Musings on law, tech, chess & other topics by a geek

Chess.com has a great feature for teaching chess tactics called a Tactics Trainer.  This is very useful tool for new players and club players.  The following video has my advice for using the tool and ways to improve the tactical trainer. (Note: Chess.com’s free account gives you access to 3 chess problems a day)

Summary of advice:

• Turn off the timer, the timer gives you a huge hint.  In a real game your opponent will not tell you how difficult a tactical win is.
• Limit you time to 3-5 mins per problem: if you can not find the solution do not sweet it.  Move on to the solution. The goal is to learn the patterns and improve calculation over all not to get the right answer every time.  The patterns will sink in subconsciously over time.  To focus on calculating tougher positions get a book like Secrets of Chess Tactics by Mark Dvoretsky and focus on calculation skills.
• Take a min after problems you miss to see why you missed it click the show solution and if need View Analysis & Source link and see why you missed it.

Summary of improvements needed:

• Give me stats! I did 2000 problems tell me which ones I am worse at.  Do I miss x-rays, knight forks, or Queen sacs.  I could learn so much from looking at that history.
• Enable crowd sourcing to add tags to problems like Mate in 1 or Queen Sac so we can sort by type.
• Let me choose a theme and do problems from that theme to get better at that theme

To take chess lessons with me check out my Teaching Chess Page.

This is part two of the MSIM book club, Sarah and I hosted a discussion on Clay Shirk’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. This was a great book for starting conversations. Here are a few highlights:
Q: How do you moderate communities while not discouraging involvement?
A: let the community to respond (ACLU of WA uses this technique)
A: Set rules in advance and filter (this is a lot of work)
A: Allow the community to vote up or down comments

Q: How would you treat an employee that made this video if you managed an electronics store?

I am on the side of promoting them to the PR department, Best Buy fired him then offered him his job back.

Q: How do we find the super-sharers or super-net-workers and get them to contribute to your network?
A: incentives, gold stars to achievements like foursquare’s badges
A: Exclusive access for high performers
A: Learn from game theory, physiology, and sociology

Q: What is the potential of participatory culture when we learn how to maximize peer productions?
A: Defective by Design is a glimpse of where crowd driven activism can go.
A: comments and reader reviews on Yelp is another example of giving online feedback.

I am back at patronizing Cherry Street Cafe again, and happy to be here. Last November I had a bad experience at Cherry street Cafe, after blogging about it the owner contacted me and invited me back.  Over the last few months I have returned for both business meetings and social events and the experiences have been good.  I am happy to add Cherry Street Cafe Back to my recommended list of Seattle Coffee Houses.

This is the first positive experience that I have had with a business that really cared about their image AND was willing to reaching out through social media to make things right.  I applaud Cherry Street Cafe.