Musings on chess, and lesser things
Non-chess posts
Australia’s annual music countdown, Triple J’s ‘Hottest 100’, has rolled around again. As always, I submitted my votes for the ten best songs of the past year. But I must confess I didn’t feel that familiar sense of satisfaction when I clicked “SUBMIT” this time. I’m not sure if it was because musical artists struggled …
The coronavirus has had large and unexpected effects on professional sports. Seasons have been cancelled, delayed or shortened; stars have played in empty stadiums; broadcasts have dubbed crowd noises for television audiences, while fans have been able to buy life-size cardboard cut-outs to fill the empty seats. (The fan response has been reasonably positive in …
It’s a new year, a new decade. And my main resolution is to make more free time. I know that sounds quite ambiguous. “Make” free time? With what ingredients? Does that mean there’s an infinite potential? How much time does one have to spend to make time? The economist in me wants to bring up …
Usually I write a post about my votes for Triple J’s Hottest 100 music poll before the countdown is announced in late January. This year, I didn’t get around to it, due to a combination of work/laziness/nappy-changing. The upside is that I can share my reflections of not only my votes, but also the countdown …
“Have you been to Africa before?” asked my taxi driver as we left the airport. “Yes,” I replied, “I visited South Africa.” “Oh, then you haven’t been to Africa, my friend.” This seemed an odd comment and, given that I knew for a fact he was overcharging me US $5 for the ride, I didn’t …
It’s that time of the year again when Australia hosts the world’s largest online music poll. The publicly-funded radio station Triple J is known as the nation’s left-leaning, youth-centred, commercial-free station for cool tunes, with the main genres ranging around indie rock, folk, trip-hop and basically anything not too hard or poppy. But more importantly: …
So, I’ve changed the look of the blog. The 10 years with the original ‘Geek’ theme were nice, but the lack of updates meant I always needed to fiddle around with things I didn’t understand in order to make things work. Plus, I got bored. I added some share buttons to posts and a subscribe …
2017 was a pretty big year for me: A wedding, a degree, a new country, a new job, then a new continent… Looking back on all the changes, I was moderately successful with my major 2017 New Year’s resolutions (such as “working out which country to move to”), but wholeheartedly unsuccessful with pretty much all the minor …
As I’ve previously mentioned, last year I went to the economics job market. The job market is an incredible annual event that sees thousands of newly-minted PhDs and young researchers from around the world pitted against each other in a global battle for careers at hundreds of universities, government agencies, international NGOs, banks, start-ups and …
I don’t know how I ended up becoming a chess book reviewer in my spare time, but it’s certainly a fun hobby. It’s gotten to the point that every now and then, I randomly receive a new chess book in the mail to take a look at – which, as any chess addict can appreciate, …