Dion Tiu

 

ABOUT ME

I am originally of Chinese background but I was born in Australia. My birthday is on the 23rd of September 1987 (yes, I’m a youngin’ compared to other sweepers). I currently attend an agricultural high school in Sydney. My school has a farm on it, with a boarder facility. The farm, as you’ve guess, has an array of animals on it. Since agriculture was compulsory in my school, I had to deal chickens, pigs, goats, cows etc for the past 4 years. Thankfully ag was only compulsory till year 10 and so I dropped it at the start of this year. The only decent thing out of ag was driving a tractor. Technically, I’m in my last year of high school at the moment. And most likely I’ll be doing something science/maths related in university. 

 

ABOUT MINESWEEPER

Like everyone else, I started playing minesweeper randomly clicking squares in hope of solving a board. About 4 years ago, my sister (that’s right) introduced me to a new concept – double clicking. With this new found weapon, my times dropped down to 4-26-81 by late 2002. I hardly remember anything before that, I have no idea why. I don’t even remember when I broke the 100 barrier on expert. And as most people, I thought I was the best in the world, so I took a year’s break. At the start of 2003, I started to play again, breaking my expert record to 74 on January 10th. At this time, I had never been to Damien’s site, and was hugely excited about my new record. So I searched the net and to my surprise *gasp* the expert record was 41. I didn’t bother submitting my times since I thought it was pretty pathetic and it wasn’t even under 100 total.

This is when I started playing seriously, getting my times down to 2-18-60 by April. I started playing at school (my computer studies teacher was pathetic so I got bored in class), and that helped my progress. During this period, I remember playing up to 6 hours a day. You’d think with this much time dedicated to minesweeper I would break the minute barrier anytime soon. But I stagnated on 60 for 2 months (felt like ages), achieving 60 5 times I believe. Finally, I broke the minute barrier getting a 57 as well as breaking my intermediate record to 16 on the 12th of August. After that, I thought I broke the last barrier that I could, thinking I would eventually get into the low 50s in a few years time. How wrong I was!

My next breakthrough was on the 28th of October, when I achieved a 52 on a low 3BV board. Less than a month later I achieved my first sub50, a 49. Two days after that, I got a 14 on intermediate. At this point, I thought my times were decent enough to submit 2-14-49. I spent a few days trying to figure out how Sorin’s recorder worked to provide some vids to Georgi. A few days before the next bi-weekly update of the best ever list, I broke my record again, a 48 on the 2nd of December.

Since then, I’ve broken my expert record by 1 second each time, in roughly the same intervals. My intermediate record went 14->13->11 with quite a lot of luck. I hope to get a 42 on expert by the end of the year. And *hopefully* a sub40 by the end of next year. I don’t want to become Lasse and get stuck on 41 forever haha.

My style is very similar to Lasse’s, and I believe that’s from watching and learning from his videos numerous times. I recently achieved my 100th sub50 including clone and MS version. And that is my long explanation of my quite short minesweeper career. In conclusion, I never dreamt of becoming this good ;)

 

INTERESTS

I have only a few interests besides minesweeper. Once of which is golfffffffffffffffff, I love golf. I only recently started playing, probably at the start of this year. I’ve been taking golf lessons every 3 weeks, so you could say I’m decent. If you’ve ever played golf, you would know it’s a very frustrating sport. I don’t play competitively, only for leisure and I doubt I’ll ever be THAT good to play competitively. To those people who play golf, my handicap is probably in the 30s. I could probably hit the ball 200m with my driver – I’m getting used to lower woods, starting off small so that’s what I’m estimating. Anyways, off with the golf terminology, I just love golf. Thankfully, Australia is a sporting mad country, and so we have an abundance of golf courses. I believe in Hong Kong, it’s 5 times as expensive to play. I recently got a new golf set from my uncle, which was apparently worth over $1000 a few years ago so that should last for a few years.

I’ve also done some webdesign before. Nothing that special, but I’ve made a few sites before. Basically, I made the ‘flash’ part of the website, but I still know how to code HTML. A good flash site for tutorials on some confusing actionscripting would be www.flashkit.com. I just know the basics of actionscripting, I’m not a superprogrammer.

Since I am still in the prime time of my teenager life, I don’t have many interests or hobbies. However, I am quite fascinated about science, specifically physics. Basically, things to do with Space, Einstein’s theory of relativity and the beginning of the Universe floats my boat. Hence my goal is to do a science related course in uni.

 

 

Minesweeper has provided me with a lot of mixed feelings over the years – fun, excitement and frustration. This game will quite possibly, contribute to the downfall of my educational career. So I will see, I might delete it off the face of my computer in a few months time to save my life. But don’t worry I will be back. So wish me luck, so I that can sub40 in a hope to reduce my urges to play minesweeper every examination period. To the minesweeper community - Good Luck and Have Fun!

 

DION TIU                                                                                                         

11/11/04