my next car:

read more about it here

but seriously, have I even picked up an xbox controller in the past year?  sadly, no.

taking the test on the rainman’s site, i get…

HA — funny, I’m this guy after 3 tests (the last one even with some random answers)

On a sad note, I lost my first game at the Open tonight.  Not only did I lose, but I LOST.  I cannot say that I was beaten as much as I beat myself.  It was a short game and pretty much reflected that I broke all of the rules or decent chess.  While getting a decent position coming out of my opening, I made a critical error which allowed my opponent to take advantage of a trap.  It’s the third round of 1999 amateur team tournament all over again, except here I lasted a few more moves to 14.

Afterward, I got a good tongue lashing from Albert Chow my unofficial chess mentor.  It was well deserved, I had not developed pieces, I had made moves without thinking and played quickly when I had two hours as well as some opponent time to think.  I think the post-mortem went longer than the game, every minute a little less pleasant than losing as Al pounded all of the things I did wrong.  So what did I do wrong?  Well I can remember all of the things I did technically, but it comes down to my own mental preparation.  When I played Al before, I was loose and comfortable and played well against a master, playing now, i was tight, unfocused and lost to a D player.  A good night’s sleep, a big breakfast and round 2 at 11 AM.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY NORI
(this is a little late as his birthday is 5/10)
from  to   when he’s not being bad, he’s so cute.
I sent a bunch of pictures to Nori’s breeder and she posted them on the front page, here’s her site: www.hugapug.us

OKAY CHESSTIME!

The 16th annual Chicago Open will be this weekend and I’m playing in it.  I’ll only be playing on the 1500 and under section because of my low rating and I expect to do pretty decently, here’s the info in case anyone might want to spectate.

Friday May 25 — Monday May 28
at the Doubletree Hotel In Oakbrook
1909 Spring Road, Oak Brook, Illinois, 60523

Chess tournaments are not usually on an elimination basis, so everyone plays all seven rounds, here are the times when they start.  The games are usually very long, the time control is 40/2, SD1 which means my first 40 moves must be made within 2 hours and afterwards I’ll have an hour sudden death, there’s nothing sudden really about it (unless you’re actually playing I guess) and this comes to a total of a possible 3 hours per player (yeah that’s just time on your clock so your opponent has the same time on his) so a total possible playing time of 6 hours per game (they rarely go that long though.)
The Schedule:
Round 1    7:00 PM Friday
Round 2    11:00 AM Saturday
Round 3    6:00 PM Saturday
Round 4    11:00 AM Sunday **(I’ll be taking a 1/2 point bye to attend church)
Round 5    6:00 PM Sunday
Round 6    10:00 AM Monday
Round 7    4:30 PM Monday

Here’s a link to a useful article if you have never been a chess spectator.

Okay, some more Nori pics:

… and I suppose that while people are blogging about the bears win tonight and the superbowl to follow — by the way, I think I can still recall about 70% of the lyrics to that song, which is a tragedy since I can never actually finish it in my head making it persist there painfully.  What was I saying? Oh yeah while people are blogging about it (I suppose I am too), I figured that I will post this picture I took at the grocery.

While I am sure that the company used the word as the Sanskrit word for “temple” (check out their FAQ site,) one — meaning me — cannot help but think of Yoda somewhere staring off meditatively munching on some 74% dark.

the wii is coming out in november.  This marks twice that I can recall that nintendo released a major product close to my birthday.  Why must they tease me so.

Okay, so I haven’t had an entry in a while and things have been piling up.  I’ll mention those things that come to mind.

42nd Chicago International Film Festival.
Started this past week.  I saw two movies so far.  Time (??) a Korean film about cosmetic surgery and  body image and how they impact a couple’s life.  It was strangely compelling and I liked it very much.  This is the same director who made 3-Iron.  I’m not particularly a fan of his work, so I wouldn’t know what most of his work consists of, but this film was not only strange, but quite interesting as well as “fun” to watch.  The second film so far is called Syndromes and a Century, a Thai film, that I just didn’t get.  Having read the synopsis afterward, I still don’t get it.  It made me angry watching this as it seemed that the director was teasing the viewer.  I was looking for plots, stories, anything.  There were a number of vigniettes that were strung together to look like a story, but there wasn’t one and he didn’t even finish the little plot elements that he put in there!  I heard people in the lobby afterward talking about it being a commentary against the fast paced ADD inducing properties of modern movies, but I saw nothing like that in the synopsis and if this movie was really trying to make this statement, it could have done so without making the watcher so irritated.

