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Found an excellent little javascript utility for displaying chess games on the web: the moves from my games from the weekend, together with my comments as a result of post-match analysis, are available here: Kidlington Chess 2010 games

And the final results table is here: Kidlington Chess 2010 U-145 – I’ve taken a local of from the Congress site, just in case the latter doesn’t stay online permanently.

The First Weekend In February is when chess fanatics from all over England gather for the Kidlington Chess Congress. Unlike last year I had had much more practice and felt more confident of doing well this time.

Last year I played four games: I drew three and lost one. Not great, but OK for not having played competitively for so long.

This year I was playing in the Under-145 tournament: my last posted grade in the 1990’s was 139 and my performance last year was equivalent to about 130, so this seems reasonable. In fact, this year all of my opponents had grades in the 130s.

• Round One: As Black I managed to get a mediocre position out of the opening. I was definitely a little worse when my opponent made a mistake which meant he had to give up his Queen for a Rook and Bishop. This was good for me but, ultimately, the placing of the remaining pawns and accurate defence by my opponent meant that the game ended in a Draw. Score 0.5 out of 1.
• Round Two: As last year, I took this round (Saturday afternoon) as a pre-arranged bye, to avoid spending the entire weekend away from the family. So that was worth another half point; score 1.0 out of 2.
• Round Three: For the Saturday evening game, I played White against an elderly chap who made his moves incredibly quickly. He only used about 15 minutes for the entire game. I hoped that his rapid play would be his downfall, so I played carefully and looked for moves with deeper consequences than I thought he would see. Eventually he made a seemingly ‘natural’ reply which was in fact a blunder: I won a knight outright and from then it was only a matter of time before I Won. Of course I was absolutely delighted with this, given my failure to win a single game last year. As an extra bonus, his quick play meant that the game didn’t end too late, so I could get a good night’s sleep prior to the Sunday games. Score now 2.0 out of 3
• Round Four: Playing Black, I opened with the Caro-Kann defence, which I’ve never played before competitively. Without making any obvious errors I got into a position where my opponent had a huge amount of play and plenty of attacking options; I didn’t really have much choice other than to defend as carefully as possible. When his attack fizzled out, my opponent made a misjudged sacrifice of rook for bishop, hoping for compensation to continue his attack; this didn’t work and from then on, I was on the offensive. It was a long game, more than three hours, but I eventually managed a second Win. Score now 3.0 out of 4.
• Round Five: In the final round, I played the Morra Gambit as White, which I haven’t done before: he played the 3. … d3 line which is essentially the Morra Gambit Declined, which meant that I had a reasonable position out of the opening without having sacrificed a pawn. My opponent castled riskily into a Queen’s side attack and the game finished rather quickly, although I made a mistake right at the end which, fortunately, he missed. That was my third Win in a row and left me with a very respectable score of 4.0 out of 5.

My final round game finished fairly early, so I stuck around watching the other games play out: at some point it dawned on me that, depending on how these other games finished, there was a possibility I’d be in the first few places and be eligible for a prize. At one stage, there was a chance that I’d be part of a massive share of 2nd Place, but in the end I came equal 4th: the winner of the competition had 5/5 and two others had 4.5. There were three of us on 4/5, sharing the £40 prize, which the organisers very generously rounded-up to £14 each

Overall this was a very good tournament for me: I scored 3.5 out of 4 over the board and remained unbeaten. My calculations show that my grade for this tournament was around 170, with which I’m very happy. I still haven’t played enough games in the last two years to get back on the ‘official’ English Chess Federation grading list, but maybe if I play again next year… ?

Normally the two girls play lego on their own. Yesterday, I played lego with the oldest (aged eight) instead. This interesting adventure for her led to the discovery of what can only be described as Boy Lego, rather than Girl Lego.

It all began sedately enough, each of us constructing a small house in the empty lego ‘village’. I then began building something rather different in the front ‘garden’ of my house: a swivel mounted, high-calibre artillery piece to be exact.

“Er… what are you building there, Daddy?”, she asked, eying the new construction suspiciously.
“It’s a gun. A really big gun”, I replied. “Just in case.”
“Just in case what?” she demanded.
“Just in case they” – I pointed to the far end of the Lego village – “decide to invade. Why don’t you turn your little house into a guard tower to watch over the main road?” I suggested.
“Well … OK”, she agreed, somewhat reluctantly.

We continued building for a while in silence. Then I found another circular, swivel piece.

“Ah! Just what I need: this can be for my new gun turret”, I muttered, mostly to myself. Not quietly enough, as it turned out.

