I randomly came across one of my old journal entries while searching for something else online. (It seems I still don't use google as a verb.) I actually made it to a UCC meet last week. The 5th annual tournament is coming up and I've been getting back into the habit of playing - a combination of turn based online games and weekly local ones. Cobh meetings are happening fairly regularly now, with two other solid attendees, one or two irregulars, one returning soon™, and one potential new player this week.

I'm trying to play differently, to change my style to embrace attacking. It feels quite uncomfortable; I'd much rather be playing moves I consider solid. But I think there is something to be learned, so I'll continue to lose games while i try to find whatever it is I'm looking for. It previously felt like I had hit a wall at about 9k EGF. Not that this current experiment is absolutely necessary, as I'm sure I would have improved if I actually studied, reviewed games diligently, etc. but this is an interesting change of pace. If I make any progress, I'll see how I get on in the tourney as 8k.

nabnerd and I started tipping away at the vaguest outline of a framework for a Go engine over the summer. I've been playing on KGS a little this week and decided to try setting up a bot last night.

For reference, I used this old guide for windows. I was going to keep the steps in parallel to those listed there but realized that it meanders needlessly, even by my verbose standards…

( the guide )

More notes relating this post.

( read )

tycondrius  recently gave me an old G4, which has me revisiting some kind of network storage solution. This led me to dig out some old notes that I never got around to posting for some reason. I figured that I'd get these out of the way before drafting one for the new machine...

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16:39 up 301 days, 23:21, 2 users, load averages: 0.24 0.29 0.29
Time to update and reboot...

Making a slow return to watching anime. I have some old stuff I want to catch up on, but until I have time to dig around and see how much that is, I've started checking out the current season.

Working!!
A slice of life drama style series with an eclectic cast of characters. Only 2 episodes in but it doesn't look like there will much in the way of plot; it's all about character interaction atm.

katanagatari
The rather simplistic designs for this almost put me off, but I plan to give it an episode or two and see what they can do with it.

High School of the Dead
I read a few volumes of the manga for this way back and found it quite amusing. Thought it might be too off-the-wall to make an anime but I should have know better.

Got a bit of reading done last night while copying stuff from the dying drive. Of note on the Go front was one (now abandoned) blog about two months spent learning Weiqi in China. It's balanced in that it gives accounts of both how the two authors lived as well as how their game progressed, complete with photos and game files.

With the opening being the weakest part of my game, an extract from one of the first entries caught me: ... play in the biggest spaces in the opening, which are easily determined by counting how many lines are between the stones. However, he warned us that we should play urgent moves first. To determine which moves are urgent, we should use 3 criteria: 1. life or death of a group; 2. if your opponent's next move in an area would make the stones you've already played there useless; 3. the points (usually keimas) where you can expand your area while reducing your opponent's.

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Currently recovering batches of folders from a dying 750gb drive. Only reason I'm posting here really, though I have been meaning to get back into the habit for a while now. Can't really concentrate on anything else as I don't want to leave the drive idle in case if locks up again and the folders are random sizes, giving me anything between a few tens of seconds and several minutes between drag-and-drops.

Referring back to my previous entry, I never did do anything productive with the G3, though I think I have a few notes somewhere that I should post. Cotton and I have settled in together ^^ I'm still the GM of BoL. Still working at the same small company, with more free time but also more get done in that time.

Stepping back another post, I don't think I've made any progress in Go. Rather, I've been clawing back my old ratings on OGS and DGS for the last few months. Started playing in Cork again recently now that weekly meetings have resumed. Prior to that, my only plays on a real board in the last year have been at the second 2009 UCC Tournament back in November and around New Year's against a player in Cobh who has apparently been living here for 'years' without knowing there were other Go players in the area.

Hmm, about 20% done on that drive. Looks like it's going to take a significant portion of the evening. At least there's nothing of dire importance on there. Still, it would take me a lo-ong time to piece things back together, so the more I can recover, the better.

Random word for this post: Whargarbl (also wharrgarbl)

Over half a year since my last post here. No, I haven't gone private, just had better things to be doing ^^ The only reason I'm updating now is because I recently got an old beige G3 from someone and decided to see whether it would do as a file server. No, I never got around to finishing that either. Like I said, better things...

I guess I should refer back to this post and mention that things did in fact go really well. And after having a hell of a lot of travel back and forth between the two countries on both our parts, Cotton will be moving here to stay in about a month and a half.

CAN. NOT. WAIT. =^^=

On a side note, at some point this year I ended up as GM for the WoW guild I play in on Shadowsong EU - Blades of Light. Besides a certain amount of dealing with people, since Cotton and I spend a lot of our online time on that server, running it hasn't been to tasking.

While I have made a post about this over on Cork Go, I wanted to make a few notes here in case I want to refer back to check my progress later this year. At the first one, back in Jan 2008, I entered as 10k and won a single of my four games. This time around, I entered as 9k and won 2 of 5. Statistically, this is an improvement. I actually felt like I had a slightly better grip of what was happening on the board during these games too, though I still made mistakes. So from a year of mostly turn-based online play, it seems I have improved a little. I think my rank is 8-9k EGF, since the games I won were both against 9 kyu players, and those I lost were against 3k-7k.

The remainder of the Cobh contingent made a poor showing (i.e. none at all). There were various lame excuses given for this lack of presence (work, death, the usual).

Speaking of lame excuses, I really need to make an effort to attend the UCC club a few times this year. It was good to play on a real board against opponents I'd never met before, as well as those I had not talked to in a while.