I've just spent the past 5 days in Nashville, Tennessee, bringing our chess club to the SuperNationals chess tournament - the biggest scholastic chess tournament of the year. This is my hobby - I discovered a few years ago that coaching kids in chess was an enormous amount of fun - even more fun than playing it seriously, as I had as a youth.

This trip to Nationals was the culmination of two years of planning, and the capstone of my older son's career with the club (along with several other key 8th graders). And what a great ride it was! 28 kids, a bunch of adults, one big magic yellow bus, and a whole lot of fun with chess!

We entered teams into 4 of the available 15 sections, and we won 1st place in a K-3 section, 11th place in one K-6 section, 1st place in the other (the one my younger son was playing in), and we also managed to win 1st place in the K9 section my older son was playing in. That last one was particularly touching for me; my son has worked really hard this past year, and all of his work paid off - his extra effort was a key difference between second and first place.

Here's a picture of the joyous team (not pictured are all of their trophies, which required a a whole bus compartment to carry):

Luckily, while I was off on the bus to Nashville, the team here has been cooking; we're making good progress on 8.0. We'll hopefully have something ready fairly soon.

Now I'm headed off to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco. While I get to ride a plane, and not a bus, and even though I'm looking forward to it, I suspect it can't possibly be as much fun .

Cheers,
Jeremy