“Gun turret?”, she demanded. “It’s not a gun turret, it’s a merry-go-round. For the village’s Children’s Play Area.”
“Not any more it’s not. Now it’s a gun turret”, I explained.
“Gun turret for what?”, she asked
“For my little tank.”, I responded.
“Tank? You haven’t got a tank”, she stated.
“This tank here” – pointing at my future tank – “and it needs a turret on the top.”
“That’s not a tank, it’s a taxi. That’s always a taxi when I play with $SISTER.”, she complained.
“Well, it’s a tank now. We need mobile defence in case of invasion, you see. The guard tower and fixed artillery are limited in their scope when faced with a mobile enemy.”, I explained.
“Hmmm” she sighed, clearly defeated by this faultless chain of logic.

We continued building our defences against possible invasion by … Them. This included turning more of the swivel pieces into propellers for my (sorry, I mean our) small squadron of aircraft.

“Is this how boys always play Lego?”, she enquired.
“Yes. This is Boy Lego.”, I informed her.

Then it was time for tea, time for bed and so on, and the Lego stopped.

This morning, I was somewhat disappointed to see that the village had been … *gulp* I can hardly bring myself to say it … demilitarised.

“We prefer Girl Lego!” the two girls announced together.

And here’s the next batch. For ages, ‘A case of mistaken reality’ was a song title waiting for some music: eventually, it turned into this epic instrumental. The second track here, ‘Hypnosis’, was one of the first where I made use of vocal samples to enhance the music. This was quite an interesting experience and, technically, quite challenging given the equipment I was working with.

• A Case of Mistaken Reality (1995, 4 mins 52 secs)
• Hypnosis (1996, 4 mins 28 secs)

This is one part of a series of posts where I release fully finished tracks from what I am now referring to as “Dave Ewart: The Back Catalogue”, and some unfinished/demo tracks from what I am calling “Dave Ewart: The Lost Demo Tapes”. The full list of all released tracks is available on the Music page.

All tracks are licensed under the Creative Commons Non-Commerical Share-Alike license.

This license means that you are free to distribute and copy, provided that you attribute it as being my work. If you wish to make derivative copies (e.g. remixes) you must release those works under this same license. Commercial use is not permitted.

OK, here’s the second batch of music. The first track, ‘Master Plan’, was written fairly early on in 1994 and if I remember originally started out as a cover version of The Grid’s “Swamp Thing” (the bassline has some resemblence, even now). The second track is a demo from later on which sounds incredibly ’80s, but still quite fun. I think I had in mind its use as a TV theme tune!

• Master Plan (1994, 2 mins 33 secs)
• Sigma Revival ‘85 (47 Seconds Of Fame) (1996, 47 seconds)

This is the second in a series where I release fully finished tracks from what I am now referring to as “Dave Ewart: The Back Catalogue”, and some unfinished/demo tracks from what I am calling “Dave Ewart: The Lost Demo Tapes”. The full list of all released tracks is available on the Music page.

All tracks are licensed under the Creative Commons Non-Commerical Share-Alike license.

This license means that you are free to distribute and copy, provided that you attribute it as being my work. If you wish to make derivative copies (e.g. remixes) you must release those works under this same license. Commercial use is not permitted.

In early 1994 I bought a Yamaha SY85 music workstation, with a bank loan taken out just a few months after I had got a Proper Job. I had always enjoyed writing music and now I had an opportunity to actually record some of it properly.

Yamaha SY85 music workstation

The SY85 is a synth, a sequencer, a drum machine and – in a rather limited way – a sampler. Technologically, this is a very crude piece of kit by today’s standards, but one mustn’t forget that it was manufactured in 1992.

It took me a while to get my head around the sampling side of things, since the SY85 needed samples in a very particular format, a format to which I could only convert audio files using a DOS-based program running on my old, slow 486 PC that I had at the time. Figuring that out involved tracking down email mailing lists of others who owned the same model and swapping tips and tricks. All the samples and sequences were loaded to/from the SY85 using a double-density 3.5 inch floppy drive, which made work very slow. However, I seemed to have plenty of time on my hands in those days (pre-kids, pre-wife!) and so that didn’t really matter.

Musically, the SY85 provides plenty of scope for experimentation. Almost all the tracks I composed were designed to be instrumentals; those with vocals were typically instrumental tracks with some added vocal samples. I never recorded my own voice and the equipment I had wouldn’t have made that very easy in any case.

