詰棋、張栩與小林泉美

看了一篇小林泉美（日本女棋手，旅日台灣棋手張栩之妻）寫她當年和張交往的文章，覺得這樣的愛情實在浪漫啊！

他們這個級數的棋手花在練棋的時間多得普通人無法想像，要拍拖又不影響練習，真是一片苦心！

小林寫了這麼一句：

因為這些詰棋，事實上也更讓我重新加強了「能和張栩交往的女生，恐怕也只有我了」的想法。

這般談戀愛算得上是最高境界吧！

Sports highlights: MLB Playoff

This topic deserves its own post as there were tons of highlights (and 1 lowlight) from the first 2 weeks of MLB Playoff. First of all, those 2 wild card "play-in" games were something. I predicted only one of the 2 Bay Area teams would have advanced and I was right. At one point the A's had a comfortable lead but gave them all up and eventually lost to Kansas City Royals in extra innings. A sports talk show host said it the best: that one game summarized what happened the whole season: superb 1st half, lousy 2nd half. On the other hand, the Giants built up a huge lead in its game vs the Pirates and never looked back.

My second prediction was totally wrong though: I thought the World Series would be LAD vs LAA. WRONG! Both of them finished the season strong and featured quite a few superstars on their rosters: Puig, Hanley Ramirez, Adrian Gonzalez, Kemp, Kershaw (who will no doubt win the Cy Young), Pujols, Trout, Josh Hamilton, CJ Wilson, Weaver. Well, both of them fell to teams from Missouri (Royals and Cardinals) in the Division Series round. Why? For the Dodgers-Cardinals series, I think Game 1 set the tone: Dodgers kept hitting and scoring runs and built up a 6-1 lead after 5 innings. With Kershaw pitching the way he did all season, it seems the outcome had already been decided. Well, who could foresee the Cards scoring 8 runs in the 7th? Matt Carpenter had 4 RBI in that game and he was THE man (instead of the more famous Dodgers) in the whole series. Game 1 of the Angels-Royals series was not as dramatic but close: they tied 2-2 until Moustakas hit his solo HR on the top of 13th which turned out to be the game-winning run. I guess Angels losing Game 1 at home did them in.

Of course the Giants vs Nationals series was the big focus here. The two SF home games certainly affected the commute, which was all forgiven because they won the series :P All 3 wins by the Giants were nail biters. The midseason acquisition, pitcher Jake Peavy, proved once again the Giants front office's ability to identify talent and make the right move. Peavy had a poor W-L record prior to the deal. In fact, he had a bad start with the Giants too but it was mostly bad luck. He pitched great in the Game 1 victory in Washington. The 18 inning Game 2 was an instant classic for sure. I started following the game at the beer fest in San Mateo ~3pm (which was kinda disappointing because most beer there was rather mainstream anyway. The highlight was the performance by an 80s Metal cover band, Hairstrike!) And the Giants was trailing 0-1 after 2 outs in the 9th inning. Then they tied it. And Brandon Belt hit a HR in Top 18th to win it. Game 4 was another strange one: 1 run scored on a bases-loaded walk. And the game winning run scored on a wild pitch!

Alex Skolnick's Vinyl Encounter

If you have been following my blogs, you probably know Alex Skolnick is one of my favorite (jazz and metal) guitarist. Just read his recent blog post titled "Vinyl Encounter or other Mr Baker" It's very interesting and I can't believe I did two things before he did:

1) "Discovered" Mickey Baker: Like Skolnick, I wasn't aware of this influential guitar player years after I played. Unlike Skolnick, I learned about him several years ago via a Jazz Guitar Forum, where study groups were formed to learn jazz guitar from Mickey Baker's instructional material. It was a kinda heated topic there: some touted it as one of the best out there while some thought Baker's way was too old-school and took long to get results. 

2) "Rediscovered" vinyl: I agreed with him that small apartments in Manhattan wasn't exactly the best place to be a vinyl collector/turntable lover. I was one when I lived there in 2000. I gave away my turntable in 2001 and didn't got back to listening to vinyl until 2013. There's simply no substitute for vinyl's magic.  

Sports highlights: F1, NFL, EPL, NHL, NASCAR

This is yet another eventful week in the world of sports:

Lewis Hamilton defeated his rival Nico Rosberg once again in the rain shortened Japanese F1 GP to extend his lead in the championship standings.

