Keep on Running
It's mid morning on Tuesday, and I am working on an extension to some software I wrote a llllooonnnggg time ago. It's going fairly well, but it somewhat boring to implement.
In the meantime I keep getting email alerts from Yahoo messenger saying something along the lines of “a move has been played on board so-and-so, by whatsisname”. I have discovered the ultimate distraction :)
A couple of weeks ago I was having a conversation on usenet about where to play chess online – and this guy asked if I had seen “letsplaychess.com” – a correspondence chess site. I hadn't so went and had a look... and my work rate fell through the floor.
Basically, several thousand people (a number which is growing quickly) are members of letsplaychess, and use the service to keep track of their games. There are teams, tournaments, leagues... you name it. And you can play your moves as quickly or as slowly as you want! (it is incredibly inticing though when an email arrives letting you know it's your turn on one of the boards).
You would think that a tournament would take ages if you're waiting for emails to make your own move, but that's the magic bit – everybody is playing all of their games at once... so the entire tournament could be over in a week. And if you get stuck in a game there is no real time pressure – you can cogitate over your next move for a couple of days if you really want to.
Anyway – I've probably gone on for long enough. I cannot recommend the website highly enough – it's really easy to use, and it's obvious the developer behind it has spent a long time making it work in as easy a manner as possible. Go try it out :)
Back in the real world, my training for the Marlow 5 carries on. I have to run for 15 minutes at the gym again tonight. I've decided to try and increase the time I run for by 5 minutes a week until I reach 40 minutes, then go for speed over the 40 minutes. Hopefully that will make the task of running 5 miles quite easy :) We shall see! (I'm hoping that increasing at 5 minutes a week is not too much).
Better get on with my work...