My Week of Go Activities: Fox Rank Up Speed Run

 

I created a new account for Fox. agaid8 is starting at 18k. I am hoping to do a Rank Up Speed Run to 6k which is the level of my legitimately rated Fox account.

My first game with my agaid8 account looks like this:

I was especially proud of cutting off the dragon in the p6 area. I am black. This 18k account might be good for trying to see the weaknesses of my opponents.  This game actually will appear on my spreadsheet for next week.

Lest anyone think I enjoy sandbagging keep in mind that I have a 3d account on Fox. I'm doing a Rank Down Speed Run with that account. I'll be looking forward to seeing if these two accounts every meet at the same place.

These runs will be speedy compared to glacial. We'll see how much time I have to devote to these two fun accounts.

I should definitely be streaming.

Here are the details of my week.

I spent over 29 hours on Go Activates last week.

Live Play came in first place with over four and a half hours.

I played nine games one of which was a teaching game in a lesson with Clossius.

You can see by the numbers and colors in the Margin Column that this was a dismal week for me.  I had a particularly terrible game in the NAOL league. It was so horrible that it sent me into an emotional tailspin that took me a couple days to recover from. I played that game on Tuesday night and did not play again until Thursday night when I was compelled to play for AYD.

My AYD Game on Thursday started out dismally. I was prepared to resign after I totally screwed things up in the upper right corner. I am white.

I decided to soldier on for the sake of the review. It was too short a game for a decent review. My patience paid off later in the game when this happened:

I figure this was about a 32 point reversal of the game. My seven dead stones sprang to life and I killed nine black stones in the process.

In-seong was pleased that I looked at my opponent's weakness. He pointed out that the game should not have ended when it did. There was a Trouble Master problem left.

White n9 and the trouble begins.

I did feel good about playing a decent number of games this week even though I lost most of them. I am going to continue to play my league games and make an effort to play a few games on Fox again this coming week.

Quilting For the First Time in Over Three Years

 

My beloved cat, Smokey, is making it difficult for me to work on my stitching, and he is confused because I keep shooing him off of my project. He sees it as a comfy quilt to nap on. I see it as a quilt in desperate need of repair.

I made my first quilt 50 years ago and apparently I knew nothing about choosing quality fabrics to work with. Unfortunately the fabric I chose for sashing in this quilt has reached its expiration date.

You can see damage above in the sashing. I decided to cover that damage with some orphan hexagon blocks that were made for potential use in another quilt. I have many of those blocks left. In fact, I could probably cover all of the sashing pieces in the quilt if I wanted to. 

I started by covering the worst damage that had occurred in the sashing near the top of the quilt. I attribute this damage to jagged fingernails grasping to pull up covers. My husband has been chastised. 

The blocks at the top of the quilt still show damage and will probably be covered in some manner. I'm thinking of using one of my orphan hexagon block with additional gold fabric pieces connected to them to totally cover the white square of the block. I have to give this some thought.

What I will end up with is a quilt that still has enough of its original design to remind me of my first quilt, but it will also have elements from some of my most recent work. 

I see this quilt as a metaphor for my aging body as my life draws to its inevitable end. If you are under 50 years old you might not appreciate this. If you as old as I am you probably will appreciate it.

The above photo shows the two damaged blocks in context.

The original quilt is kind of like a Baltimore quilt.

I used to have a blog devoted to quilting, and I am actually still paying for it even though I have not used it in about three years. I've got to let it go. Quilting is not my life anyone. I just want to patch my earlier quilt and finish off the quilts I started and never finished.

I'm going to start using my Go Blog for crafts content from now on. These posts might be few and far between.

If you are go player who stumbled on this post, don't worry. I won't be putting links to these posts up on Facebook in the Go Group. I'll simply link to them at the bottom of my weekly Go Activities Blog Posts.

My Week of Go Activities: Pie Charts are Back

 

After deleting my Now Then app from both of my iPads I was finally able to regain functionality on my iPhone. Unfortunately in the process I lost a few weeks of data.

While I was patiently waiting for things to update I did keep track of my activities manually by writing down what I was doing. I was able to enter those activities retroactively which is how I was able to get a chart for the week just finished. I am quite certain that I didn't record everything. I know I did a lot more tsumego than I have listed here. 

Live Play came in as the top activity this week I played five games. Three of them were league games and two of them were played on Fox.

There is something new in my games list. I played some games on Fox.

It had been quite a few months since I had played on Fox. I use a Mac, so it was necessary for me to run the Fox Client under Parallels Desktop. It never really worked properly. I was unable to update the client in the normal fashion so every time there was an update I had to trash the old client and download the new client. This wasn't too inconvenient until even that became impossible. At that point I had to have someone with a Windows machine download it for me and make it available through a link in Dropbox. My games list never populated so I had to ask a friend to download every game I played. It was a pain in the butt so I stopped using Fox.

Last week I found out about a way to play on Fox through the web. If you are on a Mac this just might be the best way to play on Fox. The developer has a Discord server devoted to this web client. The link will probably only work for a week so join the server if you are interested. If you want to see more detailed discussion of the client you can find it in the general_go_development_chat channel. You would probably need to joinr Shawn Ray's Online Go Club Server for that link to work. Read about it to be fully informed.

