I am in LA

I am in Los Angeles for the PDC. Today I visited downtown. Tomorrow I am going to the pre-conference on concurrent multi-core programming on Windows and .NET. Here are some photos from downtown LA (click to see higher resolution).

	It is a big country. Everything is really big. For example this advertising for a film fills a complete hotel. The film wasn’t even shown in the movie theatres, it is now released direct to DVD.
	This is Los Angeles first fire engine. It was drawn by horses.
	The modern version. Today I saw many of them parked throughout the city, I am not sure why.
	Walt Disney concert hall, looks like a space station.
	Los Angeles City Hall, seat of the Daily Planet in Superman, destroyed in the war of the worlds by mars men.
	Union station
	Union station, interior. Also used in films as it still looks like 1939. In the waiting room they have sofas instead of chairs.
	Entrance to China town metro station
	Famous restaurant in China town
	Grand central market
	LAPD police car
	Problem and solution (America is going green?)
	Angelus plaza with skyscrapers in the background.
	More sky scrapers
	Sky scraper reflection
	Even more sky scrapers

The world championship

Silverlight 2.0 was released just in time for the chess world championship – two hours before the start of game one. Fortunately there had been a release candidate which gave developers enough time to prepare for the release.

The Week In Chess has been showing the first four games of the world championship live using my Silverlight chess board. They are also running analysis of the games. Here the Silverlight chess boards are used like diagrams in a printed book, but with the additional capability to replay the game in the diagrams. I have not seen this style for replayable diagrams anywhere else. This kind of diagram was one of the ideas in creating a chess board that can be integrated into any HTML page (oh, and into any blog post, as you can see).

I went to Bonn to see games three and four on site. I was lucky as game three was incredibly exciting.

I am not doing any opening previews this year as I was busy with the Silverlight chess board, and am also going to PDC. I think tomorrow we will see yet another line in the Slav – I don’t think the line played in game three will be seen again. But just one thing, after Anand’s novelty 14..Bb7:

I think White can consider alternatives, for example 15.Rd1 (instead of 15.Bxb5 played in game three). The pawn on b5 is not so important, and the bishop is not so great on b5 either. If White can take on d4 instead, it may be the Black king who gets in danger, not the White. Of course this requires careful analysis, but I think it is an option to be considered.