Tadaa! My first post!

Hello! I'm a guy from Lahti, Finland, a father of a small boy, Leo, and pretty much into everything that goes on in the Internet, mostly Free Culture related stuff. My hobbies have also included Aikido and Chi Kung, although lately I haven't been financially able to pursue them.

I decided to start blogging about one of my favourite subjects; Go. Also known as weiqi in Chinese or baduk in Korean. I first came to know Go in business school, most likely in 2003, not very sure about that, really. It was a classmate who introduced me to the anime Hikaru no Go, Hikaru's Go.

So I tried to play on and off for a couple of months, tried Pandanet/IGS, KGS... Didn't really know what I was doing then. It wasn't until I found a 9x9 Go board on Yahoo when I really started learning the stuff.

I was soon learning more on KGS and was even dreaming of setting up my own Go salon or a Go themed café. In Aikido I had a lot of friends who were interested, and even supportive of my idea. So I even took a entrepreneurship course where I drafted a detailed plan on how I would set everything up, from getting funding to pricing, location, counting how many tables I needed, to plans for setting up terminals for Internet Go. Everything was accounted for and ready for implementation. And then my girl friend told me she wanted us to leave Lahti and move to another city (with an ultimatum). So we left for Jyväskylä. The year, I think was 2005.

The move affected my plans gravely enough all by itself, but losing the familiar milieu and friends due the move my dreams were abruptly shattered. There was no way I could have started the same business in the new place. I didn't even have to investigate it. Even building up relationships was awkward in that town not to mention trying to build publicity for a project that was most likely to fail in a place where there is a café in almost every corner. Even my hobbies were affected. I tried both of the Aikido dojos there, and sure enough I didn't feel at home in either. The other one (the one I would've probably liked) was just too expensive, and the other, well their style didn't suit me and they were really unsympathetic towards training bokken and jo. "Sticks are just sticks" was the comment if I remember it correctly.

Anyway, after that I forgot Go for years to come. In the spring of 2006 our son was born, I had a project around a web page so I didn't have much time for almost anything but work. At home. When the baby was crying and shouting all the time. It was a hard time for me, not to say the web project turned out not to be a success after all. We did get married though. In the summer of 2007.

Well, fast forward a move to Kotka in fall 2007, and another move back to Lahti in 2008. I started going to Aikido as soon as we got back here, and in May of 2009 I created new accounts on KGS and IGS as AmbyR00. I'm back on track playing Go, although being ill for almost the whole last quarter of last year also shows in my game activity for that time. Today I'm trying to catch up, slowly where I left off in 2005, maybe enough to start thinking of my dream again. Although, looking at it now, it might surely have been just a dream.

I'll be posting my progress reports and other Go related stuff here, so that I'd have another reason to keep on playing Go. ^^ See ya soon! gg!