My untidiness is my achilles heel

My heel is also something of a weak spot. I had a certificate of some kind - not a memory competition thing, some kind of work-related rubbish, that was in a glass frame, which got buried under a pile of old papers and things in my spare room, and a little while ago I accidentally trod on it and shattered the glass. I didn't bother to pick up the pieces, because I decided they were safely trapped under the general refuse in my spare room and wouldn't bother anybody until I was in more of a tidying kind of mood.

But there's a sort of slow tectonic movement to the darkest depths of the junk in my room, and a big pointy glass shard ended up protruding from the pile of papers, and stabbed me in the heel while I was sitting at my desk today. It really hurt. So I've been forced to clean the place up a bit, and get rid of the deathtrap.

27.77(X), 26.63, 30.44(X); 2:54.93; 5:27.03/405/80; 8:11.07/1225

Assorted announcements

1) My mention of the abstract-image-shuffling-Excel-spreadsheet-practice-tool-thing a couple of days ago has provoked a worldwide response from the USA, Germany, China and Wales, so if anyone else wants it, you can download it here.

Files uploaded by people who are too cheap to pay rapidshare.com for 'premium membership' can only be downloaded ten times, I think, so it's first six come, first six served, and if you're too late, let me know and I'll upload it again. Or maybe you could upload it to your own website, if you've got one. It's shareware, or freeware, or whatever the word is. Underware, maybe.

2) Should I stand for election as a Monster Raving Loony Party candidate in May? I was looking at their website earlier, and frankly I don't think they're anywhere near loony enough these days. I think I'd be a great success.

3) 31.61(X), 29.03(X), 31.38(X); 3:44.53; 5:17.30/414/200; 8:28.06/1350.
Definitely starting to burn out a little, made mistakes on all three speed cards, and lots and lots of blanks in the speed numbers. But my theory is that if I keep going, I'll get through this barrier and out the other side to a magical land where I'm better than ever before.

4) I think I'm going to have to go to the Mental Calculation World Cup, just because I almost decided not to today, in case it interfered with my memory training. I used to have a reputation as someone who competed in everything, whether I'm good at it or not, but it's ages since I took part in a mind sports competition that wasn't memory or othello. So Magdeburg here I come (in June). Who lives in Magdeburg? I know someone who's from there, I'm sure. Oh, hey, it's Johannes! Groovy, that's another good reason to go there!

It's still working

I should have thought of posting my training scores on my blog before, it's really succeeding in making me force myself to practice even when I'm not entirely feeling like it. Maybe I'll stretch the excessive-training experiment out for another week, until the Easter holidays. Or maybe I won't. I'll see what my brain's feeling like. But I'm definitely back in the mood for a bit of regular practice in the evenings again. I'll get on with the marathon disciplines over Easter and see how long it takes me to get up to speed with those.

29.44(X), 27.09, 32.53; 3:25.93; 5:40.28/453/345; 7:59.22/1440

Gah! It's on telly!

That's what I just said to myself upon glancing at the Radio Times and noticing that the Spurs/Fulham game is on ITV tonight. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that it would be, but never mind, there's still 40 minutes left, and if I'd thought of that straight away I wouldn't have done any memory training tonight, and that would have been terrible.

By the way, 29.94(X), 30.59, 31.09(X); 3:31.28; 5:37.06/448/240; 8:53.15/1370.

I'm very undecided about who I want to win this game. On the one hand it would be funny if Fulham won the cup and took the Europa League place that would otherwise go to Liverpool, leaving them Europeless next year, but on the other hand I've been rooting for Tottenham this year despite my longstanding dislike of Harry Redknapp, and I'd love to see them win the cup. I think I'll go with the positive feelings rather than the jeering-at-Liverpool's-bad-season approach, and cheer for Tottenham. Go Spurs! Woo! They've just scored! 2-1 up with half an hour to go!

