Go tournament success

This last weekend was the fourth quarter 2006 SA Internet Go tournament, and I was involved in some serious ass-whippin'! I won group 2 in the last tournament, which qualified me to participate in group 1 this tourney, and with Victor Chow, 6-dan, and his wife, Aki Zhou, 5-dan, entering, the field was always going to be tough. I was the weakest player in the group at 2k, with Andrew Davies second weakest at 1k. Ben Gale, 3-dan, was the only other non-shodan in the group. Of course, Round 1, I met up with Aki (playing as JuliusPunk). I was determined to at least lose with style, and went at her with a refusal to back down. This meant I got a fairly decent result in the first complicated corner fight, but then my tenacious tenuki'ing became painful, when my misreads left one of her groups living, while I had to take gote, conceding a ponnuki elsewhere on the board. From there it was mostly one-way traffic, with me taking chances to try reduce the deficit. In the end, I lost 3 corner invasions, of which 1 was distinctly savable, but was lost due to bad reading, and another of which I should have been able to save some of in a ko fight. In the process of (not) "saving" my corner invasions, I destroyed my top side, and damaged my central moyo, and ended up losing by an immense 111.5 points. I know I can do better if I don't try to win, though. One of those strange Go paradoxes. Well, now with nothing to lose, I faced Tristen (overdone) in Round 2, who I have a decent record against in social play. In the end, I overplayed a bit, but managed to weasel life on both sides of his one corner enclosure, not leaving him with much. Then I got into trouble trying to attack him, and was lucky to get away. Once I got out, I launched an attack on one of his groups inside my ex-moyo, and it died, giving me a win vs a 1-dan, and some good index points. Last Round I was up against Chris Visser (ChrisVis), also supposedly a 1-dan. His recent performances overseas and his win against Konrad earlier in the day make me suspect whether he's not a little underranked, but I decided to give it a bash. In the end I was forced down a path I couldn't read out, and made an error defending a corner rather than some cutting stones. This was followed by an invasion, and I was far behind. He followed this up with a large moyo, and was far ahead. However, he continued being aggressive, and opening a larger lead. Eventually a counter attack allowed me to use some aji toat least get one of my dead groups to live (perhaps). He defended in the wrong place, and my aji came to life, leaving him with 3 new dead groups, and saving 2 of my dead groups. A turn-around which I just had to safely steer to a roughly 30-point victory. Undeserved, probably, but I fought hard for it. Another 1-dan win leaves me well in the promotion zone of 2-kyu, and more importantly, 2 wins on the day left me tied for 2nd in the tournament with Ben Gale and Aki Zhou, beating all the 1-dans. And it may give me some nice placing points as well, not that I'm really in the running for a national representation. But maybe one day... If you want to check out the games, you can find them in my game archive on KGS, where the tournament was held. Link: http://www.gokgs.com/gameArchives.jsp?user=thekro. And in-between the games, we popped in at Dalene's uncle's house in Dalsig, where Dalene's dad's family was having their Christmas get-together. Great food and lazing around chatting, but I don't know the people so well, so I felt a bit awkward. Marleen and JC were there at about our age, and the rest of the children were considerably younger (understandable, since Radi's sisters are all much younger than Radi and Oom Johan). There were also a couple of Christmas gifts dished out, so we're looking forward to find out what we've gotten. We had to leave the party before the Springbok rugby started, because Dalene had to go to Sharnelle's stork tea in Bellville. They apparently had a good time, while I returned for game 3 of the tournament. After the game, I found Robert and Andries and Adrian in the Spur, who had just watched us actually not lose a Springbok rugby game we'd been leading at half time. We decided to take out a movie (the Rundown, my recommendation), and went to watch it at Robert,s place, when Dalene joined us there. On the way to his place, we bought some ice-cream, and at his place, he brought me up to date with the newest Weird Al album, which he'd bought on Amazon. Features one particularly humorous video, "White and Nerdy". Check it out, if you can find it. Monday night, we watched a DVD at our cell group, about the size and wonder of the universe, and how it conveys the size, power and majesty of God. This led to a quickly-stalled discussion about life on other planets, and what people think of it, and how it would affect one's religion. Otherwise, we've just been packing, and preparing for our move on Thursday. As of now, the people moving out have still not got a confirmed time for inspection, and their phones (all 3 guys') are off. So, we may well just have to put things in the garage at the beginning, if we can move in at all.

