Saturday, April 08, 2006

End of Week 4 - Q28

I didn't study at all Thursday night. We were going to watch The Office, but NBC had some other sit com on. So I waited around for nothing.

Friday I worked from home. At lunch time, I went outside (it was absolutly gorgeous!) and let my kid ride his scooter while I read my Thinking Strategically book.

Game Theory

The chapter I read was Brinkmanship. It talks about the art of moving down of path that the both players do not want to go, but one is willing to go in order the make the other "blink" or change strategy. The whole chapter used the Cuban Missile Crisis as a good example of brinkmanship.

The main ideas are that there are no well-defined lines that can be crossed. The whole idea is to get the players moving down a slippery slope. One side deliberatly creates risk and then allows control of the risk to loosen to the point that he can no longer control it.

The US or USSR could not make a full-blown nuclear threat because it would not be credible. But if one of them takes small steps down the slippery slope and creates an enviroment where he is slightly out of control, then the other should see this and being rational, he comes to a point where he cannot take it any longer.

It was a very good chapter and I enjoyed it a lot. It made me want to watch the movie Thirteen Days again. The chapter also mentioned that any readers who havn't seen Dr. Strangelove and Failsafe should watch them.

PTAP

The class I wanted to take since taking my 2nd finance class ... I no longer want to take it. It's not the worse class I've had, but I just don't want to study for this class! Isn't that terrible? I'm getting so lazy as I near the end. I just need to stick it out and finish with these two finance classes and then my other two (one in the Summer and one in the Fall). The rest of the classes will be enjoyable.

I'm going to try to study for PTAP this morning, but I'm stalling big time. I'm just going to review and read the instructions for our next case.

Quixote Update
Chapter 28

The barber and the priest are still in the mountains and they take Cardenio with them. So Cardenio, the barber, the priest and (I think) Sancho are all looking for Quixote. In their search they find what they think is a fair boy with his feet in the water. All of the sudden the boy lets out his blonde hair ... it's not a boy but the most beautiful woman they have every seen. She attempts to escape, but the men tell her not to be alarmed and that they are there to help her. She opens her mouth and reveals by her speech that she is very intelligent.

She begins to tell them a story ... at this point I went to bed.

Chess Update

Back in February, I had a few bucks on a card to spend at Best Buy. I was looking at the software section and noticed that Chessmaster 10th Edtion was only $10. So I bought it. Ever since it's been sitting on my desk. Thursday night I decided to install it and check it out. I can't believe it, but it's been out 3 years already!

It is MUCH better then CM9000. I love the interface and the graphics and all the features. I've just barely scratched the surface. Now that I have a computer that can handle 3D, I've enjoyed playing in 3D. They even included some 3D glasses. I dinked around with the tutorials and a few other features and everything I've seen so far, I really like.

I wish that the board could be re-sized. In my opinion, it is a little toosmall. It may be possible, I just havn't figured it out yet.

So the last couple of days, I've been playing the personalities on Chessmaster. I logged on the UBI game forum to see how many were playing chess. Only a handful were there. FICS will always be the best free option. Eventually I may break down and buy a membership over at the Chessbase/Fritz forum and play the Europeans.

Well, I've stalled long enough. I think I'll skip the chessgames.com puzzle today and start getting into HW.

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