
I knew there was a reason I liked US police comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
One episode features Andy Samberg playing a game of mahjong.
I knew there was a reason I liked US police comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
One episode features Andy Samberg playing a game of mahjong.
Each Monday lunchtime at work, a group of us get together to play mahjong. Mahjong Mondays we call them.
Sadly, however, one of our colleagues, Felicity, is leaving shortly so we invited her to leave us with a Felicity memorial special hand.
This is what she came up with, we could call it “Wild winds”:
I wonder if there is already a special hand like that out there.
Back in April I wrote a post called the cobbler’s shoes in which I made the poor excuse that I hadn’t redesigned my website for 11 years because I had been too busy building sites for other people.
We also had three children in that time who turned out to be somewhat time-consuming, and they didn’t simply auto-upgrade on a one-click four month roadmap like WordPress.
I concluded with the following (slightly amended) plan:
Of course, if you were to visit garethjmsaunders.co.uk right now you might just notice the tiny detail that erm… in the last eight months I’ve not quite managed to do any of the above.
The truth is that I delayed my plans for two reasons:
So, this is it. Over the next month I’m planning to go through with what I’d sketched out in April.
One of the things that I realise that I’ve dithered about while planning this is the “delete a lot of content” bit. I’ve got a lot of content on my site that hasn’t been updated in a long, long time (sorry). Some of it is out of date, but a lot of it isn’t but currently it’s too much for me to migrate neatly.
A lot has changed in the lasts 11 years. I no longer use a Psion (although I do still rather enjoy people emailing me about them) and I haven’t written a line of code for one for the last decade. Sadly I haven’t played mahjong much (except on the computer) in the last six years, since writing a book on it and, oh, our oldest children have just turned six—do you see a connection? And nobody really needs to read my poetry from the mid-90s, or essays I wrote at theological college, do they?
So it’s all going. Except this blog, and a few other bits and pieces. Some of it may make a reappearance at some point in the future, in a different format, but for now I need to clear the decks and give myself the space to focus on the projects I want to pursue next year, which is mostly writing. And getting well.
I just want to take this opportunity to especially thank the Psion and mahjong communities for your support over the years. I’m sorry I’m bailing out at this point but my priorities are currently different.
See you on the other side, which will now be at www.garethjmsaunders.co.uk/shed/ rather than on the ‘blog’ subdomain.
Thursday 8 January 2015
After much deliberation I have eventually decided to retain my www.garethjmsaunders.co.uk subdomain. For a number of reasons:
And so there you have it, for now it is settled. This blog isn’t moving… except, of course, it is. Because I’m going to move it very shortly to another server.
See you on the other side…
A couple of months ago I came across a set of the most beautiful mahjong icons created by web developer and icon designer Martin Persson.
I got in touch with Martin because the set was almost complete: it had everything for the Western game apart from flowers and seasons. After a short conversation by email I sent Martin scans of the flowers and seasons from my Gibson’s mahjong set and a few weeks later he made his new icons available for download from his website.
Martin Persson’s set consists of 37 mahjong icons in both 64px and 128px sizes, which are free for both personal and commercial use, provided that you link to his site.
A few months back I got an email from the management team for the Open European Mahjong Championship looking for a team of British players to participate in this year’s championships in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The competition runs from Thursday 21 – Sunday 24 June 2007, with an optional pre-tournament sightseeing tour from Monday 18 – Thursday 21 June 2007, and uses the Chinese Official International Rules.
Anyone interested?