The dream started with me being home (a long time ago, still the grocery store) from university for lunch, just finishing up and about to walk back to school. As dream logic goes: apparently, a 16 km walk wasn’t about to deter me from saving a few quarters on bus fare.

Along the way I cut through an alley and passed the computer lab of my elementary school. As entirely opposed to reality, here the lab was on the first floor, enclosed in glass walls and I could clearly see what was going on inside. All the kids were working hard in front of Apple IIGs. Entrances to the lab were all keypad locked doors, but on the wall opposite those doors across the alley way, there were coin exchange machines, each one guarded by very short men in sunglasses and suits. Kids darted out with dollar bills in hand, exchanged them for quarters, and scurried back inside. I thought to myself, “well, these students must be sitting in front of coin operated computers, and there wasn’t enough room to install coin exchange machines in the lab, so they put them across the alley and hired dwarfish security guards so as to not intimidate the schoolkids. Yes, this all makes sense.”

A few minutes later I arrived at my class at UBC. It seems I was taking some sort of media class on doing your own television commercials, and I had arrived just to see my particular project be screened to the rest of my classmates.

Narrator: “Have you ever found yourself suffering.. from uncontrolled sarcasm?”
Woman in a boardroom, commenting on a coworker’s presentation: “Yeah, this is SUCH a brilliant marketing pitch. I’m sure the CEO would LOVE to know that our profits will rise by a WHOPPING 3% with that AMAZING advertising campaign”.
Everyone else in room: nervous stares, uncomfortable shuffling.
Narrator: “Now, with Sarcastaid, you can treat your once uncontrollable sarcasm! A once a day pill attacks sarcasm right at the source - your tongue!”
Animated cutaway graphic of tongue, showing red glowing arrows of sarcasm flowing from bloodstream upwards through tongue pores, then showing suppressive effect of Sarcastaid: white arrows pointing back down through tongue pores, countering red arrows and reducing sarcasm by 85%.
Repeat of same scene in boardroom, same woman presumably after taking drug: “Who designed the color scheme of your slides, your mom?”
Everyone else in boardroom: easy grins, benign chuckles.

Commercial over. Silence. Classmates looked around, a little shocked at the sheer inanity just on display. Some student, “You know, that wasn’t really all that less sarcastic.” Various mutterings of concordance. Then the professor: “For the rest of the year, ‘your mom’ will be one of those viral memes that comes up after every project is screened. It will be disruptive, and not even that funny. And who will we blame?” Accusing, unison answer: “Julian”.

And then I woke up in a cold sweat.

• The plugin can now be installed one subdirectory lower - i.e. if you unzip while in the WordPress plugins directory and leave all the files where they are, it should still work correctly. This should make installation simpler.
• PGN comments are now supported. They will be shown in the status field when you click on the corresponding entry in the game log. Game entries in the log which have comments are shown in italic (in the default themes). Recursive Annotated Variations are, for now, treated as comments.
• Event, round, date, and location information is now displayed with the board (this can be configured on or off).
• The “JsCom” tag is now supported. This can be used to specify a starting display position for the board which is not the last move. The syntax is: [JsCom "startply X"], where X is the starting halfmove (i.e. specifying 5 will show the board after White’s 3rd move).
• The plugin will now try to respect the display name preference of players. (This can only be done when the board is first created, it is not dynamic.)
• Some compatibility issues related to WordPress blog theme style sheets have been fixed.

As usual, here is the Chess By Blog blurb page. You can download the release directly from the wordpress server: chess-by-blog.1.1.1.zip, or first take a look at the Chess by Blog page on wordpress.org.

By the way, since a lot of my users seem to be overseas, I’m looking for volunteers to help with internationalization - this would amount to translating the strings that are in the user interface. If you’re interested, please drop me a line.

Please post any questions or issues in the comments. Happy chess playing!

