Playing games

I am intrigued that playing games is a regular theme across the range of podcasts that I listen to, such as the TED talk Stuart Brown says play is more than fun, the RSA talk on Why games are the 21st century’s most serious business and IBM Developerworks on Serious games.

What unites these talks is the way that game playing helps in real world situations but what differs is the way that it does this which includes, for example, by building leadership skills or enabling simulations of events like the outbreak of a serious virus.

Games have also been a significant factor in the growth of Facebook where almost everybody I know plays some sort of game be it something "serious" like chess or scrabble or something more frivolous like Mafia Wars or Farmville.

I have a foot in both camps as I play both chess and Farmville!

What I like about Farmville is that it is a very open game which, rather like a large box of mixed Lego bricks, lets you do anything you like within the confines of some very lose rules around the planting and harvesting of crops, flowers and trees.

It's also a social game (as opposed to a competitive one) in that you are encouraged to make friends and to help them by working on their farms and sending them gifts.

But I mostly use it to make coloured patterns out of lavender, red wheat, sunflowers, coffee, etc.

In many ways it's not unlike Kings of Chaos that I played for a few years in that most of the game's objectives were personal, it has to be played regularly to work and there is some interaction with friends. So, bizarrely, being a gentle farmer is not unlike being a violent elf.

I don't know how all this makes me a more effective or nicer person but I'll accept all the testimony from the learned speakers mentioned above and believe that it does!

A rare win at chess

I do not win that many games of Chess so please indulge me in rejoicing in this win. I only play chess on Facebook these days and most of these games are against a former fellow member of Weymouth Chess Club, who always beats me.

These loses mean that my chess grade keeps falling so occasionally I accept challengers from other players and I do manage to win some of these games and so my grade recovers a little.

This is one of my recent wins that I particularly enjoyed because of the way it ended. Black had wasted a lot of time moving his queen several times while I developed all of my pieces. Black's last move was e5 (PK4) in an attempt to bring his bishop into play, but it is too late. Can you see what I played? And do not cheat by looking in the moves box!


The winning move, exposes the weakness of Black's position where there is just one rook on hand to protect the king against White's onslaught of a queen, two rooks and a bishop. In a position like this sacrificing a rook, or even a queen, is immaterial as the checkmate is certain.

So the move I played, Rf6 (RB6) is not really a sacrifice, it puts unbearable pressure on h6 and so quickly opens up the Black king. The game quickly ended, 24. Rf6 Qd5, 25. Rxh6 Kg8, 26. Rxg7+ Kxg7, 28. Qg5++.

A lucky win at chess

A quick look at this position shows that white (that's me) is three pawns down in the ending and that black's pawns are well placed in the middle of the board.

Normally that would be enough for an easy win for black but I kept the queens on in a desperate attempt to get a draw through repeatedly checking the black king.

I offered black a draw several moves ago but he declined thinking (probably correctly) that he could force one of his extra pawns through.

The luck came when black made the mistake of moving his king away from his queen which meant that his queen could not block checks from my queen.

This mistake was compounded when the black king moved to the edge of the board where its movement is severely restricted.

My previous move was to take my king from g2 to h3, stopping his king from moving to h2, which meant that suddenly my manic attempts to drawn the game were rewarded with a simple win.

The only move that black had to delay the checkmate was to play his queen from e2 to d2 to put me in check but playing my pawn from g3 to g4 blocked black's check and inflicted one of my own. (This is the position shown here.)

Black's only legal move in this position is queen takes pawn on g4 to which I would reply queen takes queen which delivers checkmate. So black resigned and I am one lucky bunny.

Playing chess again

A recent, and very successful, feature of technology platforms like Facebook and the iPhone is applications that allow developers to significantly enrich the already impressive environments.

Thanks to the Facebook chess application I am now playing again, including two concurrent games (one with each colour) against somebody I first played about 35 years ago at the Weymouth Chess Club.

I lose almost all of those games but I win most of my others and am now ranked in the top 500 players, out of a total of just over 30,000 :-)

Here is one of my recent wins. I am white and am materially well in front but can you see the wining move?

Czechoslovak beer, food and conversations

We have made the British Czech and Slovak Association (BCSA) "get to know you" socials a regular event, they now happen on the second Wednesday of each month, mainly because that makes planning the dates easier.

All we need to do is book one of the rooms at the Czech and Slovak National House, West Hampstead for the evening and and the guests turn up any time between 7pm and 11pm. Food and drink is available from the restaurant and bar so that is all sorted.

Basically, it is a very easy event for us to run and all we really need to do is take care of the publicity. Increasingly this is via Facebook where the BCSA group now has over 260 members.

It may have been because of Facebook, or it may have been down to the start of the new academic year, but October's social attracted a lot of students and the evening was quickly full of lively conversations.

The kitchen and bar had a good night too with most people choosing to have the very traditional meat and dumplings. I had my usual Smazeny Syr (cheese fried in breadcrumbs) that I grew so fond of when I worked in Prague some 17 years ago. And we all drank a reasonable amount of the excellent Czech beer. I, predictably, had Pilsner Urquell (another taste acquired 17 years ago) but draft Budvar is also available.

