Little exercises with 9x9s

IgoWin can be tough

This gets tough. And it goes up to 10 dan?

I haven't been having much time for 19x19 games so I've just been playing 9x9s, online and off. I don't know how helpful these would be to improving my skills but chrono3450 thinks that they can. I've heard that one way to keep the mind sharp is to do several simple math problems everyday. I see this as being akin to that.

Offline, I play using IgoWin which is a scaled-down freeware version of The Many Faces of Go. IgoWin has its own ranking system and goes up to "10-dan". It doesn't seem to correspond to any real-life ranking system.

As a beginner, IgoWin still proves to be quite a challenge. I've discovered that a territory-oriented strategy works fine up to about 5-kyu. After that, victory seems achievable only by fighting since IgoWin starts taking Black and gets more and more handicap stones.

chrono3450 said that he plays IgoWin at the 10-dan level and I'm still rather stumped at how to deal with it at the 3-kyu level (13 levels behind).


Microsoft's IE 7.0 falls short of Firefox 1.5


I downloaded and installed the Beta 2 version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7.0 yesterday to see if it offered any compelling reason for me to switch back from Mozilla's Firefox 1.5.

The answer is "fuggedaboutit".

My chief complaint with IE 7.0 is that it limits the total number of tabbed websites that automatically open (multiple home pages) when the browser is launched. You can launch only eight.

I open twenty-three tabs automatically when I launch Firefox 1.5. Those sites include my email accounts, news, blogs, investment sites, my personalized eBay page, my Netflix DVD queue, library accounts, and a plethora of Go-related sites.

There probably was some compelling reason for a software engineer to have limited the start-up tabs to a paltry eight. In any case, IE 7.0 immediately fell short of my minimum requirements so I'm sticking to Firefox 1.5.