Joey Logano won his 2nd race in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship (and the 1st race of the 2nd round of playoff which advanced him to the 3rd round automatically) I have been following his career since his Nationwide series day. He did quite well there. However, he underachieved during his days with Joe Gibbs Racing in the Sprint Cup series and raised some doubt about his ability. I think he was a bit overshadowed by Brad Keselowski, who won the Sprint Cup quickly after moving up from the Nationwide (BTW, Xfinity will be the title sponsor of the series starting in 2015) Ironically, leaving JGR to join Team Penske and becoming a teammate of Brad proved to be a great career move by Joey. This guy could win some (actually a lot of) races! It's time for his generation of drivers to shine. One could feel the next generation is coming quick, like the 2nd place finisher Kyle Larson, and the current leader of the Nationwide championship, Chase Elliott. It's gonna be exciting the next few years to see the elders and the young guns duking it out. (Drivers like Hamlin, Edwards, Busch don't seem young anymore) And it showed how competitive this sports is. Gotta appreciate the drivers who are able to last long (without support from family money) there.

Manchester United defeated Everton with goals from newly acquired Di Maria and Falcao. Most Man U fans still remembered the last loss to Everton in last season, which was the last straw for firing former Man U (and former Everton) manager David Moyes. Not many are calling for firing of Louis Van Gaal now but it's gonna be a long season with this leaky defense.

The Dallas Cowboys defeated in-state rival Houston Texans, barely, with an OT FG. Didn't know it was on local TV until I headed out biking with kids. Glad that I missed it 'coz I would not dare to watch the last few minutes in which the Texan came back and the Cowboys missed a late FG that would have won the game in regulation time. On one hand, I can't be too optimistic. On the other hand, a 4-1 record has some margin for the team to fall back to .500 later in the season (that's how they finished the last 3 seasons) And I was glad that the Texan was not one of the many teams that were able to comeback and win this week. Most notably the Cleveland Browns came back from 25 point down in an away game. There were way too many blowouts this season, especially for the Monday/Thursday night games! Speaking of blowouts, the Patriots had a horrible loss to the Chiefs last Monday. One could only imagine the Chiefs will have a let down at the next game while the Pats will likely to rebound. So, the fortunate team was the 49ers (who played the Chiefs next) and the unfortunate one was the Bengals (who played the Pats)  Last but not least, Peyton Manning scored his 500th TD this weekend and will break Brett Favre's all-time record soon. I read that Favre said he's happy to see that but I think he is secretly looking for teams who need a QB now.

While this season of Champion's League of Twenty 20 finished on Sunday (still haven't finished watching the 2nd half of the final!), the new season of NHL starts on Wednesday. Go Sharks, Pens, Rangers!

[Update: finally finished watching CLT20 final. Chennai Super King, especially Suresh Raina, put up a strong performance. Congrat to my co-workers who are fans of the team! BTW, I looked up the name of the runner-up Kolkata and confirmed it's the city formerly known as Calcutta. The name changed happened in 1996. Chennai was renamed from Madras in the same year too. I actually knew about Madras from my schoolmates earlier and didn't know it's the same city 'til now.]

Tech from the olden days

I am cleaning up some really old posts that I wrote way back yet still in draft status. The title used the term my daughter likes to play with: olden days (which apparently many others found interesting too. In fact, it has a long history according to this.)  All those posts are consolidated here.

1) Workaround was needed for sharing files from Win2K to Win7 Home Premium Edition (dated 2009.) Those were the days I still used a Win2K laptop as our home NAS. It required a registry change.

2) Guest Additions (dated 2010) was for VirtualBox. I needed it back then for sharing files between my VM and the host (and I still need it now!)

3) Dell DJ 20 Gen 2 was my latest toy in 2010 (and I still listen to it almost every night!) When it was newly released in 2004, it cost >$100 and I bought it for $40.

Its drivers were still available for download from Dell in 2010 (not sure if the link works now.) It is not a plug-and-play device on Win7 and the Windows driver needed to be installed for it to be recognized. The WinXP driver actually works on Win7 too. Also, to use subscription service like Rhapsody, one needed to upgrade the player with a PlaysForSure compatible firmware (the last one on the page) Unfortunately that .exe only works on WinXP so you need to somehow find one. And when I ran it, it stuck on "Restarting player" even though the player was restarted (and upgraded) Fortunately it didn't matter. I just close the installer and it didn't cause any problem. Once the player has been upgraded, you could still transfer subscription tunes using a Win7 computer.

Fast forward to 2014: I could use my Dell DJ 20 on my Win8 PC in plug-and-play fashion. I couldn't get it to work with the Rhapsody client though. Rhapsody no longer officially supported it (no more PlaysForSure?) Today it plays non-DRMed files for me only.

4) CopyTrans is a free tool for copying songs to iDevice without iTunes

5) 2009 was the 50th anniversary of COBOL. It was obviously an important milestone but it's also one of the few major computer programming languages that I knew little about.

6) Shozu was an iPhone App I experimented with (and wanted to recommend) for posting to Blogger. I don't think I used it that much after I drafted that post in 2008 with it though :P

Fast forward to 2014: the official Blogger app on iOS is free yet still not very good. I'm writing this on a PC instead.

