Met cool people, had new experiences

Firstly, let me congratulate myself and the awesome Multimedia Search team at Yahoo! for winning a team excellence award today. Though sad to leave Vertical Intent Search team, the new problems and challenges at the new team has been creatively engaging.

That brings me to the most awesome person at Y! among those I had never met before. Sydney Lewis was a revelation for me; great chess player, a wonderful leader, and a humble and responsible person. Learning chess from him is an honour. I would really spend a fortune to be coached by him, and by grace of God he has accepted me as a student!

Another guy I met whom I could learn something about RC helis from was Anirudh Sanjeev. But, alas, his internship ended. That brings me to Karthik who promised to mentor me on cubing. Exciting times ahead!

Learning new languages

The weekend was pretty nice. Spain beat France 2-0 (vamos sirpicha, sorry spendy). Then Fernando Alonso won The Grand Prix of Europe (Valencia), despite starting from 11th on the grid. Kimi Raikkonen got 2nd and Michael Schumacher 3rd (starting 12th on the grid). And now Alonso leads the drivers’ championship with 111 agaisnt Webber’s 91.

Other than that, had good time learning Spanish and Clojure. Reached Skill 5 in DuoLingo and did some initial 30 odd problems at 4Clojure.com. Learning both Clojure and Spanish seems addictive. Once the rhythm settles in, it becomes hard to stop pushing harder.

On the shopping front, just purchased my first ever e-book, “Functional Programming for Object Oriented Programmers”, purchased a cool toy that has been shipped and should be arriving shortly as well as a book from Infibeam to help me make best use of the toy. Among other activities, trying to chase down a few bugs with the Python support in Anjuta. Also, in recent days, I’ve run into excellent form with the Pirc Defence as black. So long as it doesn’t transpose into a King’s Indian, I seem to be doing great in the opening and middlegame. As white, trying out some Smith-Morra stuff and King’s Gambit with reasonable success.

Chess improvement tips

Today, at FICS, tjradd(SR) gave some golden tips towards taking your chess to the next level. Here they are:

  1. Do at least 10 tactics puzzles on chesstempo.com every day. When you get a problem wrong, go through it SLOWLY and figure out what you missed.
  2. Stop playing all forms of blitz
  3. Study GM games
  4. Establish an opening repertoire, understand the themes and main plans
  5. Study your own games carefully, and if possible with stronger players
  6. Study all “fundamental” end games.

All wonderful suggestions. I am going to work on them now. Here’s my current situation/progress against each point:

  1. This is something I need to start.
  2. I need to stop blitz immediately.
  3. Past month or two, been watching a lot of GM games. Helped a lot.
  4. Due to the T49 at Team League, I’ve studied a few more openings now. Need to work more.
  5. Thanks to spendius and sirpicha on FICS, I’ve studied my games on a regular basis.
  6. Thanks to tjradd again, I’ll now get started with his endgame primer.

Do you have any other tips?