Mystery solved.

It all started when I emailed chess clubs in England offering link exchanges.  My emails appeared to be from “Trent L” because, well, my name is Trent and my last initial is L.

However, when replying, some people would call me “Lawrence”.  The first time, I figured it was just a slip.  Hey, maybe the guy just finished talking to a Lawrence and had Lawrence-on-the-brain.  (You know how bad that is.)

But it happened several times.  My curiosity was, as they say, piqued.  Am I going crazy?  Am I Lawrence?  Is my whole life some kind of crazy Fight Club illusion?

I emailed someone who called me “Lawrence” and asked why they thought my name was Lawrence.  Turns out, there is a young chess whiz in England called Lawrence Trent.

Ahhh.  Now I get it.  Suffice to say, I’m not Lawrence Trent.  Sorry to disappoint anyone who thought they were being contacted by a renowned genius

Chessup has a links page. I’d be happy to include links to any chess-related sites, and would appreciate return links back. I’m particularly interested in club websites, so send ‘em on in. I hope to format the page a little bit better in the future.

The best way to reach me is via the address below:

Not related to chess, but I like the way this guy thinks.

Cool.  Bruce Pandolfini has linked to me in his January 24th column at ChessCafe.

For those new to the site, the tool is on the front page.  Here are some instructions for using it.

I have a policy on hotlinking.  I’m pretty much OK with it, but please give credit to my site in the form of a link.

I hope you enjoy ChessUp.

Happy New Year!

Yeah, I know it’s the end of January, but saying “Happy New Year” during the first week of the year is so…predictable.  Besides, this is the time of year when you need a happy message the most.

The PC that I used to create ChessUp decided that it did not want to live to see 2007.  All the source code is saved, I just need to rebuild everything on the machine.  I’d like to make this blog a little easier to read.  (What the heck was I thinking when I put a striped-background directly behind the text?)

The forums continue to be a frustrating point for me.  It is very difficult to build a community and fight a wave of spammers simultaneously.  I need to re-vamp all the anti-spam measures on this site.  My feedback email inbox is flooded with spam, too, and so are my blog trackbacks.  It can be fixed, I just need to sit myself down one evening and do it.

If you sent me a message recently, I probably missed it.  If you want to contact me, the best way is to email:

spaceNOSPAMrook[at]gmail[dot]com

(Remove the NOSPAM and replace [at] with @ and [dot] with .)

Hope to hear from you.