My thoughts this morning go out to my brother, who has been sent to Afghanistan for a month. Part of the troop surge there. He’s going in a support role, in order to provide some equipment and weapons training, so he’s not expected to see combat; however, I’m still thinking of him. He’s a large fellow and at least as smart as me.

A couple weeks ago I joined the Screen Actors’ Guild. I’m hoping I can leverage some of the Ambassador’s Day work into a new agent.

I just wrote the world’s youngest chess playing program, Superpawn. Superpawn plays like a smart young child. It plays a mostly legal game of chess, though it doesn’t understand concepts like castling and the fifty move rule. Superpawn loves to get the queen out early and parade her around the board. It is trivially Winboard compatible. Once Superpawn survives the epd2wb test suite, I’ll probably release it with a CC0 license.

When my wife was a little girl, she used to play chess with her older and somewhat more serious sister. At a certain point in the game, Amanda would grab a pawn and scream “SUPERPAWN!” and fly it around the board, knocking all the pieces over.