• Long overdue: the game history can now be browsed. There are new navigation buttons, and the gamelog can be clicked on directly to display the board as of that move. Check it out on the examples page.
• There is now theme support. The intention is that new themes can be written in much the same manner as WordPress themes, and can be installed in the same manner as well: they’re subdirectories which only require a style sheet ChessByBlog.css, and are installed under the chess-by-blog/themes folder.
• In conjunction with theme support, there is now a new management panel added for the plugin, which allows you to switch themes easily and control board display options.
• The default themes now use image packing and CSS sprites, which should reduce board load time.
• Other user interface tweaks!

As usual, here is the Chess By Blog blurb page. For this release, however, I’ve switched hosting of the source to the WordPress.org plugin repository. You can download the release: chess-by-blog.1.1.0.zip directly from there, or first take a look at the Chess by Blog page on wordpress.org.

Please post any questions or issues in the comments. Happy chess playing!

The other half has the vacation write up, so I shall just provide some photos.

We spent last weekend in Southern California, sweltering through a heat wave at Disneyland, being tourists in Hollywood, and attending the world premiere of Wall-E at the Greek Theatre. Getting to go was Susan’s privilege as a lead on the film and I got to tag along and pretend to be famous. Although not your A-list Hollywood event, there was still a red carpet scrum which we were mostly tangential to. Susan claims her foot is visible somewhere in a publicity photo next to some Disney Channel starlet, while I as usual am the invisible, not even implied presence. We did play spot the celebrity and at the after party, we hovered for a moment, one mere foot away from Sigourney Weaver (she’s the voice of the ship’s computer in Wall-E) - alas we were too awestruck to introduce ourselves.

That wasn’t the first time I’ve seen the film; that would be the end of last month at the Wall-E wrap party. A lovely event, made more so by an especially touching thanks from the director to the crew. As for the movie itself, I’ve sat through it three times now and it holds up well. It is truly unlike anything we’ve ever done and works brilliantly.

In other news, CSUEB orchestra is done for the school year. This term our cello section was reduced to three (yours truly as principal this time around), but we padded out the rest of the strings with more professionals and we sounded excellent at the concert. We have come a long way since last September. The program this term was the Marriage of Figaro Overture, Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, KV. 488. The last was weird: the first concerto I ever played with orchestra back when I was ten. Two decades later and I’m on the other side of the piano playing cello. No real regrets, just a small irony. Cello’s not in storage for the summer. I’ve been dragooned into playing the bass part for some Slayer noodling at work. An honest to goodness bass amp has been ordered and is on its way. More on this furious acoustic metal assault soon.

Of the remaining search terms, here are some of the more interesting ones lately.

if (m_square.getRank() == enpassantrank) { // from the POV of an attacking pawn = 5th rank
    if ((square = m_square.getNeighbor(left)) != null) {
        Piece pawn = square.getPiece();
        if ((pawn != null) && (pawn == m_board.getLastMovedPiece()) &&
            (pawn instanceof Pawn) && ((Pawn) pawn).isEnPassantCapturable()) {
            // Make sure our own king isn't in check by this move
            // ...
            // append to list of valid moves
        }
    }
    // likewise for right square
}

And yet somehow, he got Googled

Saturday May 3rd was the fifth year anniversary of our first date - the Finding Nemo wrap party - and I decided that was going to be the big day. I had the diamond since a little before Christmas (hidden in a box of Lego around the house, which was pretty much the last place Susan was going to look), but decided to wait until Susan had finished up on Wall-E before popping the question. Susan and I also hadn’t celebrated that particular anniversary before, so there was also a nice element of surprise to the date. I had the ring set last month, which involved subterfuge (and some fibbing - sorry Susan) on two consecutive weekends. The last step was to work up the courage to call her parents the week before. Mr and Mrs. Fisher were very nice but they also said they were going to pop a prompt congratulatory card in the mail. That card arrived on Monday - talk about not leaving any room for chickening out!