Throwing it all away

This post is about last night's Go. I arrived at Go last night with Adrian, and ended up chatting to Alex, who we bumped into there about our cell group's dynamics, and if/how he fits in there, and what he should do in the coming weeks. During the discussion, Konrad arrived. Our discussion went on a while longer, and Konrad took over the game I was going to play against Adrian. Alex went off to watch a movie, while I watched Konrad beating Adrian. But they were playing sudden-death, and Konrad's time was low, so in the last few moves of the game, Konrad's clock dropped while he had a comfortable lead on the board. I took him on next, with 2 stones. I overattacked from the very beginning, playing tenuki too early in the first joseki of the game. He countered by setting my group drifting, and I tried to convert my flight into a counterattack. Didn't work out too well, but eventually a large ko formed, giving me a chance. It turns out he had a way to get a good result despite the ko, but his greed for an extra 10 points cost him. I got a good result in the third corner after he ignored a ko threat, resulting in me getting a large wall with some of his stones isolated against it. However, I tried to pincer the stones from too close, and he entered the last corner with an attachment on my handicap stone. Eventually, I had captured his isolated stones against my wall, but on a small scale. However, that was enough to give me the game. After that, 4-5 stupid mistakes in 20 moves, and he captured some of the stones surrounding his originally isolated stones for not much compensation at all. There was no way it should have happened that way, but it cost me the game - a harsh lesson, as I went down by 17.5. Next I took on Rory, giving him 3 stones. I missed a chance to capture a huge corner and get off to a really good start, instead ending with a low position on one side, and stones which would later be subject to attack on an adjacent side, while he live in the corner, and with a group cutting me apart. Later, I tried to reduce his framework instead of thoroughly invading. Basically, I got wasted, by 25 points.

What does it take to be "saved"?

Yesterday, our cell group met at our house for the last time before we move. We handled chapter 29 of the Screwtape letters, where Screwtape exhorts Wormwood to look after his patient's physical well-being as far as possible, since his untimely death will result in a failure for the Lowerarchy. Lewis points out that time is the devil's greatest ally in drawing people away from God. This led our discussion to consider the statement that people make that "I am saved", as if it is a once-off thing. We considered if that is really how it works, and if so, what are the requirements to "be saved". Does one just have to believe in Jesus? Do you have to change your life? Do you have to repent? Confess your sins? How about baptism? Is that necessary? Or just an optional extra? If you can "lose" your salvation, when do you lose it, and (how) can you get it back? Well, these are thorny issues, so of course we didn't get down to an actual solution. But the discussion was interesting, especially seeing how different people in the group reacted/responded to the question and discussion.

