Some more journaling

OK, I didn't get a chance to post this yesterday, since my laptop died. Anyways, this is from 9/25.
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For the second day in a row, I woke up before both my alarms (iphone and hotel wakeup call). Only got about 7 hours sleep, but not tired. Jet lag doesn't seem to affect me. Took a nice long walk to the hall. The weather is very nice, no rain as might have been expected. Took a nice walk to the playing hall. Almost immediately after leaving the hotel, I realized I forgot my map. Oh well. I already took the trip once before.

Got to the tournament hall, and spent some time getting things set up. As would be expected, the first round started a bit late. I was one of the first to get there, and of course I had a lot of stuff to do, so I was just barely ready by the start of the round. The game was against Fridolin, a new German program. I had talked with the author a bit the day before, so we were ready for a fight :) You can see the game from an earlier post, as well as the next game, so I will skip over a bit.

After the first two rounds, I had Erdo (Rondo's book author) set up the machine for the software tournament remotely. I was finally able to get some food, my first meal of the day, besides some little sweet treats provided in the playing room. I had a roast beef sandwich from the restaurant that was inside the complex. Quite tasty, and I ate it while Johannes and Stefan (the Shredder author) went over the Jonny - Rondo game. I also looked over what Erdo was doing a bit. Again we were late to start the round.

Rondo played black (3 blacks in 3 games, huh) against Thinker in the first round of the "software" championship. There are three different chess tournaments this year--unlimited hardware, uniform platform (software), and the blitz (fast). The book line was the same as the last round, but Rondo stayed in book a bit longer. It was pretty drawish, and neither side really had much going. Once the game was traded down to an opposite-color bishops ending, it was clear it was a dead draw. Thinker, having a fairly simple evaluation function, believed it was ahead, and so kept trying to avoid the draw. The humans knew better (or maybe both just wanted to go home), so we agreed to a draw.

Had a nice long walk home. I managed to get pretty lost. I took a wrong turn at one spot, and then walked by a Circle-K and decided to get some food. After leaving and walking for a bit, I realized that I had no idea where I was. Luckily, I remembered the path I came well enough to get me back to where I made the wrong turn. I ended up walking on the order of 3 miles, rather than the nominal ~1 that it should take. Oh well, it wasn't so bad, though I've been quite sore the whole trip, perhaps due to the plane ride. I picked up a nice cold Asahi in the hotel vending machine, and went back to my room. I worked on my laptop for a bit before the battery died--still haven't gotten an adapter.