Expanding horizons, or something like that...

Back when I lived in New York, I remember Memorial Day weekend as being the "official" start of the summer beach season. So after Natalie and Kyle left for Colorado, I got to thinking about the local pool—the one operated by the association—and Galina informed me that it had been open for the past couple of weeks.

My failure to note this fact is understandable, as I believe I can count all the times I've visited the pool over the years that we've owned the house on the fingers of one hand, and that includes the visits I made yesterday morning and this morning. The pool is nothing spectacular—three feet deep at the ends and five feet deep in the center—but it's certainly up to the job of getting you wet.

With any luck, I'll keep visiting the pool, and increasing the number of "laps" I swim with each visit.

* * *Galina and I took a short break yesterday to go for a drive and ended up at the Barnes & Noble at I-45 and Bay Area. While Galina went inside to browse, I started to observe a chess game that was being played on one of the tables outside the store's Starbucks installation. A minute or so later, I sat down to play against a pleasant-looking, sunburned woman of roughly my age who introduced herself as Debbie, and who asked whether I was a rated player. Hmmm.

I sat down to the Black pieces and played Alekhine's Defense (1...Nf6 in response to 1.e4) against a Four Pawns Attack, and eventually, I arrived at a position where I was up two pawns, at which point I sort of "zoned out."

In the following position, Black has just recovered one of White's pawns, which had been pushed to f5 in response to ...g5.


What prompted me to play ...g5 was sloppy judgment, because in the diagrammed position, White slammed the Black Bishop on a3 off the board with 19. Rxa3, which woke me up right quick (both the move itself and the gesture). After a moment or two, although I saw the looming threat of 20. Bxf5, it didn't occur to me to play 19....Qxe5, which would have left me with a bad position, but not as bad as the one that occurred after I played 19....Kb8 20. Rb3 Rxh2+!??, a wild (but ill-considered) attempt to mix things up, because after 21. Kxh2 Rh8+ 22. Rh3 Qxe5+, White plays 23. Kh1, keeping the win.

Instead, White played the horrible 23. Kg1?


From this position, Black can (and did!) draw by perpetual check after 23....Rxh3 24. gxh3 Qg3+, and there's just no way the White King can escape an endless series of checks by the Black Queen.

* * *The final straw that convinced me to move my work files to the new Asus:



Cheers...

It ain't easy...

My guesstimate as to how difficult it would actually be to move from my old work machine to a new one was off by at least an order of magnitude. And I'm sure there are still a few 'gotchas' hiding, somewhere.

Some of the stuff I thought I had taken care of (e.g., my custom spelling dictionaries, Word macros, just about every Word setting) wasn't. I figure it's "easier" to just go in and redo all of this manually than to try to export and import settings from my old machine.

In other news, my Emacs setup was all wrong, which had the side-effect of making me painfully aware of the extent to which I've incorporated Emacs org-mode in my work flow. I use it to find old files (to be used for reference, or whose formatting will come in handy) as well as to keep track of completed and outstanding work.

I was starting to get a little tired of Thunderbird as my email client, so I went with something called Claws, which looks an awful lot like Thunderbird, and it appears to work fairly well, except it doesn't understand Windows shortcuts. In other words, double-clicking on a shortcut is not an act of navigation to another folder. Instead, Claws interprets this as a file name specification, e.g., of an attachment.

(Let me tell you, it took me a little while to figure that one out!)

To add insult upon insult, Word displays "funny" under Windows 8. For example, sometimes, when I manually highlight text (using Ctrl+<arrow>), no highlight shows up, alghough the text is ready to have something done to it.