posted 2008/01/31 at 20:37
Is the United States Chess Federation in trouble? (New York Times blogs)
Getting back into playing chess is one of those things that always seems to be high on my to-do list that just never gets done. All I've managed to do over these past few years is knock off a few tutorials and practice games on Xbox Chessmaster (yay no absurd security locks), and play the odd game online. I really don't like playing on television or computer screens because it just doesn't inspire the same kind of deep thinking that I can do playing on an actual chess set, but I haven't really had anyone to play chess with in real life since high school. For that matter, my physical chess set kind of poofed after the fire and wasn't in the boxes of stuff we got back from the fire people, and I haven't bothered to replace it. (Actually, I take that back: I picked up a two-dollar chess set at Kroger a few years back, but a huge corner of the board was torn off of it when I got it, even though the package the set came in was sealed tight.) Perhaps it's because of how I've been socialized to handle in-person stuff versus Internet stuff, but playing chess over the Internet just isn't something that works out too well for me.
This article kind of makes me think about how the Internet has changed the various aspects of gaming. I had a youth membership to the USCF when I was in high school, although I never played a USCF-rated game. (I didn't want to travel to the big tournaments with the rest of my chess team because I didn't want to spend any more time with them than was absolutely necessary. My love of chess only extended so far even back then.) At that time, playing in school leagues and playing in USCF tournaments was kind of a big thing because it was the only real way to get rated and to be able to position yourself against other people and have an idea of where you stood. Pretty much every online chess service I've tried has had its own ranking system, though, and that takes away a large part of the allure of the USCF and what they offer. I imagine that similar games must also be experiencing identical growing pains. I don't follow chess closely enough to understand all the other politics that may or may not be going on at the USCF, but I can't help thinking about how the Internet may be changing the face of even the most classic of games that don't absolutely require physical presence and performance.
As the networking capabilities and pure computational power of the Internet increase, games of the mind are likely to become more and more altered. Chess is one of those games where I confess to being something of a luddite; I don't want to play speed chess and bullet chess all the time on a screen that doesn't give me a real sense of dimension. I kind of miss sitting in a school library somewhere, spending two to three hours on a game, enjoying the silence in which I could contemplate my next moves. With the way modern life is evolving, silence is becoming a scarcer and scarcer luxury, and contemplation seems to be almost an anachronism. For all that computing and the Internet make so many things easier for us -- I would never give them up -- I hope that they don't spell an end to the old chess clubs and tournaments.
posted 2008/01/22 at 20:56
When I first made Yggdrasil Mark I, I bought an IBM mouse that worked like a charm for a while. Eventually, though, the wheel became stuck, so I wound up buying a Microsoft mouse as a replacement that didn't work so well. Not only does the pointer like to jump around the screen a lot, but about once every one hundred boots or so it just doesn't respond at all and I have to reboot in order to get the mouse pointer to work. About a week or so ago I actually had the mouse fail to work on two consecutive boots, but a third boot got it to work all right. However, once I started loading my applications up, I found that my Google sidebar had lost all its information; my blogroll and photos were defaulting to things I'd viewed on the Web recently but didn't add (and my old directories disappeared), and my to-do list just vaporized. I can't be certain that the mouse problems and the Google problems are related to one another, but I was starting my reboots before Google Desktop had a chance to load. I'll just blame Microsoft for this, since it's easier and, let's face it, likely true.
Speaking of Google stuff, I'm only now beginning to use Google Calendar on a regular basis. Back when I was going to school my schedule was kind of straightforward, and I never really had much need for a scheduler of any kind because, well, I had no social life. I still don't have a social life (or at least much of one), but as I start teaching more and more, and start branching out into other professional things, I'm starting to see the value in scheduling software. If nothing else, by putting in the days of upcoming events that I probably won't go to but would give some consideration to, I'm at least giving myself a reminder that there is other stuff out there for me to do in case I change my mind about going to stuff. (Given all the tasks I've already piled upon myself, though, I don't know where I'd find the time for most of these events.)
On a related note, I think it's only now that I'm starting to see the value of browser tabs. I hadn't heard about Meebo until Ariel blogged about it recently, and now I'm finally beginning to get a picture of what so many of you out there must be doing. I'm guessing that for a lot of you, you keep one browser tab for surfing, then keep your Webmail account always active in another tab, your messaging client in another, and your scheduler in another. I'm still using Outlook for e-mail and Trillian for messaging, so I have to keep switching between windows, which isn't as elegant. I'm not sure if I could ever switch entirely to Web applications, but I'm probably going to use browser tabs a lot more in the future here to see if they help me keep things in order.
