k czk. I didn’t really want to settle on anything but she almost forced me to.
I think her english was worse than mine, which surprised me. Well, she said that my english was okay but that my linux knowledge wasn’t good enough for the job. That’s ridiculous. She heard me talking english, but she has no idea about my knowledge of linux, only what I told her about it (and I can imagine people knowing next to nothing about linux who would say that they are experts). So in the end she said that my linux knowledge might be okay but my serious lack of experience in documentation creation makes me unsuitable for the place, that it would require working independently and that they want to hire someone experienced in documentation creation or at least publication. Bah, maybe I shouldn’t have told her that I know her job is making my wage as low as possible… That prolly made her angry…

Ok, cya… gotta go work on pages & links -> SERPs -> visitors -> profit! :-)

Fonts/typefaces are more part of our lifes than most of you think, they are virtually everywhere.

Today I was again deciding which fonts to use as my system fonts (on LCD), it is very difficult to choose wisely, so here are my top candidates: FreeSans (I like it), Arial (well, Microoftish, butnotthatbad, actuallyIuseditforquitealongtime), Verdana(alsoM, takes quite a lot of space but reads very nicely) and Gentium. Let me say more about the last one, as I started to really like it:

Gentium is kind of half-serif font (not really serif and not really sans-serif) which is very nice to look at, it also renders well on my screen. It is rather dynamic yet very well readable, and there is a reason Gentium is called “typeface for nations” – there is almost any char you could think of. Well, in case that wasn’t enough, have a look at a screenshot:

Nice, ain’t it? So that’s what I use in almost all applications now as a default font.

Then I’d like to mention terminus, that is the monospaced font. Suitable for day-long sessions in front of screen (believe me, I have tested it many times). I was very annoyed with Courier (New), Fixedsys and similar crappy fonts as their readability is awful. On the other hand terminus has wonderful readability and I got addicted to it very quickly. Here goes the screenshot:

Oh yeah, and vim rocks: no useless menus, only the info bar at the bottom… simple yet powerful :)

That’s about it, sorry for rather longish post (which should have been divided into two or three, I know) and for it being written in a hurry (working hard on a secret project ;-)).

PS: Some things I forgot: Terminus is a bitmap font, which is one of the reasons its readability is so good. It also contains all characters I need to use, and lastly, compare how mmmmm and iiiii has same width while it is both easy to read:

After the lunch I sat down and wrote a short CV, I sent it somewhere prepared to wait for the ten days after which no response means rejection. What a surprise when an hour later my cell phone rang (wtf? someone calling me on my cell phone? that hasn’t happened for ages…). I got asked several questions and the woman even tested my l33t 3ngli5h skillz. After rather longish talk she told me to turn up for an interview on wednesday… okay, nothing to lose, I will try :)

Now one thing that puzzled me a bit – I got asked what wage I’d expect… Well, to be sincere I have no expectations, but as her job is to make my wage as low as possible, I am going to try to make it a bit harder for her :)

Well, almost…

So now I have it up & running, good ol’ KGS World Map now hosted by tasuki. :)

But, there is a serious problem with database encoding – I was not able to recognize it. So here is request for help, with some additional info:

Å (A with circle, as in Århus) is dec 313 (or hex 0139)

à (a with reversed accent) is dec 341 (hex 0155)

è (e with reversed accent) is dec 269 (hex 010d)

And it is even a bit trickier than just that as some characters are escaped, for example ů is written as ů

Well, that’s about it, whoever helps me gets a beer :)

PS: I wonder whether WordPress screwes the special characters I wrote here…

It started like “Oh, there will be many people there!”, but then, eh…

Well, the weather was nice enough, snow & temperature also ok, the only problems being lack of machine made trails and Drc’s headache (which made us leave sooner than we initially planned).

…or you could say inferior beginning :)

I usually start very bad in board games, be it go, TwixT or amazons (in hex, chess and dots&boxes I don’t know at all, so it is probably even worse ;-)), but later on I often surprisingly catch up. I recently managed to win so many games I considered lost that it really surprised me (I even seem to have a good chance of getting second place in second TwixT league of 11th TwixT championship (which would mean returning to the first league)).

I seem to have similar problems in beginning stages of go and amazons (prolly as the games are surprisingly similar), I take sure points, but too few of them. Maybe it has to do with my mind and general approach to things – I prefer to take less and to have it sure than to take more and risk, I hate risking. But my cowardish approach pays off in the middle game and even more so in the endgame.

Someone once told me that I play much better go when I play for influence, well, I usually only do that in handicap games, since there I seem to be so much behind from the beginning that it calls for something weird. I hope to try it on a tournament soon, since I have virtually nothing to lose now (I have fallen about as low as possible after that Polish tournament (oooh, didn’t tell you about that? …and I will not tell you :-P)).

This post evolved kind of chaotically while doing several other things, so please forgive me if there are many errors and too few ideas. I am also pretty tired… and tomorrow – cross country skiing – yay. Good night.