who has time for games?

i think the honeymoon is over for me. I am getting documentation dumps and meeting requests for 3 long term projects I have not touched yet.

Here they come thump thump here they come.

Is not the very essence of life a game? How can one NOT have time for games?

A lot of the world's best poker players cut their teeth in professional backgammon (before the internet poker anyway). Check out Action Dan Harrington's biog.

pootle flump ur codings are working excelent.

Yahtzee looks similar to poker (but I haven't played either) and there's been loads of debate recently on whether poker is a game of skill or chance - simply because if it's skill then the gaming laws are much more lax - which makes a big difference if you're running a poker web site. This British research seemed to conclude chance but I'm sure I read some recent American research had declared it was entirely skill (I'm pretty sure the research was sponsored through a poker web site though).

I love playing all games but no-one in my family will play me at all anymore . I recently had a great game of chess in the local park on one of those big boards - the young lady I was playing turned out to be a damn sight smarter than she looked. After the game I asked her where she played and she said she used to be the Czech junior champion! A bit like showing up at your local tennis court and getting a game with Nadal.

Mike

There's no debate - that's just playing around with the legal definition. It is clearly and simply both - the skill is in minimising the impact of bad luck and maximising the good. Poker has a lot in common with life, which is one of the things I enjoy about it.

pootle flump ur codings are working excelent.

Shouldn't that have been "Here they come flump flump here they come."???

Think about the double entendre in that quote!!

documentation! yuck. i hate it at work when I am not coding.

dude, put your documentation inside your code!!! (e.g. everything that you're now writing, at the top of each module, in a comment block)

also, produce "live" documentation from your app!!! (e.g. table layouts, etc.)

then you wouldn't have any non-coding work to do

Dude, I do all of that. This is multi server process flow diagrams in Visio. They are scrambling for stuff for me to do because something they thought was going to take a big chunk of the year, I pushed to Test this week.

So I have some low priority bugs, documentation and they are lining up some more C# responsibilities and we are coordinating "ownership" transfer of some datamart stuff from someone we are losing.

I am bored and they watch internet usage here.

rudy, watching the caps tonight? not sure if you are hockey fan.

Brett was.

great. now I am going through new developer orientation for the application developers. can someone just hypnotize me so that I think I am fishing all day?

do you have access to a library? a small conference room?

grab a sheet of paper and a pencil, go sit at a clean table in a quiet location, where, if you are discovered, it will be obvious that you are there for the quiet and the isolation

with nothing else but the contents of your mind, sit there and start writing stuff on the sheet of paper

stay there for at least a half hour

two things will happen

one, you will be surprised at what you come up with

two, the rest and isolation will do you good, not the least part of which is a renewed sense of energy and purpose

you might think that this little exercise is silly, but trust me, you will soon see its worth

when i was writing my book last summer, i often (too often) needed to step back from the detail and think really hard about the essence, the nugget, the heart of the matter that i was trying to explain

i got some of my best ideas for the book in the bath

i was very clean last summer

Sudsy baths

pootle flump ur codings are working excelent.

And the last time you heard either Yahtzee or Backgammon being used as a metaphor for a competitive challenge was....when?

“These young guys are playing checkers. I'm out there playing chess.”
Kobe Bryant

"We are in the process of transforming a team that has been coached to play football into a group of people who also know how to play chess ... They're still going to have to put their helmets on, but they have to know chess as well."
General David Petraeus, Commanding General of Multi-National Forces in Iraq

"You have to keep control over it. Just like in a chess game, you have to keep control over the whole board. You don't want to be checkmated."
Shark Researcher Ryan Johnson, on diving with multiple sharks.

“Chess strategic thinking helps me prepare court cases effectively because the thought processes are parallel. Preparation to win includes planning, tactics and strategy, evaluating the opposition’s position and power, coordination of all your forces to win throughout the game or the trial, and respect for your opponent at all times.”
Walter Gerash
Denver defense attorney

“A chess problem is an exercise in pure mathematics.”
Godfrey Harold Hardy (1877-1947)
British mathematician, famous for his achievements in number theory

"It's less about the physical training, in the end, than it is about the mental preparation: boxing is a chess game. You have to be skilled enough and have trained hard enough to know how many different ways you can counterattack in any situation, at any moment."
Jimmy Smits

“If a ruler does not understand chess, how can he rule over a kingdom?”
Sassanian King of Kings, Khusro II (Ruled Persia from 590-628 A.D.)

"It's like a 190-mile-per-hour chess match."
Rick Crawford, NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series driver

"I often describe tennis as "chess on wheels" because it completely taxes your mental/strategical prowess while demanding extraordinary mobility and coordination."
John F. Murray, Sports Psychologist Ph.D

quite tryna make chess out to be some sort of higher echelon in human achievement that only ascetics and mystics can master

chess ain't rocket surgery, ya know