Also, let me just say three cheers for Christian Schäfer, who won the North German Memory Championship at the weekend, with some really impressive scores - 240 in 5-minute numbers, 585 in 5-min binary, 68 seconds in cards and 236 images (dammit, that beats my best score in competitions!) This is yet another graduate of the Junior Memory Championship scene in Germany who's going to start threatening the top rankings now he's officially an Erwachsene. When is someone going to organise a real junior competition in this country? I'd do it myself, but I'm lazy and have no money. But without it, the days of British dominance in memory sports are going to die with me...

Fear my memory

Day two of the forcing-myself-to-do-more-memory-training-than-is-sensible-considering-I'm-out-of-practice, and I genuinely think I'm clicking into gear. And even though I accidentally watched the first five minutes of an intriguing Stargate:Universe episode (never watched the series before, but it started out with a murder mystery and I really wanted to find out who dun it) I had enough willpower to turn it off and go and memorise numbers.

I'm not going to blog about memory every night, by the way, I'll revert to general nonsense tomorrow, but I'll post my daily scores as promised:

35.08, 31.84(X), 30.31(X); 3:54.09; 5:31.56/453/360; 9:21.97/1360

(That is, three speed cards attempts, the last two of which had errors - my excuse for the slow times is that I've switched to my brand new, slippery cards and I need to break them in before they get to the kind of state that flutters effortlessly between my fingers; 15 rows of abstract images in just under four minutes (all correctly recalled); 468 digits in five and a half minutes, good enough for a score of 360 in a competition if we'd had an extra 32 seconds; and a better time than yesterday for 1500 binary digits. By the way, I only give myself 15 minutes of recall time for that, which is barely enough to write them all down, to test my immediate short-term memory)

Eye of the tiger

Okay, I've decided to get serious about memory training again. I know I said I was thinking of dropping the whole memory thing for a while, but in the end I've concluded that life is basically meaningless without long periods of sitting at a desk, memorising 1s and 0s. And all that talk about money yesterday probably helped, too. So I've resolved to seize this momentary enthusiasm and force myself back into a training schedule.

So, today I did three packs of speed cards before work, 15 rows of abstract images using my handy-dandy Excel abstract-image-shuffle-o-matic on my lunch break, and 468 decimal digits and 1500 binary this evening, all in as fast a time as possible. And I even checked my recall to see how many I'd got right, which is a tedious process but useful for motivation purposes when I see how much I've improved. I could of course circumvent this marking process by doing my memory training on the computer, but I prefer to work with pen and paper. There's less temptation to click onto the internet, for one thing.

And now I'm intending to do the same routine every day for the rest of the week. This is, according to my long experience of memory training, much too heavy a schedule which will lead to bad results by the end of the week as I start to burn out, but I think it would be a good thing to do for a few days, just to get my brain up and running properly again. And given the times I've recorded today, I can expect to see some quick improvements if I keep up the schedule. I'll post my times and scores nightly on my blog, so that a) everyone can know to nag me if I fail to post anything and b) all my rivals can see what kind of form I'm in and try to do better.

Today's results - speed cards in 28.75, 36.68 and 29.61 seconds. All correct, but all three of those, even the awful 36-seconds one, were me trying to go as fast as possible. This is the kind of slowing-down that I suffer when I haven't done any training for months.

Abstract images in 3:57.04 - not too bad a time at all, I aim for an ideal of three and a half minutes. One mistake where I didn't notice that there were two identical textures on a row and had to guess.

468 decimals in 6:09.56 - which is dreadful. Five minutes is the time I normally try for with this one. 452 digits correct, or a score of 328 in championship scoring (including 20 points lost for one extremely careless wrong digit written down after I'd memorised it correctly). I can do better, but that's not bad. If I keep to my training schedule, I would expect to see the time get better and the scores get worse, then when I get down to around the five-minute mark, the number of numbers I remember will gradually start going up.

1500 binaries in 10:11.38 - atrocious. Eight minutes is the time I have in my head as 'good' for this exercise, but there was a time when I was doing closer to seven very consistently. Hopefully some fast improvement to come here, too. A score of 1415 in the recall (one careless memorising mistake when I used an image that nicely fitted the story I was telling, rather than the one-digit-different image that I should have used instead, and the final image in the final row was one I couldn't remember, as it very often is, for some reason).

