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.

In Polish, “piwnica” means cellar, in Czech it would be an archaic term for a pub (with a bit different spelling).

Months are even trickier: April is “duben” in Czech and “kwiecień” in Polish. May is “květen” in Czech and “Maj” in Polish (to make it even more confusing you can use “Maj” for April in Czech as well). So now you can imagine the confusion when we were talking about a go tournament and mentioning that it will be in “kwiecień”…

As I was in a train heading to Poland there was rather largish group of young people. At one station they got out, but one girl somehow (dunno why & how) got stuck inside. As the train began to accelerate, she has gone totally crazy, shouting and screaming. Then somehow conductor entered the scene, being the ideal target of the mad girl. He was trying to explain her that he really can’t stop the whole train just because she didn’t get out in time (the train was accelerating all the time), but she was really maniacal, calling him names, explaining that she left the rest of her group who are waiting for another train that will leave in 15 minutes, etc. In the end, to the great surprise of all the other people, the train began to slow down… So, if you ever get into similar situation, just pretend you’ve gone crazy :-)

PS: Uhm, yeah, I know I often tell people not to write everything into one paragraph…

PPS: The timestmp is cheated, it is 6th february already, but 4th february is when I should have written this :-P

Today it returned, after more than half a year without problems. I noticed several symptoms and it freaked me like hell.

For those of you who do not know, RSI is Repetitive Strain Injury, it is usually caused by sitting by the comp 15 hours a day ;-).

I first learnt about it a year ago or so, and in the beginning of the summer I noticed that I have several of symptoms (mostly uneasy feeling in fingers, but sometimes also in arms). Luckily we went to Corsica then and all got okay. Then I almost forgot and only remembered today. My mistake (apart from sitting by the comp all the time) was that I didn’t keep my fingers warm which is not good for ankles. Well, some hot water and ten minutes rest and all seems okay, but I am still freaked and I am afraid to take mouse in my hand (as that is much worse than keyboard because it fixes the hand in single position).

Well, my point: when you feel tired from the computer, have a rest at least for a while. It helps to have breaks regularly (but not once in five hours as I do ;-)). Well, enough of writing, that only makes it worse. :-)