Chess Blunder

| | General

Good grief. What a blunder. I was playing a 12 minute game of chess against a human opponent on playchess.com and got to the following position –

Chess051220062.png

I was playing white and it was my move. I had about 3 minutes on my clock and my opponent had about 1.5 minutes. So no time pressure. So what did I play?

49. b7??

Really stupid move or what? Can you see why? Black can checkmate in a single move with 49 … Ng2#. Here is the position at the end:

Chess02122006_22.png

I couldn’t believe it 🙁 I should have played 49. Rxf4 Kxf4 50. Kxe2 and then advanced the pawn on the b-file to Queen it. More study required I think to spot obvious mating positions. Here is the full game if anyone is interested:

[Event “Rated game, 12m + 0s”]
[Site “Beginners”]
[Date “2006.12.05”]
[White “Canicula”]
[Black “Coriolis”]
[Result “0-1”]
[WhiteElo “1251”]
[BlackElo “1283”]
[ECO “C42”]
[Annotator “Robinson,Ian”]

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. d3 Be7 5. Be2 O-O 6. Be3 Nc6 7. O-O Be6 8. Ng5
d5 9. f3 d4 10. Nxe6 fxe6 11. Bg5 dxc3 12. bxc3 b5 13. d4 b4 14. c4 exd4 15. e5
Nd7 16. Bxe7 Qxe7 17. f4 Rf7 18. Bh5 g6 19. Bf3 Rxf4 20. Qd2 Raf8 21. Bxc6 Nxe5
22. Rxf4 Nxc4 23. Rxf8+ Qxf8 24. Qf2 Ne5 25. Qxf8+ Kxf8 26. Be4 c5 27. Re1 Kf7
28. h4 c4 29. h5 b3 30. axb3 cxb3 31. cxb3 d3 32. Kf2 Ng4+ 33. Kf3 gxh5 34.
Bxh7 Kf6 35. Ra1 Ke5 36. Bxd3 Kd4 37. Bc4 e5 38. Rxa7 e4+ 39. Ke2 Ne3 40. Bf7
Nxg2 41. Bxh5 Nf4+ 42. Kd2 e3+ 43. Ke1 Nxh5 44. Rd7+ Ke4 45. b4 Nf4 46. b5 e2
47. b6 Kf3 48. Rf7 Ke3 49. b7 Ng2# 0-1

BTW the chess boards above are taken from the excellent Sigma Chess.

UPDATE: It’s not all doom and gloom. I won my most recent game –

[Event “Rated game, 8m + 0s”]
[Site “Beginners”]
[Date “2006.12.05”]
[White “Canicula”]
[Black “G¸nni”]
[Result “1-0”]
[WhiteElo “1169”]
[BlackElo “1378”]
[ECO “B06”]
[Annotator “Robinson,Ian”]

1. e4 g6 2. Nf3 Bg7 3. Nc3 Nc6 4. Bd3 d6 5. O-O Bxc3 6. bxc3 e5 7. Bb2 Bg4 8.
Bc4 Qd7 9. d4 exd4 10. cxd4 Bxf3 11. Qxf3 Nxd4 12. Bxd4 O-O-O 13. Bxh8 Ne7 14.
Qxf7 Rxh8 15. Qe6 b6 16. Qxd7+ Kxd7 17. Rae1 Rf8 18. f3 Rf4 19. g3 Rf6 20. f4
c6 21. g4 b5 22. Bd3 a6 23. g5 Rf7 24. f5 gxf5 25. exf5 Nd5 26. g6 hxg6 27.
fxg6 Rg7 28. Rf7+ Rxf7 29. gxf7 1-0

Batten down the hatches

| | Science

Yikes. Looks like it might be a bit windy over the British Isles this weekend. The picture below is the Atlantic pressure chart for Sunday 3rd at noon. I love sitting in a nice warm house listening to the wind howling. It’s certainly better than being out in it. I remember being out out fishing in a boat in the Irish Sea off Ardglass Harbour one day in a gale. It was a reasonably big boat. Well made. Sturdy. The waves were bigger than it was. It was weird. When in a trough between waves there was a wall of water for 360o around the boat. All you could see was water, sky and extremely harassed gulls! I think going out that day was probably a mistake.

