You win some, you lose some, you talk some

2008-06-23T00:00:00Z

After my shameful performance in the previous tournament, this weekend saw my greatest achievement in tournament Scrabble to date: that of advancing to the quarterfinals of the Cup of Poland. For the record, here are the final standings. In the quarterfinal, I lost both games to Tomasz Zwoliński (the former Champion of Poland), who went on to win the Cup.

On Thursday, I will be delivering a presentation about the dark side of programming: error handling and how to cope up with Murphy’s law. The talk will last around 30 minutes and be held within TechAula, a place to hear about exciting and revolutionary technologies in software engineering. Feel invited to register and show up.

(Postscriptum 11 July: By public demand, the slides from my talk are now available for download.)

I’m not playing this stupid game anymore

2008-04-14T00:00:00Z

Not until the next tournament, that is. My achievements in the 12th Scrabble Championship of Warsaw can be described as “mediocre” at best; four won, one drawn and seven lost games mean that my general rating will drop down by two points or so. Oh well. Everybody knows it’s a stupid game. ;-) At least I’ve managed to get a decent small score, with an average of 377 points per game.

Random resolutions for the indefinite future:

Get a final draft of the C++09 standard when it’s ready and acquaint myself with it as closely as possible. I strongly dislike C++ (and I’m not alone in this — see the Frequently Questioned Answers about C++ for very detailed criticisms); however, I’ve long wanted to learn that language better just to know all the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. The ideal moment for this will be when the new standard is out; this will give me the advantage of not having to unlearn the things changed by the standard, while staying on a cutting and competitive edge.
Get a copy of Federico García Lorca’s poems translated into Polish by Jerzy Ficowski. I have only a very vague knowledge of Lorca (just his Romance of the Spanish Civil Guard (Romance de la Guardia Civil Española)), but I very much like what little I know.

Daniel Janus – Scrabble

You win some, you lose some, you talk some

I’m not playing this stupid game anymore