Flying Kites.
This Sunday, after leadership meeting, Bobby and I ended up hanging out for a bit.  I was under the impression that Rea was going to see a movie at the Film Festival on her own, so I was thinking about hanging out with Bobby and maybe with Peter later and watching a couple episodes of Office.  This was not to be, as Rea was expecting me home to go see the movie with her, this was the Syndrome movie I just talked about.  What Bobby and I did do was to try out his kite.  We first tried to fly this kite at Retreat last year.  It was a dismal failure as there was no wind to speak of.  I remember many of my fellow churchgoers running up and down the soccer field trying to get this thing to fly.  Besides not having the best form (none of us really know how to fly a kite) the aforementioned lack of wind made this a fun experience only for the spectators.  Yesterday we ran up and down a field next to the church (well Bobby did most of the running) trying to get this kite to fly.  We did succeed in getting the kite in the air and in discovering a few techniques to get the kite turned into the wind and at the correct angle of attack.  But again the wind betrayed us, blowing for a while and stopping just as the kite was pulling on the string and going higher.  Perhaps in a couple weeks.

Chess Tournament.
Today is Columbus Day and the Rudy Lozano Chess Club held a tournament.  Not having gone to a tournament in so long, I decided that I should try and mix it up a bit.  There were a few strong players there and I had a couple good games.  I lost my third round to the eventual winner of the tournament and the pairings and score gave me a second place result.  I liked the way that I played and was a little dissapointed that I blundered away the good position I had in the game I lost, but my opponent was a very strong player who pretty much punished both major mistakes I made.

I do everything that South Park tells me to do.
The season premiere of South Park was last week and it was a show that made fun of World of Warcraft.  I have friends who play this game, but have never gotten into it.  Despite playing the real time strategy games on which this is MMORPG was based..  So what do I do?  Well if you haven’t guessed that I started playing using this free 10-day pass I got from Casey, then you’re an R-tard.

Fun was had by all.

We met at church a little after 9 AM, but had a little drama since Bobby cut himself on my very sharp car.  Seriously though, when this happened while we were getting gas, I didn’t think much of it, but when he asked for a paper towel and I saw the blood, I was pretty sure he had to go to the hospital.  We went to CVS to get some antibiotic and those stick on sutures, but this really didn’t work and so we went to Northwest Community Hospital, the same place Peter was when he broke his leg (doing something dumb.)  I hated to leave him there and I’m sure that he didn’t want to be left there but he told us to go on.  What a trooper.  He was able to come later after rainman picked him up and join us for the second tour.

Lakefront Brewery was the same and maybe a little better.  We had a guide who hurried us through the tour, but we didn’t really miss anything.  This is the place that encourages you to drink throughout the tour.  You get a pull when you check in, nurse your beer while everyone gets together then you have taps along the way.  I like this system.  The beer was good, the tour is fun and the atmosphere is very lighthearted.  I realized later that the tour was sort because people were on this boat tour and needed to leave early.  Hmmm… I like this idea of a boat tour, basically three breweries in 4 hours, we may check this out next year.  I had two beers and traded my last two tokens for one of their root beers.

Sprecher Brewery was more of the traditional type of tour.  While the guide was very nice, she didn’t really compare in terms of personality to the Lakefront people.  The beers came in small glasses (unlike Lakefront where they were VERY generous) and you didn’t get any until after the tour was over.  BUT while the brews were quite good, the sodas were amazing.  They were also free so after I had three beers (remember the glasses were very small) I kept going back for the best tasting soda I’ve ever had in my life.  Since we were at the last tour of the day we ended up hanging out there longer than planned, shopping for souvenirs and buying beer and soda to take home.  I purchased matching t-shirts for me and the wifey, they were really cute.