Improvements to come tomorrow. I don't know if I'll have the time to do the cards first thing, because I start work early on Tuesdays so I can take a long lunch and do my reading-volunteer thing, but I'll fit them in somewhere.

Who wants to be a thousandaire?

A groovy announcement went out today, confirming the prize money distribution for this year's World Memory Championship:

The 2010 World Memory Champion will receive US$20,000. Silver Medallist receives US$10,000 and Bronze Medallist, US$ 6,000
Tee 4th to 10th place competitors will each receive US$2,000.
In addition, each of the ten memory disciplines attracts further prizes. Gold US$ 2,000 Silver US$ 1,200 and Bronze US$1,000
The top three competitors in the 2009 World Memory Championships in London have already won free flights and a luxury hotel suite for the week of the competition. The 4th to 10th placed winners in 2009 also receive free hotel accommodation.

This is pretty awesome, obviously, and it's already nearly the end of March and the arrangements don't seem to have changed at all since they were announced last year - this is almost certainly a good sign. There have only been, what, two world championships that have been cancelled and rearranged at short notice later in the day than this, and this one sounds like it's got a lot of enthusiastic people involved. I'll still reiterate my usual advice not to book your tickets yet, but I think we've got good reason to be excited about it now (also, don't leave it till the very last minute, people - you need to apply for a visa at least a month in advance).

As for the prize distribution, it's nice. I like the big amounts going to the top three in each discipline - that'll give a lot of people a decent share of the cash, rather than it all going to one or two competitors. If we'd had these prizes last year, actually, just eleven people would have shared the prize money between them (everyone getting $3000 or more), but I think this year might be even more closely contested, and there might be more people taking home big wheelbarrowsful of cash.

It would have been nice to see some cash prizes for the juniors and kids competitions too, and I would still be very happy to swap my 'luxury hotel suite' for a normal cheap room and have the extra money put to some more practical use, but hey, if there are people out there who are prepared to give us ninety-two thousand dollars just for remembering a few numbers, I really shouldn't complain. I'm not going to say another word on the subject that isn't glowing and positive. Starting now. Unless the organisers have another falling-out and cancel it. Right, properly starting now. I love these people, really.

Buying things = happiness

I went into Nottingham today in the hopes of finding some cool recorder music in the music shop there (see my recent recorder-themed blog post), only to be remembered by the sales assistant who sold me my ukulele (she recognised me from the telly) and made to feel terribly guilty about not having played the thing for a long time. I considered buying another, more expensive, ukulele to compensate for these feelings of guilt, and because they had a really top-notch-looking one that cost hundreds of pounds, but I'm gradually coming to the realisation that buying ukuleles will never turn me into a real musician overnight. I bought some Beatles and Abba recorder sheet music and resolved to practice with my old ukulele some more. I'm really awesome with the recorder, though - some things you never forget. I may have to buy a new one, though, because my antiquated instrument (which I've had since I was about six) just can't manage the high notes as well as it once did. Maybe on my next trip to the music shop, by which time I will almost certainly be able to hold my head high when Rachel asks me how I'm getting on with the ukulele.

My day was then further enlivened by a trip to the comic shop, when I realised that a complete collection of Chris Giarrusso's indescribably brilliant "Mini Marvels" comics has been available since December, but nobody told me about it. I blame this shocking omission on everyone reading this blog, but I'm prepared to forgive you, because I've just had an afternoon's hilarious entertainment from the escapedes of Elephant Steve and his comrades. If you've been so inconsiderate as to not even read the comic yourself after deciding not to tell me about it, I heartily recommend it to everyone (although especially those with some knowledge about superhero comics in general and Marvel comics of the last ten years in particular, because otherwise most of the jokes will go right over your head). Also, please do check out everything else Chris Giarrusso has ever written. You won't regret it.

Times tables

I'm trying to decide whether or not to go to the Mental Calculation World Cup. It only happens every two years, and I couldn't go to the last one because I didn't have any money, so I haven't actually done any mental calculating since 2006. I'll be completely rubbish and come last, most likely.

On the other hand, it's rather groovy to be there anyway - it's much more elitist than the World Memory Championship, they only allow a maximum of 40 people to compete, and they reserve the right to choose which applications to accept ("they" is a guy called Ralf, by the way), and I'd get in by virtue of my amazing memory skills and my less amazing mental calculation skills, so I'd get to look down my nose at the people (if any) who wanted to compete but couldn't.

Still, I'm undecided. I'd have to do a whole lot of practice, and frankly I've still got that motivation problem with the memory stuff, so I don't need anything else to distract me. I've got another week-and-a-bit to make my mind up, I'll see how I feel...

What is the matter with Virgin TV?

"We're reorganising your channel line-up to make way for new exciting services."

So now E4 and E4+1, which used to be channels 143 and 144 (although a couple of years ago they were 144 and 145) have now moved to 144 and 146 respectively. I mean, what are they going to put on channel 145? E4+½? And ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4 have moved from 114, 116 and 117 to 115, 117 and 118. They're still leaving room for the inevitable ITV2.5.

A thought occurred to my conscious mind

About last night's blog. Every eighteen months, give or take, I feel inspired to write a story about three people called Cecil, Phillip and Samantha, who apparently all live together in some undefined relationship, in which Cecil attempts to assume a position of authority over the world's population, Phillip tries to stop him out of an apparent feeling that it just isn't right and Samantha half-heartedly assists Phillip, while constantly eating and caring for nothing but her own pleasure. I don't mind at all that nobody reads these things, but nonetheless I like to post them on my blog.

After writing yesterday's fourth episode of their interesting lives, I thought to myself that if anybody asked me what it was all about, I could maybe come up with some silly explanation that the three characters represent my ego, super-ego and id, and their adventures are metaphors for the darkest secrets of my own psyche. And then I thought about it some more and realised (based on my very limited knowledge of Freudian theory and skimming the article on wikipedia) that that interpretation completely and totally fits. Cecil's the ego, Phillip the super-ego and Samantha the id. I'm almost afraid to go back and read those blog posts again now, in case they really do shed light on the innermost workings of my mind. Maybe I'll just send them to a psychiatrist and see what they make of it.

The waters of life

“Phillip,” Cecil said, kicking Phillip in the small of the back to wake him up, “I need a favour.”

“Wha? Who? What? Who?” Phillip asked, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, why am I asleep in our treehouse?”

“It’s a long story,” Cecil answered. “But the only relevant bit of the story is that you couldn’t sleep last night because a bat was snoring in your bedroom, so you came up here this afternoon for a quick nap.”

“Oh yes, I remember,” Phillip sighed. “What’s the rest of the story?”

“The list of things medically wrong with the bat that caused it to be indoors, sleeping and snoring during the night,” said Cecil, taking a sheaf of handwritten papers from his pocket. “The vet was very thorough.”

“So you need a favour?” Phillip asked, tearing the papers to shreds and eating them, hoping to turn the conversation back to Cecil’s reasons for waking him up and maybe generating some kind of apology.

“Yes. I’m getting married in half an hour, and I need a witness. The men next door were going to do it, but then they remembered that they’re both the same person, and we need two different witnesses or it’s not a real wedding. I didn’t want to ask you, because you’d only say no, but I don’t know anyone else.”

“No,” said Phillip, lying back down and closing his eyes. However, at that exact moment, give or take half a second or so, Samantha had gone into Phillip’s bedroom, seen the bat eating her favourite expensive eyeliner and screamed “Yes!” in the way that her psychiatrist had advised her to do whenever she meant “No!”. The sound reverbrated around the house and echoed into the treehouse outside, where both Cecil and Phillip mistook it for Phillip agreeing to witness Cecil’s marriage.

On the way to the church, Phillip asked Cecil a few pertinent questions about the upcoming wedding, while Samantha grumbled ceaselessly about being forced to wear her second-favourite eyeliner, which she despised (she wasn’t terribly keen on her favourite eyeliner either, but at least it wasn’t quite as revolting to her as her second-favourite). “Who are you marrying, why are you marrying them and what’s a church?” Phillip asked.

“I’m not marrying anyone, I’m just getting married,” answered Cecil. “And I’m doing it because I want to be emperor of the world, and the people just won’t accept an unmarried emperor. There are a lot of old-fashioned people out there, and I just can’t afford to upset them. And it’s a building like that one over there, only bigger and not a fire station.”

“Oh, I see,” Phillip said. He then frowned and sat in silence for two hours, apparently thinking about something, before getting up from the pavement again, walking the remaining five yards to the church door and going inside.

“Dearly beloved,” the vicar began. “We are gathered here today – my God that’s a terrible eyeliner – to join Cecil in holy matrimony. If anyone knows why I shouldn’t, speak now or forever hold your peace, do you, Cecil...”

“Hang on a sec!” Phillip whined. “You’re supposed to pause after the ‘speak now’ bit! I was going to say something!”

“Shut it, fat-face,” said the vicar. “... take Cecil as your lawful wedded self?”

“I d...” Cecil began, but Phillip grabbed him by the knee and prevented him from finishing the word, while Samantha opened a packet of salt-n-shake crisps and ate them noisily and the men next door discussed their pet dog’s obsession with tennis racquets.

“Cecil, I’ve realised why you want to be emperor,” Phillip said. “It’s about your third cousin Brenda, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Cecil admitted. “In another fortnight, give or take, it’ll be twenty years since she vowed to destroy me once and for all in twenty years’ time. Only by becoming emperor of the world can I stop her.”

“You could just kill her with a knife,” Samantha suggested, eating fish and chips that she’d had noisily delivered to the church during Cecil’s heartfelt confession. “Or a bigger knife.”

“Killing people is against the law,” Cecil said. “If I was emperor, I could just make it so that she never existed in the first place. But that’s all out the window now that Phillip’s figured it out.”

“I now pronounce you Cecil,” the vicar said, having taken the ‘o’ in ‘another’ to be the completion of Cecil’s ‘I do’, “and also the emperor of the world. You may kiss anyone you see fit.”

“No no, it’s okay, I don’t need to be married any more,” Cecil said. “We’ve sorted it all out. Brenda can’t destroy me now that Phillip’s worked out why I wanted to be married. It’s a shame, really, I would have quite liked to be emperor of the world anyway.”

“Well, you are the emperor of the world...” the vicar protested.

“Shut it, vicar,” chorused Phillip, Samantha, Cecil and the organist, and they all went home for tea.

The Entertainer

It occurred to me today, after the grand prix (I really need to get into memory training again, if only to give me something to do on Sundays), that instead of learning to play some cool new instrument like I keep trying to do every now and then, I should just dig out my old recorder, which I can actually play quite well. I can still remember how to play a wide range of three or four tunes I used to play at school, and I could probably play a whole load of groovy modern tunes if I could dig up some sheet music for them.

I tried looking for free sheet music on the internet, but the only free stuff is the kind of boring old stuff I used to play at school and don't still remember because it's boring. Works by the likes of John Loeillet, whose name I will always remember because it inspired my recorder-playing schoolmate David Stevenson to giggle "It looks like 'toilet'!". He was about 15 at the time and that was by far the rudest thing he ever said.

Looking him up on the internet today (Loeillet, not David), incidentally, it turns out his name was actually Jean-Baptiste Loeillet, usually known as Jean-Baptiste Loeillet of London so as not to confuse him with his cousin, Jean-Baptiste of Ghent, who was also a composer. And Jean-Baptiste of London was also occasionally anglicised as John Lully, but shouldn't be confused with another composer called Jean-Baptiste Lully of France. And he in turn shouldn't be confused with his composer sons, Jean-Louis Lully and Louis Lully. It just seems to me that if these people really didn't want to be confused with each other, they should have just not all had the same name. Really, who calls their son "Louis Lully"? It's a tongue-twister. And who, having called their son "Louis Lully", calls another of their sons "Jean-Louis Lully"?

Which seems to have drifted away a little from my original point, which was that I wondered if anyone knew where I could find cool recorder music on the internet. Written by people without silly names.

