Another small win...

I had noticed, in playing "correspondence" chess over my BlackBerry, that opponents who stay mute for somewhere around 5 days or so forfeit their games, which makes sense, as some people would rather keep an opponent in thrall (to the extent that's possible when they're down a queen) rather than resign.

Lately, though, I had been noticing it's been harder and harder to get the software to behave. For the past few days, I have flat out been unable to get far enough through the procedure to actually get a move in.

Out of curiosity, I disabled the firewall on my phone (a constant nuisance) and zap! the connection to the game server went through with no hitch and I was able to make the next move in a game where I am the exchange and a pawn up.

So... just how necessary is it to run a firewall on a BlackBerry? Hmmm?

Cheers...

I'm (sort of) famous...

The Wikipedia article on the Baikonur Cosmodrome has been edited (not by me) to include some of my photos.

In other news, I'm pretty sure that I've done little today, past a really short telecon, some paper-chasing, and being nice to a neighbor's cat.

I also decided, on the spur of the moment, that an absolutely marvelous Mont Blanc Meisterstück fountain pen that I picked up in Switzerland in 2004 ought to be used on a more regular basis (and not kept as some kind of collectable souvenir). Call it my contribution to spending my last nickel before (eventually) checking out.

A Long Time Ago™, I developed a "system" for keeping track of items I'd like not to lose track of, ranging from newspaper clippings, to intersting Christmas cards, to drafts of articles I've written for publication, that - being too insubstantial to warrant their own files (- are all items that fit inside of 8-1/2x11 plastic sheet protectors. The protectors or numbered sequentially, and stored in the same manner, and descriptions of what's in each protector have been maintained in a program called InfoSelect that - at one time - was the cat's tongue when it came to keeping track of stuff, and probably still is. (This avoids another principal issue of keeping physical items in order: naming them. Recall that libraries classify books at least three ways in their catalogs - title, author, and subject... or at least they used to when this kind of thing was done on paper.)

Of course, if you don't keep the system current, it's not a system at all, but a ragtag collection of miscellany. This is a situation that I started to put right today. I've checked 228 items of a collection perhaps 5 times that size.

One of the pros of the system is the ability to keep items organized, even if you're not sure you want to keep them. You can also throw stuff out, willy-nilly. What, in the end, is of paramount importance, is for the InfoSelect file to jive with what's in the protectors, so you can find stuff.

Today, I''ve thrown out a pile of items that seemed important at the time, hopefully leaving a core of items that might someday turn out to be useful (as individual items have, in the past, turned out to be). Let me tell you, it's been one wild trip down memory lane (especially the drafts of articles written for magazine columns). As a beneficial side-effect, I get to recall what kinds of things are in my "collection."

Between us, however, I must confess: there are still items I hope to "rediscover."

Cheers...