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Trials of a woodpusher: Adventures in chess, backyard gardening, and maybe whisker chopping

Today is a holiday for many of us up here in Canada and I get to work because it's the Monday of a payweek and, well, someone has to get the stuff processed 🤪. I even got up early to start at 6am as we have an earlier than normal cut-off today for some strange reason.

I should say "I get to TRY to work" as I can't RDP in and apparently nobody else can either. Push comes to shove, I might have to go into the office or "let" my director do the work. Yeah, I like the second one better 🕺
 
Argh, IT support just got RDP working and I am able to log in to work. :cautious:
As my work machine looks to have been rebooted over the weekend, my guess is that the applies some patches, rebooted everything, but forgot to reboot the RDP server (yes, we have only one. It's not a big shop IT-wise)



@Majorrich As I was signing off the Zoom call last night, you asked about whether computer chess is now all about who has the biggest/fastest/bestest computer

Back in November I wrote....

At the 10,000ft view, this is indeed what it appears to be, and I have no doubt that many folks simply play the engine's top choice with their only input being how long to run the analysis. The ICCF (correspondence association) gave up on trying to control engine use as there was no way to accurately determine whether someone was cheating or not.

The better correspondence players (which I aspire to become ..... one day ...... maybe ...... I hope) are much more selective and focused in how they use the machine. They let the machine run for "a bit", play a move or two of the computer analysis on the machine, and then inject their own move to see how it shakes out after more analysis. Wash, rinse and repeat for sometimes days or weeks on a single move.

There's no doubt that the top 10 engines are better than the world champion, but even the top GrandMasters look to correspondence games for ideas to try in their play. It is a VERY different type of game than normal over-the-board (OTB) chess.

Adding a little bit to it now, a faster machine just means that what used to take me 2-3 days on my only 4GB RAM 32-bit WIN-XP machine will now take about 4-6 hours on my new machine. If one move stands out in the valuations as way better, of course that is what you must play. More often the case, you get 4-10 moves with very close evaluations and the "fun" part is trying to figure out which way to go.
 
Retirement is inching closer (I hope)
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Busy lunch hour for me today:
- dropped paperwork off at the Bank
- mailed something to Revenue Canada to get back some $$ from a re-assessment of my now-closed consulting corp.
- picked up a retirement planning book from the library (one more pending inter-branch shipment)
- picked up some Natas, Chorizo bread, sweet bread at Nova Era (@Somnos)
- picked up 2x WhiteClaws to try after work (Black Cherry and Lime, all out of Mango)
 
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