I won my game in the $CITY Industrial Chess League match. I was board 7 and only the first six boards count for the match result. I crushed the guy relatively quickly (like, 2 hours for the game). I had the win fairly early but it took some time to demonstrate it. He was mildly unsporting at the end: he tried to claim a draw by threefold repetition because he had moved his king back and forth three times, but the rest of the position had changed, and then he tried to claim a draw by stalemate, but he still had a move. At least he didn't make me checkmate him. He played the Center Game: http://www.chesscafe.com/text/kibitz103.pdf Except 4. Qd3?! instead of 4. Qe3. It seems I played into some of the thematic ideas of the opening, though, which makes me feel vaguely good. One of the problems with Qd3 is that you want the bishop on c4. I entered the game into my database, entered some comments, threw in some variations, and now have a nice report in a PDF with some diagrams at crucial moments.

I also went through my database and deleted any games where both players were rated less than 2000 when I noticed there were games where both players were rated less than 2000. I might have to do that again with 2200. There's no point in having a game in a database where neither player is a master by any definition.

It's unenlightening to read popular discussions of the nuclear disaster. People are like, "OMG, all the nuclear technicians are on a suicide mission," or, "OMG, all the technicians should be sent on a suicide mission to fix this." Chernobyl was possibly at "suicide mission" level. This was not. It's remarkable how willing armchair enthusiasts are to throw lives away. People also don't quite seem to realize that you will notice levels of radiation one million times weaker than that necessary to raise the risk of anything happening to you.

Oh frig, I need to get tickets to fly to that wedding in May.

My parents visited my aunt and confirmed that she doesn't look like she's long for this world.

I have enough chess books, but I am always on the lookout for certain books, like the books in Euwe's series after Chess Master vs. Chess Amateur which are out of print, but supposedly awesome. I found a French version of the sequel, L'amateur devient maître, but am not sure if it's worthwhile to get it at its current price.

Work is still workful. I ran into barooo on the train the other day.

Classes are still classy. I got an 89 on the test in that one class, I made a couple stupid mistakes. I don't know how well I did on the take-home test in the other class.

We had a small group of people over for games on Sunday. We ended up playing Seafarers of Catan for 6 because we had one person who was new to this sort of thing but we didn't want to just do "vanilla" Catan. She won, actually. I had terrible luck until the end. My strategy was based on sea expansion (everybody's was, of course), but I turned over 4 sea tiles in a row. This hindered my development. However, at the very end, I turned over some land tiles and then quickly built 3 settlements right before the end. I ended up with... 5 victory points. That's right. Pretty pathetic. I was stuck in last place except for the brief moment where I had longest road.

Just saw agenda for today's team meeting: literally nothing on it about my own work. Fortunately, somebody just came by and said that they're going to go over the presentation on a webinar, so we don't have to go to the meeting (that is to say: I can get on the call and tune out for an hour). UPDATE: I haven't paid attention to a single word on this call!

We went over some of the games we all played at lunch today. The top board had an interesting game where he sacrificed a piece for two pawns and had three passed pawns. It should have been an easy win since the opponent would have had to give up a piece for a pawn and still could not have prevented the next pawn from promoting, but he made a mistake and allowed the opponent to get a draw by perpetual check. Another guy had a somewhat analogous position in that he had a passed pawn on the queenside that would easily promote, but he made a slight slip which let his opponent win. Huh, that makes three of us who had passed pawns on the queenside... I need to get a lot better at this.

I also need to get a lot better at the material I'm mastering for school.