I've worked my ass off for the past 10 days so I could have a day and a half
to prepare for the Liberty Bell Open, which begins tomorrow night.

Here's how I spent 10 hours today.

* Opened the box for a printer I purchased from Amazon for the express
purpose of printing chess-instructional index cards. Installed the software
but discovered no ink cartridge was included. Went to Staples but learned I
had to buy both black and color cartridges for this model printer to work.
Cost: $53. Forget it. I'll use loose leaf paper.

* Got home and spent approximately 4 hours trying to get ChessBase to print
some positions and opening material. Program would not allow me to remove
the headers and footers I put in a year ago. Couldn't print commentary next
to diagrams, either. Chessbase Help file was as much help as a freaking SS
Stormtrooper on Yom Kippur. Nothing useful on website either.

* Thinking I might be able to print in an alternate view, I re-loaded a
diagram into CB and loaded Rybka2.2. After about 15 minutes the CB interface
stopped recognizing Rybka in the engines folder. Program hung and needed to
be restarted through control-alt-delete three times. Then spent about 40
minutes looking for another copy of the program so I could re-install the
engine. No luck. "INVALID ENGINE." Why wasn't it invalid on Monday night
when I analyzed my last tournament game with it? Oh well.

* So I tried printing the materials I needed from Shredder. The first one
worked so-so, but the diagram was crooked. Ok, so I moved on to the next
diagram but Shredder would only print the first one!! I learned I could get
another diagram to print by exiting the program and re-loading, but that
only worked for 2 more diagrams before it would only print the last one no
matter what I did. Rebooted a couple of times; helped once, but not the
second time. So I tried another view, where you get one position per move.
Couldn't get that to print at all.

* Nearly out of options, I decided to install Convekta's Modern Chess
Openings: 1...Nc6!?, so at least I'd have *something* under my belt before
tomorrow night. Installation went perfectly, or so it seemed. When I tried
running the program all I got was "Runtime Error 501 (249). Reinstalled 3
times, but no luck. Tried copying the files to my hard disk and installing
from there, but the installation hung (no other programs were running).
You'd have thought I'd learned my lesson from my last Convekta product!!

* Spent about 40 minutes looking for Runtime Error 501 material on
Convekta's website. Couldn't find anything, so I googled it and hark! There
it was. A list of about 30 Runtime Error 501 patches, for every Convekta
product, it seemed, but my own.

So here I sit, 22 hours before game time, having wasted pretty much an
entire day ****ing around with horrible, expensive software from horrible
companies.

Does anyone know a good defense to 1. f4?

Angelo