Not A Go Post - A Graphics Post

I am taking a course on Photoshop Elements 6, and was having trouble posting a gif file on my other web site using iWeb.  The image was converted to a png file.  So I am going to try to upload the file here as a gif.

Go On A Treadmill

I posted this message on Go Discussions, so if you read that discussion group you can probably skip this blog entry... otherwise please continue.

I have a membership to a local gym that has something they call "cardiac theatre" which is simply a row of television sets tuned to various channels with audio input devices on each treadmill, elliptical, and bike. You can plug your own earphones into these input devices and change channels so you can watch TV or listen to music stations while you exercise.

I know I should get to the gym more often, but network TV and music is almost as boring as walking on the treadmill and doesn't make the time go by that quickly for me.

Yesterday I took my Tablet PC to the gym with me to see if I could stand it up in the book stand on the treadmill. This would never work with a laptop because the book stand is narrow from side to side, and not particularly deep either. I had to put my tablet into a portrait orientation because the width of the space was not adequate to hold the unit in landscape orientation. This made it necessary for me to size the window of cgoban so it only occupied half of the screen because it doesn't work well in a portrait orientation. If I had allowed it to fill the screen in portrait mode 
I would have had only a narrow strip at the bottom for the commentary and for the move tree. The tablet was surprisingly stable on the rack and I didn't have any fear of it falling off.

My thirty minute walk seemed like only a fifteen minute walk as I reviewed one of my Yang lesson games on the tablet.

Next I'm going to load up my tablet with some screen captures of audio go lessons and try listening to them as I walk. This will be easier because I won't have to use the stylus to navigate a tree structure as I walk. (Before anyone asks if I will share my screen captures I will say that I made them for personal review and not for distribution. Guo Juan deserves her Euros. She's already got mine.  She should have yours too.)

I wish the gym had wireless. That would be fantastic. I could watch go games live and maybe even play them "on the go".

I have a stationary bike at home, which I don't like as much as a treadmill, but if I could rig a good system for supporting the tablet while riding I might get some use out of it.

The image at the top of the post represents the appearance of cgoban as it takes up half of the screen space of my tablet in portrait orientation.

SmartGo for the iPhone

SmartGo for the iPhone and iPod made its debut at the U.S. Go Congress this year.  I was lucky enough to get a demo from Anders before the first round of the U.S. Open.  Here he is pictured holding his iPhone with SmartGo active.  The picture doesn't do the display justice, which is brilliant and dazzling.  Anders, however, is looking good, as usual.

I'll be getting an iPod when the next model comes out, hopefully in the Fall.  I can hardly wait to have all of the recording and reviewing power of SmartGo in the palm of my hand, at which point my Palm will likely be history.

Terri

Knowing A Position Can Pay Off

My teacher, Mr. Yilun Yang, has always recommended studying life and death.  It undoubtedly develops one's reading "muscle", but I think that when one knows the status of certain positions for certain, it also gives one the confidence and patience needed to find the solution in one's own games.

An example of this type came up in my game yesterday.

I had just played c14 to complete the corner.  It was my assumption that the corner could no longer be invaded.  I think I had read about it in a book at one time.  My opponent and I were chatting during our friendly game, and he said that he was thinking of where to invade in the upper left.  I told him that it was my understanding that theoretically an invasion in that corner should fail, although I admitted that I could not claim to know exactly how to refute it if he tried.   Thus the gauntlet had be tossed...  The starting position appears below...

Before we get to the actual sequence of play, which dragged on for a nerve shattering 20 moves, I want to show the position which I felt I knew.  It helped boost my confidence in the middle of the sequence, and helped me to avoid a bad move, which I might have played if I had not known the position.  Most of us know that "six die and eight live".  I even own the tshirt from Samarkand.  This life and death proverb refers to stones in a row along the second line.  The position below is taken from this game, in which six in a row appear.  Because I could recognize that this would be the position  a few moves before it actually occurred, I was able to resist the urge to make a premature hane at b12, which would have increased my cutting points, and would probably have resulted in disaster.

Here is the "six die" position...

And here is the actual sequence of play...