Wedding pics online

Due to a number of requests, I've put some of the wedding photos online. There aren't table photos and the like, since the pictures came to us on a DVD, and flickr only gives us 20Megs upload a month. The group photo also didn't make it, because that's about 10 Megs, so it gets rejected by Flickr. I can hopefully downsample it later, and upload it then. Of course, as part of the upload process, I had to get a place to put photos on the web. I have a gallery at the computer science department, but abusing this for lots of traffic is frowned upon by the admin (and space on the server is limited). Picasa has an online service, but that would entail getting on the internet in Windows, and (a) that ain't happening through the university's firewall at the moment, and (b) that would make adminning it later a pain. Picasa now has a "linux version", which basically means it runs under Wine, but when your Linux is as old as mine, the new Wine doesn't run, and the "linux version" means nothing. So, I had to go with Flickr, which is generally the best online gallery. Except that if you want to do anything useful, you've got to pay a membership fee. Which I'm not planning on doing. So now I have a glorious 100 Mb of space, with 20 Mb of upload per month. Yay! Now that the background is past: here's the link to the wedding pics. Note my fancy name (37963....). I can only replace that with a paid membership, I gather. During the whole upload process, I got into an IM chat with a guy I know who used to live up in Joeys with Andre and Theuns, soc. Turns out he's moved down to CT for da lifestyle. Which means he has a new job and is spending 12 hours + on it per day. Sometimes I'm glad I'm still a student ;) Last Thursday was exciting. I spent the morning racing between 9 PCs tring to run virus scans on them. Some of the PCs had Norton Antivirus on, and they were doing OK, but others were running Avast! Now Avast, despite it's MP3-player interface, is a pretty good antivirus program, as free anti-virus packages go - probably at least in the Top 3 in the English-speaking world. But, alas, it would find the viruses, and then it would not be able to delete them. I refer specifically to the variants of Win32:Warezov. In the meantime, another PC on the same network was so broken by another virus, it couldn't be shut down. By the time I had to leave the network to its own fate and move on to my other responsibilities, I had come to a conclusion: if you use Windows, and local e-mail programs accepting attachments, you are going to get a virus sooner or later. Even with the latest and greatest antivirus tools. However, it's likely to be a lot later with a subscription antivirus package. So do the math. How valuable is your (oft-times confidential) data? If it's important, (a) buy a decent antivirus package, (b) make sure keeping PC software updated is assigned to someone's task list who knows how, and (c) arrange for regular backups (ask me - I'm still struggling to get things going on the Go website after the recent hack, and that was with pretty recent backups). If you're going to go the free route, I still suggest (b) and (c), and as an added precaution, try using an online mail and calendar solution, such as that provided by Google at Gmail (if you need an invite, I've still got). Thursday night yielded a depressing quality of Go for me as well. I got myself into trouble against Adrian, and only serious time trouble saved me from a thumping by Bernard. My last game against Jaco added insult to injury, when he trounced me, mentioning that he wasn't really pushing, since I was obviously playing half-heartedly. Which I didn't think I was. Post game analysis showed that to mean that I was switching between plans (attacking vs moyo) too often, rather than sticking with just one. With all of the excitement last week, I fell behind with my thesis. So I planned on coming in over the weekend to try and play catch-up. However, first there was a conference dance on Friday night - Dalene had given a talk at the Lord Charles' Hotel in Somerset-West, so we scored a free double ticket. Last year we went because Dalene won 2 prizes, but this year, we were just there for the social side. 2 of her colleagues won the prizes this year, so she's still hobnobbing with the top brass. Pity her husband shows no class ;) Jeanne and Douw from our cell group were at our table to provide some familiar faces, but I ended up seated next to an enology student called Riaan. We hit it off quite well, and spent the evening joking, drinking, and eating to our heart's content. I even managed to fit in 2 dances. The next day I decided I'd rather put time in packing for our move later this month, and then head to the office on Sunday. Made some good progress there as well. That evening I helped out at the Stellenbosch Night Shelter, since the supervisor and his wife were at a family funeral. All round, general chaos ensued, but finally I got back home. And packed some more. On Sunday, after some morning packing and a crumbed chicken breast lunch, I headed off to work. In the heat. The plan had been for Dalene to drop me off at work on the way to the shops, but she had instead dropped off on the bed upstairs, so I walked. Which meant I was supremely disappointed when my desire for some water and a comfy chair were thwarted by the failure of the card reader to register my card and open the door at my department. So I headed home. The walk gave me blisters. I will not comment any more. I got home and dropped off. Sunday night: Church. It was the Christmas Song service, and we were warned to be there early, but of course we forgot. Which meant that we got there to find the parking lot and streets in chaos, and not a spot to be had in the church. We decided to walk around the corner, and attended the United Church instead. In contrast, there were 18 people there, including the elders, the priest, and the people leading in the music. It was quite interesting since the sermon was delivered in more of a cell-group, interactive, q&a style. Unfortunately, people weren't that responsive to the questions. I had some comments, but they were more academic and background-oriented, and since I didn't want to stir the pot too much, I kept my trap shut. I was surprised to see a friend who's been at dancing school in Cape Town the past year, Jessica, helping to lead the singing. Topic was: is man a king or a slave (the king perspective from Psalm 8, and the slave perspective from Job 7). This was linked in a rather tenuous fashion to Hebrews 2, why I can't quite say, except that it had something to do with following the example of Jesus. The most fascinating aspect of the sermon to me, was that the metaphor of a weaver's shuttle is used by Job, for the speed with which his life passes. He then says that they "end without hope". What is not clear for the English reader is that the Hebrew words for hope and "thread" are the same, making the metaphor more of a play on words. Pretty cool. And this morning, I got to my office, and the card reader was still busted. Which means my meeting with my promoter came to nothing, and after I got back from that, it was still busted, and then some blokes from the Engineering faculty broke in for us. It seems the computer behind the card reader was down, or something. Anyway, I'm back in my office, now. At last. Oh yeah, I had another fun banking experience, but I've decided it was just a misunderstanding, so I'm not going to rant about it.

