A lot can happen in one hundred and nine days.

Susan has been sick the last few months, and is still sick. She’s had to go to the hospital twice. We were lucky to have her discharged just prior to Christmas, and her parents flew out to help make it more festive here, but it seems like it will still be a long way to full recovery for her.

During her second extended hospitalization Kaylee decided to take after her mother and have a solid week of being sick as well. She took to waking her dad three or four times a night to be let out into the backyard to do her business. As a result her dad did not sleep particularly well, especially after spending evenings at the hospital. At least she recovered, albeit immediately after being taken to the vet.

Before and during all this going down, I’ve found myself playing a lot more cello. Two days at the CMNC workshop when they had too many pianos, and two quarters as the principal (and sometimes, only) cellist with orchestra. The first quarter concert was a treat: a performance of Mozart’s Requiem in Berkeley with full choir, including the Vilnius Pro Musica group from Lithuania. We’ve never sounded so good. The second quarter concert featured yours truly as a soloist on Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasy on Christmas Carols. That experience, along with Burke’s assertion during the chamber music workshop that my current cello is a piece of crap, convinced me I needed a new cello. So I ordered one - it’s on trial and I will post more about it if I decide to keep it.

Our wedding website is up: ffwed.com. Currently more of interest to guests, but we’ll have photos there after the big day.

Happy New Year to all. I’ll try to keep my New Year’s resolution to boost this blog’s interestingness.

Another minor release. What’s new:

• Some compatibility issues related to user logins under WordPress 2.7 have been fixed (I think this only affected the playability of live boards).
• A single blog post containing multiple live boards should now work correctly - moves are posted to the post under the correct board, and multiple players should no longer interfere with each other.
• A new PGN button has been added. This opens a new browser window with the PGN content of the board, this can then be saved to the local drive. This feature is somewhat experimental and I would be interested in any comments (note that due to browser security, there isn’t much I can do from JavaScript to make this prettier).
• Live boards can now automatically refresh themselves on a regular interval, to reflect moves made by the opponent. This interval can be configured in the plugin control page (under Tools in WordPress 2.7).

As usual, here is the Chess By Blog blurb page. You can download the release directly from the wordpress server: chess-by-blog.1.1.2.zip, or first take a look at the Chess by Blog page on wordpress.org.

By the way, since a lot of my users seem to be overseas, I’m still looking for volunteers to help with internationalization - this would amount to translating the strings that are in the user interface. If you’re interested, please drop me a line.

Please post any questions or issues in the comments. Happy chess playing!

Our familes will have to fly in from opposite ends of North America to our wedding in Berkeley (more details forthcoming when I get the website up and going). We wondered what the geographic average of their hometowns would be. The answer is a cornfield in Nebraska. (If you think the map is off, remember that the Earth is curved.) The closest town is Stuart and as much as I would like to stay for the Summer Stock Car Races for our honeymoon I’m pretty sure Susan would not go for it. Factoring in the overseas parent leaves us with an average somewhere in the middle of the Yukon; not a marked improvement either.

My subconscious is repressed enough for me generally not to remember my dreams when I wake up, but lately there was an exception.

The dream started with me being home (a long time ago, still the grocery store) from university for lunch, just finishing up and about to walk back to school. As dream logic goes: apparently, a 16 km walk wasn’t about to deter me from saving a few quarters on bus fare.

Along the way I cut through an alley and passed the computer lab of my elementary school. As entirely opposed to reality, here the lab was on the first floor, enclosed in glass walls and I could clearly see what was going on inside. All the kids were working hard in front of Apple IIGs. Entrances to the lab were all keypad locked doors, but on the wall opposite those doors across the alley way, there were coin exchange machines, each one guarded by very short men in sunglasses and suits. Kids darted out with dollar bills in hand, exchanged them for quarters, and scurried back inside. I thought to myself, “well, these students must be sitting in front of coin operated computers, and there wasn’t enough room to install coin exchange machines in the lab, so they put them across the alley and hired dwarfish security guards so as to not intimidate the schoolkids. Yes, this all makes sense.”

A few minutes later I arrived at my class at UBC. It seems I was taking some sort of media class on doing your own television commercials, and I had arrived just to see my particular project be screened to the rest of my classmates.