One of the first tracks I composed and recorded follows: this was my first real attempt at programming the sequencer properly and I think it worked out quite well:

• Champagne Breakfast (1994, 3 mins 47 secs)

It is now my intention to release these fully finished tracks from what I am now referring to as “Dave Ewart: The Back Catalogue”, and some unfinished/demo tracks from what I am calling “Dave Ewart: The Lost Demo Tapes”. I will release two or three tracks at a time over the next few weeks, hopefully with some vaguely interesting anecdotes and notes about the composing and recording process at the same time.

All tracks are licensed under the Creative Commons Non-Commerical Share-Alike license.

This license means that you are free to distribute and copy, provided that you attribute it as being my work. If you wish to make derivative copies (e.g. remixes) you must release those works under this same license. Commercial use is not permitted.

The rickrolling karaoke mentioned in the previous post is now available here. Clickety-click, if you dare.

Video recordings of this and other performers are available here.

That is all.

Lugradio Live 2009. This was the second time that the Last Ever Lugradio took place. There won’t be another one. Well, probably not. Well, who knows…

Anyway, it was just as much fun as all previous events. Except for the pigeons, that is. More about that later.

The drive to Wolverhampton was rubbish: dark, foggy, rain, spray, no fun at all. Then, as dawn broke over the beautitful city … no, I’m sorry, I can’t keep that up. Wolves is nothing like that.

On arrival at the hotel, I bumped into a few familiar faces: chatted to Felim during the walk over to the Venue. It was straight down to business with the first talks. Spoke to many other regulars: MrBen, Popey, Tony, Bruno, Dotwaffle, Essk, Pinkoi and others, not to mention the Large Gents themselves.

Everyone who attended was encouraged to sign one of the big banners which had been used for the past few years around the various venues. This was to be given away later in the day to MrBen; however, due to a lack of any means to transport it home, he entrusted it to my care. I’ll get a decent photo of it uploaded at some stage soon: it is a magnificent piece of Lugradio memorabilia

Lugradio book of condolence

The rest of day was a good mix of informative and interesting talks, fun and games, plus downright silliness, especially the live on-screen twitter feed.

By the end of the day I had acquired (i) a Bytemark mug, (ii) the above-mentioned banner and (iii) no copies of Jono’s book whatsoever, thankfully.

The highlight of the whole event, like last year, was The Great Lugradio Karaoke. Oh yes. This year I successfully rickrolled the Lugradio attendees with my rendition of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. See this tweet and pic from Aquarion. Steve Lamb (the regular lamb-to-the-slaughter Microsoft chap who always comes along to Lugradio) said immediately afterwards that I had given “a well-delivered” performance. I wondered whether he meant “well-delivered” in the real sense or in the Windows Vista sense. I also wondered whether he noticed on my later song “Another Brick In The Wall” whether I altered the words to sing “We don’t need no Windows 7″…

After the karaoke, I slept very well. Until dawn, when I was rudely awakened by the pigeons on the hotel roof. Noisy buggers. Still, it meant that I got up early-ish and had a long, relaxing breakfast. Chatted with a number of people for ages, mostly a long conversation about clocks and calendars, kicked-off by the fact that the clocks had just been changed. I like to think that I provided information of a Quite Interesting nature. Helps being married to a clock/time geek, I suppose.

All done until next time, whenever and wherever that may be.

This blog is not being very regularly updated, is it? Ah, well, just don’t seem to have the time. Anyway, here follow two paragraphs describing a a few things that are going on…

Next weekend is Lugradio Live. The last one ever, again. Or not. Probably the only reason for going to Wolverhampton, in any case. Very much looking forward to that.

Have also been playing a bit more chess: lots of online chess (a few minutes per game) and also some Facebook Chess (typically allows three days per move). This is quite fun, although is best if you have several games on the go. I’m only just finding my level here: I’ve just popped into the top 2%, so will now be playing against people with a similar rating to me.

“Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions!”

Describe Yourself:
Jack The Lad

Describe where you currently live:
Suburbia

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
All Over The World

Your favorite form of transportation:
KDX125

Your best friend is:
Don Juan

You and your best friends are:
Positive Role Model

What’s the weather like:
Home And Dry

Favourite time of day:
In The Night

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
How Can You Expect To Be Taken Seriously?

What is life to you:
It Always Comes As A Surprise

Your fear:
Vampires

What is the best advice you have to give:
It Doesn’t Often Snow At Christmas

Thought for the Day:
What Have I Done To Deserve This?

How I would like to die:
The Man Who Has Everything

My soul’s present condition:
Absolutely Fabulous

My motto:
We All Feel Better In The Dark