I've been stuck at 2000 for 40 yrs, but I did have a career and a life. I've picked it up again, and have as a goal, 2200 and a stretch goal of 2400. I'd like to think I could get to 2200 as I have focus now that I am retired. But, I really do not know and I think after a year of serious study, I need to evaluate my opportunity costs as there are other things I like to do.
That said, the on-line puzzles from chess.com or lichess.com are great. Puzzle books are great, better than sudoku, and you have an easy metric to see how well you perform.
Be careful not to play speed chess (its fun) but probably not the best for development.
I recently found: http://www.billwallchess.com/. what is nice, he has a lot of chess books in PGN notation, so you can get the book, then follow thru the whole book on a chess viewer, it saves a lot of time setting up pieces. So, books on endgames, etc are much easier to study.
At the early steps, I'd suggest not to waste time in studying openings and work on combinations, endgames. You just need enough opening to muddle thru and then you can win in later stages.
I am putting together a small binder of the openings I will play. If it is not in the binder, I will not play it. I've been far too whimsical playing things like Kings Gambit, but I need to focus on more specific openings, at least playing them more often.
Very nice post. To me, it always seemed like antidotal rules and observations. It is right until it's wrong, my bad.
Where I find him very useful, when professional people suggest or reference his books. It tells me I am not going to use these people or their services.
Oh! I hate linked-in. Never used it and am now "retired". Never did not work a day in my professional 39-yr work period. What do I hate about it? the resume embellishment, the spam recruiter's, and my observation (poking around without a linkedin account) of people in my work group who hated each other but were linked together on their individual linked-in accounts. If you don't like someone at work, perhaps you do not need to recommend them on social media.
I have seen that, where I want to just cut and paste the response but the return content has something like a one liner that states ("the rest of your code here") and I can't cut and paste it. I ask for a full return of content, but don't always get it.
I'm still finding value in the FT comments. There are a few strange ones, but they do not get much of my time. Ranking may have some value. FT is fairly expensive, it strange to see see the equivalent of flat earth comments in that type of publication.
Agree, it is just more work than it used to be & heading in the wrong direction. I am assuming some subscribers are corporate with multiple users doing fake comments
I still value my subscription to The Economist, and Financial Times. A bit pricy but I feel caught up and the content is minimal compared to something like WSJ that is overwhelming with content I do not want to look at. I look at the price premium as freeing up my time searching and reading other material.
I also recommend the Financial Times. It's not perfect and definitely still has its own viewpoint, but the quality and matter-of-factness of the articles is miles beyond the omnipresent biases of the NYT, WSJ, and most other papers I've read. The business news is also (as you'd expect) excellent.
Splunk was so expensive we could not use it to monitor our servers used for weather modeling. Seriously. The log files generated were at times too voluminous and you frequently blew thru your bandwidth cap.
Great product, but completely useless utility value with financial considerations for environments with high volume.
Hard to beat FT and The Economist, gets to the point quickly.
I do not like the weekend section in FT about "how to spend it"
The WSJ is too heavy, takes too much time to read and overwhelming.
Barrons is not the publication it used to be.
Bloomberg Business Week looks interesting, but where I spend my money & time is limited and think my subscriptions to FT and The Economist are better spent.
I'm not sure I would avoid the war coverage and potential conflicts down the road.
I found $50 for a month of resumeworded.com helped optimize your resume based on their provided objective function. Just make multiple copies of your resume, like in my case, lastname_first_name_x89_y92_z95.doc and based on the ATS feedback, adjust your resume by making the incremeental changes and updating the file name for the new scores that they pass you. Eventually, you will get to lastname_first_name_x99_y99_z99.doc or thereabouts and have a nice ATS resume. The other part of your question, the skills. My approach was to decide what field I was working in and review various job postings making a list of the desired skills in that field. Then summarize and list those skills for that that targeted field.
Its a little work, but I have never had to wait more than a very short time for a nice job.
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