Kofuji

You shouldn't fear, everything about the game is automatic. I'm sure Doitsuyama will be making some slight modifications to my results grabber to make recovering from server outages easier (actually much of the data is already tied to the Sumo Reference and it wouldn't take much to hook up the rest). Doitsuyama has agreed to take over the care of the server and to update the older games. He is already in contact with our host.

Actually, Scott Kahn (Sukubidubidu) is a cancer researcher in New York and is chair of the Biomarkers committee for the International Cancer Advocacy Network. That organization has worked tirelessly to find me the best people to see, the best therapies to use and generally cheer lead me and my wife since the metastases were diagnosed to be malignant. They're still working. But at this point with my huge tumour load I'm not interested in trying a chemotherapy that might have a 10% chance of working when I've had the best therapy for melanoma ever found and the huge tumour load beat it. When the time comes, a memorial gift to the International Cancer Advocacy Network would be most appropriate if you care to do so.

Yes, this is another string to Bob's bow. He is currently the secretary to the Worldwide Dragonfly Society, and is a leading member of the Emirates Natural History Group. He has written papers on odonata (dragonflies and damselflies). He is an excellent wildlife photographer, particularly for close-ups of insects. Some of his stunning photos can be found here. He has another amazing claim to fame --- he has discovered a new species of dragonfly mite (I hope I have got this correct), which he got to name, and wrote a paper on (I have been trying to find it online - but so far, no luck....). This mite rides on the backs of dragonflies that live in one of the wadis in Oman. The provisional name for it was going to be based on 'dragon rider'. Thanks, Jezz. Fortunately the Association has found another secretary and the new drug gave me time to get her set up. She's an incredibly capable young lady from Portugal who organized the European conference I was invited to speak at a few years ago. The parasite of dragonflies I found is a biting midge (like a noseeum for humans). The females suck blood from the veins in the dragonfly wings just like female mosquitoes do to humans in order to mature their eggs. Unfortunately the paper is still in preparation even though it's basically done. My collaborator who was supposed to format for the publication we are targeting has apparently taken a sabbatical to study the similar parasites found on the Seychelles. I took pictures of them there in February. Apparently Seychelles has at least two species of these things and more samples are needed to allow our other collaborator, the midge expert, to sort them out. The name we plan to give it is Forcipomyia (Pterobosca) rikbi. Forcipomyia is the genus, Pterobosca (wing lover) is the tribe and rikbi is the species name. It is the name for the racing camel jockeys in the local dialect of Arabic. The boys have recently been replaced by robots. If you go to http://www.enhg.org/Home/Publications/Tribulus.aspx and look at Volumes 17 & 18, there are two articles I co-authored with some of the better dragonfly photography.

Looks like the network connection went bad on our servers. A third next to them was fine. Up and running again...

Results are now grabbed for sumogames. Expect Goly's games grabber also kicked in automatically. My grabber only grabs for a certain window of time currently. Could make it continuous.

It appears the servers have gone offline, fortunately after game deadlines. It may be an ISP issue as Jack mentioned that they were going to increase the speed of the line to 100/100 from 40/10. Jack won't be up for at least 4 hours if it was a power failure and the machines haven't restarted.

Dear sumo gaming friends, I'm very sad to have to declare my intai in all games as of now. My 28 day check up for my response to the new drug was today. Unfortunately I had only a 2-3 week transient response to the drug. The melanoma has already mutated as we were aware it eventually would, although we were hoping for a lot longer time. I have been taken off the drug. There are no chemotherapy options. All of the other clinical trials available exclude me due to the brain metastases as none of the other drugs have crossed the blood/brain barrier. My doctor is consulting with his colleagues in radiation oncology to see if there is some radiation therapy they can do to minimize the chances of swelling in the brain and its attendant nasty side effects. He is also investigate palliative care options in the area where I am living with my cousin. Due to the rapid progress of melanoma, the prognosis is 4-8 weeks, so this will be my last basho for the worst possible reason. A number of sumo people are on my wife's medical update distribution list, so they will keep you informed. As I have energy, I'll try to inform Doitsuyama what needs to be done to run the games on the current basis, but he has also agreed to port them to ASP.NET which should lead to improvements in the games, like the common signon that I put together for Maegashira Game. I've really appreciated this community and especially the kindness shown by and help received from people I've never met during this difficult year. Warm regards, Kofuji

OK all you Sekitori Oracle fan boys ... When Hoshitori and UDH were created, there was no such thing as SO. I haven't missed a basho for Hoshitori since I first played in Nagoya 1995. Unfortunately, there's one player that started the basho before me, so I'm not the iron man. I think I'm the only player that actually went up to Aomori to visit Totoro. UDH came out of my discussions with Chuck Finberg. When I was on Canadian Coast Guard ships, our cribbage tournaments where 2 games to win and one to lose. The one to lose really was interesting, so we decided to make the inverse of Hoshitori Game. When BenchSumo was created there was no such thing as Sumo Reference, only Stewart Nelson's SCGroup stats. I pulled them into my database and developed the bout page for myself as well as my bouts which I used for about a year before I released them to all players. Of course I plummetted through the standings when I did so because all the information available to make a more informed decision about the outcome was in one place. Fantasy Sumo is a Johnny-come-lately compared to RotoSumo. At one point we did consider adding the option to ST to automatically populate ISP with your pick, but then there was the issue of X bouts. Personally, I dropped out of SO a while ago. Not to disparage Golynohana's coding, but there are all sorts of helps the entry page could give you like a Javascript function that would show you how many wins and losses you have predicted. It's a zero sum game, and I tended to be give too many wins out. You really have to do it in a spreadsheet first before you make your entry if you are going to be anywhere near realistic. Anyway ... don't knock those early games. If it wasn't for them, there wouldn't be a sumo gaming community!

This time it's a real mess for picks ... It's a big tossup today but I'll go with: Day 5: Takekaze

I'm going with the other sekiwake ... Day 4 Toyonoshia

Sorry, I can't rescore until I've been told that all the henkas have been fixed by the DTD Gyojis. Assuming I'm notified while I'm awake and at the computer, it doesn't take long to rescore. But it might have to wait until Day 2. I haven't seen any responses to Jezz requests for the updates.

Forgot to mention that all the ST entries for Day 2 have been corrected and I did the correction well after the Torikumi was fixed.

Bench and SekiToto are fine now for entries. SekiToto has been rescored.

RotoSumo standings are now correct.