The plan was dinner at Masa’s Restaurant in San Francisco - fancy French food in a romantic setting. This was actually my second choice, but I couldn’t get reservations at Gary Danko. Since I could only get a 9 pm reservation, I decided to also book a room at the attached hotel (the Executive Vintage Court) as driving back across the Bay Bridge late at night didn’t seem like a great end to the occasion.

So, on Friday night I made a nonchalant suggestion of going out for a dinner on Saturday. Impending minor catastrophe: Susan wasn’t keen on a late dinner, and suggested Sunday. When I shrugged, she said something to the effect of “well, at least I now know it wasn’t a proposal dinner”. I am proud that I didn’t give it away right then and there. I did spend part of that night sleepless in bed staring at the ceiling fretting about the weekend plans.

Saturday morning I presented Susan with an anniversary card and strongly suggested that it would be really nice if we could go out for dinner that night, since I’d actually made reservations to celebrate our anniversary. Fortunately this went over much better than the night before. I spent most of the day in Marin at a chamber music workshop with the rest of the piano trio. Got home, got dressed in a jacket and tie (Masa’s is fancy!), and drove into the city with Susan. When we parked at the garage, and handed Susan a pair of tennis shoes, she knew something was up. I’d furtively packed in secret on Friday and Saturday and had left our overnight things in the trunk, remembering almost everything we needed for the hotel. I’d actually planned ahead, even ensuring Kaylee got walked on Sunday morning when we weren’t home.

Dinner was amazing, although when we looked down at our plates at the first course of the tasting menu - I think I had one solitary octopus tentacle on my plate nestled amongst a few greens - we thought, “wow, we might have to fill up on bread today”. (Actually, what we thought was: my mom is right about French food.) However, six delicious courses and three hours later we were actually full! I lacked the courage to propose during dinner, but when we got back to our hotel room, after a few minutes of puttering and working up the nerve, I said “I have one more thing..” and pulled out the ring box from my jacket. I got down on my knees and asked Susan to marry me. Then I handed her the box. Oops. This was apparently the glitch of the evening that we will be talking about at the wedding. I didn’t know about the entire sliding the ring on the finger part of the procedure. Thankfully she teared up and said yes.

That’s the proposal story. Sorry, it was a bit traditional and didn’t involve something crazy like Lego minifigs (not that I didn’t think about it.) We spent the following day in San Francisco shopping for Susan’s Wall-E wrap party dress and dropped off her ring to get sized. She had to live without it for a few days (we did substitute a Lego piece attached to the tension clasp that the diamond came with), but now it’s permanently attached to her finger as she freaks out about planning weddings in Northern California.

It’s book review time. I’m most of the way through a book entitled Where Does the Money Go?: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis, by Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson. The New York Times business section mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. Despite the goofy Schoolhouse Rock cover, it is absolutely a must read. And very relevant right now: not just because it’s tax season, but because it’s an election year. Wondering where most of your federal tax dollars go? Hint: it’s not (yet) defense, and it’s definitely not pork-barrel, or even earmarked spending. For the most part, I avoid discussing politics on this blog because as a nonvoter for both where I live and where I’m from, I really don’t have a say in the matter. However, as a fiscally responsible (and dare I say, conservative) person watching the economy slide into recession due to fiscal irresponsibleness, I’m still keenly interested in what the presidential candidates have to say about money matters. Yes: it’s about the economy, stupid, no matter which party you vote for. How else are we going to fund universal health care? Or if that’s a non-starter for you, fair enough: replace those last three words with “national security”, and it still starts with the budget.