It was great to be able to see the "six die" position coming, and to know how to deal with it all the way through the nobi at 12, the hane at 16, the throwin at 18, and the nobi at 20.

Now I really have to pay some attention to the the following shapes:  the L, the L+1, and the L+2.  Getting the status of those positions down cold ought to be worth something.  I want to not only know what is alive, but how it is likely to be attacked, and how to refute those attacks.

Strong players can not only read, they also know stuff.  I know stuff about the opening, but I don't yet know much stuff about standard corner positions.   It's on list of things to do to acquire such knowledge.

Played Rated - Went From 8k to 7k

The friend I blogged about yesterday kept our date to play a rated even game today on KGS.  Yesterday he was 6k and gave me two stones in our handicap game.   Today he was 7k. We played an even rated game with 6.5 komi, which meant I was still slightly under handicapped.

It turned out that I didn't need the komi.    As we approached the second half of the endgame my opponent resigned because it became apparent that my moderate lead could not be overcome as there were only regular end game moves left and no real tricks to be played.

Upon his resignation I immediately became 7k, which was my plan all along.  

We had a really good time playing.  We agreed to play a slow game and chatted throughout.  Adding time, if necessary, was agreed upon by both sides.  My opponent played the game on a real board alongside the computer to slow himself down.  Since he is very far from a go club he hardly ever gets a chance to play an opponent on his real board.

The whole game had quite a real life club flavor to it, and I will probably use a real board myself next time when I play this opponent to slow myself down as well.  Incase anyone is wondering, we did agree that there would be no variations played out on the real board.  It is impossible to enforce, I realize, but I trust this person, having known him online for many years.

The real life feeling was enhanced by our review, which we conducted along with another of my online go friends who I started helping back in January, and who has since gone on to become a Yang student.  My fellow Yang student showed his superior reading skills by pointing out something I had missed in the game.  There was a weakness I was aiming at and I thought that after my opponent had added a couple stones that it no longer worked, but it actually  did work due to a ladder.  I had tried to read it but was off enough to think it didn't work.  

I've saved the game analysis locally to my computer and will go over it again.

Time To Play Rated Again On KGS

About two weeks before the Congress I stopped playing rated on KGS because I had a good solid 8k rating, and I wanted to maintain it as justification for my two stone self promotion.  And since coming back from the Congress I have been busy reviewing games and have not played much, and not any rated games at all.

Today I accepted an offer for a clan game in the Battlefield room on KGS.  I am a member of the Honinbo clan.  The offer came from a long time go acquaintance for a game at no more than two handicap stones.  Since the offer came from a 6k, and I am 8k, I took the offer.  He seemed surprised to see me, probably because  I so often turn down offers to play.  I have to stop doing that.  But I also have to be firm about not playing when I really don't want to play, but that is another problem altogether which I may address in another post.

The game proceeded well for me.  I made a kill early on in the game.  I managed to win by 39.5 so I may have won without the kill.  But who knows what would have happened on the rest of the board without it. 

My opponent suggested that I play some rated games to get my rating up to where it belongs. 

I have decided that I will try to play one rated game each weekday between 8:00 am and 9:00 am my time, which is Eastern Daylight Time.  My opponent and I have a tentative date tomorrow for an even rated game at that time.  If I lose it won't hurt me since I will be under handicapped anyway, but if I win it should help me get my rating where it belongs, which might be 6k or 5k by now.

Self Promotion Pays Off

The games from the Congress have been factored into the ratings.

Before the congress I was -11.41904 with a sigma of 0.25708

After the congress I am -9.35656 with a sigma of 0.68605

I don't have all that far to go to get to 8 kyu :-) and with my new improved sigma it should be easier to get there.

I am very happy.

My U.S. Go Congress Results

I am back from the Congress and have good news to report.

I went 3-2 at my self appointed 9 kyu rank. I didn't need the note I brought from my teacher to convince the TD to allow me to self promote, but I showed it anyway just for fun. I had printed out our conversation from the sgf file in which we had our discussion, and had the TD okay it.

