I’ve not had much to say of late but that’s not often a sign that I’ve had nothing on, but more often a sign that I haven’t really figured out what’s going on.
One thing I’ve been trying to do more lately is to play more real-time chess instead of the correspondence kind that I started practicing on. Playing the game with much greater time constraints has different demands on your approach so develops different skills, namely your working memory and fast recognition of different piece configurations. Some of the best players in the world have very highly developed skills in this area. I’ve been playing a few games with a 30 minute bank and 5 seconds per move which is just about do-able for me. I’ve managed to win one game so far with 8-9 minutes left on the clock but that was fast for me so I don’t think I’d go down to a 15 minute game just yet. The main problem with this kind of game however is that you have to find 30 minutes to focus on one thing and that’s something I’m not often able to do.
After forcing myself to conclude my over-researching activities I “invested” this morning in my new piece of glass, which is photo-geek talk for a lens. This will fill the hole left vacant when I smashed my 50mm portrait lens, although I’ve managed to partially reassemble it, it’ll never quite be the same again with dust inside the casing and a damaged auto-focus motor. I decided rather than simply go for another portrait lens I would open up a new area for myself in the shape of macro photography and so I’ve bought a Sigma 70mm Macro lens which is supposed to be razor sharp and a good all-round performer but for the slow auto-focusing which is normal of Macro’s.
Concluding my lens research I tuned my focus on the exciting world of boats! Yes, boats. The primary motivator for this was a conversation with the dad about how nice it’d be to have one moored in a different country (France, specifically) as a holiday home and secondary means of transport to tour the country. It does seem to be a costly hobby however so I’m considering joining a course to earn a Royal Yachting Association certificate in Inland Waterway Helmsman Competency. Quite a mouthful but I think it’d be fun to do and it has the added bonus of the option to upgrade to the International certificate required for European “boat driving”; well, I’ve still a lot to learn on the terminology front!
I shall wrap this up here as I am also trying to modify my writing style to reduce waffle so perhaps next time I break a disk I won’t have a 50MB database to restore..

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