Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

So my project and my life as we know it begins :) I have posted my first, and hopefully not last inspiring contribution which I sincerely hope may move even the smallest molehill. Please visit my other blog:

inspirational-doses.blogspot.com

I hope that you will enjoy the reading and video.

Eat Your Own Cooking

Since the beginning of time, actions have spoken louder than words and it is because things are easier said than done. Lately, I have been talking a lot but not actually doing. Who am I kidding? Only myself. Everyone around me seems to buy into what I preach.

Who trusts a cook that does not eat his own cooking? Most people would have known by now that I am currently self-employed. By that, I mean that all income and expenditure are borne by yours truly. As I have told some of you before, in some parts of the world, I would be classified as unemployed. Who am I to argue with that?

It will be foolish to assume that I have been biding my time killing mosquitoes but of course unwise to believe that my time is optimally occupied. While I keep myself productive for the most part of the day, there is also a certain lack of challenge in my life. This has been continuing for a while now, in fact, for too long. What is worse, it has continued for so long that I don't even remember what real challenges are like.

Just the other day, I repeated the words of wisdom that I have taken for granted for a long time. Long have I preached that it is challenges that bring out the best in people. Have I been avoiding challenges of late? That would be very unlikely. Nonetheless, the opportunity to challenge myself again has once again arrived at my doorstep. It is time to let the best be brought out in me. It is time to eat my own cooking.

Inspirational Doses

These are troubled times. Doom and gloom has become such a cliched phrase. Nonetheless, troubled times call for great heroes. If you have read carefully on the side bar on the right, you would have noticed what I wrote about heroes. They are just normal people who acted extraordinarily under ordinary circumstances.

I choose to dedicate my blog to all the troubled people in this world during these troubled times. If my capacity would enable me to share an inspirational story to motivate you, I would. Given my dire circumstances, I look to all you faithfuls to share your stories with me, and with everyone who visits my blog.

Please send your stories to inspirational.doses@gmail.com

From today onwards, I have created a new site under inspirational-doses.blogspot.com to cater for all the inspirational stories you can provide. Of course your stories may or may not be edited for public viewing and originality is encouraged. I really look forward to being inspired and motivated by you. Thank you in advance for your contributions.

For those of you who have totally missed what I wrote in the side bar, here it is in full font size :)

There comes a time when life simply refuses to grant you a breather, puts you down in the hollows and in many occasions drive you towards madness. I hope that you can indulge in my sharing and cherishing of the little things in life that provide us with that glimmer of hope to go on, to pass this day, in hope that tomorrow, we will be called upon to answer our calling. You see, "heroes" are not born extraordinary people. They are ordinary people, given an extraordinary circumstance and acted extraordinarily. This may happen maybe once in your lifetime, and for that one time, you will know that "life" as we call it, is forever worth living.

NBA Chess

The playoffs are on. For those of you who know me well enough, you will know that I am a Spurs fan. No, I do not support Tottenham Hotspurs and don't try to talk trash to me about their 5-2 defeat at the hands of the lucker team (also the worst team on the planet).

In the NBA, the Spurs refer to the San Antonio Spurs. I think the video is very well made in many ways. The narration suits the on-screen events. Nonetheless, to the amateur eye, the kings of basketball may appear to be masters of the black and white jungle. But to the trained eye (like mine), they are so amateurish. One glance at the way these ballers hold the chess pieces tells me that they probably have never played chess in their lives.

You're probably thinking that I am taking this too seriously, but you are the one who is taking it too seriously. I just meant it as a joke. The late Eduard Gufeld would have said that their basketball is better than my chess.

Anyhow, as to how I obtained the video, I use some backdoor software to rip it off the Chessbase website. I don't believe I am infringing copyright laws as this video is made for advertizing purposes and I am merely serving the same purpose.

P/S: I am disappointed they did not include Tim Duncan.

He's Just Not That Into You

Disclaimer: I reserve the right to spoil your movie experience should you choose to read this without having watched the movie. For those of you who have already decided not to watch it, please proceed without caution. I also reserve the right to spoil your blog-reading experience taking into full consideration of your kindness and generosity in visiting my blog. I also reserve the right to deny you the privilege of enjoying the contents of my mind-blowing piece of work. Last but not least, I hope you will run to the cinema or download the pirated version or do whatever it takes to watch the movie really soon so as to not disrupt your blog-reading experience in this site. I thank you for coming and hope to see you again soon.

When I watched this movie yesterday, I find it inevitable to think that if what happens in the movie really applies to myself, and to the people around me. Maybe to a certain extent it's true. I have not been involved in the dating scene for a really long time now and I don't really recall what it feels like to wait for someone to call you back.