Narrator: “Have you ever found yourself suffering.. from uncontrolled sarcasm?”
Woman in a boardroom, commenting on a coworker’s presentation: “Yeah, this is SUCH a brilliant marketing pitch. I’m sure the CEO would LOVE to know that our profits will rise by a WHOPPING 3% with that AMAZING advertising campaign”.
Everyone else in room: nervous stares, uncomfortable shuffling.
Narrator: “Now, with Sarcastaid, you can treat your once uncontrollable sarcasm! A once a day pill attacks sarcasm right at the source - your tongue!”
Animated cutaway graphic of tongue, showing red glowing arrows of sarcasm flowing from bloodstream upwards through tongue pores, then showing suppressive effect of Sarcastaid: white arrows pointing back down through tongue pores, countering red arrows and reducing sarcasm by 85%.
Repeat of same scene in boardroom, same woman presumably after taking drug: “Who designed the color scheme of your slides, your mom?”
Everyone else in boardroom: easy grins, benign chuckles.

Commercial over. Silence. Classmates looked around, a little shocked at the sheer inanity just on display. Some student, “You know, that wasn’t really all that less sarcastic.” Various mutterings of concordance. Then the professor: “For the rest of the year, ‘your mom’ will be one of those viral memes that comes up after every project is screened. It will be disruptive, and not even that funny. And who will we blame?” Accusing, unison answer: “Julian”.

And then I woke up in a cold sweat.

Hopefully a minor release. What’s new:

• The plugin can now be installed one subdirectory lower - i.e. if you unzip while in the WordPress plugins directory and leave all the files where they are, it should still work correctly. This should make installation simpler.
• PGN comments are now supported. They will be shown in the status field when you click on the corresponding entry in the game log. Game entries in the log which have comments are shown in italic (in the default themes). Recursive Annotated Variations are, for now, treated as comments.
• Event, round, date, and location information is now displayed with the board (this can be configured on or off).
• The “JsCom” tag is now supported. This can be used to specify a starting display position for the board which is not the last move. The syntax is: [JsCom "startply X"], where X is the starting halfmove (i.e. specifying 5 will show the board after White’s 3rd move).
• The plugin will now try to respect the display name preference of players. (This can only be done when the board is first created, it is not dynamic.)
• Some compatibility issues related to WordPress blog theme style sheets have been fixed.

As usual, here is the Chess By Blog blurb page. You can download the release directly from the wordpress server: chess-by-blog.1.1.1.zip, or first take a look at the Chess by Blog page on wordpress.org.

By the way, since a lot of my users seem to be overseas, I’m looking for volunteers to help with internationalization - this would amount to translating the strings that are in the user interface. If you’re interested, please drop me a line.

Please post any questions or issues in the comments. Happy chess playing!

Time for a new release! The previous release was 1.0.3, in case you were wondering. Anyways, new features:

• Long overdue: the game history can now be browsed. There are new navigation buttons, and the gamelog can be clicked on directly to display the board as of that move. Check it out on the examples page.
• There is now theme support. The intention is that new themes can be written in much the same manner as WordPress themes, and can be installed in the same manner as well: they’re subdirectories which only require a style sheet ChessByBlog.css, and are installed under the chess-by-blog/themes folder.
• In conjunction with theme support, there is now a new management panel added for the plugin, which allows you to switch themes easily and control board display options.
• The default themes now use image packing and CSS sprites, which should reduce board load time.
• Other user interface tweaks!

As usual, here is the Chess By Blog blurb page. For this release, however, I’ve switched hosting of the source to the WordPress.org plugin repository. You can download the release: chess-by-blog.1.1.0.zip directly from there, or first take a look at the Chess by Blog page on wordpress.org.

Please post any questions or issues in the comments. Happy chess playing!

The other half has the vacation write up, so I shall just provide some photos.

We spent last weekend in Southern California, sweltering through a heat wave at Disneyland, being tourists in Hollywood, and attending the world premiere of Wall-E at the Greek Theatre. Getting to go was Susan’s privilege as a lead on the film and I got to tag along and pretend to be famous. Although not your A-list Hollywood event, there was still a red carpet scrum which we were mostly tangential to. Susan claims her foot is visible somewhere in a publicity photo next to some Disney Channel starlet, while I as usual am the invisible, not even implied presence. We did play spot the celebrity and at the after party, we hovered for a moment, one mere foot away from Sigourney Weaver (she’s the voice of the ship’s computer in Wall-E) - alas we were too awestruck to introduce ourselves.

That wasn’t the first time I’ve seen the film; that would be the end of last month at the Wall-E wrap party. A lovely event, made more so by an especially touching thanks from the director to the crew. As for the movie itself, I’ve sat through it three times now and it holds up well. It is truly unlike anything we’ve ever done and works brilliantly.

In other news, CSUEB orchestra is done for the school year. This term our cello section was reduced to three (yours truly as principal this time around), but we padded out the rest of the strings with more professionals and we sounded excellent at the concert. We have come a long way since last September. The program this term was the Marriage of Figaro Overture, Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, KV. 488. The last was weird: the first concerto I ever played with orchestra back when I was ten. Two decades later and I’m on the other side of the piano playing cello. No real regrets, just a small irony. Cello’s not in storage for the summer. I’ve been dragooned into playing the bass part for some Slayer noodling at work. An honest to goodness bass amp has been ordered and is on its way. More on this furious acoustic metal assault soon.

