A blog about stuff. Mostly.
7. The Hummer
6. Email. I get 300 messages per day – on a quiet day.
5. Thrash politics. IMHO we should just tune out anybody whose discussions focus on the other group (“the liberals”, “right-wing nutjobs” etc) rather than on issues and solutions.
4. The Exchange French
3. Usury. 40% interest cards – these guys must have the most powerful political lobbyists in the world.
2. Lady Gaga
1. tie: Infomercials / NASCAR
Not really endless. Last linking post:
“Mathematics has always been used for denotation. However, our interest is to use math as a language for connotation.” – Mathematical Poetry. The concept of poetry expressed in math form is interesting in and of itself; it gets even more weird when you start merging and/or solving the resulting equations.
My wife designs and builds websites (and marketing plans and…). Like one for those who need a charter flight, or another if you of more modest income and have to go by bike (of course biking in Provence is much nicer than biking in Framingham), or another if you aren’t traveling and want to make your home much nicer through remodeling. She’s extremely talented and smart.
If you want to compete with her level of genius and need inspiration, these guys at Tiny Gigantic always find fascinating creative ideas and projects.
Want more chess? Unless you’ve been under a rock you know about the pure thrills of the US Chess League. I kinda maintain its Wikipedia page and follow/support my local team. And here’s some love for Wang’s Chess House, and Smitty’s Chess Corner, and Strong Among the Weak….
If you’re a blogger, pass some links around to those you love.
Not to be too derivative but Wahrheit mentions several other chess blogs that deserve linkage: Dennis Monokroussos’ The Chess Mind (the author is, you know, actually *good* at chess); Michael Goeller’s The Kenilworthian; and Blue Devil Knight (who would himself probably admit to being not so good at chess, but whose blog is intelligent and entertaining; also don’t miss his more serious but equally interesting brainy Neurochannels blog);
I also feel I have been remiss in not pointing people to Tacticus Maximus, who created ChessFlash.
Liquid Egg Product needs no introduction to Reassembler readers, which is good because he/they/it is/are hard to properly introduce.
Down a different path, I have taken some of my notes on SEO and turned them into columns for emediavitals, a new site for publishing professionals. It’s all written aimed at editors like me, but if you’re interested in how search engines work and how people can listen to them and talk to them, you might like such stuff as Keyword research: Two critical strategies. (Can I link to my own stuff and call it love? The point is I’m linking to emediavitals, which seems determined to publish little or no whining about the death of journalism, which is why I like their site.)
I also want to give a shout-out to former colleague Con Von Hoffman (yes) whose Collateral Damage blog is snarky to the max, smart and funny commentary on culture, marketing, news, you name it.
More later (although I risk appearing to Google as a giant link farm).
I put up Link Love as a potential post in the Reassembler voting process.
It lost. Undeterred, Wahrheit took up the flag on his excellent chess (and other stuff) blog. He’s right – the river of interblog links seems to have dried to a trickle in recent months. I’m guilty as anyone.
For instance, I don’t think I’ve ever linked to Blunderprone’s in-depth chess history posts. Unlike 99.9999999999 percent of the world’s bloggers (*points at self*), George really puts some research into his posts.
The inimitable DK Transformation never fails to enlighten and entertain (unless he’s on hiatus :) both on his chess blog and on The System of the System.
My friend and former co-worker Michael Fitzgerald covers broad ground on Archimedes Hot Tub (get it?); eg On Feudal Capitalism – read the comments too. (Michael recently wrote an indepth series about the Mafia for csoonline.com.)
I thought this Abbie Lundberg interview was fascinating on the revolutionary nature of the iPhone - this is much more insightful than merely “oh look it’s so cool”. Gets to the nature of software systems in the business world.
There’s lots more to link but I’m pressed for time. More later.
In the words of some 70s band, let your love flow.
A small side note for those who love to give: It’s better to link words of substance (examples above) than to link the word “here” or “this post”. From a Google POV. Just sayin’.
A friend asked what we did in the evenings in France. My answer? We went to sleep. Usually by 9:30 pm or so.
Maybe that’s partly because of the time difference. France is 6 hours ahead. But we were there for about 10 days, which is a pretty good amount of time to adjust.
Rue Dauphine, foot of Pont Neuf bridge, Paris
I think we were exhausted because being in a foreign environment makes your brain work overtime, even to do mundane things that you take for granted in your usual habitat.
Simply going to the bakery or grocery store and buying a few items is a big deal if you speak only a few words of the language. Road signs are different. The car dashboard (in this case a rented Renault) is different. Waiters and shopkeepers may or may not make any allowance for the fact that you are obviously straining to follow their questions.
It keeps your mind working overtime, like running a mental marathon.
Not quite as extreme as this neurobic exercise, but still pretty darn good.
In football, on a passing play, the quarterback usually has a primary receiver. Ideally, that’s where the ball is going.
If that option is taken away – the DB knocked the receiver off his route, the safety is cheating over that way, etc – the quarterback has to look to his second option. And so on, maybe checking all the way down to a dump pass to a running back. Of course, there are several 300-lb men rushing to try to flatten the QB while he still has the ball.
So I’m quite impressed with the brain of the quarterback. They have to read the defense at the line of scrimmage, make and communicate a coded play adjustment if necessary, take the snap, drop back, and then go through this mental and physical progression of reads – each one requiring a microsecond throw/don’t throw decision - while trying to sense and avoid the rush.
So in chess, what’s your progression? If your first plan doesn’t work, are you prepared to check down in an orderly manner?
Sometimes I get a position that I just don’t understand. Don’t know the themes, can’t figure out a plan, don’t know where the pieces belong, don’t know who’s better. I have a reputation for stewing endlessly over these positions – a 20-minute think is not that unusual for me, which in the context of our club time control (40 in 90) is que estupido. It’s roughly like a quarterback holding the ball for 10 seconds – an invitation to get flattened.
It would be smarter to give myself a time limit for any particular move (I think Howard G does this) and then check down to a simple question like “Which of my pieces is least active?” and attempt to improve it.
This approach undoubtedly applies at work and elsewhere too. What about you – do you have ‘checkdown’ strategies for dealing with complex situations?
When I was a kid, a summer day lasted roughly forever. Now the clock and calendar conspire against us, and sometimes whole years seem to zip past, like blurred scenery through a train window.
Through the generosity of a friend, we stumbled on a way to slow it down: 
If you go to France, and travel to the Provence region in the south, there’s a valley connecting immaculate little hillside villages like Sault and Moniuex.
Go to the valley and stand outside a farmhouse in the afternoon in a lavender field. Look at the mountains, look at the lavender, look at the villages.
Don’t do email, don’t blog, don’t tweet. Turn the ringer off.
Bring a glass of wine if you like. If you’re hungry, pick a fig off a nearby fig tree, or crack open a walnut.
Listen to the grasshoppers, or the sheep just over the hillside.
While you do this, the sun will hang in the afternoon sky for a long, long time.
Not reassembling anything until mid-October.
(Can you name the source of the post title without assistance from Mr. Google?)
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