The first product I am proud to announce is a WordPress plugin called “Daily Chess Puzzle Widget.” The plugin is a simple way to add chess puzzles to the sidebar of any WordPress powered website. The only prerequisite is that the theme you are using needs to be “widgetized.” The official home of my plugin will reside at adrian3.com/projects/wordpress-plugins/daily-chess-puzzle-widget/

The Daily Chess Puzzle widget pulls its puzzles from shredderchess.com, a website that offers the puzzles for free. Each day they deliver an easy, medium, and hard puzzle. My plugin gives you a dropdown menu where you can choose the size of puzzle you want shown.

While this chess plugin is a relatively simple project it did teach me some valuable lessons that I am planning to build on in future releases. For example, this is the first “widget” I have created and that will be a valuable tool to have in my arsenal going forward.

The next chess plugin I am working on involves a chess game viewer that allows you to post a games into your blog post for people to replay. It will allow you to customize the style, color, size, and features of the chessboard. I am pretty happy with it so far and plan on releasing it in the next week or two so stay tuned.

Not sure how long I will stay in the chess plugin phase, but it has been fun so far!

Whenever you make a birthday post on your blog you feel like you have to say something profound about getting older. Since 31 is such an uneventful age, forgive me for not having the secret to life in this post. However, I am going to use my birthday as an excuse to do a little naval gazing. Apologies in advance.

If I had to comment on a characteristic of my personality that I have noticed lately it would be how competitive I am. I have always been competitive but lately it seems especially hard to not want to win at everything I do. It doesn’t matter if it is ping pong, chess, basketball, graphic design, or a weight loss competition. I will put everything I have into trying to beat you at it. I am even competitive when the only person to compete with is myself. For example, when I run I am disappointed if my time isn’t a personal best every time. I am so competitive, that I don’t want you to just think of me as being a competitive person, I want you to think I am the most competitive person you have ever met. And I am not sure why.

As I try to consider what makes me the way I am, I think it has something to do with how I handle failure. My mom tells stories about how stubborn I was as a child. Being strong willed is a trait that hasn’t left me over the years. I like to think of this as a positive attribute, and it has served me well. Perhaps a better word to describe me would be “determined,” When I don’t win I will try again, and again, until I achieve my goal.

If I have achieved any degree of skill, it has been earned from failure. I have always been a mediocre basketball player. Today I can hold my own because years of blocked shots and turnovers have taught me what not to do. I have lost more games of chess than I care to admit – probably in the thousands. Playing ping pong with me is like playing against a wall – because I have logged so many hours of racket sports.

Unfortunately, being extremely competitive often goes hand-in-hand with being a jerk. And that’s where things get tough. Allow me to end this post with an apology to anyone I have annoyed with my constant determination. As I said at the beginning of this post, I am blessed with family and friends. Thank you for putting up with me! Oh, and if you think it is annoying now, wait until I turn 40 and really have something to prove.

Capablanca learned the game of chess from watching his father play. He claims to have never read a book about chess. I don’t tend to believe in talent, but Capablanca seriously challenges that belief. His incredible mind seems to have been born with an amazing natural ability for chess. At age 12 he defeated the Cuban champion. Here is a video showing on of those incredible games:

When Capablanca became world champion in 1921, he was in the middle of a winning streak that lasted 8 years. Yes, you read that correctly. Capablanca, playing against the greatest players in the world, including Alexander Alekhine, Emanuel Lasker, and Akiba Rubinstein he never lost a single game.

To give you an idea of the amazing mind of Capablanca, consider this. He would give exhibitions where he played multiple games at the same time. At one point he played 102 games simultaneously. He didn’t lose a single game. His opponents marveled at his speed and praised his ability to instantly see deeply into the position of a game. Here is another game of Capablanca’s that has been described as one of the most instructive games of chess ever played:

A world champion of chess may seem like an unrewarding title, but don’t be fooled. When a world champion was defending his title in 1915 the stakes were about $700,000 in today’s terms. Don’t ask me where this money came from, but needless to say, world champion chess games are big money.

