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Chess...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
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And being prompted by my brother to play chess online I accept the offer and promptly lose 3 games. Simultaneously.
Which rather wounds my pride, although to be fair I haven't particularly been paying attention.
But it annoys me to the extent that I begin working on my game.
Now, my game, it's a combination of mistakes, blunders, errors, all of them, taken together and shaken up, and if ever I've won a game it's been a result of hard searching for a less worthy opponent.
Time to change that. I've got to up my ante.
So I play quick games vs the computer, my lightening quick moves showing me error after error...and there are a lot of errors.
Games, it would seem, are the long way around to learning this. I mean, it takes 10 minutes a game only to realize Blunder one, two, three in that I'm going to lose, and this is not boosting my ego. But it does explain the losses.
So I'm onto a different learning tack - that of the Chess Puzzles.
And this has vastly improved my game (not to good, just better).
I'll explain it like this. IN a game you're invested in the narrative, you're building up a defense, offensive strategy, and it frequently blinds you to what's going on everywhere else on the board. Whereas the puzzles, you don't have any investment, you simply have to see the board for what it is, and make the best move.
That is not always apparent, and there's been a couple of the puzzles where I would probably contest the will of the judges, but my contesting this is a little like ... well, I know there are many better players, and so maybe I'll just solve the puzzles as best I can and hope that the "reasons" or logic becomes clear to me as I go on.
I do enough puzzles, back to the games with my brother. Now, 6 games in a row I've won, a very slight effort at sharpening my skills has vastly improved the outcomes.
Only he's stopped asking me to play chess...
Probably he's working on his skills...
Starbucks
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 612
And this I noticed, on my trip to the city, the new tip function on the POS systems in Starbucks.
While for the longest time they wouldn't accept tips (you had to have cash for the tip jar), they now have a tip function. And, instead of prompting you with a percentage % or dollar $ amount, it actually suggests a minimal tip of $1.00.
This, for a coffee, boy oh boy they're making up for lost time.
Anyways, late stage capitalism, when the customer is expected to make up the shortfall in every employees wages, and - really - I'm all for tipping, I tip a dollar on coffee anyways, but to make it the minimal expectation, this is predatory...
Too Good To Be True - The Colossal books of Urban Legends - Jan Harold Brunvand
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
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This was a long read, although easy.
A formidable tome of contemporary Urban Legends, thorough, told very much in the breathless style of the invariable narrator of such bollocks.
While very definitely not a fan of the style, a few things I did note:
That the legend often preceded the atrocity, not as a result; incidents for example of Wartime Atrocities in WWI often ascribed to the enemy (but didn't take place) were later enacted in the second War, and did in fact happen.
That reality invariably trumps fiction, overreaches it even, and I recognize many of the legends from headlines, (the reality of the incident is not the point, the point being that they are over-repeated, an attempt to personalize extraordinary events, and whereas an odd thing might happen once there's no way it's happened as often as it's been told).
And that the news - specifically Fox and Reuters, and Paul Harvey ("The Rest of the Story) - have frequently fallen for them, a good headline beating the most remedial of fact checking. Although to be fair most news agencies and media outlets have fallen into the "no fact checking" bracket at some time or another.
Anyways, I didn't enjoy this nearly as much as I thought, and time would have been better spent on Snopes.
Black Sand, Upper Salmo River
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Images
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This, using my USB Microscope to examine the concentrates, the black triangular crystals have me puzzled, the clear - quartz, green - peridot, the rest?
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