Well, having done no memory training yesterday, I eventually managed to force myself to do a 30-minute-binary practice today, and wow, I don't remember ever being so slow and lumbering at memorising 1s and 0s. It's been a while since I last practiced, I know, but even so, today was exceptional. I had to really give myself a mental kick up the backside, repeatedly, not to give up half-way and go and do something else, but at least I managed to get over that hurdle and now, theoretically, it should be easier to get into the swing of things tomorrow.
But as for today, I only got through four and a half pages in the 30 minutes. I normally aim for seven and a half as a best-case-scenario, although only if my brain is running in a super-speedy kind of way do I get that far. I don't recall ever not getting to the end of the fifth page before, it's a bit scary.
Thing is, though, going so slowly makes my recall much more accurate - I normally think I'm doing well if I get about 80% of the rows correct, whereas today it was very close to 100%, and I ended up with a score of 3210, which is... well, it's not what I'd call 'good', but if I'm having a bad day I'm more or less satisfied with anything over 3000. And maybe next time I can increase the speed a bit without dropping too much of the accuracy. Maybe. We'll see, but if I can chain myself to the desk all day tomorrow, I might start thinking it's still possible to do well in Guangzhou.
(It isn't, but I like to try to be optimistic anyway)
Having received an email about the upcoming competition, I am a bit worried about the China competition. On the left, there is the blue memory elephant and on the right there is a red dragon. Must they go into conflict? Maybe they could fuse the logos and have a dragon with a trunk!
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't be a terribly fair fight - the poor elephant's only got three legs, and they're so oddly placed that I doubt it could even walk. It's probably a symbolic representation of how badly I'm going to do in this year's championship - the elephant represents me, because it's big and fat, and the dragon represents everyone else, because dragons are cool.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was little, I used to get Warlord comic and the Beano. In the classifieds section of one or both of them, there regularly was an advert for free stamps. I sent off for them and received them with some extra stamps which I was told I had to pay for within a time limit. I just ignored it and began to receive postcards from that company with an elephant logo stating, "An elephant never forgets". I hope the WMC elephant is a nice elephant and not a mafioso Eastenders elephant.
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