Full-Contact Chess

You got your tricks
Good for you
But there's no gambit I don't see through
Oh I'm the Arbiter I know the score

From square one he'll be watching all 64
Chess (The Musical)

Chess is great. (The game, I've not actually seen the musical. But the music is a lot of fun too--seldom does one hear songs from musicals on popular radio stations.) I've never been much good at it though. I've yet to figure out how to think about it such that it doesn't take tons of planning, looking many moves ahead. Doing that takes more memory than I seem to have. Instead, I try to figure out an overall plan, try to move into a better position. Alas, against people that actually play the game, it doesn't do very well.

Thankfully (or perhaps not), most of my chess-playing experience is against the inexperienced. Kids at the camps that I've worked decide that I look like a good opponent, but I manage to hold my own. I never won them all, but I did fairly well. Of course, it could be my playstyle that won out. Generally I'd make fast semi-random moves, and they'd think that I knew more than I really did. I psyched them out, and they made bad moves, allowing me to gain the upper hand.

Of course, playing the game isn't my favorite thing to do with chess. Rather, it makes an amusing answer. When playing the "meeting-people" games at camp, one of the standard questions is "What's your favorite sport?"

Noone managed to forget that my favorite sport is chess.

The Anti-Sock

So I got my MP3 player a while ago, and of course with it came a (really cheap) set of headphones. The bud-style, with some bud-coverings to, err, protect your ears? Or to protect the headphones? Or to just make 'em look cool? I've not figured that one out yet. Anyway, it's a set of headphones complete with bud-coverings. Magical bud-coverings. Mystical bud-coverings. I wish I had a pair of socks like these bud-coverings.

The problem with the earphones (other than them being cheap, so their sound quality isn't the greatest, and being small so you get like anti-bass or something, the problem is the coverings fall off fairly easily. Not on putting them on, that would suck. Then you'd end up getting ear-bud-coverings in your ears. But if you've got the player in a pocket or backpack or something, it's entirely possible that the coverings will fall off when extracting the player from such an enclosed space.

This has happened to me twice now, loosing the covering. So it'd be nice that they shipped with a couple of extras. But since I've had it for such a short time, I'd be a bit worried. If the coverings weren't magical.

Both times, I ended up searching everywhere it could have gone. Pockets, backpack, floor, hovering somewhere in midair. Removing everything, opening everything, cleaning everything, and nada. And then about an hour or three after giving it up as a lost cause, not looking anymore, not expecting to find it, it turns up in a completely unexpected place. Unexpected, as it's somewhere that I had looked a half-dozen times, and it certainly was /not/ there.

Now if I could figure out how it does this, I could finally stop worrying about sock-eating dryers.