AtPressure03122006.png

A new pleasure

| | General

With apologies to Douglas Adams for nicking the line uttered when Arthur Dent uses his bottle of Retsina to gain access to the flying perpetual party in HHGTTG. But I discovered a new pleasure tonight. Thatchers Coxs Single Varietal cider. It’s really tangy and crisp. Delicious chilled and over heaps of ice. Even better, they sell it in a Tesco store I pass on the way home from work. I bought one a few days ago to taste it. I’ll be getting more 🙂

ThatchersCoxCider.jpg

Yearly check-up done

| | Uncategorized

I had my yearly TC check-up today. Is it really a year since the last one? Had the usual physical exam and a chest x-ray. Assuming the x-ray is clear, and it should be, I’ll have another exam same time next year.

Happy days 🙂

Site update

| | General

You may have noticed that I’ve changed the theme in use by WordPress for the Soapbox. The new one is based on Man~ja. I want to change the colours of the entry headers to blue and the colours of the links in posts to a different colour as well. I’d also like to change the Posted by… text to a different colour as well. However no matter what changes I make to the style.css file the colours won’t change. I’ll sort it out later! I like the new theme. I think it is cleaner than the previous one. A few more tweaks and I’ll be happy.

UPDATE: Looks like the colour changes I made to the CSS file are working today. I think the blue is a bit bright so I’ve changed it to be Dark Blue (#00008B). I think the style sheet must be getting cached somewhere between me and the Gradwell servers. So I’ll see tomorrow, after the cache has expired, how the new colours look.

Campaigning for dark skies…

| | Science, Technology

Saw this on Brian May’s Soapbox. New initiative to try and preserve dark skies at night so that people can see and appreciate the stars, nebulae and other celestial objects. At present the amount of light that goes up into the sky from lights is ridiculous. Just take a look at the pictures of cities, or indeed the Earth from space, at night. Or look out the window from a plane when landing in a city at night. Lots of light from street lamps, building lights, etc. goes up into the sky. Surely if nothing else this is a waste of electricity? If street lights had mirrored reflective hoods to project all the light downwards would this not allow a reduction in the amount of energy required to light a location and also reduce the amount of light that was wasted and allowed to escape upwards? Surely in these times of awareness of climate change and the impact of power generation on the CO2 emissions this is the perfect time to address the light pollution issue as well?

Testing MacJournal again

| | General

I’m having another look at MacJournal to see if it’ll work as my personal diary tool and also as a blog editing tool. I’m writing this entry using v4.1d4, which is the latest available development build from Dan Schimpf. The editor is nice. Probably a bit better than ecto form a Macintosh GUI perspective.

I was able to download all 190 entries from my Soapbox okay after pointing it at the base URL. When I tried this in a previous version it only downloaded a subset of them. Not sure if that was as result of something I did wrong or the program itself.

In theory I should be able to use this one program to compose and store both personal entries and public entries for the Soapbox. Anyone want to take bets on how long it’ll be before a private entry gets posted here 🙂

Here is a screen grab of this entry being composed in MacJournal. If picture uploading is working then you’ll be able to see it. If not I’ll need to do some more tweaking!

MacJournalSmall.jpg
Click on picture for larger view

Update: Obviously pictures are being scaled to fit the column width. Have to fix that. Three options:

        • Find out if MacJournal can mimic the behaviour of ecto. The latter will include a thumbnail of the image in the post and will display the image in a new window when it’s double clicked. This would be my preference for a fix.
        • Amend the CSS templates for the WordPress theme to stop images being scaled. If anyone knows how to do this post in the comments.
        • Change the WordPress scheme to not use a single centred column. Might be time to go to a normal full window width theme anyway.

Update 2: The images are okay in the RSS feed from the site. Which is how everyone reads blogs anyway! Right?

Update 3: I’ve edited the picture to make it a thumbnail with a link to the larger version.

New Job!!

| | General, Science, Technology

I’m moving to a new job!! If you look at the side bar it says that I’m employed as an IT Consultant by a UK based IT services company. I live in Belfast, UK, and work mainly in Northern Ireland. Well that’ll soon have to change to something like I’m employed as a Senior Solutions Architect by a UK based IT services company. I live in Belfast, UK, am based there but my work is focused on the education sector in England.

