Well, not to me, but to my school. No one outside of William and Mary knows this, but W&M is John Stewert’s alma mater. It’s true. And here is his commencement speech to the class of 2004. Here’s a great passage.
In 1980 I was 17 years old. When I moved to Williamsburg, my hall was in the basement of Yates, which combined the cheerfulness of a bomb shelter with the prison-like comfort of the group shower. As a freshman I was quite a catch. Less than five feet tall, yet my head is the same size it is now. Didn t even really look like a head, it looked more like a container for a head. I looked like a Peanuts character. Peanuts characters had terrible acne. But what I lacked in looks I made up for with a repugnant personality.
Well, my fun in the Pacific Poker universe has come to a grinding halt. My inexperience in on-line play, coupled with some unbelievable bad beats, have conspired to rob me of my $250 bankroll. Looking back, it’s incredible how quickly money can be lost on-line. You can buy-in to a $10 SnGo and be out in minutes if you misread one of the other players. Limit poker seems more immune from wild swings, but with the number of suck-out artists riding long-shots to the river, fortunes can reverse quickly.
However, the experience was very valuable. I lost $150 very quickly, but pretty much hung around the $100 mark for a while. If I could have forgetten about the $150, and just focused on small wins here and there, I really think I’d still be in it. But I couldn’t let go of those past losses, and ended up chasing long-shots to pay-off big. Pretty typical gambling mentality.
Anyway, I may be back, and I may not. I’m going to look into Empire and Party, and see what the sign-up deals are. If I do play any more, I’ll have to be infinitely more disciplined and put a cap on my exposure on any given night. We’ll see how it goes.
…into on-line poker. I had stayed away for a variety of reasons, the most prevalent being the difficulty of funding an account. Apparently Citibank wants nothing to do with offshore gambling companies (imagine that) and thus reject my attempts to fund with my credit card.
So, not more than 15 minutes after I had given up trying to fund a Pacific Poker account I get a call from them. Guess I entered my real number on their registration form. Anyway, long story short, I fund the account for $200 and get a $50 bonus. I found out about these guys by way of Chris Halverson’s blog.
Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. I’m still feeling my way around on-line play, and spent last night dropping $50 bonus. But the experience was valuable. Two of the last three SnGo (Sit and Go) tournaments I played, I finished in the money (3rd). Well, that’s not 100% true. I got my $10 back, but the $1 juice is gone forever. Still, I’m getting the hang of it.
It was too good to last. The idea that a company like Google could go from zero to hero and stay true to what got them there. But money (and investors and management and PR people and…) talks and then next thing you know Google is speaking legalese and covering their asses with the best of them.
I’m sure you’ll think I’m blowing this out of proportion, but I don’t think so. This is a trend I’ve been noticing, from booting people from their AdSense program without cause to trying to quash RSS with Atom. Google is forgetting about what got them to the table, and how fickle a user base can be. If it turns out that AllTheWeb.com (or anything coming from Microsoft or the open source community) is better, I’ll switch in a heartbeat. Why wouldn’t I? Google has no lock-in.
Last night was a great poker night. One table, lot’s of swings, lot’s of rebuys. Thanks to Dan (New York), Brian (I Never Bluff), Kenneth (Maniac), Josh (Slow Roll) and Blakewood for making it out.
Before the rest of the guys got to my place, Kenneth and I played a little HU Hold’em with $0.50/$1 blinds. 20 minutes later, I was up about $12 up and then people started to trickle in. We started the game ($0.25/$0.50 NLHE) with 5 players (New York showed up later).
From now on I will try and keep a notebook going during these games so that I can share the exact details of notable hands. However, I didn’t need a notebook to remember what happened on the first hand. Blakewood had the hammer (pocket K’s) and decided to go all-in pre-flop after several rounds of betting. What he didn’t realize was that he was going up against the rockets (pocker A’s). Josh’s hand actually improves with a trip A, and Dan is buying back in after the first hand. That’s hard to recover from.
Once New York showed up, the game became a frenzy. NY was the ideal combination of a guy who’s new to poker and likes to throw money around. When I hear the phrase “it’s just money” I start salivating. He also loved to see the flop, even if he had to overpay for the privilege. My only regret is that I didn’t have decent enough hands to play while this guy was betting. The players around me soaked up his buy-ins rapidly. I think at the end of the night, NY had blown 4 buy-ins ($80).
