From the manual: "19.Care and Cleaning Your DGT NA is a durable, well-made product. If you treat it with reasonable care it should give you years of trouble-free performance.To clean the clock,use only a slightly-moistened soft cloth. Do not use abrasive cleansers"
It was before COVID.
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Well I don't know about your life membership but I'm pretty sure mine expires when I do.....
My personal view is that membership retention needs to be the primary goal in the immediate future. This is done by enhanced the perceived value of membership to members which obviously is going to be judged differently by different people.
The hell of all this is that just as Covid has already attacked various parts of the country at differing rates, the recovery is going to happen differently between provinces as well. If PEI (for instance - I'm simply picking them as one of the lowest infected provinces) has zero cases for 6 months while it's still going strong in ON is it fair to continue the extension? Similarly within a province - presently the infection rate is MUCH higher in Calgary than Edmonton. My question is "What's Fair?" and the only answer is "it's complicated"
While there are a lot of online chess resources, the CFC "Brand" is OTB (over the board) Tournament play and while we can spread boards out to give more space between boards, other than allowing only one player at the board at a time enforcing 2 metres between white and black at a single board is going to be difficult. I don't think I've seen that at ANY tournament in 40+ years of participation.
But I do think that we won't go wrong in asking ourselves what we can do that enhances the perceived value of a CFC membership to present members and to those who have recently chosen not to renew until events in their area resume. We do need to be proactive - it isn't going to just happen!
Very good points Lyle. Perhaps we could extend life memberships by 20 years. I think they currently expire in 2099.
It is complicated.
We could play online but in person as a close comparable to OTB though this could be complicated. The two players might face each other at the long ends of a table and make their moves on a computer. Can you imagine if the whole tournament lost its internet connection due to a power failure.
You don't have to imagine this scenario. Actually the setup you describe is manageable since presumably most of the computers being used would have a battery backup. Much more problematic is when the server goes down, which eliminated one round from the online BC Senior last June (chess.com), or the server has to reboot, which lichess seems to do fairly often with only 10 minutes warning and with no particular rhyme nor reason as to when this happens.
Last edited by Stephen Wright; 08-22-2020 at 11:28 AM.
I investigated this option with the Convention Centre we're playing in at Thanksgiving - even with only 25-40 players, the load would be too much on their Internet. Probably a big hotel might be more robust. On the other hand, your back up is to mask up (if not already) and continue playing OTB.
There are apps that two players can play LAN game via bluetooth (no internet, no server needed). This one plays between two phones, with both phones fully charged before playing (also should bring a power bank as backup battery), there will no power or server outage problem - https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...om.cnvcs.chess. I just looked this up, needs more extensive research to determine the feasibility of using this kind of app for semi-OTB tournaments.
More resources on two players chess on PCs (laptops) without internet:
- Ethernet LAN connection: https://sourceforge.net/projects/avmnetchess/
- Ethernet LAN connection: https://sourceforge.net/projects/skychess/
- LAN, Direct Connect, and IRC: https://sourceforge.net/projects/jfchess/
But all of them are quite dated, last updated a few years ago.