My first game I lost by 5.5
My second game I won by 2.5
My third game I won by 2.5
My fourth game I lost by 0.5
My fifth game I won by resignation while I was at least 40 points ahead on the board. That felt really great.

Based on the starting ranks of my first four opponents I could tell that none of them had self promoted... too many digits following the decimal point. My fifth opponent had self promoted from 12k to 9k, which based on his record he feels was one stone too optimistic. That game may not help me, but the other four should put me somewhere near -9.5 when the dust settles.

One of my rationales for trying the self promotion this year was that I was flying back early Saturday and would be unable to play the 6th round. I didn't want to run the risk of doing well as an 11k and miss the chance to earn a prize. I would have been heart breaking to board the plane at 5-0 with a game yet to play. I hoped to go 2-3 as a 9k and claim a new rank.

As it turned out my record of 3-2 meant that if I had played today I might have gone 4-2 and probably could have come in third again this year if I had done so. Last year I pulled that off with a 3-3 record, but that was undoubtedly a fluke caused by too many players byeing out of too many rounds in my band. Mediocre results and fighting spirit paid off last year. They probably don't always get such good results.

I'm okay with not playing the last round this year. Having lost my first game I probably didn't have all that great a chance at a prize anyway.

This was undoubtedly the best Congress I've ever had because I was able to tell people that I self promoted and that I was even in wins and losses at the end of the fourth round. It felt like a major victory. And the 9k I probably earned is a ten stone increase above my first AGA rating of 19 kyu.

I am very anxious for the ratings to be updated so I can see where the dust will settle.

Self Promoting To 9k At The Congress

Although I don't tend to self promote at tournaments I decided to ask Mr. Yang's advice about my entry rank for the U.S. Go Congress before our lesson yesterday.  He said he would like to see me enter as a 9k, so I am going to do that.  Having him suggest it takes the heat off of me in a way.  I don't have to be conflicted about it.  I can simply follow my teacher's directive.  

Just to be silly I printed our our conversation so I can show it to the people at the registration desk if they are reluctant to let me promote.  Since it is a two stone promotion I know they will let me do it, especially since I have a solid 8k KGS rating.  But it would just be fun to flash the document for a laugh.

It is hard to argue with a 7p, so I don't think I will have any trouble.

The Tablet Is Coming Along For The Ride

I am no longer conflicted.

I have decided to bring along the Tablet PC to the U.S. Go Congress.  But the main reason I am doing so is because of the horribly long eleven hour journey to Portland with the stopover in Phoenix.   I am downloading episodes of Photoshop User TV to watch in the airports and on the flights.  Books and magazines just won't be enough to keep me happy for that long eleven painful hours.

Whether or not I lug the tablet to the playing area each day remains to be seen.

Conflicted About Whether To Drag Tablet To The Congress

With five days left before departure for the U.S. Go Congress I have yet to decide if I am going to take my Tablet PC with me.  For every tournament and Congress in the past couple of years I have used my Tablet PC to record games.  It's always been a hit, and to some extent an interesting distraction to my opponents, which may or may not offer me an advantage across the board.  But mostly, for the past four years, my tablet has just been a very important part of who I am as a go player.  I'm the middle aged gray haired woman with the incredibly cool contraption that people just can't keep their eyes off.

Recently, however, with my new found addiction to everything Mac,  I have lost patience with this aging technology.  Compared to my iMac my tablet is slow, and the only thing it has going for it anymore is that I can place it flat on the table between myself and the go board.  There is no doubt at all that it still carries an amazing coolness factor for that alone, but I am not sure if it worth lugging around for 11 hours from Philadelphia to Phoenix and on to Portland.  Of course there is something to be said for the entertainment value of having the tablet with me during those long waits in the airport and the flights.

I'll have my Palm to record games if I want.  I'm still conflicted.  

Next year I will probably have a nice new Mac Book Pro to take along once the tablet dies and I wean myself away from my PC hardware altogether.

When I come back from the Congress one of the first things I will be doing is installing VMWare Fusion on the iMac so I can run SmartGo.

