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The picture is of me at meal time. Don't worry, I'm 'armless really.
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I'm a Software Developer, mainly Mircosoft Technologies such as SQL and .Net, and always have projects that I'm working on both at work and at home. Due to this, my leisure time is severely limited, so if you're after a fast game then you should probably just move on because I will use all of the allocated
time in a game before making a move, after all it is correspondence
chess!
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I read for pleasure a lot, both fiction and study materials.
In fiction, I almost exclusively stick to Sci-Fi and Fantasy. My favourite authors (in no particular order) are Robert Jordan, Raymond Feist, Brandon Sanderson, Brent Weeks, Fiona McIntosh, Robin Hobb, Joe Abercrombie and Stephen Baxter.
I like to keep my computing knowledge as up to date as possible, so often have a copy of a Kalen Delaney SQL Server book or Dino Esposito .Net book that I'm reading. I can also highly recommend most O'Reilly computing books – I own several!
And finally, you may catch me studying a chess book such as Karpov's “How to Play the English Opening in Chess” (which was in severe need of an editor before it went to print!) or a Grandmaster Repertoire volume. I find chess is not like riding a bike, you DO forget.
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I'm also a bit of a PC Gamer, as I write this my Steam account has more than 120 games on it. I enjoy mainly RPGs, Bioware games being a particular favourite. My top game of all time is Baldur's Gate II, followed by Mass Effect 2 then Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I tend to stay away from subscription games, so the only MMORPG that I've sunk any real time into is Guild Wars which I played from the beta. I haven't logged in much lately, mainly due to lack of time but also because I have no desire to get any of the other achievements – it began to feel more like work than fun.
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As for my chess - When playing OTB, with White I tend to play the English and with Black I tend to rely on the Sicilian and Reversed Grob (this works much better than you'd think, most people have no knowledge of it so are unable to counter it when they face someone that knows the pitfalls quite well). I use Gameknot to experiment. I play wacky openings just to see where they lead, and more conventional ones to further my understanding of positions. At the end of every game, I go through each move and attempt to see what my opponent saw. This means that I generally learn more from a loss (or a draw where I was winning at some point) than a win, with the aim of not making the same mistakes again. I still have a lot to learn in chess, I make many of my moves due to how I “feel” rather than for concrete reasoning.
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