7) I wanted to raise awareness of radiation level in Hong Kong back in March 2012. Excerpt from the CNN article:

When Pieter Franken visited Hong Kong one of the first things he did was measure the level of radiation in his hotel room. "The whole idea is to measure everything (rather than only performing spot checks)," said Franken. Hong Kong lies just 50 kilometers from a nuclear power station located in Daya Bay in Guangdong province, but its 12 permanent radiation monitoring stations are not in heavily populated urban areas. On a six-hour drive around the city's major commercial and residential, Franken mapped radiation levels with a portable monitoring kit devised by Safecast. All the data is publicly viewable as interactive heat maps on Safecast's website. The drive revealed that Hong Kong had a constant level of radiation that hovered around 0.2 microsievert per hour for an annualized dose of 2 millisieverts. This was slightly higher than the 0.1 microsievert per hour that Safecast mapped in the major urban centres of Tokyo and Beijing. One millisievert per year is an internationally-recognized nuclear factory guideline for exposure to radiation by the general public, according to Dr. John Leung, radiation expert and physics professor at the University of Hong Kong. "Your risk of having cancer is increased for 4 to 5% per sievert of radiation your body absorbs," explained Leung. "The way to control it is to receive as little as possible." On his drive around Hong Kong Franken wanted to see how localized the radiation was, "but it seems to be all over," he said. Franken believed that the common denominator throughout the city, concrete, was a key source of the radiation. Or more specifically, the locally-sourced granite aggregates used in place of pricier cement to make the concrete. "Hong Kong is lying on a high-background radiation level because the radionuclide content in the granite in this region of the country is a bit higher than the world average," said Leung. "There is more uranium and thorium in our granite. It's natural." A study conducted by Leung and his colleagues in 1990 found that the gamma radiation dose rate of local soil to be 1.8 times the world average. Hong Kong's concrete infrastructure poses no immediate harm to residents' health, but some wonder if more attention should be given to how buildings are made in the city. "When we make concrete, we don't pay attention to the mineral content of the rock, so long as it is strong enough," said University of Hong Kong structural engineering professor, Albert Kwan. "If it's really is the case (that local granite has elevated radioactivity), perhaps we should import our granite from elsewhere." The everyday doses of radiation we encounter are far from being fatal in one shot, but it is the accumulated exposure that may be cause for concern. To reduce everyday levels of radiation Safecast suggests opening doors and windows to ventilate rooms. This minimizes the accumulation of radon - a radioactive gas produced by the decay of naturally occurring uranium and thorium. Inhaling radon - one of the leading sources of human exposure to natural radiation - in the home and workplace causes tens of thousands of deaths from lung cancer annually, according to the World Health Organization.

8) I was experimenting with booting to a Live version of Arch Linux on a USB drive on my personal laptops in 2009. larch was the next thing to try after my FaunOS experiment.

I basically followed the instructions and also did the followings:
I) make a copy of an existing profile. I copied xmini to a new one named "my"
II) I changed the addedpacks by
- remove all xfce* lines and added one line with jwm (pacman cannot find those xfce related packages and I prefer jwm anyway)
- remove aufs (otherwise I got error about dependency on pre-2.26.29 kernel. It has actually become part of the new kernel anyway. However, the included one is aufs2 and it doesn't support "Merging overlays" when you save sessions from running the resulting image of larch.)
III) create a directory for building the image. Make sure it is on a filesystem with lots of free space!
IV) the command should be./mklarch -ug -p ./larch/profile/my [dir created in 3]

Fast forward to 2014: I tried something similar again: Live Ubuntu on USB on my Intel Core i5 laptop. The performance was horrific. Slow to boot and slow after boot (probably worse than the 2009 experiment!) I ended up buying a $50 60 Gb SSD (el cheapo and SSD didn't appear in the same sentence back in 2009) and installed Ubuntu 14.04 properly on it. I like this setup. It didn't require much tweaking at all and most things work out of the box (except this)   

Yahoo Mail glitches: font size

I have been a Yahoo Mail user since the dotcom days. Gotta admit GMail has a better UI but I am still "loyal" to Yahoo and use it for communications with most of my friends. And I gave Yahoo credits for not letting the product sit still and keeps trying to improve it. However, for some reason they tend to introduce bugs (Well, I do that as a web app dev too but our apps are not as widely used as Yahoo's) and sometimes annoying new features (like the tabs vs no tab fiasco now I don't even remember which is better. Still remember using this workaround last year though) The latest bug is defaulting the font size to 'Tiny' Yes, it's really tiny. Simply go to "Settings->Writing emails" to change it back :)