We always seem to discover connections at these events so it was no great surprise to discover that one of the newly arrived students had been taught in Prague by a friend of mine.

The Czechoslovak food and beer are enticing but it is the unexpected conversations that make these BCSA socials such fun for me.

iPod touch gets even better

Several of the enhancements made this week to the iPod touch software are cute but of minor interest, such as the calculator that is a basic calculator when the iPod is held upright (portrait mode) but when it is rotated to landscape mode it becomes a fully fledged scientific calculator. How cool is that!

Similarly, there are minor enhancements to email, contacts and calendar. All good but nothing to get really excited about.

What is worth getting excited about is the new App Store application which gives you access to a wide catalogue of new applications, several of which are free.

I quickly added new applications for some of the websites that I use regularly, i.e. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. These are all good and give you much better access to the websites than Safari does (hardly surprising as that is what they have been designed to do).

I've also added my first game, Morocco (a.k.a. Othello), and enjoy demonstrating my mastery over the computer, though it beats me often enough for this to be a real challenge.

My favourite application so far is last.fm. This sounds like, and to a certain extent is, a radio station that plays your favourite music. But it is much more than that. last.fm makes it easy for you to find new music based on the artists that you like, to find gigs that you might be interested in, to find out what your friends are listening to and to find people with similar musical tastes.

The beauty of last.fm is that it relies on the input from the many users to create the links between artists and events etc. which is where the value of the service comes from. User content and networking is what web2.0 is all about and last.fm is an excellent example of this.

The five ages of technology

The second TFPL Connect event was titled "The future of work - technology" and looked at how technology will impact the how, when and where of work in the future.

As usual for me, the learning points from the event will slowly simmer with everything else that I have learnt to form unexpected relationships that bubble to the surface years later to provide useful insights to a specific issue that I am working on.

The two notes to myself that I made during the event are the result of the same process.

In my working life I have gone through four ages of technology and can see that we are entering a fifth:

1. No technology; my career in IT started by writing programs on paper
2. Work technology; I had computers in the office to do basic tasks like word processing and to run applications like time recording
3. Work technology at home; I got a PC to do the sort of things at home that I did at work, e.g. write letters and send emails
4. Home technology; now I use more technology at home than I do at work with sophisticated web applications (Facebook, Blogger, etc.) and cool hardware like my iPod touch.
5. Home technology at work; people increasingly want to use the tools they use at home to communicate and collaborate at work where the current tools are (generally) much less effective.
   

The other note was quite different and was about choice. We increasingly have more choice over when we work, where we work and how we work (e.g. face-to-face, email, IM, voice, etc. etc.) and we need to think carefully about what is best for any given situation but we also need to respect people who have made different, but equally valid, choices.

Petersham Village Open Gardens 2008

It was a wet and blustery Bank Holiday Monday so what could be more natural than going to look at some gardens?! The occasion was Petersham Village Open Gardens 2008 which, for two days only, opened 9 private gardens to the public. Well, I was not going to miss a chance like that to be nosey!

The gardens were a mix of sizes and styles, so too were the houses, which made for an interesting afternoon. The highlights for me were the modern formal courtyards at The Glasshouse and the rambling majesty of the very large garden at Petersham Lodge (pictured below).

The rest of my photos from the afternoon can be viewed on Facebook (you do not have to be a member to see them) and will be appearing on my Ham Photos blog in stages over the next week or so.

The energy for the walking was provided by a reasonable pint of Landlord beforehand at the Dysart Arms (which looks less like a pub every time that I go there) and an afternoon cup of tea with a delicious slice of cake in the Petersham Village Hall.

A Bank Holiday with rain, beer, gardens and afternoon tea - this must be England!

My Tweet Cloud

Twitter is a unique application for "micro-blogging" and has quickly become an essential component of on-line publishing for geeks like me who spread our thoughts all over the web.

The thing I like most about it is that it is easy to follow what other people are doing and, through this, to respond in almost real-time to events. I am following six people currently, including 10 Downing Street!

The other main benefit is that it can feed other websites that display your status, which is why mine on Facebook always start, "Matthew is twittering: ...". It also feeds sites like Plaxo and MyBlogLog so I need only publish my current status once on Twitter for everything else to get updated.

And if that was not cool enough, we now have Tweet Clouds that summarize all your tweets in a tag cloud, like mine shown above. (Why is "working" the largest word?!). The Tweet Cloud is generated as a web page which gives more information, i.e. how often each work is used. Apparently I have used "working" 73 times!

March, march, march across Red Square*

On my last day in Moscow I had a little bit of free time before heading off to the airport so I made the trek though the falling snow to Red Square to see the must-see things, such as Saint Basil's Cathedral pictured here.

Not surprisingly there are several majestic buildings in and around Red Square and you can see these in my Facebook photo album, but I found Red Square itself a little disappointing. This may be because it was wet and grey and cold but the gaudy temporary ice rink also had something to do with it!

