Long Time No Blog

Not too much new to report here. Work is going well, but all I can say about that is they pay me on time. I'm still not cleared enough to know what I'm doing, but as soon as I am, you'll be the last to know.

My sister, who went to Europe to study different cultures and learn about diversity, has reached the highlight of her trip by attending a traditional Spanish performance of los Backstreet Boys. Naturally, she finagled her way backstage, got to eat dinner with our second cousin once removed (practically a brother by Latin and Southern standards), and see the concert from the front row, all while speaking Spanish in a redneck accent.

My other sibling has outfoxed, or at least outdrawn, a deer 50% larger than himself (he's the one smiling, with the gun). His story is more straightforward, involving the deer being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and my brother in the right place at that same time, and pointing a rifle along the right vector at the right time and releasing a projectile at the right velocity at right time, resulting in the termination of the animal's primary functions (assuming that being eaten and mounted are secondary functions; reprioritization of the stag's functionality will of course require a revision of this description).

Anyway, here's the picture.



Anyway, poker is going strong; I won $30 taking third place on Saturday night in a 39-man tournament at Sticks. The game started at 7:30 and went until about 1:15. Basically the first two hours consisted of the suckers exchanging way too many chips with each other, the third hour was spent sorting out the results of that carnage, adn the final two in a dead heat between the last 5 or 6 of us. First place took $100 in tabs, and second $60, but I was happy.

I also won $60 playing online Saturday morning, then lost it on Sunday, but I was up for the weekend. I'm now switching sites, and working on rebuilding a bankroll.

I busted out midway through a tournament on Monday, then had a date Tuesday (a situation that has resolved itself, since the girl in question is now incommunicado), but my luck picked up last night, as I found myself on the good end of several bad beats. (Nothing beats flopping a set of nines when the preflop raiser flops a set of sixes, except flopping tens, jacks, queens, aces, a straight, flush, straight flush, or 4 of a kind, or a royal, or maybe catching any of the above on the river). Anyway, I dominated the final table until we were heads up, at which time my luck ran out. My opponent was playing pretty solid poker, so I was able to bluff a few times, but never had any real hands worth betting. This is of course an excuse, since when you're only against one person, anything worth calling is worth betting. Anyway, he ended up beating me slowly, although a more aggressive player would have been more interesting to be up against. He was tough to read, since he hadn't said a word in the whole time we were playing against him. As a rule, the loudest players tend to be the first ones out, but the most sorely missed. Worth keeping in mind, I guess, if I intend to get any better.

Anyway, it's Thursday again, but not a payday thursday. So I'm at the halfway point or something. I need to check my calendar to see if I get tomorrow off, but I'm thinking not, seeing as I'm not a veteran. Of course, all our money comes from the Pentagon, so you'd think we'd take military holidays off.

In the news, it turns out that Mr. Sulu has been crossing the Neutral Zone for the last 18 years. It's interesting that one of the first leading Asian characters in a major series, and one of the finest helmsmen in the fleet turns out to be a double minority. Maybe it'll be an inspiration for gay Trekkies everywhere, or at least an excuse for those who are technically straight but have never been within phaser range of a human female.





OK, so Tronie != Trekkie, but I couldn't resist. You should thank me for finding a cropped version of this photo; the lower half is not pretty.

The Trouble with Being a Shark

is that it's always feeding time. I'm getting to be pretty deadly at hold 'em, but it remains to be seen who's going to be killed first. Time is already gone, and if anybody's money is next, it won't be mine if I have anything to say about it.

I invested in three books on the subject (as a way of justifying the expenditure, I told myself I'd be staying at home reading instead of hitting the casinos), and they've already paid for themselves. Just a few tweaks here and there have made me 30% more lethal. I trounced 32 people at Sticks on Saturday night, winning another $90 tab, making it $170 from that bar alone over the last two weeks. Then I went to a home game, but was late getting there, on account of one of the people I was carpooling with had to win the second tournament at Sticks. So I played pool with my designated driver for a while, and neither of us earned any bragging rights from those matches. We both see pool as a way to kill time between poker tournaments.