Labels: internet
posted 2007/12/23 at 20:39
I've been sick for close to two weeks now, and it's only been in the past day or two that I've felt well enough to resume what I consider to be normal activities for me. It's almost as if my body was trying to make up for how I didn't have a serious illness for close to two years there, and shut down almost completely when this bug really hit. As it is I'm still not feeling well enough to resume exercise, and I continue to use television as a way to distract myself for how lousy I feel (thankfully there was a MythBusters marathon earlier today), but I'm no longer feeling like I was earlier when I basically had to save up my energy so I could tend to work stuff, then come back here and basically collapse either in front of my computer or, more likely, on top of my bed.
It's amazing just how out of it I continue to feel right now. I've kind of been taking things easy so that I didn't tire myself out with other things, but now I feel kind of disconnected from the world around me. For example, I haven't been following the news that closely for a couple of weeks, and I don't even have my Google Sidebar on my computer now because it was hurting my head trying to keep up with all the information on it. I recognize that this is a natural response to being sick, and that in the long run this is probably a healthy thing for me to be doing, but at the same time we're getting very close to the first primaries for the "big two" parties and I don't feel all that informed as to what's going on here. Just from the cursory glances I've gotten of the news lately, it looks like Ron Paul's come out of nowhere in terms of coverage devoted to his campaign, and once again Dennis Kucinich is getting the short end of the straw. Without being able to delve deeper into the news, though, I don't feel like I can make a good blog post about the campaign, so I'll probably need to take an afternoon here after Christmas just to get caught up on the news.
I also haven't been on instant messenger that much lately, when I'd been doing such a good job of making myself available on it once I downloaded Trillian and got it installed. Normally this wouldn't be such a big issue for me, but a couple of my friends seem to have been going through some tough times recently and it kind of stinks that I haven't been around to help them. I suppose it would help if I were better about talking on the phone, but I haven't had a landline connection in my room since we got our cable modem, and I only really use my cell phone for emergencies and business purposes. I'm kind of an insulated person to start with, but this cold just made things ten times worse for me in that regard, and just like with the news, now I find myself needing to catch up on stuff with my small circle of friends that I missed these past couple of weeks.
There have been some other important developments in my life here, but I'll get to those in another post; right now I must play catch-up with yet other things. Gee, I thought things would slow down once I was on vacation here. Silly me.
Labels: internet, personal, politics
posted 2007/11/18 at 18:19
Reforms urged after MySpace hoax's victim kills herself (AP via pantagraph.com)
I've been following this story as it's been developing for the past few days. This doesn't exactly follow the pattern of behaviour I've been so interested in tracking recently, since the person who created the fake "Josh" account on MySpace was an adult (and a parent at that) rather than a fellow teenager, but what happened to Megan is certainly similar to what I've been warning could happen if this kind of Internet misanthropy, more common among younger people than people the age of the parent mentioned in this story, continued unchecked. Although I have mentioned in the past that I am concerned over how some older people have latched onto the relative anonymity of the Internet to keep doing the kind of immature bullying most of us get tired of in our teenage years, this was clearly more a case of premeditated action than juvenile humour. I still think it's a huge cause for concern, though, and I can only hope that this news story opens up a greater dialogue about this kind of cyberbullying.
At the same time, though, I'm kind of conflicted about how to resolve this issue. Someone on a messageboard I visit pointed out that there is a free speech issue involved here, and of course whenever the words "free speech" get brought up I hesitate because I'm such a huge First Amendment advocate. That being said, there is that whole thing about not being allowed to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre, and I think that in that same spirit it's hard not to argue that there should be some consequences for telling a vulnerable person to kill himself or herself. (Ignoring that Megan was diagnosed with depression and Attention Deficit Disorder, the fact that she was just thirteen years old kind of automatically made her a vulnerable person.) Perhaps for the parents involved here this was a more methodical thing, but it's shocking for how many young people this kind of "go kill yourself" rhetoric is a humourous pasttime.
I don't know if there is a legal solution to this problem that can make me, let alone anyone else, happy. The underlying problem here is a society that encourages people to act in their own self-interest and not care if their actions harm others, and gives young people lots of examples of how attacking other people, whether physically, verbally, or emotionally, can either work to their benefit or at least provide them with "great entertainment." This is a problem that would require an incredibly long time to correct, though, and given the changing sociopolitical climate in this country, we seem to be moving away from a more just society in this regard rather than towards it. In the meantime, though, 13-year-old Megan is dead, and every day since then there have been more immature people going online, harassing people just as vulnerable (if not more so) than Megan and inflicting tremendous emotional pain on these people for their own jollies. I can only hope that this story, as tragic as it is, draws more attention to this problem before it becomes a true epidemic.
Labels: cyberbullying, freespeech, internet
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon