08.20.06
2006 US Go Congress: Initial thoughts
My first Go Congress got progressively better over the week. Lots to learn. Here are some things I absorbed:
1. Attend lectures in preference to playing self-paired games: you can play games at home (on KGS and the like if not in person), but the chance to hear lectures from professionals is rare.
2. Avoid playing simultaneous games, especially large ones: it takes forever to finish your game.
3. For self-paired games, bring a little sign: “12 kyu [or whatever] looking for a game.” This lets people know your rating without their having to try to read it from your badge, and makes it clear that you want to play a game.
4. It helps to get some tournament experience before the Congress so that you’ll be familiar with the clocks, with recording your games (quite useful since later review can reveal a lot to you), and the like.
5. Record your games. Some do not record the games, others record using a recording form and pen/pencil, but the happiest seem to be those using a PDA or Pocket PC with a color screen. (The black & white screens are hard to read.) Go Suite seems popular with the Pocket PC group and has nice features (e.g., if you place a stone on the wrong intersection, you can drag it to the right one).
More anon.
Travel Shaving
I’m not home yet, but The Son-in-Law has a very nice new Dell Laptop (with the non-exploding battery option) and I’m able to post from afar, thanks to the non-locality of the Internet. A few shaving discoveries have occurred worth (I think) passing along. First, the Target $3 white cereal bowl is probably not a good lathering bowl for travel, especially in a checked suitcase: it arrived in pieces. So, willy nilly, I had my chance to practice my skills at creating lather in a cupped hand and creating a lather directly on my beard. Both work, but I will probably return to using a bowl when I get home. (Later: I found that creating a lather directly on my face is easy with the Simpson Major, because it has a relatively small knot. It’s all but impossible with a large knot. YMMV.)
Second, the Simpson Major Super Badger Travel Brush (scroll to bottom of page), shown above, is wonderful! I highly recommend it. The brush doesn’t look large but it holds plenty of lather for 4 (or even 5) passes. And the bristles are like those in the Simpson Emperor 3: not too stiff, not too soft.
Finally, this discovery: between passes, I let the brush rest on its base. After the last pass, I learned to squeeze the bristles gently with the fingers of my left hand and then feel my face for patches of roughness: surviving stubble. Just feeling the stubble in that way lathered them so I could immediately wield the razor in my right hand to trim the patch to smoothness: quite efficient and very easy.
I used the Vision, Feather blades, QED Tangerine & Spearmint shaving soap (a great scent for summer), and Thayers Witch Hazel Aftershave (no fragrance, which is ideal for travel).