Look For Me At The Congress

I don't look much like my picture here on my blog, nor that on Go Discussions.  I don't much resemble the highly stylized image that functions as my KGS identity either.  On KGS I am buzzsaw.   I should be easy to find at the U.S. Go Congress this year, however, since I will be sporting the cool name tag pictured above, which I have slipped into the highly functional tag holder provided at the 2007 Congress.

I hope to meet many new go players this year and visit with old friends.

An Observation of One of My Students

Today my most active student, chaslayton on KGS, sent me an email with some thoughts that he said I could post on my blog.  The following is what he has to say about observing a game on the KGS server.  I thought it was insightful, and certainly echos what I feel myself many times.  You are always five stones stronger when you kibitz. 

===========================================

Yesterday I watched a game on KGS – one of those fascinating games in which everything rides on a single move. In this case, if white played J2 first, white would make a second eye, thereby saving a group of about 20 endangered stones. White would then have been able to turn around and kill an equally large group of black’s stones. White would have won the game.

However, if black played J2 first, white’s large group would die and black’s would be saved. It was a huge move – the import of which was obvious to me as an observer – but neither player saw it for several turns. I was sitting at my desk yelling, “For God’s sake, somebody play J2!” When black finally did play it, white immediately saw the light, and resigned.

This brought home to me the fact that an uninvolved observer often sees the game more clearly than the players can. Even though I am far inferior to both those players, I saw what they did not. But it also brought home that even very good players make dumb mistakes – just like me. This is good for me to know. 

  Go, in this respect, is much like real life. And that, apparently, is true at every level of play. 

Yang Lesson Review - A Small Gathering Of Friends

I have one student in particular that I have been spending a lot of time with in the past few months.  In the time that we have been working together he has gone from 21k to 14k.  He gets most of the credit due to his hard work, but I have been commenting his games pretty regularly, so I take some credit too.  Recently I started reviewing my Yang lessons with him online by replaying the sgf files of those lessons on KGS at a specific time each week.  My lessons with Yang are private, but it is really easy to upload them and step through them for my student's benefit later.  Although I used to make all my lessons public many years ago, I think that at this stage, with KGS being a little less civilized than it used to be, that I would be too self conscious making the lessons public again.  I do the replay of my lesson not only for my student, but also for myself as a form of review.  In the six weeks that I have been doing this we have drawn a small audience, and I would like to keep it that way.

There was a post not long ago on go discussions concerning stronger players "taking over" lessons, so I have been silent up until now about the reviews, and people have wandered in from time to time and they behaved themselves well.  Aside from my involvement with the Mac, the focus on my Yang lesson reviews also accounts for the lack of posts to this blog.  They have dominated my go activities lately, and I had been reluctant to mention them until now.

I have been really clear with anyone who ends up watching that the objective is to review the lesson rather than go off on tangents that were never explored in the original lesson.  I also make it clear that we are trying to keep the review at the 20k - 10k level.  My student is around the middle of that range right now.  So far things have gone really well.  Last week there were only three people besides myself in attendance, and it went very smoothly.  During a previous presentation we had about eight people in the room, and it was a little more difficult to control, but I can be pretty direct, so it wasn't really a problem.

I am still not advertising the time of the review because I am not trying to populate the room, just posting about what I am doing right now in my go life, which after all is the purpose of this blog. For those who might wonder how Mr. Yang feels about my lessons reviews... he was asked, and he approves.

Neglecting My Go Blog - Sorry About That

It has been nearly a month since I posted to this blog.  My new iMac must take the blame.  I have been spending most of my waking hours reading books about the Mac, watching instructional videos on lynda.com, and learning how to use the applications that came with the iMac.

Highest up on my list of priorities has been finally using the domain that I registered a couple of years ago, terrischurter.com.   I am using iWeb to create my web site which consists of a Welcome page, a blog currently devoted to my Mac experiences, and a page mentioning my lessons with Yilun Yang.  My domain is hosted on the space provided by my .Mac account.  I am finding iWeb easier to use than Blogger , and I am posting to my Mac blog once a day on average, which is why I have been so busy.  It is great to be able to simply drag and drop images onto a page.  I really love my Mac.  There is no going back to the PC for me.