A Visit to the Rustic Cafe

Yesterday was Jaco's birthday. So we went out to the Rustic Cafe for a few drinks. Also there were Rory, Charl, Bernard, and Mahen (short for Mahendra, a colleague of Jaco's). Had a good time drinking beer and chatting with friends. Discussion ranged between Go, Final Fantasy, violence in South Africa, the Bush administration and American politics, heteropaternal superfecundation, Charl's irritation with stupid customers, Mahen's Indian heritage and their liking for curries, the dead-end nature of Bloemfontein and Pietermaritzburg, my honeymoon, the "don't-mess-with-us" attitude of Free State cops, dead people winning elections and collecting pensions, and a number of other topics. Earlier in the evening, I impressed even myself with my skill at making steak, and was fortunate that Dalene wasn't hungry enough to take more than a bite of it...

"Ook dit sal verbygaan"

Yesterday, our cell group took a break from the Screwtape Letters (a book by C.S. Lewis we've been working through), and listened to a sermon from the Moedergemeente in Stellenbosch. Richard preached about the importance of patience and perseverance in conditions which are hard, and when pain and suffering are all around one, and one can not understand what is causing it, or what the reason for it is, or even if there is a reason for it.

His reference text was Habakkuk, who is righting in the context of a siege (of Jerusalem, I believe). He also quotes the philosopher Epicurus in relation to the the theodicy problem (why does a good God let bad things happen?).

The sermon was quite relevant for a number of people, including me, after the stone throwing of the weekend, and the ideas raised yesterday morning about leaving the country. Other people in our cell also have big decisions about potentially moving overseas, and/or have encountered some criminal elements recently.

Other big news is that Ben and Astrid have decided to get engaged.

Things I forgot in that update

Well, the server hosting my Go website was hacked. Now that seriously sucks. I was vastly impressed by the fact that the hosts had recent updates for us, so I haven't lost much. However, now security has been tightened up, making things a bit more of a pain to do. So the ranking system is still non-functional, and we can't upload images or files, and the gallery doesn't work. That kind of thing. I had quite a good game of Go against Konrad on Thursday as well. No major upsets, but some poor moves, and I ended up losing by 5.5 on a 2-stone handicap. I felt I wasn't being pushed around, so that was good. Perhaps I'll be able to pull off a win next time. On the reading side, "Adventures in Missing the Point" turned out to be quite good, but not quite as good as the next book I worked through, Rob Bell's "Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith". I'd heard a lot of the stuff in this book from Rob when he visited Stellenbosch and gave some talks and a sermon, but I still think he's got a lot of valuable insights, also, I guess, showing us how we as Christians often miss the point. Finally, my dad's cousin, and one of my parent's neighbours, Uncle Joe, passed away while Dalene was in Malta. He had been suffering from cancer for some time, but of course it has been a difficult time for his family, especially Aunt Sigi who I assume will now be home alone. Tomorrow, Dalene is at another conference, giving another talk, but it seems she will be paraphrasing her doctoral defence, so at least it won't all have to be done from scratch. Perhaps this really is all.

