First Two Days in Spain

I've been in Spain for 2 days now. My sisters Michele and Caroline met me at the airport. I didn't manage to sleep on the plane, so I rested a bit. We went out and got lunch at a place called Pan's. It was a fast food kind of place. I got a sandwich with salmon and hard boiled eggs on it. Given the name of the sandwich, I think it was more Norweigen than Spanish, but it was good. I thought I would be getting something Spanish by ordering nuggest as the side order instead of fries, but they turned out to be chicken nuggets, and they weren't very good on top of that. Our hotel is in Plaza Mayor, and we went West from there to see what is on the Map as Palico Real. I forget what function the palace serves today, but it's quite an impressive structure. Despite being October, yesterday was quite warm, and we were all worn out from walking around town.

We went back to the hotel, and I took a nap. We went out at night to get some supplies from a grocery store, then after dropping those off back at the hotel, we went for an early dinner at 8:30 PM. I got a pizza, which is more Italian than Spanish, but I did get a taste of more traditional food from Carloline's sandwich. It was a ham and cheese, but the ham was more like prochuto, and the cheese reminded me of Grueye. Spain seems to love ham even more than the US loves beef. I haven seen the museam of beef anywhere before, but there is a museam of ham near the hotel.

Today, we went to the Reina Soffia art museam. The first floor was full of odd modern art stuff. The second floor had some wartime art, and a lot of Picasso and Dali. I liked those. There were a few exhibits that were very mathmatical from the 1st floor, but most were just strange. The building was huge, there were two more floors of exhibits that we didn't even get to. We had to get Caroline back so that she could eat and back to a metro stop so she could get to work tomorrow. Michele and I have to get up early tomorrow so we can get to Barcalona. We'll probably do a little more sight seeing later in the day, eat dinner, and try to make it an early night.

( I can't spell check this on the browser at the hotel, so I'll have to clean this up later.)

One Week Until Spain

This will be my first trip to Europe. I've actually crossed the Pacific before, having been to The Land Down Under 10 years ago. That was a blast. I have to admit I'm a bit nervous about my very limited Spanish skills. Going to Sydney, the only reason I would have needed a foreign language would have been if I had wanted to talk to one of the many groups of Japanese tourists visiting Sydney in their own language.

Granted, I did have a a conversation in a bar with an Australian woman about the differences between the word pissed between US English and Aussie English. For those who are curious, in US English, pissed means exactly the same thing as pissed off, or angry. In Aussie English, pissed off still means angry, but pissed means drunk. Also, you will hear the word mate for friend, but not nearly as often as in a Crocodile Dundee movie. You might even hear the phrase, spot you a pot of piss mate? Which means, can I buy you a beer? (OK, if this paragraph doesn't get any comments, nothing will.)

I need to get a list of things to do before the trip ready. I've got my passport and a new digital camera, but I still need to pack and I've got a few things to buy. I'm already mentally preparing to eat everything in my fridge before I got and then stop cooking. I foresee an omelet or two in my future. One reason I want to clear the fridge is that the freezer isn't freezing and cleaning the coils hasn't helped. I'm hoping something critical is frozen up, and will go back to normal if left powered off for a while.

Birthday season

I should more specifically say that it is birthday season for my nieces and nephew. Tomorrow is my niece Regan's 8th birthday. By mid-December, Blake will be 10, Karina will be one, and the twins will be 6. The twins seem older than that for some reason, maybe it's because Lauren has glasses and Taylor is so large for her age.

Speaking of Taylor, I heard that she though wearing uniform shorts to school entitled her to use the boys restroom even to the point of using the urinal.

In non birthday news, the two barbs the Clark kids got me on Labor Day seem to be doing well. They will venture out of their hiding places around the tank, but one of the barbs is noticeably more shy than the other. I think I might try adding another silver dollar or two next.

It's been nearly a month since my last post.

In a whirlwind recap:

• I'm going to Spain in less than a month
• Me, Mom, Dad, and Blake went to a Riverbats game for Dad's birthday with help from free tickets I got from work.
• I made the last production turn on a 6 month project that lasted 18 this week.
• I got two new fish in my aquarium, which seem to be doing well.
• I tied for first place in a chess tournament after posting my game against an IM to this blog.
• My nieces and nephew wanted to get me the more fish, which is why I have new ones. Taylor rode with me back to my house holding the fish. On the way, she told me that we needed to come to a decision about where to hold her birthday party. She wanted to do it at my house, but her twin sister Lauren wanted to have it at Chuck E Cheese.