One of the messages I’m getting out of Where Does the Money Go? so far is this: the federal government (and by extension, Americans as a whole) is in deep, deep trouble unless we address Medicare and Social Security spending, and balance the budget. That trouble might be a couple of decades away in the case of Social Security, or looming on the horizon immediately (Medicare). Balancing the budget means reducing the deficit to zero - and not just reducing the deficit by a few billion dollars - because only then will we start making some headway on the debt (which is not the deficit, as Bittle and Johnson make clear). The authors, in a mostly non-partisan style, go into clear and precise detail about worst case scenarios; and better yet, propose common sense, realistic (yet painful) fixes to the budget crisis. Yes, raising taxes is one of them. After reading this book, it’s worthwhile seeing exactly what the current presidential candidates have to say with regard to these issues. As a single example that affects my financial situation: Social Security taxes now cap at about a hundred grand. Removing the cap means more money into Social Security, which may delay the looming SS crisis for a few years. An important point the authors make clear: the government needs much of those SS tax dollars you’re paying now, simply to pay out this year’s benefits to other people: you’re not just funding your own retirement. (This is why simply switching to a privatized, self-directed Social Security is not an answer in itself: you’re not funding the current generation of benefit receivers.) Personally, I think people who make more than the cap (self included) can well afford to continue to pay SS tax on the remainder: seeing as how they were able to live for some first portion of the year where it was automatically deducted from their paychecks. Barack Obama is in favor of removing the cap, while Hilary Clinton is uncommitted (and in fact, she’s been extremely vague on Social Security in general).

It’s only one issue, but when you realise the candidates aren’t very clear about the basic issues as presented in the book, you start realising they’re aren’t very clear about how they’re going to fund other issues they’re campaigning on. And why am I harping on Social Security? Because it’s the biggest chunk of where your federal tax dollars go. Not defense. Not earmarks. Medicare is #3 (defense is #2), but unlike defense it’s mandatory spending, and its costs are skyrocketing.

After you finish your taxes, go buy the book and read it before you vote. There’s a lot more to it than what I covered here.

So there’s that orchestra thing I do, every Wednesday I lug my cello to Cal State East Bay in Hayward, dump fourteen quarters into a parking meter, and practice for a couple of hours. Our spring end of quarter concert is coming up next Wednesday, March 5th. We’re playing Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn, and Gluck’s Overture to Iphigénie en Aulide. 7:30 in the Music Building Recital Hall. Request your ticket online!.

A few comments about orchestra these last two months. Everyone else in the cello section who was around last quarter is gone. I was the sole cellist for the first three practices, then a ringer from the SF symphony and a high school student showed up. Ringer is gone, but I think he’ll be back for the concert. Meanwhile, it’s been me and the student, who is now the principal of the section. Roz probably thinks I’m annoyed at this, but she showed up and, while sight reading, played the music on the spot better than I after having practiced for three weeks, so .. yeah, she deserves to be there, I don’t.

Susan told me that I’m a cocky cellist based on the amount of practicing I’ve been doing (i.e: none). While I’m probably over confident in some areas, piano probably among them, I don’t think that’s true of cello. I feel like I’m slogging uphill, every step of the way. The Brahms Variations with its five flats in some sections proves that I’m still intonation challenged when it comes to any flats. G flat? Forget it. F sharp? Sure, no problem. Yes, I know it’s the same note, but put the G flat next to an A flat and suddenly I’m the guy playing sour notes in the lower strings. The one area I’ve realised some progress on: while I rarely pencil in bowings (there’s that cockiness again..), that’s partially because I can actually come up with sensible bowings on the spot, or at least remember them from week to week. I’m not at the level of deciding how to bow a phrase based on musical merits - don’t ask me how to bow the Bach Suites, please - but at least I understand that bar beginnings and sforzandos should be down bows, certain staccato phrases are probably easier up bow, and that the string sections should be more or less consistent.

Somewhere I picked up the habit of pencilling stars into my music. I wonder who I got THAT from, and how many stars of hers I ignored over the years.

I’ve been neglecting blog lately. Fifty hour work weeks, chamber music activities for the last three weekends (playing piano, not cello, even though two weekends were devoted to cello sonatas), plus family in town and the last thing I’ve been wanting to do is bang out a screed on the keyboard. Nonetheless here’s one to round out the second month of the year.