Tales from the jar side: The Game of School, An actual chess tournament, Unused praise quotes, and Amusing tweets
I'll get back to technical content next week. Probably.
Welcome, jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of July 11 - 18, 2021. This week I taught my Managing Your Manager course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform, which led to several sign-ups here. To those of you who are reading this newsletter for the first time, welcome! For those who have been here before, welcome to you as well. This newsletter is free and will always remain so.
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Game of School Article on Medium
This week my Medium article in the Pragmatic Programmers publication is called Struggling at the Game of School. It’s very short (for a change), containing an anecdote about a friend of mine from my grad school days. He was brilliant, but terrible at the Game of School, which is what I call the process of figuring out what the teacher wants to hear and how they want to hear it.
The article was originally part of my article about Good Enough Answers, but the editor suggested we make it a separate entry. She said short articles like this are doing better than expected, so I figured I’d give it a try. I’d tell you the story here, but I suppose that would defeat the purpose, right?
Anyway, feel free to give it a read.
Speaking of Help Your Boss Help You, I received an email from Amazon this week:
Yes, that is an author I’m interested in, but according to the Prags the book will be available on July 17. So expect it in print some time between July 17 and July 27. I guess the only way to be sure is for all of you to pre-order it and post a photo when it arrives. Maybe we should have a competition — sorry, this shameless self-promotion just went too far. Sorry.
Real, Live, OTB Chess
Frequent readers of this newsletter may recall that this weekend I planned to play in my first live, over-the-board chess tournament in years (which is why this week’s newsletter is later than normal). That tournament was the 25th Bradley Open, so named because it was held at the Sheraton hotel at Bradley airport in Windsor Locks, CT. That’s my first trip to an airport in about 18 months, and the best part is I didn’t have to go through TSA security.
It didn’t help that just before I left, I received an email that started things off in the right frame of mind:
Oh, lovely. Just what I needed to see. Thanks.
(The article wasn’t like that. The author tried to act like age was an advantage, about which I am just a tad skeptical.)
According to the tournament entry list, there were about 285 players registered ahead of time, in several sections.
The Major section, open to players rated 2100 and above, included several titled players (Grandmasters, International Masters, and Fide (the international chess federation) Masters). Whoa.
Under 2100, which I was originally signed up for but came to my senses. That section had about 70 entries, and I would have been 3rd from the bottom.
Under 1800, which I switched to before the start. That section had about 60 players, and I was in roughly the 30th percentile. Lots of opportunities to get clobbered, but a handful of people at the bottom if the tournament goes that way.
Under 1500, where I would have been the highest rated player, but would have felt awful every time I lost a game. You can’t go up if you don’t play against better players, but you can drop quickly if you lose to lower rated ones.
Under 1200, which was fortunately not an issue.
I’ll update this newsletter with the results before I send it out Sunday evening.
Update from Saturday’s results:
When people used to ask me why I stopped playing years ago, my standard answer was, “I got tired of getting crushed by 12 year olds.” Since sometimes the good Lord, in His/Her infinite wisdom, really enjoys messing with me, my opponent in the first round was a 12 year old kid. At least I think he was 12. He could have passed for younger, but I didn’t ask because frankly I didn’t want to know. Sure enough, I lost. It was close, but I ran out of time and was probably a goner anyway.
I lost the second round, too. Again, close, but this time a blunder at the end was the difference.
In the next round, I played against another guy having a rough tournament. He was friendly and we seemed to be getting along fine. Then, after a long, hard-fought game that ended in a draw, we had this little exchange as we were packing up.
“You realize you had me, right?” he said.
“What? No.”
He set up a few pieces from our pawn endgame. “Here, when you took that pawn, if you had just pushed the pawn instead I was done.”
Picture me realizing he was right, but maybe you shouldn’t, because it wasn’t pretty. At least I managed a draw rather than a loss.
So my general opinion at the end of the day Saturday was that chess sux, in case you were wondering.
Update from Sunday’s Results
I was ready for the first game today when my opponent, a burly, older man with a Brooklyn accent, said:
“I only plan to be here about 45 minutes, so if I resign early, you’ll know why.”
“Really?” I said. “Why?”
“I only have 1/2 point after three rounds, so what’s the point?”
I didn’t mention that I had the exact same score, which is how a Swiss System works. So be it. I briefly considered taking 45 minutes for my first three moves just to see what he’d do, but no, I took it seriously. I struggled for a while, then won a pawn and looked like I might win another, when he resigned. It took about 90 minutes. He really should have played it out, but I’ll take it.
My last round was against a young woman. As in all my games, I took an aggressive tack, figuring I’d put enough pressure on my opponent and see if they could handle it. This time, like pretty much all the others, they handled it better than I did. I eventually lost, but she played very well and earned it.