Upon signing in to Fox via the web client I clicked the auto match button and played this game which I uploaded to my OGS library. It was a thrilling game because it was 1 minute of main time with 3 periods of 20 seconds of overtime.

I got a resignation after a skillful kill. I am very proud of myself. I am black.

I finally figured out how to change the time settings for auto match and tried 20min 3x60. 

I have a 6k account on Fox where I am buzzsaw as on most servers.

I also have a 3d account on Fox named buzzkill. I am planning a demotion speed run. Let's see where I end settling in with the account that I started at 3d.

My Week of Go Activities: No Pie Charts Until Next Week

There will be no pie charts until my next report. I'm working on the issue.

I'll start with mention of an account I created on KGS specifically to play experimental games. I resurrected that account after returning from the Go Congress last year and was quite surprised to do really well with it. I maintained a rank of 3k with it for a number of months and then I stopped using it. 

Oddly KGS now thinks I am 2d?

Obviously I am not.

I tried to get a game with the account last night to knock it back down to size, and to see if I could still maintain 3k with it,  but I was not getting an auto match after waiting quite a while. I will try again soon. Or I may even create a totally new account that I will keep secret which is what In-seong Hwang wants me to do.

Look at that crazy graph.

 

I played six games last week. All of them were league games.

All of them were reviewed. In fact one of them got reviewed three times.

The AYD games got extra attention.

The last game has not yet been reviewed because neither I nor my opponent was present on review night so In-seong Hwang will review it offline. He'll do that soon so I credited him (crowis) for the review. It was the weekend game and had to be scheduled ahead of time because my opponent could not play it on the assigned day. 

I had a week off from lesson with Clossius the week before and he was able to review all of the games that had not yet been reviewed from two weeks. He covered a lot of material in my two hour lesson.

I'm really hoping to hav e my pie charts back next week.

My Week of Go Activities: Pie Charts on Hold

 

Ordinarily I would begin my blog post with a colorful Pie Chart of my Go Activities followed by a list of Go Activities with the percentage of time spent on each. 

Instead this week I offer a screen capture by way of explanation as to why I can not provide my usual chart and list.

I had purchased an iPad mini to use to record my U.S. Go Congress games last year and I had not used it since returning home after the Congress. I recently charged it and checked to see that its is operational for the Congress this July. 

I opened Now Then, the IOS app I use to record my Go Activities. It started to update data from iCloud yesterday, and it is still updating. Eight months of data is a lot to update. This process has made the app unavailable on my iPhone where I normally use it. Based on the above screen capture I would expect it to take a few days for this situation to resolve. In the mean time I will keep a rough estimate of time spent on various actives to enter retroactively once things are back in order.

In the meantime I'll just present my game information for the week.

I played only four games during the week. The first two were BenKyo Main League Group B games. The third was a Go Magic League game. The fourth was an AYD Game.

The AYD Game was interesting because it was so close. I had a lot of time on my clock so I was abel to count multiple times at the end of the game, and I was quite certain that I was going to win by exactly half a point. 

Unfortunately, I was not so careful about clicking the dead stones when it came time to help the computer score. I am black. This was a Points Lover game.

You can see that the failure to click the dead white stone in the lower right created an inaccurate score of W+8.5

I uploaded this game to my SGF Library on OGS and you can see it there.

We agreed that the score should have been B+ 0.5 and I reported it as a win for me and In-seong agreed because he presented it that way in review. I have to be more careful about checking for dead stones. I was so sure of the score I just clicked to accept it and then realized my mistake immediately.

This game put me at 2:0 for the current cycle in Group C3 of AYD.

Update:

It has been a couple days since I uploaded this post and the situation has gotten even worse with the updating of the data for the NOW THEN app.

Notice that it is now estimating that it will take over 95 hours for the updating to complete whereas a few days ago it was estimating that it would take only 42 hours.

I will admit that there is something freeing about not tracking my activities. Perhaps I will take a vacation from that. What isn't fun is manually taking a notes about my activities to enter the data retroactively. I might stop doing that if a few days if things don't get better.

My Week of Go Activities: A Three Way Tie for First Place in the Go Magic League

It was a moderately active week with over 23 hours spent on Go Activities.

Two Tsumego categories came in with over 28% of activity combined.

It was a light week for Live Play with only four games being played, one of them a Correspondence Game with Clossius which he reviewed during my weekly lesson.

The big news for the week is that I finished the first season of the Go Magic League (in beta). I came in at first place, but not alone. It was an amazing three way tie with each of the winners beating one of the other winners.

Division 15 was the second Division to finish play. We might be the only division to finish with such an epic three way tie. 

The Go Magic League was fun, but there were major scheduling issues which will hopefully be improved for the second season which is currently on hold while the Leago Team works on improving scheduling moving forward.

The main problem with scheduling with Go Magic is that the default time suggested for games is not very friendly for North American Players which requires that every game must be rescheduled. I managed to do that, but it required a lot of effort. 

I'm taking a break this week because NAOL and Go Magic are both between seasons, and because I don't have a Lesson with Clossius on Friday, so I won't need games for review. As a result I will be short on games again in my next report.