Ray Brinzer

It strikes me that, as of this winter, it has been 30 years since I began wrestling as a second-grader in Charleston, West Virginia.

Throughout a large part of that time, the sport was the focus of my life. I lost and won a great many matches. My teammates have been some of the most remarkable wrestlers in our country. I’ve had the good fortune to learn from the likes of Dan Gable, Dave Schultz, John Smith, and Gus DeAugustino. And I got to compete in something like a dozen countries (other than my own), many of them repeatedly.

Overall, it’s been pretty cool.

When I was in college, I took (extracirricular) chess classes taught by Kevin Burnett, a fellow who was in the middle of what turned out to be a six-year run as chess champion of the state of Iowa. Kevin made a lot of very simple, sensible observations about the game, and came back to them often. We learned a lot of ordinary things, like how many moves it takes to queen a pawn (five), and how to recognize situations where basic tactics, like forks, pins, and skewers, were imminent.

The students, many of whom were not bad players, would often bring in their games, and we’d analyze them in class. Frequently the mistakes were very obvious. There were a few times when I offered a game and then, without ever a harsh word from Kevin, promptly wondered why I hadn’t had the sense to keep quiet. I hadn’t bothered to study the game properly myself, and the only explanation the mistakes required was how I could have managed to make them.

There is a great deal that goes into being a great chess player. Pursuing simple, sensible goals and not making stupid mistakes seems to be enough to make one much better than the average chess player. Without ever being told as much, I understood that if I wasn’t going to show a basic level of discipline that I was hopeless.

After awhile, I could hear Kevin’s voice in my head as I played. This improved my game a lot; having the right voices in your head is a big deal, in life. I also started to be able to see a board in my head, and I realized that playing “blindfold” (as Kevin frequently did, though without an actual blindfold) isn’t such a big deal as people make of it.

So, my friends and acquaintances tend to regard me as a very good chess player. I can easily say, with no sense of false humility, that they’re quite wrong. It’s possible that I play well enough that someone who takes the game seriously might not find me to be a total idiot. And if so, it’s merely because I’ve learned some basics.

The fact is, molding yourself to do simple things correctly, in a consistent fashion, takes a lot of time and effort. And it’s worth a lot of time and effort. Understanding this, mistakes in every field of education become apparent.

Every now and then, it’s expeditious to use Windows.

By and large, Gentoo Linux and WindowMaker suit me quite well. It’s not for everybody, but I like using good, straightforward tools, and having control over my machine. And while I have any number of complaints about Linux, for my purposes it’s still the best there is. Macintosh is pretty, but from the few occasions I’ve used them in modern times I don’t like the command line environment as well, and the command line is where I live. Windows is much better than it used to be, but still no comparison to a proper Unix for my needs.

It depends, though, on how you’re using it. Back in the ’90s, at a little dot-com I worked for, we had Windows workstations, but we all just ran full-screen X sessions and worked on the server. Then we could drop back into Windows when it was time to play Command & Conquer. That’s using Windows for its strength.

These days, too, Cygwin and a large batch of open-source software can ameliorate the situation. With a lot of configuration, Windows can be almost as tasty as the real thing for casual use. And with SSH, it really doesn’t matter that the command line you’re using isn’t on the system in front of you. So, you’re mostly using Windows as a window manager. If you have to test websites in Internet Explorer, this is a very likely scenario.

But it doesn’t have virtual desktops.

Really, this is madness… Read more »

After poking around Squeak for a few days, I noticed a blog post about an image called “Pharo”. So, I downloaded it, and tried it out.

I was nothing short of astonished. It was very attractive, and loaded almost instantly. Someone has been working hard on this. Turns out the project is a fork from Squeak; the rapid progress reminds me a lot of when X.Org broke away from XFree86.

Now, my instincts tell me that when you’re just getting started with a not-so-mainstream development tool, it’s not the time to pick up an even-less-mainstream fork which is less than a year old. I’m really tempted to do so, anyway, though. It’s not like I’m trying to get work done with it (yet).

It is a shame, though, to see a small community divided. Besides, I like the mouse.

I decided to celebrate this Friday the 13th with a link to the Wikipedia entry on the International Fixed Calendar. The Gregorian Calendar kinda sucks, after all, even for daily use. And if you have to do date calculations, it’s a big mess, and you wind up using one of the many tools created for the purpose.

But as it happens, a 28-day month goes into a 364-day calendar year 13 times evenly… which leaves you just 1 day unaccounted for most years, 2 on leap-years. Each month gets exactly 4 weeks, and the weekdays always fall on the same days of the month. Now, that’s keen! Plus, you get a Friday the 13th every month; I figure the superstitious people will get over this, through pure exhaustion.

Now, granted, advocating calendar reform definitely places you on the kook scale. It’s not near as bad as being a NASA-faked-the-moon-landing nut… but still, rightly or not, people are going to look askance at you if you start going on about getting Congress to create a new month.

But hey, if you’re afraid publish slightly goofy wishes on your own website, you may just be a bit too uptight. And I’d like a nicer calendar.

Picking up The Lord of the Rings, or looking up something about it online, is dangerous; I frequently get nothing done the rest of the day. However many times one reads it, however, some things some things remain unclear. It’s very hard to tell how the songs are supposed to go, for instance.

It’s remarkable what you can learn from YouTube, however. Here, the Professor himself gives a stirring reading of the chant of the Ents as they go to make war on Isengard. It’s much better than anything I’d imagined reading it, and what had seemed one of the least remarkable poems in the book is now one of my favorites.

I got a good laugh out of this bit from Ann Althouse:

How long does it take people to get something through their skulls? The Prez is black. I’ve been used to it since months before it happened. (And it seemed normal to me back when he was a long shot.) Are people really still going around dumbfounded, marveling that this — this! — happened in America? What is wrong with you? Get up to speed, people.

It does, indeed, appear that racists of the traditional American sort are vastly outnumbered by the people obsessed with them. We had an election, votes mostly followed party lines, and the stronger candidate won. This is a dog-bites-man story.

A conversation with an athlete reminded me of an important point.

Any sufficiently ambitious wrestler, as he learns the sport, is going to lose matches. From a coach’s standpoint, that’s acceptable.

That shortly after the match he should have no idea, or only a sketchy sense, of why he lost is not so great. Some people do a better job of remembering what happened on the mat than others, though.

That he makes no effort to figure out why he lost… that’s unacceptable. Athletes should be taught to analyze tape starting at a young age. And even if there’s no tape available, one can usually talk to a coach.

Analysis, by the way, is mostly a matter of asking and answering questions. At first, the coach asks the questions, and helps the athlete answer them. After awhile, the athlete should be able to answer common questions more easily. When the athlete can ask useful questions of himself… then you’ve gotten somewhere.

In folkstyle, for example, an athlete should be able to explain his choice of position (i.e. top, bottom, neutral, defer). Of course, he can only do this if you don’t always make that decision for him.