Zen Comment About "Moving" In Impressive Circles

I was having a discussion with one of my students today online.  We were talking about my new Mac computer.  He also has a Mac and is just as enthusiastic about his as I am about mine.  He was telling me that he wants to get a laptop, and I was telling him that I still have a tablet that I use, and that since it is a windows machine it can run SmartGo

I then informed him that I know Anders Kierulf in real life, and that "sgf" stands for "smart go format" which he invented.

Whereupon he said, "Wow, you move in impressive circles."

To which I responded, "I am like a go stone... I don't move... other stones gather around me."

To which he responded, "How very zen."

That was the idea.

Mac Rebate

It pays to ask.  I called Apple and asked if they offer a rebate to customers who have bought a machine within a certain period of time when they upgrade models.  They gave me a $200.00 rebate, with which I was very satisfied.

Got a Mac - Kind of Off Topic, But Not Really

Given the fact that my career was that of an art educator it is amazing that it took me until now to get a Mac.  I finally took the plunge after sitting on the fence since 1984 when I abandoned the Apple IIe for my first IBM compatible.  I got a 20 inch iMac for my husband a couple weeks ago first, and then spent a few weeks getting to know his machine and trying to decide if I should get a macbook pro for myself, or if I should get an iMac too.  I decided on the 24 inch iMac because I still have a working Tablet PC, which I can count on to provide me with computing functionality when I travel.  When the tablet dies it will be time for a Mac Book Air or a Mac Book Pro.

I am not sure if I can meet all of my go needs on the Mac, but I sure hope so, because I have no intention of running windows on the machine.  I am planning to try to find Mac applications for all of my computing needs, not just go.  Those who know me can vouch that I am pretty compulsive about things, so when I make the switch to Mac I am committed.  You should have seen me when I sold Tupperware.  I do little halfway.

So far I have decided to be satisfied with iWork rather than Microsoft Office for productivity.  I might feel compelled to get a Mac version of the Adobe Creative Suite.  I do have an academic version of CS...  yes. the first version.  Since I no longer have academic status I might be compelled to take a course at a local community college and go on an academic spending spree after I decide what I think I need to have.  I am looking at the iLife applications to see if I can make do with them.  I have used Photoshop for so long though, that I think I would have a hard time making due with anything less than Photoshop Elements at least.  We'll see.

I renewed my subscription to lynda.com so I can watch tutorials on the Mac OS X operating system as well as tutorials for the iLife and iWork applications.  I'll watch everything I can and then cancel the subscription until I think I need to go on another learning frenzy.

What is kind of funny is that the very day my iMac arrived at my door I read and article in the Apple RSS feed set up in my mail program on the iMac.  The article was titled "Meet the new iMac"  I just have to figure that it's only a couple hundred dollars of money I'm out by buying at the wrong time.  If I had waited just a week I would have gotten more Mac for my money... more memory... more speed... more of just about everything,  but you have to buy some time.  Your technology is always going to be old soon, just not usually the same day you get it.

One of the things I invested in is a .Mac account, which comes with an email account and also with disk space and the ability to publish web pages and to sync multiple Macs over the web.  Given that I already have multiple Macs and stand to accumulate more, this sounds like a good thing to me.  One of the things I will do with my .Mac account is to eventually make my lesson sgf files available for download so I can share them with others.  I'll let you all know when they are available.

AGA Ratings Prediction Pans Out

After the Cherry Blossom Tournament in Philadelphia where I went 2-2, I predicted that any ratings change would be glacial and negative. I was right about that as the screen capture from my favorite note keeping application "EverNote" shows...

My rating decreased from -11.39507 to -11.41904

My sigma went from 0.26936 to 0.25708

It's just fun to keep track of.

Back to 8k

I finally made it back to 8k on KGS this morning after winning an auto match game.  It was a 0.5 victory.  It feels good to be 8k again.  I want to continue to play rated on a regular basis, perhaps one game each morning whether I feel like it or not ... kind of like a daily vitamin... but I will bask in the glory of being 8k for today and not risk losing it, at least until my friends have had a chance to see that I managed to make my come back.