I just love a good game of chess, and I was delighted to see people playing chess just off De Brouckère metro station in Brussels.

Street #chess #Brussels Sunday pass time…

A photo posted by Foldilocks (@foldilockz) on Sep 13, 2015 at 2:16am PDT

I played this gentleman with the cool hat, and when he moved his queen on the second move, I knew it shouldn’t be too hard to win this one. The game didn’t last long, and he was kind enough to say bravo, bravo at the end of it which brought a big smile to my face!

Remember to develop your minor pieces first, and only then take your queen out, and if you leave a coin or two at the table for the gentleman who owns the boards, and keeps this thing going, he will much appreciate it.

One of the most embarrassing moments right after I started my new assignment in Brussels was when on my second day I locked myself out of my computer because I typed in the wrong password far too many times.

A part of me wants to blame the AZERTY keyboard for this mishap but being no stranger to making a fool of myself; I’ll accept that I forgot my password, and get on with it.

It does give me an opportunity to write about the AZERTY keyboard, and share a good tip with anyone who has to set passwords, and deal with the AZERTY and QWERTY keyboards at the same time.

Before coming here, I assumed that there was just one type of keyboard, and I was quite surprised when I saw an AZERTY keyboard. It looks like the image below.

The main thing to keep in mind is that 21 out of 26 alphabets have the same location in the AZERTY as well as the QWERTY keyboard, and the five that are different are A,Z,Q,W and M. In addition to this, remember that it’s hard to type a $ or a # sign on this keyboard.

If you know these two things, you can be smart about your password and set something that gets typed the same way in both keyboards. For example – “Brussels123*” is a password that contains an alphabhet, number, and a special characters so will be accepted by most systems, and is also something that gets typed the same way on both keyboards (I have assumed you have a numeric keypad).

Another thing that you don’t realize is that just switching the AZERTY keyboard with the QWERTY keyboard does nothing for you — you need to change the input at the computer as well. In Windows this can be done using the Alt – Shift key combination. If you don’t know this it can confuse you as to why you keep typing the wrong letters over and over again.

So, voila, keep this in mind, and don’t lock yourself out!

Image Source: “KB France” by Yitscar at the English language Wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons -https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KB_France.svg#/media/File:KB_France.svg