For me, the highlight of Moscow was the pedestrianised Arbat Street which starts from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Being pedestrianised is a real plus as most of Moscow is dominated by the motor car which makes getting anywhere above ground really quite difficult and noisy. And the street has numerous attractions including market stalls, statues, restaurants and artwork in the paving. It's a great place for a leisurely stroll, which I did three times in three days :-)

* The title comes courtesy of the Human League's The Things That Dreams Are Made Of (from the excellent Dare album) which I could not get out of my head once the lyrical connection had been made.

A quick view of Moscow

After being here for the best part of three days I finally manged to get some time to walk around outside while it was not that wet or that dark.

My photographs on Facebook give an overall view of what I saw but this is the stand-out building so far, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Other major buildings have the same basic look, a cross between Lego (shape) and Gothic (finish). And it works; the buildings look majestic from a distance and from close-up.

I hope to be able to do a bit more exploring tomorrow (and thanks to fellow SAHB fan Andrey for some advice on this) but the weather forecast is snow so this coule be bit of a challenge!

Kiev in the rain

My short trip to Kiev got off to a wet start but I still managed to walk around the city center for about an hour before it got dark and hunger forced me back to the hotel.

First impressions are good. There are many beautiful baroque buildings to remind you of places like Prague and Riga but there is a little extra too with the domes on the orthodox churches, such as the one in this photograph.

There is much evidence of wide-scale renovation so the city center is likely to look even better soon. All the building that I could see under construction (including the one in my Facebook album) are in the baroque style so the character of the city should remain. And before you moan about mock-Baroque all I can say is that I have seen large scale building in the old style in Gdansk and it works!

The only negative so far is that the overground public transport (i.e. trams and buses) seems to be a little thin on the ground.

I am here until Friday morning so hopefully I will get the opportunity to explore the city a little more.

The Hassan II Mosque is staggering

I planned a day's "contingency" on my trip across North Africa so that I could spend some work time with my colleague from South Africa before we both headed home, and also so that I could have some free time to explore Casablanca.

Boy, am I glad that I did!

We spent a large part of the morning visiting The Hassan II Mosque which is possibly the most impressive building that I have ever seen.

The photograph gives you a clue but does not begin to do justice to the scale, beauty and grandeur of the building.

My other photos on Facebook show some more reasons why it is such an impressive building but to truly appreciate it I am afraid that you will have to go and see it for yourself.

My software and social networking websites

I know it's bit of a busman's holiday but I've spent the start of the Easter break sorting my technology out on my PC. This is the oldest of five PCs in the house and is the only one running Windows98, the others run XP, MAC OS and Ubuntu. Despite this low technology base I can do all that I want so I'm in no rush to upgrade.

I have been using Netscape 7.2 for email and browsing for some time but this is a technology dead-end (I did upgrade to Netscape 8 once but it was far too slow on my PC) so I have now moved to Firefox and Thunderbird. Both of these are based on the same source at Netscape so the user experience is much the same and the installs copied most of the settings across. The only minor problem was that Thunderbird copied my message filters to the wrong email accounts, but I can live with this.

I use OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, and had great pleasure in uninstalling Office97 recently. There is a new release of OpenOffice out, v2.2, and I installed this as well.

Having got the PC software sorted I did a bit of work on my social networking websites. Much of this was prompted by David Gurteen whom I am continually indebted to. Buying him the occasional gin and tonic seems scant reward for this.

I am now using del.icio.us to manage my bookmarks. The main advantages of using this over the browser bookmarks menu are that it uses tags and it's server based so is not tied to one PC. There is also the bookmarks sharing element but that's something to experiment with on another day.

I am using Bloglines to aggregate RSS feeds from the blogs I read and sites like BBC News to one website. Basically, this presents new postings on the websites that I monitor much as Thunderbird presents new emails. RSS, the technology that does this, is very common and is used by most major websites, like the BBC, Guardian, Business Week etc. Even UK Government sites like DfES and DCLG use it, though DoH is a notably exception and the lask of an RSS feed was the main criticism of the site made by doctors in a recent survey.

I still use MyBlogLog but now that I have Bloglines for reading blogs I use MyBlogLog for monitoring my sites' statistics and, more importantly, seeing who else is interested in the sites that I subscribe to so that I can see whether other sites that they subscribe to are also of interest to me. It's like getting like-minded friends to recommend books or albums to you.

There is still a role for MySpace and I use my account there mainly for keeping track of the bands that I am interested in.

My Facebook account is currently only really used for communicating with the Czech and Slovak community in London.

As a consultant I have to have an account on LinkedIn but this seems to be a network that you only go to when you need to, i.e. when looking for somebody with specific expertise, rather than for social interaction.

That may seem like a long and complex list of social networking websites but I acquired them over time, I have found them all to be useful and they are all low-maintenance.

If any of this technology is new to you then I recommend that you give it a go and see how it works out for you. I went in with no great expectations but am now a firm advocate ~ hence this post!