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My Chess Improvement Process: Step 1 - Data Mining

This post is part of a series describing the process I am using to attempt improvement in chess. The main post gives an overview of the process while this article explains one of the steps in detail. The first step on our chess improvement journey is to understand factually the strengths and weaknesses in our game. I am speaking from lifelong experience when I say that this is difficult to intuit. It is simple to remember recent blunders and draw conclusions that are not aligned with your performance over a longer period of time. The cognitive term for this is  Recency Bias . So, the question we are faced with is: How do you measure your chess ability? There are a great many approaches for this, and my choice is not necessarily the best fit for everyone. My approach is to identify all mistakes from my competitive chess games with a classical time control. Basically, taking the idea of the "List of Mistakes" that Axel Smith describes in the excellent book Pump Up Your Rating,
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A New Approach To Chess Improvement

In my late teens I feel in love with the game of chess. That is way too late in life to have a realistic chance of achieving true mastery of the game. Regardless, this hasn't prevented me from continuing my journey, trying to increase my knowledge and becoming more skillful.   I am now starting a new serious attempt to improve my understanding and execution of chess. Building on my past failures, I will implement a few novel ideas to this approach. My plan is to document the process for my own benefit and accountability, and for others to hopefully get inspiration from. My Hitherto Chess Journey Let's start with briefly recounting my chess journey so far. I can safely state that I've invested my 10,000 hours in chess without achieving anything resembling mastery. I started playing in my late teens. Today I am 47. I have been playing in the Swedish national league, postal correspondence chess, online leagues and been active in computer chess organizations. My FIDE Elo rating

The Decade Migrant

"So ferry, cross the Mersey, 'Cause this land's the place I love, And here I'll stay." Gerry and the Pacemakers Today, I've been living abroad for exactly 10 years. It's a time as good as any to share my first-hand experiences on immigration. Immigrants are individuals like me, sustaining themselves in a foreign country. But, I am not an immigrant . I am an emigrant . On a good day, I'll agree to be called a migrant , so let's use that term going forward as it's neutral. The distinction between the terms is important, as it contains the crux of uprooting yourself and replanting your existence in foreign soil. An immigrant is identified with her new country, while an emigrant is identified with her old country. I am not an immigrant because I belong to my old country. Despite having chosen my new country out of free will, I am not integrated, and I don't strive to be. I fail the primary directive of any successful government immigra

The Paradigm Shift of Daily Planning for Productivity

I have previously written about my obsessions with task management, and various productivity techniques to fight off procrastination. In the past, I expected to holy grail of personal productivity to be found in an organized list with appropriate metadata for each task. Much like MS Project but on a personal level. This is why I was so pleasantly surprised to find out how much I love Any.do 's daily planning feature. In an otherwise bare-bones implementations with hardly any metadata for each task, and other features not completely ironed out - the daily task planning is divine. This is what made me switch from my trusted Toodledo to Any.do. Any.do's daily planning feature does everything right. It pops up a friendly and appropriately obtrusive reminder each morning to plan your day. With interspersed motivational messages it is a reminder that you should be in control of your to dos and not vice versa. In combination with a super-attractive and to-the-point GUI, the dai

RIP Phrase Finder

Phrase Finder , a quick solution I put together for finding popular expressions that include a specific phrase, is no more. Yahoo made true of their promise to shut down their free Search API, and with it Phrase Finder. I am sad to see it go, because I regularly used it myself. There are no plans to bring it back to life at the moment.

The World and You

Today, more and more people find themselves living in a foreign country. Be it a temporary state or a more permanent situation (as for myself); regardless, the world is becoming more global and multi-cultural. Or is it? And what exactly is culture? These are some of the questions that is being answered in Geert Hofstede’s cultural research, which now spans five decades. The book is a goldmine for people who are puzzled by culture clashes, and want to increase their understanding of cultural behavior. And who isn’t puzzled by cultural enigmas these days? No matter where you live, you just have to turn on the TV or head down to your local market or restaurant, and you will be exposed to foreign culture. Cultures and Organizations: Software for the Mind, Third Edition It turns out that the environment where we grew up ingrains eternal values in us. These values can be analyzed and measured, with averages calculated per country to quantify regional differences. This is exactly what

The Cognitive Overload of RockMelt

Maybe I am just getting old. But I simply don’t get the concept of RockMelt , the newest flockesque browser/social-thingy on the horizon. It crams IM, social networks, and a web browser into one glorified application. I quietly ask myself how I would ever be able to get work done in an environment with that amount of cognitive overload? When accessing a web page I would be bombarded with information from the social sphere. Reading a longer article in that browser would be a feat worthy of the deepest reverence. On the surface, it seems nice and innocent enough to save a couple of Alt-Tabs to access my social networks. But the Alt-Tabs are there for a reason: to separate different contexts. 95% of the time when I am on a web page, I am there for a reason, and I don’t want to be distracted by other stuff. I believe the way forward is to simplify the user experience and use separate applications for web browsing and IM/social, so that the IM/social interactions can be turned off when