An interesting footnote to Capablanca’s amazing life is his invention of a variation of chess that added two new pieces to the game. The first new piece is called an archbichop which has the combined power of a bishop and a knight. The second piece is a chancellor which has the combined powers of the rook and a knight. The game is played on a 10×8 board and is referred to as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capablanca_chess. If you are interested in chess variations the wikipedia page about fairy pieces is fascinating.

I invented a boardgame.
One of the things taking a big chunk of my time has been a board game I designed that is tentatively called Blockade. I will talk about it more in future posts, but it is basically a two player strategy game where you roll a cube on a 4×4 board trying to pin your opponent. Stay tuned for more information in future posts.

Font Burner Plugin Updates
I released a major upgrade to my Font Burner WordPress plugin. Feedback has been great and downloads passed the 3000 mark recently.

Fever
I recently purchased Fever, a $30 personal rss feed aggregator. I don’t recommend it for anyone who isn’t savvy enough to install apps on your website, but for me it is really great. Once I loaded it up with the hundreds of feeds I try to follow (keyword: try) it filters through the “hot” feeds kind of like a personalized Digg.

I am quoted in Web Designer Magazine
A Twitter connection gave me the opportunity to be quoted in the upcoming issue of Web Designer magazine, a publication out of the UK. Now all I have to do is track down where I can buy a copy of the issue which I think will come out next month.

Music
My favorite album right now is an album called Fantasies
by Metric. The new Eels album
is great, too.

Movies
Netflix has been hit and miss lately. I enjoyed the Wrestler more than I was expecting. Finally saw The Village and Unbreakable and I thought they were great. I enjoyed The Omega Man as much as the remake, Legend.

Red Rocket
Life at work has been busy but good. I have a couple of posts up on the Red Rocket blog. One is about how good design adds credibility to a website and the other is about this YouTube video:

The connection for me is that Chess is a game of creativity. Within the rules and structure there is an infinite amount of possibilities. You sort out the potential winning ideas from the sure losers. You avoid traps and stick clear of easily predictable moves. You narrow down your options until you are left with a few “rough drafts” that might work. No guarantees, just your best effort and the hope that it will work out the way you plan.

You also have to predict the actions and tendencies of your opponent. When you play well you are actually controlling their actions and reactions just like a well designed object will. Things fall in place and you are successful. When you play poorly, the best intentions – the seemingly fool-proof strategy- falls apart and you lose.

Design also is more of a problem solving activity than just the “make it look pretty” mentality that defines our profession to the uneducated. A creative mind can overcome a deficit of “pieces” by understanding how to use limited assets in powerful combinations. With a firm understanding of “the game” we can see possibilities that are hidden from the average person.

If you are interested in exploring the chess/design metaphor further, you can browse the Be A Design Group archive where I have talked about the connections in the past.

There have only been a few rare occassions when I have felt bad about winning a game of chess. The example that stands out in my mind is playing my dad. My dad taught me how to play and I have fond memories of the games we played as I have grown up. When I was at the top of my game a couple years ago, I don’t think my dad could have beat me. I was playing several games a night, and he probably hadn’t played in years. When I saw that he left me an opening, I felt disappointed. I didn’t want to win that easily. It is strange because all my life I wanted to beat him, and when I finally could do it, I realized it wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. Beating someone you respect and love can be agonizing.

Back to the invitation from my friend. I think I hesitated for reasons similar to why I didn’t enjoy defeating my father. I am not saying I have a father/son relationship with him by any means, and I am not even confident that I would win. The thing is he is someone I really respect and admire. I would hate to think less of him if I win, and the thought of losing is equally unappealing.

So did I accept his invitation? Of course I did. Everything I have written so far is really irrational when you think about it. Basing my opinion of someone on how they play chess is ridiculous. Fearing that someone will think less of me if I lose is silly. If I let my irrational feelings get in the way of enjoying a game that I love, then I have lost sight of the fact that chess is just a game and a very small part of who I am. I expect that learning to not take the game so seriously will help me enjoy the game even more. Who knows, I might even enjoy beating my dad again.