My sequence: Loss, Loss, Draw, Win, Loss. Every person I played was rated higher than me, but I expect my rating will either stay about the same or even drop a bit. We’ll see.
I’ve been saying that I think I’m underrated. I now suspect that may not be true. The road to respectability (however that is defined), is going to be a rocky one.
4 Sale Cheap! Unused Praise Quotes
This week I was fortunate enough to be interviewed for the Pragmatic Hero’s Journey podcast, which should appear some time next month.
(Spoiler alert: During a discussion of Star Trek vs Star Wars, I managed to refer to the director of Star Wars episodes 7 and 9 as Jar-Jar Abrams, which is how I think of him after those travesties.)
As preparation, I dug through my old emails to remind myself of my history with the Pragmatic Programmers. Way back in 2007, I started out there as a tech reviewer for my friend Scott Davis’s book Groovy Recipes, which sadly is no longer available. I enjoyed reviewing the book, mostly because it was a good way to learn more about the language.
After the review, I sent in some potential praise quotes for the book. One of them was actually used in the text, but that’s not what I wanted to show here. Instead, I’ll just say that my sense of humor (which has a tendency to get me into trouble) asserted itself. Because I couldn’t resist, I eventually sent a few “alternative” praise quotes for the book, which were:
“Relative to others in the genre, far fewer lab rats exposed to this book mutated into vicious, slavering were-bunnies, and those that did were much fluffier.”
“The poor phosphors who gave their lives to bring this book into fruition were probably just going to be wasted on Internet porn anyway, so at least mankind gained something there.”
“I've seen worse.” — Satan
Truer words were never spoken. It’s probably just as well that none of those found their way into the marketing for the book. Though who knows? Maybe if they’d gone with one or more of these, the book would still be in print. I guess we’ll never know.
(Incidentally, if any of you decide to add one of these quotes to the Amazon page for HYBHY, I’m totally okay with that. Let’s mess with their algorithm and see what happens.)
In case you’re thinking that the term were-bunny sounds vaguely familiar, then (1) you might want to talk to somebody about that, and (2) I felt the same way. It turns out that the brilliant animated short Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit came out in 2005. Here’s a clip (spoilers, but the title kind of gives it away already):
Wow, digging that up led me down quite a rabbit hole (sorry / not sorry). If you’re not familiar with Wallace and Gromit, you have a real treat ahead of you. Aardman Animations only made three shorts (A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, and A Close Shave) and one feature film (the were-rabbit one just mentioned) about the characters of Wallace and Gromit, and they’re all wonderful. We owned them on VHS, to give you an idea how long ago that was. The same group made the feature film Chicken Run as well, which my family has always loved, and is apparently the highest grossing stop-animation film in history.
Apparently there’s going to be a Chicken Run sequel distributed by Netflix. I can’t wait.
Age Again
This tweet made the rounds this week:
The tweet is based on a Facebook post by Wil Wheaton, who wished Patrick Stewart a happy birthday and mentioned that fact.
Sir Patrick was born on July 13, 1940, and the first year of Star Trek: The Next Generation was 1987. That means he was 47 during that (truly awful) first season, and I’m sorry, but he looks older than that to me. Sure, older people look young to me now, but Wil Wheaton at 47 doesn’t look like that. Here’s a recent photo he posted on Facebook:
Um, on second thought … yeah, okay, I get it. But still.
Notable Tweets
The creator of Dogecoin is SO done with cryptocurrencies:
Check out the complete thread. It’s quite a diatribe from somebody who knows what they’re talking about.
Here’s a good tweet on conflict resolution:
Next, I’m afraid Dr. Jones is not getting tenure, for a variety of good reasons:
Apparently having your own theme song written by John Williams is not enough.
Finally, NASA engineers were successfully able to switch the Hubble space telescope to a backup system without going into space:
I guess the next time my wife needs computer help when I’m traveling I shouldn’t complain.
For jarheads only
If you decide to buy my book Help Your Boss Help You, use the coupon code 7bc968c446 at checkout for a 35% discount. The code is good until the end of September, 2021.
BTW, if you’re not a subscriber and you’re reading this anyway, that’s fine. You get to use the coupon too. :)
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
Managing Your Manager, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform.
Recorded through Chapter 5 for the audiobook version of HYBHY.
I was a guest on the Pragmatic Hero’s Journey podcast, which should appear next month.
This week:
Introduction to the Gradle Build Tool, the bi-monthly online course I teach for Gradle, Inc.
Record more chapters for the audiobook version of HYBHY.
Record a podcast for the GOTO Book Club.