After my arrival to Incheon International Airport (“A WORLD BEST AIRPORT”, as they proudly write everywhere), I had to fill in and sign a few papers. Although I messed up several times, the personnel were very friendly and extremely helpful (even the security guys, unlike the security hag in Schiphol who made me throw all my stuff from my bag, and then felt the need to doublecheck my umbrella (it’s an effin umbrella, what did you expect?)).

After a while of free airport wifi, Kim-sabomnim arrived to pick me up and brought me to Hanguk Kiwon, the Korean go center, where I had the pleasure to watch woman pro-tournament. I was surprised that most participants were girls apparently younger than me. I was expecting them to be extremely skillful players, but I was still completely taken aback by their complete and utter concentration combined with calmness. Also, some of them were very pretty (yes I took photos, yes they will be online, just you wait).

To me, Korea is full of contrasts. A lot of stuff is simply the other way around. All the Koreans drive Jaguars, SUVs and business-class cars. It never ceases to amaze me to see a farmer living in a small, falling-apart hut, next to which his brand new hyunday genesis is parked. Which leads me to accomodation…

There are no family houses in Korea (actually, that is a mild exaggeration, as in the villages you can find family houses, because that is practically the only way to live there). But it appears to me that in Seoul, everyone lives in appartments.

Koreans work hard and they apparently enjoy their work. I haven’t seen anyone slacking off here (Czech builders spend 90% of their time just looking around).

Korea smells. I’m no sewer expert, but I think they are doing it wrong.

Korea is covered by wonderful hills/mountains, which all look about the same: spiky and steep, rising few hundred meters above the valleys, completely covered with forest. The forests are sort of normal, with similar to European vegetation, but they are a little more dense, which (in combination with the steepness of the hills) makes them practically impassable. Hiking is difficult, I haven’t found a single tourist path yet.

Korean food. I can’t say I like it. It’s basically rice + something so spicy that you can’t taste anything but fire (often, that “something” is kimchi). Although I’m not a huge fan of rice, I have to say that Asian rice can’t be even compared to European. It is simply something different – in Europe, it’s either overcooked slimy thing, or undercooked hard pieces. Here rice is slightly sticky, solid, and tastes ten times better.

Korea is mostly cheap, you can get a nicely sized dinner for about 3€.

I believe there is no single bakery in whole Korea. Chocolate is hard to find, expensive, and it sucks.

Koreans drink water, you can get free potable water practically everywhere. It’s awesome.

The weather is mostly rainy, but the last few days were surprisingly sunny. I heard that winters are real cold around here.

Stay tuned – the next post is going to be about KBC and why it is much harder to study here than you might think.

[EDIT:]
One thing I forgot to write – Koreans don’t speak English. But they speak Korean. And I speak English. So we usually understand each other pretty well.

My blog is dead. Long live my blog!

My plans have changed. I am going to Korea for three months to study go. Then I’m going back to Amsterdam, almost moneyless, to begin the new life.

You can have a look at amazing amounts of new photos.

The EGC was mostly eneventful. After a promising first week, second week was a small disaster.

I am in Amsterdam now. I love Amsterdam.

Tomorrow, I’m flying to Korea. I was urged (by several people!) to put some info from Korea here – I will try not to disappoint you.

Good night.

LSG has ended. It was too short but a lot of fun. I’ve made about two bazzilion photographs, which I’ve managed to reduce to just 212. You are invited to see pictures from LSG 2009. They are mostly portraits, as I’m still in love with my Samyang 85/1.4 and I mostly refuse to use the kit 18-55mm lens.

You might be also interested in my gallery from Warsaw go tournament, or more generally in my pictures from the year 2009.

Again, I have no time to write much more, but hopefully all the pictures will keep you interested for a while. European Go Congress is coming up shortly, so I’m not getting a break in go nor in photography… And then – well, there’s time to slack off, travel, play go, make pics, drink vodka, and have fun, and then there’s time to work. Time to work is getting close, and to my own surprise, I’m sort of looking forward to it. :)

I just finished reading Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter. I’ll wait for you to at least read the wikipedia description of the book.

Done? Ok… The main surprise for me was how many seemingly unrelated topics the book touches. Logic (Gödel), graphic art (Escher), music (Bach) to start with. But also mathematics, molecular biology, genetics, philosophy, zen buddhism, formal systems, artificial intelligence, programming, recursion and self-reference, various paradoxes, and much much more.

It is easily the best book I’ve ever read, although I can’t claim to have understood everything. If you want to borrow my copy, I’d be glad to help (the book is sort of expensive and really hard to get in Czechia).

I’ve wanted a DSLR for a while. At first, I wanted to buy an entry level camera like Canon 1000D, but after I found out that the price of a used Canon 20D (semiprofessional camera, about five years old model) was considerably lower than price of 1000D, I just had to buy it.

1000D has more megapixels, but that’s about where the advantages end. 20D is more sturdy, has better handling and controls, rubberized grip, bigger viewfinder, higher frameburst rate (5 shots per second) and better high iso performance.

I decided to buy two lenses (neither money nor space for more :-)). The first one was the kit 18-55mm with IS (maybe buying used lenses isn’t such a good idea… but hey – it was cheap). As the second one, I originally wanted to buy Canon 50mm f/1.8, but I wanted also a little longer lens (I already have 50mm covered by the kit lens) and after finding the new Samyang 85mm f/1.4 with manual focus, it was an easy decision. That said, I’m still fighting with getting the focus right (it is very very hard, as almost everything appears in focus in the viewfinder… I wish I had live view and could zoom in to get preview of focus).