All the hanging out changed our plans.  Instead of going to the OKTOBERFEST at Heidelberg Park (the Sprecher people told us that it wasn’t that great in any case — maybe so we would hang around and buy more stuff at the gift shop, I don’t know) we did what we did during my bachelor party, which was to sober up before dinner at the Borders in downtown Milwaukee.  I suppose from now on a trip to Milwaukee will not be complete unless I go to the downtown Borders.  From there we went to The Safehouse.

Did I mention that I’m glad that Bobby was able to join us?  I’m also thankful that Gene was able to pick him up from the hospital.  I mention that I’m glad that Bobby was there because he was the one who gave the correct password, which saved us a bit of embarrasment.  After a bit of a wait we were ushered to our table.  The food was pretty good, but the real reason one would go to the Safehouse would be to just experience the spy themed aspect of it.  If we do this again we would probably choose a different place.

While walking today, this lady wanted to pet the dogs (actually just Nori, poor Mochi, he’s being ignored in favor of a smaller cuter brother.)

Well, besides making the mistake of just liking the smaller cuter one, she bends over and then stops and asks me if this is a pit bull — you know because she never touches pit bulls.  I find a lot wrong with this.

1. She is already too close, if she were facing a pit bull that she should be afraid of at that range, asking whether Nori was a pit bull would have been one of the last things on her mind.
2. Since she had to ask, I deduced that she had never met a pit bull.  If this is the case, then she made her decision on not petting pit bulls on ignorance.  This FUD based decisionmaking is always a bad thing and earns only my scorn.
3. Since she most likely never met a pit bull, she never knew them to be really cute dogs when raised properly.
4. BESIDES HOW CAN YOU EVER MISTAKE A PUG FOR A PITBULL?!, stupid lady.

I’m thinking about this also because the rainman sent me a couple links to articles about Pit bulls.  It’s all FUD + Ignorance.

well… I’ll take back the misogynist part since the person I’m describing can be a number of men I know.

So I’m sitting here at the coffee shop and a group of four decide to play Scrabble™.  Three girls and a guy.  One of the girls starts to pronounce that she will beat everyone at the table and then continues to talk about the rules while they play.  Some of her rules are wrong, which would be forgivable if she didn’t put herself forward as some kind of great Scrabble™ player.  The other three decide to gang up against her and then I hear this stream chatter complaining how unfair it is that the three of them decided to gang up on her.  Well if you have the hubris to tell the other three at a Scrabble™ table that you’re going to beat them, you deserve to be ganged up on.  I mean, my best friend while destroying you at the tabletop strategy games he so dealy loves would never tell you outright that he will beat you.  Instead he will give you advice subtly skewed to not only be of some use to you but really of more use to him.  It took much longer for people who play against him to gang up on him.

Ugh, I’m glad they’re gone, I couldn’t stand the constant stream of chatter from that one girl, sometimes I believe that some people shouldn’t have the power of speech.

The third “dog”

Mochi and Nori have a new playmate.  Well, they follow him around and look at him while he works.  We just aquired a brand new (to us) refurbished Roomba.  This is the one with the updated firmware and scheduler.  It works really well, getting to most areas of the living room/kitchen without too much difficulty, even under the couch.  As a daily collector of Mochi (and now Nori) hair, it works well and I will not be vacuuming as much, maybe once a week.  It plays this nice cheerful tune, and disengages from the docking station and starts on its random walk around the room.  I like the algorithim that it uses, it “recognizes” objects to go around like islands and follows walls.  I like that it can go over rugs and finally it puts itself back into the docking station when it is running out of juice.

A really cool thing of this latest generation of Roombas is that programmability built into the device.  Basically it’s like programming a simple microprocessor robot.  With a serial cable, I can get inside the SCI (serial control interface) and program to my hearts content.  There is also a bluetooth module that you can control the Roomba directly with.  The modding community seems to be really rich and the fact that the robot’s programming interface specifications are open makes for interesting homebrewed apps, I saw a midi program that makes use of the Piezo speaker on the roomba to play tunes, cool.

…well at least the wall decoration at the Adler Planetarium is now accurate again.