The driver is essentially ballast

I haven't watched a grand prix for years, but I'm currently watching the "action" in Bahrain and it's nice to know that nothing has changed. The TV cameras still miss all the interesting bits, the commentators somehow fail to notice the things that they do see on screen ("Oh, Alonso's got ahead of Massa somewhere," two laps after the first corner where it happened) and don't know which car they're looking at, and it's still the car that starts first on the grid that wins, because it's still impossible for a faster car to overtake a much slower one.

I was inspired to watch it by an article saying that three of the four top teams this year have two good drivers racing for them, rather than the traditional one good driver and one less-good one under orders to finish behind his teammate, so we at least get to see which driver of the pair is able to get the faster time in qualifying and thus measure who's the best. And also to see how the Mercedes team sabotage Schumacher's teammate while conveying the impression that he didn't just let him win. But since it's still as boring as ever, I don't think I'll be watching the rest of the season.

Turned out nice again

After all my whining yesterday, the weather was actually quite nice today, and almost warm - certainly nice enough to cycle from Leicester to Oadby without dropping dead. The othello was fun, too, we had eight players, more clocks than we knew what to do with (we could have built them into a little tower, now I come to think of it, but that didn't occur to me at the time) and I won most of my games, drawing with Iain in the first round and just making a mess of things against Andrew to ensure that I ended up second instead of joint-first.

There was also the traditional lunch in the excellent pub down the road (The Old Library, which is right next door to the current Oadby library, so I don't understand why they bothered to move it), where I impressed our newcomer Rob with my status of world memory champion, and then even more so when a stranger at the bar recognised me and said hello.

And, since it's so nearby, I got home nice and early and didn't have to get up early in the morning. All othello tournaments should be like this.

Winter sports

It's the Oadby regional tomorrow, and I traditionally (ie for the last two years) take my bike on the train to Leicester and cycle out to the Baptist church where the competition is traditionally (for the last four or five years at least) held. But it's still really cold out there, and it's been spring-like for the last couple of years by this time. It's disgraceful. Still, I'm sure the tournament will be fun. I'll also make an effort to break with tradition and remember to bring my clock.

Drat those Germans

England lost to Germany in the semi-final of the hockey world cup today. You'd think they would have been more considerate, knowing how I love to find bad omens in minority-interest sporting events and relate them to the world memory championships. I tell you, if I don't win this year it won't be because I haven't done any training, it'll be because of bad omens. Evil spirits, that kind of thing.

Weight a minute

I've been trying to lose weight for the last couple of weeks, in a half-hearted, still-eating-lots-of-sweets kind of way. But it just occurred to me today that the one time in recent memory when I did genuinely lose a lot of weight and become really quite slender was back in early 2003, when I was particularly devoted to memory training and developing my systems. It's apparently true that mental athletes' exertions make them lose weight, and obviously I just need to mentally exercise some more to get the pounds falling off...

I'm bored!

I haven't been on TV for ages. This must be what it's like to be a normal person, instead of a major celebrity. Unless that other Japanese company decides to go for it, there's nobody even considering making a documentary about memory competitions at the moment, is the point I'm seriously making here. It's about time somebody came along and wanted to film the 2010 world championships. Come on, TV producers, the public wants to see the exciting spectacle of a group of people sitting in a basement looking at numbers!

Unclean!

I got a computer-virus thing on my laptop today - one of those fake security tool things that takes over your machine and tries to persuade you to download bad things and/or give people money. Luckily, I'd heard of them before when someone I know got something similar last year, but less luckily the thing stopped me getting onto the internet and finding out how to get rid of it. But it all worked out happily in the end, because I could still get Yahoo Messenger to work and I got a helpful friend to look it up on Google, and now I've got a clean bill of silicon health again. But I've never had a virus/trojan/whatever before, and now I can't be scornful towards people who get them and say that only stupid people are at risk from computer viruses. Well, I can, and will, but I probably won't sound so convincing.

Also, congratulations to Ron White for winning the US Memory Championship, and Nelson Dellis for nearly winning it and achieving some really cool-by-the-standards-of-American-memory-competition things. I expect both of them to become even more cool, memory-wise, in the future. Let's have an American invasion of top-notch memorisers, to fight off the Chinese and Europeans!