I am really happy with the high iso performance. With Canon 20D at ISO 3200, the noise is somewhere between ISO 200 and 400 on my point & shoot Canon A590. Five shots per second is very useful whenever you are shooting something moving unpredictably (kittens!).

I hope I haven’t become an equipment-theoretician freak yet. :)

The good:

• Polish people are extremely hospitable and helpful.
• Either there is a very low amount of thieves or I am really lucky.
• Food (cheese, bread, yoghurt, chocolate) in shops is quite a bit cheaper here than in Czechia (though restaurants aren’t cheaper at all).
• Krakow rocks. Especially the shores of Wisła river next to the Wawel castle.

The bad:

• Car drivers drive like assholes. When you’re going by bike, they drive way closer than what I find comfortable (I thought I was used to this from Czechia, but in Poland it’s even a little worse). When you, as a walker, get to a zebra crossing, in Western Europe the drivers will do everything they can to stop and let you pass. In Czechia, they usually let you pass, but not always (not when they’re going fast and don’t want to halt). In Poland, drivers almost never stop at a zebra crossing. You can see them slowing down, so you step into the street thinking “finally a decent driver” and the next thing you know is that you are jumping back onto the pavement as the driver was just slowing down to take a right turn. Similar on red lights – just because there’s red lights shining 50 meters ahead of the passing car doesn’t mean that the driver will let you pass.
• No discounts for lunch menu in restaurants. Eating out is quite expensive compared to cooking yourself.

Yeah, both lists are incomplete. Does it look like I post this just because I haven’t posted anything in April yet?

I was thoroughly bored with the previous theme, and although I tried to revive it with the new header image, it was still bugging me. So I created a new one.

I had a draft of a new theme lying around for quite a long time, so I made few adjustments to it: made the code much longer and much less clean. But it seems to work.

Features of the new design include, but are not limited to:

• big letters in headings (big letters rock)
• even less images (none, except the two links to flickriver, smilies and images in posts)
• half-fixed-width half-fluid design (the design is fixed width, but the sidebar is fluid – works well for many different widths of browser (800px – the sidebar isn’t displayed, it’s accessible through scrolling; 1024px – sidebar in one column, 1280px – two columns, more px – more columns (it is capped at three columns)))
• emphasis on typography (lists, blockquotes, etc. are styled properly)
• lines vertically in synch (left column, middle column and sidebar)
• the old color scheme, I mostly like it and more importantly – couldn’t find a better one at the moment :)
• justified text (I’m still very unsure here – justified looks way better, but left-aligned is more readable)

Bugs of the new design include, but are not limited to:

• IE6 sometimes messes up the sidebar, not quite sure why
• Opera doesn’t keep lines in synch when there are smileys (and I thought I had the solution, sigh…)
• IE doesn’t align the comment date in the comment list (will look into that later)

Also, I spent ages dealing with various bugs in IE that caused things to disappear.
One such bug caused the sidebar not to appear (it was an absolutely positioned element next to a floated element – don’t ever do that), another sometimes caused titles to disappear (they were relatively positioned, now that they are static it seems ok, but I have no idea why). When repairing the sidebar, I had to move it in front of the actual content in the markup, which is wrong and I know it. I am sorry to all lynx/links users out there.

Bug reports, remarks and suggestions are welcome! ;-)

Almost everyone, myself included, underestimates the basics.

If you want to be an expert in any field, you need very strong basics. When you don’t know the basics, you tend to make many mistakes which are hard to get rid of. We are ambitious so we dive deep into all sorts of advanced stuff, leaving the basics for later, perhaps thinking we will somehow figure the basics out along the way. This sometimes works, but more often it doesn’t.

So, back to the basics for me! (in what, you ask? – in everything!)

I first read Desiderata in Polish, at Letnia Szkoła Go. There’s a path that leads through woods. As you walk down, every few dozen of meters you encounter a slab with one verse on it. I found it hard to understand as my Polish wasn’t as great back then, but from what I understood I knew this was something special.

I thought it was just local folklore and so was surprised to find out that Desiderata was originally written in English almost one hundred years ago by Max Ehrmann.

Desiderata is a short prose poem, possibly the most powerful text I’ve ever read. Everytime I’m feeling down, angry, hurt, upset or desperate it brings instant calmness. Here’s a quote, one of my favourites:

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
–Desiderata

I felt an urgent need to print out Desiderata and cover the walls with it. As I haven’t used TeX for quite a while (a year or more?), this was a good opportunity to recall it a bit. You can download Desiderata (pdf) for printing.

The first time I saw square thumbnails (ie. thumbnails which are downsized and cropped to square) I thought they were the best thing since sliced bread.

The advantages of square thumbnails are obvious:

• they are really easy to align and never mess up your layout
• the layout will look more uniform and better than with irregular thumbnails
• they do not show everything so they invite the visitor to view the full sized picture

But there is a downside. Square thumbnails alter the composition of the picture. In some cases, when the photographer hasn’t thought much about composition, it can often actually improve the picture. But in other cases, when the composition is deliberate and well thought out, the square thumbnail can destroy it completely.

I use square thumbnails in my photo gallery (have you seen the pictures from my recent cross-country skiing trip?). And I keep wondering whether I should change it to normal thumbnails (normal = scaled down so as to fit into a given rectangle while preserving the aspect ratio).

Do you personally prefer photo galleries with square thumbnails (cropped) or with normal ones?