As of late, most people who find this blog via search engine are interested in one of three things: Lego, chess, or bathroom remodeling. (One day perhaps, I shall explore the intersection of those things. Susan will undoubtably object, but I believe there is some weekend’s worth of amusement therein.) Then there’s a small number of searches possibly related to people I’ve annoyed. I’m surprised there aren’t more of those.

Of the remaining search terms, here are some of the more interesting ones lately.

if (m_square.getRank() == enpassantrank) { // from the POV of an attacking pawn = 5th rank
    if ((square = m_square.getNeighbor(left)) != null) {
        Piece pawn = square.getPiece();
        if ((pawn != null) && (pawn == m_board.getLastMovedPiece()) &&
            (pawn instanceof Pawn) && ((Pawn) pawn).isEnPassantCapturable()) {
            // Make sure our own king isn't in check by this move
            // ...
            // append to list of valid moves
        }
    }
    // likewise for right square
}

And yet somehow, he got Googled

As of last weekend, Susan and I are now finally engaged! Here’s the proposal story:

Saturday May 3rd was the fifth year anniversary of our first date - the Finding Nemo wrap party - and I decided that was going to be the big day. I had the diamond since a little before Christmas (hidden in a box of Lego around the house, which was pretty much the last place Susan was going to look), but decided to wait until Susan had finished up on Wall-E before popping the question. Susan and I also hadn’t celebrated that particular anniversary before, so there was also a nice element of surprise to the date. I had the ring set last month, which involved subterfuge (and some fibbing - sorry Susan) on two consecutive weekends. The last step was to work up the courage to call her parents the week before. Mr and Mrs. Fisher were very nice but they also said they were going to pop a prompt congratulatory card in the mail. That card arrived on Monday - talk about not leaving any room for chickening out!

The plan was dinner at Masa’s Restaurant in San Francisco - fancy French food in a romantic setting. This was actually my second choice, but I couldn’t get reservations at Gary Danko. Since I could only get a 9 pm reservation, I decided to also book a room at the attached hotel (the Executive Vintage Court) as driving back across the Bay Bridge late at night didn’t seem like a great end to the occasion.

So, on Friday night I made a nonchalant suggestion of going out for a dinner on Saturday. Impending minor catastrophe: Susan wasn’t keen on a late dinner, and suggested Sunday. When I shrugged, she said something to the effect of “well, at least I now know it wasn’t a proposal dinner”. I am proud that I didn’t give it away right then and there. I did spend part of that night sleepless in bed staring at the ceiling fretting about the weekend plans.

Saturday morning I presented Susan with an anniversary card and strongly suggested that it would be really nice if we could go out for dinner that night, since I’d actually made reservations to celebrate our anniversary. Fortunately this went over much better than the night before. I spent most of the day in Marin at a chamber music workshop with the rest of the piano trio. Got home, got dressed in a jacket and tie (Masa’s is fancy!), and drove into the city with Susan. When we parked at the garage, and handed Susan a pair of tennis shoes, she knew something was up. I’d furtively packed in secret on Friday and Saturday and had left our overnight things in the trunk, remembering almost everything we needed for the hotel. I’d actually planned ahead, even ensuring Kaylee got walked on Sunday morning when we weren’t home.

Dinner was amazing, although when we looked down at our plates at the first course of the tasting menu - I think I had one solitary octopus tentacle on my plate nestled amongst a few greens - we thought, “wow, we might have to fill up on bread today”. (Actually, what we thought was: my mom is right about French food.) However, six delicious courses and three hours later we were actually full! I lacked the courage to propose during dinner, but when we got back to our hotel room, after a few minutes of puttering and working up the nerve, I said “I have one more thing..” and pulled out the ring box from my jacket. I got down on my knees and asked Susan to marry me. Then I handed her the box. Oops. This was apparently the glitch of the evening that we will be talking about at the wedding. I didn’t know about the entire sliding the ring on the finger part of the procedure. Thankfully she teared up and said yes.

That’s the proposal story. Sorry, it was a bit traditional and didn’t involve something crazy like Lego minifigs (not that I didn’t think about it.) We spent the following day in San Francisco shopping for Susan’s Wall-E wrap party dress and dropped off her ring to get sized. She had to live without it for a few days (we did substitute a Lego piece attached to the tension clasp that the diamond came with), but now it’s permanently attached to her finger as she freaks out about planning weddings in Northern California.