I’m moving sideways in the company I work for into the Managed Services Education section that delivers solutions for the Building Schools for the Future project. The new job will be helping to deliver environments and solutions to the education sector. It involves using technologies to create flexible learning environments, both physical and virtual, so that students can learn at their own pace, access lesson materials when not able to attend lessons (for whatever reason), adopt new technology to enhance learning (podcasts, digital media etc.).

I’m really looking forward to it. It’ll involve finding out how people learn. How the environment they are learning in influences this. How technology can help keep students interested and make them want to learn. Obviously the job will involve more than that, but I’ll learn that as I go along. I’ll transfer to the new role in January. Can’t wait.

Michael Palin – Diaries 1969-1979 The Python Years

| | General

Finished reading Michael Palin’s excellent Diaries 1969-1979 The Python Years yesterday. I loved it. It gives an inside view (abridged admittedly) of the birth of Python, the ups and downs and tensions within the group and the transition from the TV series to the films of the 1970’s. Palin’s thoughts on the Ripping Yarns TV series are very welcome as well. All in all a wonderful read. I note that on 12th July 1979 petrol hit £1 per gallon. It nearly hit that per litre a few months ago! I hope there will be another volume. I want to read about the making of the film Brazil, the making of the Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (I’m sure there where some tensions in that process), although the initial writing for the 4th Python film just makes an appearance towards the end of 1979 in this volume. Reading some of the entries I wondered how so many activities were crammed into some days. As a counterpoint to some of the hectic days we also read of Palin’s family life and more normal activities. I really enjoyed it.

David Gerrold wrote in his book World’s of Wonder that “…your first million words are for practice. They don’t count.” Meaning that to be a writer you have to write a lot of words. Like any activity you get better with practise. Want to play the guitar? Learn chords and practise. Want to be a good bowler in cricket? Get in the nets and bowl. Want to be a writer. Write lots of words, sentences, articles and stories. Practise, practise, practise. Good advice from Mr. Gerrold I reckon. I started a diary of sorts myself whilst reading Palin’s book. Mainly in response to Gerrold’s maxim on writing, rather than hoping the diary will be of any interest to anyone. No one will see it until i croak anyway! On a technical note I’m using the Journal feature of SOHO Notes as the place where I write and store my daily scribbling. I have a few articles and other ideas that I want to write and the more writing I do the better I’ll get at it!

Hubble Space Telescope top 100 images

| | Science

Hubble has returned many stunning images in its lifetime. Hopefully now that NASA plan to send another service mission to replace faulty parts and install updated instruments it’ll continue to provide images for a few years more. There is a collection of the top 100 Hubble Space Telescope Images at the spacetelescope.org site.

The God Delusion – 6 reprints already!

| | Uncategorized

Wow. It seems that Richard Dawkins’ new book has been reprinted 6 times since it was release in September. it’s selling like hotcakes. A quote from the publisher:

Publishing Director Sally Gaminara, who commissioned the book for Bantam Press, said she had always thought the book would be a success. She said: “We have had the book reprinted six times and it was only published at the end of September. That’s an awful lot for a hardback book. I always have high hopes for my books and always tipped this book to sell well since the day I read the manuscript and thought it was absolutely wonderful. The book is very much of its time, with an increasing amount of conflict over religion. I do see this book on top of the bestseller list at Christmas. It is an ideal present — how many people celebrate Christmas for religious reasons?

Happy days.

Faith schools

| | Uncategorized

So the Government are going to bring forward legislation that will require faith schools [1] to take 25% of their pupils from other faiths and none. This is a good first step as long as those who are not from the faith ethos of the school are not forced to take part in religious and semi-religious activities. There should not be prayers etc. at the end of assemblies without giving everyone (including those whose parents are of the faith of the school) an opportunity to leave the room. It looks like only new schools will have to follow the rules if they are implemented. Why can it not apply to existing faith schools? Surely if the concept is valid for new schools then existing schools could implement it as they take in new pupils each year. Then over a few years the existing schools would be operating under the same rules as new ones.

And why 25%? Why not 50%? If the school is taking state funding then it should be open to all pupils irrespective of their faith. I’d like to see schools that took pupils based on there academic ability and/or proximity to the school. However in the real world this is unlikely to happen for some time given the penetration of faith schools. But 50% of other or no faith seems like a good compromise to me.

[1] Aren’t faith schools a daft concept in the first place. They should be schools, not places where parents belief systems can be forced on children. Teach tham about all religions and none and then let them make up their own minds.

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