But the movie certainly points in the direction of what I wrote about women in "Empty Promises". When you like someone, it's so hard to not think about them. Even when you try not to think about them, you're still thinking about them. Do you find yourself pacing around waiting for your date to call you? Do you check your phone every 15 minutes for your special someone to call you back or text you?

With the vastness of the world being squeezed by the tight electronic net, more and more relationships are e-based. People dwell on actions like, "Oh my gosh, he superpoked me, does it mean he likes me?" or "He didn't reply my wall message for him, what's taking him so long?" or "Why hasn't he uploaded that picture we took together? He promised to do it as soon as he got back home." and 1001 many other things you can imagine yourself thinking with regards to facebook (apparently the new "in" thing).

Anyhow, I wouldn't classify this as the best movie ever, but for those of you who enjoyed "Love Actually" will enjoy this as well. The chemistry between the comical star-studded cast is pretty amazing. The movie contains many of my favorite actors and actresses and they played their role well. There wasn't any head of the cast or anything like that. All of the co-stars blended in and didn't exaggerate the motive of the film which made the ideas completely accessible and easy to relate to. Nothing was made to be more than what it seems.

At the end, all I could say is that I tried to express the same ideas, but they simply did it better. Kudos to the makers.

Financial Explosion

I first saw this on Cheng Teik's blog... so credit to the man. I am re-posting this on my blog just because I feel that too many people talk about the financial crisis without knowing what they are talking about. If you feel that way, here is a way to educate yourself. The animation in this video is pretty cool as well. It's pretty instructive and the diagrams make things just so much clearer. Hope you enjoy!


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Impossible Is Nothing

I did not sign a contract with Adidas to promote their slogan and what not, and not that I am being paid to pass their slogan around. For the few chess enthusiasts who visit my blog, this is a tribute to all of you, with many hopes that you will return for more. I have posted a beautiful chess puzzle and I sincerely hope that you will return the favor by giving your all in solving this problem.

Here is a little background on the problem which I found in ChessBase.com:


A game begins with 1.e4 and ends in the fifth move with knight takes rook mate.


This may seem like an easy problem at the beginning. However, when you have tried it for a while, you will soon realize why I chose the title of this blog. Furthermore, when you find the solution, all things will become even clearer. Here is what Frederic Freidel, an author for ChessBase.com has to say about this problem:

This is the starting position. All you have to do is enter some legal chess moves, so that the game ends on move five with the stipulated knight takes rook mate. Easy enough, don't you think? Maybe not. When John gave me the problem originally, he sealed the answer in an envelope and asked me to return this unopened, with the solution written on the back. Together with Ken Thompson, one of the people behind Unix and C, I spent many hours trying to solve the problem (and Ken spent at least an hour trying to read the contents of the envelope over a bright light). In the end we tore the thing open and admitted humiliating defeat.

There is a nice story about this problem. In 1986, during the turmoils after Kasparov had won the world championship and was forced to face an immediate rematch, both he and Karpov went to Lucerne to meet with FIDE president Campomanes. I was with them and we had a long car journey together from Zurich to Luzerne. To entertain them I gave the two top players in the world John's puzzle. It kept them busy during the ride and for the next couple of days in the hotel. They couldn't solve it.

Before we parted I did the Nunn on Garry: I sealed the answer in a hotel envelope and told him to return it unopened with the solution. I didn't hear from him for many months. Then one day I came home and found a number of messages with a phone number where I should call Kasparov urgently. I did so and found him in a distraught state. "You are a dead man, Fred," he said, "you have put me in a very embarrassing situation." Turns out he was running a session of his chess school, together with Botvinnik, and he had given the problem to his students. When they couldn't solve it and asked him for the answer he had told them to try for another day. Meanwhile the hunt was on for the envelope, which unfortunately could not be located. When I told him the solution on the phone I could hear Mikhail Botvinnik gasp in the background. And Garry, who was convinced I had stated the problem incorrectly, couldn't believe that he and his students had missed it.

Another little story? I was telling the above to Vishy Anand and Vlady Kramnik two years ago in a little restaurant in Wijk aan Zee. They were listening bemused, thinking that I was probably adding a lot of journalistic dressing to the whole thing. But then suddenly a Grandmaster sitting at the adjacent table turned to us and said, "Are you talking about the problem which Kasparov gave his students back in 1986? Well I was one of the students!" The Grandmaster was Boris Alterman, now grown up and one of the seconds that has helped Garry in some of his matches.

- Frederic Freidel