My game against an International Master

Two weeks ago, I went to Indianapolis to play in the US Open Weekend Swiss tournament. For those of you who don't know what a Swiss style tournament is, the best way to think of it is as a no elimination tournament. In theory, if you're 0-4 at the end of the 4th round, you should play another player who is 0-4. Draws complicate this picture somewhat, but you should end up with a clear winner in a 5 round tournament of 32 players.

With my chess rating in the 1500's, I often end up playing either one of the strongest or one of the weakest players in the tournament in the first round. When I saw the pairings two Saturdays ago, I saw that I would be playing the strongest player in the tournament. His name was Emory Tate, and his rating was high in the 2300's. For those of you not familiar with chess ratings, I would be expected to win about 1 game in 10 against someone rated in the 1900's, the hypothetical 1900 ranked player would be expected to win about 1 game in 10 against Mr. Tate. If you want a different measure of my challenge, type Emory Tate into a google search and wait to see what additional terms Google suggests. I was kind if disappointed since I had white in this game, and the difference in our skill was so great I didn't think having the 1st move would really matter. I would have rather had black so I could play white the next round.

Here is the game:

1. e4 c5 2. c3 e6 3. d4 cd 4. cd d5 5. e5 Bd7

At this point, instead of playing the closed version of the Sicilian defense, we are in a French defense. From my experience, only one time in using the closed Sicilian have we not transposed to the French. My reason for doing this is that I believe that most people playing the Sicilian do not want to end up in a position from the French. However, after the game, Mr. Tate said that he finds the closed Sicilian annoying and wanted to switch over to the French. Also, I didn't realize it at the time, but his last move is preparing to trade off his light squared bishop.

6. Nf3 Qb6 7. Be2

According to Mr. Tate, this was my first mistake. He wants to play Bb5 to trade it off for my bishop now sitting on e2. I should have challenged his plan by playing Nc3 now.

7... Bb5 8. Nc3 Bxe2 9. Qxe2

I debated between this and Nxe2. Taking with the knight provides me with extra protection for my central pawns. However, I took back with the queen trying to keep my knights in more of an offensive than a defensive role. Mr. Tate said taking with the Queen looks natural, but isn't as strong as taking with the knight. One reason for that is that he makes use of the knight sitting on c3 to trade it off creating a weak pawn for me to defend in a few moves, and he immediately threatens the my pawn on d4.

9... Nc6 10. Be3

Mr. Tate pointed out that this pawn didn't need immediate defense. If 10. o-o Nxd4 11. Nxd4 Qxd4 12. Qb5+!! black is lost. With his queen out of position from recapturing and no pieces on the kingside developed yet, the white queen inflicts heavy positional and material damage to black. This gives white more time to develop before eventually playing Be3.

10... Bb4 11. o-o Bxc3 12. bxc3 Na5

I was actually pretty happy to get out of the opening against such a strong player. I can see that his knight is trying to head to c4, where it would be a major thorn in my side, but other than that I didn't really see where I had any problems. However, when I didn't castle at move 10, Mr. Tate felt like he had overcome the advantage white has by making the 1st move.

13. Rab1 Qc6 14. Rfc1 Ne7

Given the piece trades which have occurred so far, I missed 15 Qb5 which would have forced a queen trade. It's not the strongest move on the board, but having queens come off the board early increases the odds of getting a draw. I also missed the fact that even though black has two pieces lined up against my pawn on c3, the queen is in the lead, so my pawn can't be taken immediately.

15. Nd2 Rf8 16. Qd3 o-o 17. Nb3 Nc4!

I was wondering if Mr. Tate was just going to trade off lots of pieces and try to squeeze and endgame win out of me, which is why I played Nb3, when he put his knight on it's ideal square, I should have immediately put my knight back on d2. However, at the time I foolishly decided to press on under the assumption that b3 was the better square for my knight.

18. Bd2 b6 19. Be1 f6!

In hindsight, I have to play ef. I didn't like the f file opening up for black, but it's better than what comes next.

20. Nd2 fe 21. Nxc4 dxc4 22. Qe3 Nd5

I didn't understand this move at the time. Black, going back to move 11, has been trying to win one of my central pawns by creating the weak pawn on c3, suddenly, he's giving the pawn back. I should have known there was a method to this madness, but I couldn't find it so I took the pawn back.