Not too many memorable hands beside that. Everyone (except NY) played very well. I went all-in (~$10) against Kenneth at one point with rockets and they held up. I slow rolled Brian into paying me a nice pot when his high two pair went up against my trip cowboys (pockets with one on the board). That was probably my highlight of the night, Brian’s the tighest player I’ve ever played against. Oddly enough there were almost no straights or flushes the whole night.
After the main game broke up, Blakewood, Kenneth, Brian and I decided to run a quick and dirty tournament. $10 buy-in, winner takes all. I quickly busted out (JJ lost to AA) and went to bed. As soon as I hear, I’ll post the results here.
Greg was kind enough to lookup the “showdown” rule for future reference:
One point on which Hold’Em departs from other poker games is the option for any
player to see another player’s pocket cards once they’ve been mucked. Provided the
requesting player has Called or Raised the last Bet made, they simply ask the dealer
and the mucked cards will be retrieved and shown. Since asking the dealer isn’t
generally possible online, sometimes, game logs will show the final mucked cards.
Linux Journal has a great article on compressing the content served by Apache. Since the vast majority of content being served is text (HTML, XML, etc) compression makes a lot of sense. Lower bandwidth, quicker downloads, the works. The real trick is to find the sweet spot between the level of compression and the amount of CPU you sacrifice to handle it. Once my new server is up and running (courtesy of Taurus) I will implement this ASAP.
We had 10 guys over tonight, and split up into two games. Taurus, Eddie, Hege, Dan, Brian, Brendon, Jay, Kenneth, Anthony and myself were in attendence.
$20 buy-in, NLHE Hold’em. The games went well. Brendon and I dominated on the one table, not sure how the other table was running. I guessed from past experience that Brian and Dan were wiping up. Kenneth was a new guy to the scene, and played very loose from what I heard. I think it worked early (we’re a very tight crowd), but once people got a read on him, he got taken down.
Kenneth and Hege busted out. I caught two flushes on the flop in a row to grow my stack. Greg almost killed me when that happened. The two tables merged, and I believe Anthony was the next person to bust out. It got late, people were tired, and eventually it came down to the last hand.
I was dealt Q10o, and pretty much decided I was going all-in at some point. Not because I felt good about the hand, but I was bored. That’s a huge problem I have, the need for action. Anyway, the flop was huge AKx. The turn was a Q and the river was crap. Three of us were left. Greg bet $2 and I re-raised all-in. Eddie thought about it and folded. Greg thought for a while, and decided to meet me. Bummer. His pair of A’s beat my ladies. It’s cool, it was his birthday anyway.
Update: For the record (since I’m going to try and track these things) I was -40BB (big blinds) for the night. That’s a pretty horrendous session, but bear in mind that until the last hand, I was up 20BB. We were playing $0.25/$0.50.
Anyone who even casually browses my sight has noticed a lot of changes. Worse, they’ve probably noticed a lot of broken code. Pages not rendering, error messages, etc. Other computers are affected too. Feed readers that can’t find feeds (rss.do) that were there the day before. Feeds that are broken (post.xml). People who click on links to my site from Google (or other search engines) may encounter broken links or empty pages half the time.
The point being that 1) my methods for coding and testing are not working and 2) better methods were consume time that I don’t have. This is annoying. I like working on the site, but I’m finding that the code-base has become too complicated for simple acceptance testing (clicking on a few links to see what happens).
So, I need to try to find a way to easily automate some simple testing. Both of the underlying code, and of the JSP pages. We’ll see how it goes, and I apologize for any problems y’all are having.
I think I’m still recovering from the wringer that the CMU crew put me through on Saturday. Taurus and I went over to their place for a “friendly” beer pong tournament, and it turned in a no-holds-barred grudge match.
For those who aren’t acquainted with this style of beer pong, personals are cups lined up at the back of the table and map 1-to-1 to players on a team. If a personal cup is hit (from the side) 5 times, the player needs to drink the contents and reload it. If the opposing team sinks one in the personal cup, the player must drink and reload.
Anyway, in the end the regular pins were ignored and the personals took center stage. After a bout of paranoia on my part (coupled with some food throwing) I got back into the spirit of the game and we all drank ourselves to oblivion. I’m told I passed out on Eddie’s bed, at which point he started screaming “What”. I was then relocated to the mini-couch. Good times.
You know it was wrong, what you did to me Eddie. Look at my face!
Anyway, thanks to Peter, Dan and Eddie for hosting. Good times all around. Just be sure to bring your A-game to Louer-palooza this Saturday.
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