Updating

Well, the blogging curse seems to have hit me: infrequent updates. Things have been quite busy the last while, and I've been trying to deliver some decent updates of my thesis to my professor, with which I have been moderately successful. Dalene had a good time in Malta, and came back a few days after my last post. In the last two weeks, I helped out twice at the night shelter, since the permanent guy is writing exams - our cell group arranged to help him out over these few weeks. Our car has been leaking water, which is a major trial, especially since the leak is unreliable. We discovered this during late afternoon traffic in Stellenbosch, and were lucky to make the garage in time to get a refill. With all the emptying, we managed to lose the cap of the radiator's water bottle, so we've had to get a new one. Last weekend, we popped by Dalene's folks to visit Dalene's grandparents, since her grandfather had turned 77 during the week. Afterwards, we went by James and Verna, and had a pleasant visit. They're getting a swimming pool put in, and of course, there are complications and arguments with the contractors and builders (aren't there always). Jason's crawling now, and putting everything in his mouth, but they seem to be handling their frustration ok. During the week, I saw James and Verna again: I attended the UWC Honours students' project presentations, since I'm their external examiner this year. Afterwards, we went for lunch with Reg Dodds and Isabel Venter. I also ran into Maricel, who did her Ph.D. with Dalene, and is graduating with her in December. This weekend was packing on Saturday morning, since we're moving at the end of the month, and in the afternoon we went to Somerset mall to return an item, and ended up spending the whole afternoon gift shopping. That evening Sharnelle had us over at her place for a potjie prepared by Cobus. I ate way too much, but it was nice visiting with them and Sonet and Theuns, who had left Emma for babysitting with Theuns's folks. Despite their busy schedule, Sonet and Theuns look very happy. Sonet has started work again, so with her working in Paarl and him in Malmesbury, they're getting more serious about leaving Bellville. They were actually planning to look at places in Malmesbury yesterday... The trip back was marred by an ugly incident. Some of our country's criminal element tried to waylay us on the N1, just short of the Wynland Engen 1-stop, by throwing rocks at Dalene's car. Fortunately, we were missed by the big grey construction block(s?), but some gravel did hit us, breaking a light fitting, chipping the windscreen in 2 places, and scraping the body work in a few places. When we got home, we phoned the police, who told us a van was already on the way, so I don't know if there were other victims who prompted an earlier call. This has again prompted the "why don't you leave SA" discussion with some people, and I'm not entirely sure, at the moment. It seems mostly momentum, actually. Oh, I almost forgot. I saw Brink and Antoinette's son Alex in the mall as well. I hadn't seen him since before he could crawl, and now he's 18 months - he gave me high-five before we went our seperate ways. Sunday, Dalene took me out for lunch (Blue Orange), where we both had food with Brie, getting caught out by the super-mature cheese. And after church, we went for a visit to Marius and Janette, who we'd been hoping to see for a while. But I left our wedding photos behind, only to be reprimanded, since they actually hadn't seen them, despite my convictions. On the computer front, Mozilla and Internet Explorer's new versions came out in the last few weeks, and I had the misfortune of upgrading to IE7 on a windows box. Well, the upgrade itself went smoothly. Pity I wanted to browse as well... Mozilla Firefox 2 on the other hand, seems quite slick. And I think the "ad-blocker Plus" extension is worth a plug. Download and install it (after you've installed Firefox), and start blocking all the irritating content on webpages. Yay! That is all.