23. Qxe5 Nf4!!!

I read on the web that Mr. Tate likes to give moves triple exclamation points when explaining games, so I'll give this move of his three. At first, I only saw that he threatened to fork both my rook and queen with ...Nd3 and my king and rook with Ne2. I was just about to put my queen back on e3 where it is out of the line of fire and continues to guard e2. At the last instant I noticed that black also has a mate threat with Qxg2. The best defense was f3, but I tried Qg5 and got my queen pushed around before black finally take his extra exchange.

24. Qg5 Rf5 25. Qg4 h4 26. Qf3 Qxf3 27. gxf3 Ne2 28. Kg2 Nxc1 29. Rxc1 Rfc8

I'm in seriously bad shape now, I'm down the exchange and I can't guard the pawn on f3. To make matters worse, I can't even try to make something of my bad bishop sitting on e1 because it's tied down defending f2. I try to get my rook to worm it's way into black's queenside, but my opponent will have none of that.

30. Rb1 Rg5+ 31. Kf1 Ra5!

I didn't expect this, but it's very strong. It effectively eliminates any possibilities I had for counterattacking.

32. Rb4 b5 33. a4 ba 34. Rxc4 a3

I can't stop the pawn, so I resigned. I made sure I tracked down my opponent so I could get his thoughts on the game. Mr. Tate might not have been feeling well that weekend, because he seemed like he was trying to get back to his hotel room between rounds, and he didn't have a good weekend tournament. However, he played in the 6 day schedule of the full open and finished 1 point out of 1st. That put him in 25th place in a 450 player tournament.

It was neat being in the big tournament atmosphere, and I didn't have to pay for a hotel room since I stayed with my sister Suzanne in Noblesville, which was only like a 20 minute drive from the tournament site. By playing in the weekend tournament, I didn't have to take a week off of work for it either. For example, when Abby Marshal won the Denker high school tournament of state champions, I had seen her walking around in the halls of the hotel.

http://main.uschess.org/content/view/9606/544/

I don't know what to title this.

I lost track of one of my good friends from high school after the summer between our freshman and sophomore year. The last I had heard, his family didn't know where he was and had filed a missing persons report on him. I can't remember when I heard that news. I want to say that it was sometime in the mid 90's.

I got a facebook invite, and I accepted it, but I wasn't sure what to make of it since there were no photos on the page. That was probably earlier this year when I had just started using facebook. My brother and one of my friends didn't know what to make of this page either. Their guess was that someone in his family was using it to try to track down people who might have had information on him.

However, last weekend, I got a message from him that he was in town at a hotel by the fair and expo center. I gave the hotel a call and we met up and hung out for a few hours and caught up. It still seems surreal, and it reminded me how much I missed having him around.

Are things spiraling into control?

When I first started at SVS, I was looking for a way to get organized. One night, while working in the data center, I came across an article for implementing a system called Getting Things Done (http://www.davidco.com/) using gmail. Since I like gmail, I was interested. What sold me on the system was that things I wanted to do, like read a book or play a video game got to go on the to-do list along with things that needed to be done, like laundry or cutting the grass.

So for a while, all was well. I managed to do things like arrange my schedule to see the Police play Wriggly Field since I was unable to see them play Churchill Downs since that date conflicted with Suzanne's wedding. As I kept coming up with more and more things that needed to be done every week, I discovered that I was mostly just keeping up with day to day activities and (mostly) getting once a week and once a month tasks done.

Things really spiraled out of control when I had strep a few weeks ago. I didn't feel like doing anything useful, and even once I felt better, I still didn't feel like doing anything useful. I was getting frustrated by having a lot of cool stuff on my to-do list that I wasn't getting to. Learing a new ray-tracer, finishing my homemade chess men, learing new programming languages, learning Japaneese, learning how to draw/sketch.

So, I've dedicated a Friday night to getting things back on track. So far so good. I've actually gotten a bit more done tonight (this blog post being one of those things) than would strictly have been necessary according to my plan. And that's even after taking a break to watch a VH1 show on the top 20 one hit wonders of the eighties. (Seriously, 99 Luftballons, Take on Me, Tainted Love, 867-5309/Jenny and She Blinded Me with Science were all better than Come on Eileen)