The big break, 75%, and New Books
Hello everyone!
After studying for many hours everyday for several months, I finally started to get burned out on chess. After the London May Open I decided to take some weeks off of chess and renew my love for the game. I ended up taking the entire month of June off from chess and instead focused on my guitar playing and fitness. Anyway, at the beginning of July I resumed my usual schedule of chess training in earnest, my passion for the game has returned once again!
Pleasantly, after returning to my daily Chess Tactics Server training I was able to increase my overall accuracy to an even 75%. This was one of my goals for the year, the next one is to make a rating of 1600. It took me around 25000 tries to get my rating to 1573 with 75% accuracy....not bad! 
I turned 22 years old on the 27th of June and recieved a lot of gift certificates to chapters booksellers. I happily purchased some new chess books including:
"It's your move" by Chris Ward
"Understanding Chess: Move by Move" by John Nunn
"How to Defend in Chess" by Colin Crouch
"Zurich 1953" by David Bronstein
"Chess Master vs. Chess Amateur" by Max Euwe
"50 Essential Chess Lessons" by Steve Giddons
"Silman's Complete Endgame Course" by Jeremy Silman
"Play the French" by John Watson
Hopefully these should keep me busy for awhile.
My next over the board tournament will be the London July Open at the end of the month. I usually do well at these London Opens and hopefully I haven't lost my skill completely after my hiatus!
One more thing that may interest some people....
I am a lover of Linux, and use Ubuntu as my main OS. Chessbase in their infinite wisdom do not support any format other than windows,and so I have had to run a windows partition as well. I'm going to try my best to come up with a list of programs that will run on Linux as an alternative to chessbase. Everything from ICC clients to analysis engines and instructional software. Also I'm going to post ways to run chessbase software on Wine. I've heard it's possible to run fritz 8 and other earlier editions on wine, but the chessmedia system doesn't work no matter what you do. I'll keep you updated.