Anyway, it was well into the first tournament when we arrived, and they wouldn't let us buy in, so we had to wait another 90 minutes or so, and by the time the second round got going, everybody was too tired to play well. Several people went all-in way too early, but I wasn't in a position to profit on those hands, leaving me heads up with the guy whose house I was at, with him having a 7 to one chip lead against me. This was about 2:30 AM, and everybody was putting pressure on me to end the game quickly, and that put me on what they call "tilt," which means I lost focus. This was a winner-take-all match (although the first match ended in the first two places splitting the pot), and, not being the winner, I took none. But it was a good time anyway.

Then yesterday I had a huge lead at On the Rocks (almost 8 to 1 against the next highest stack), with 5 of us left in the tournament. Then I started talking to the blonde next to me, and the next thing I knew, I was the short stack. I can't complain, though.

On the ballroom front, I'm getting the hang of Lindy hop, and learning which girls aren't worth the trouble to dance with. Some mean girls hurt my feelings, though.

Things that Aren't Supposed to Happen

After striking out (or maybe just another foul) with an effusive yet evasive Asian Studies and Biology major on Sunday, I drove home to find that the whole "Jack Frost likes to pick on the mountains" stereotype to have some degree of validity to it.

No Pain, No Shane

So I've scaled back on the hold'em front, not because I'm tired or out of money, but because it occurrs to me that there may be more effective avenues for me to increase my unearned income. Such a great concept, that. Money for nothing; the chicks for free must come later, I guess...

Speaking of which, it turns out that Springs is a tricky place to meet women. There's no shortage of single girls, but the problem is that half the population is under the age of 3. The mothers tend to be anywhere from 16-22, so the trick is to find a girl that is both old enough to date me, and young enough not to be already way too involved with somebody else. I have no qualms about eliminating rival suitors through any means necessary, but I'm not such a jaded playa that I'll come between a man and his kid.

What else is new? Oh yeah, my landlord has been promoted to overlord, and is now in control of my eating, drinking, sleeping, and working out. It's good that somebody is up to the challenge; Shane's certainly more qualified than I am. I've had two workouts so far, and I'm usually dead by the end of the warmup. (The Olympic Training Center, mind you, is downhill from us). I'm gonna be so buff that I'll have to be careful not to step on all the dead vampires everywhere I go.

It officially went below freezing this morning. I wasn't happy with that; the least the city could've done was to consult me on it. By the time I was up and ready to go, though, it had risen to 38 or so, so I had no excuse not to come in to work. Next week, though, it looks like I'm going to have strep throat, so that's something to look forward to.


I'm still out of Zoloft, and while working out helps with the endorphin levels, which probably have a positive interaction with various feel-good neurotransmitters, I'm not sure I can get along without it for that much longer. It's a rush that's hard to describe; on the one hand, I feel more alive than I have in a long time, but then again, that's only a good thing if I like being alive to begin with. So I'm kinda breaking even.

Finally a Monopoly Everyone Can Love

I'm starting to regret that I missed out on the Google IPO. I've been a loyal customer of theirs since before it was cool, and am increasingly impressed by the quality of their software and search offerings. It's only going to get better.

It's now becoming obvious that the Big G (no, not that one) has its sights set past the mere cataloging, digestion, and distribution of all of humanity's information. Now they're in position to be a leader in content creation, and I can't wait to see it happen.

I'm in the process of enslaving the half dozen or so email accounts I have to Gmail, which is so vastly superior in terms of usefulness and design elegance that I need not even bother going into it here. I'm waiting for a Google Calendar, which will let me publish (public) appointments from anywhere as well as singly add them from any website dealing with time-sensitive content (that is, everything from court summonses to TV shows). But that's only the half of it. Since it's not MS proprietary, it can be shared with anyone whom I trust to see it, and will probably allow different permissions for different times of day, different people, and common trust levels based on how well they know people I know well.

If this sounds like rambling, it's because I'm overwhelmed by the potential that the new Google/Sun deal brings to the office sphere. Finally, we'll have (for the very reasonable price of free) what MS Office has been trying to do for the better part of a decade: seamless interaction with other users, the internet, etc. Massively distributed editing, immediate publication, and, of course, the ability to search every sentence ever written by anyone from now on.

Now, of course, privacy advocates will whine about how, if they could only go on using typewriters, no one would be able to see what they were up to. Certainly there will be at least as many concerns as there are over the gmail searching (I for one support it as long as it's done in a way that benefits me, rather than overwhelms me with useless information. Google is currently the only entity I trust to limit itself to reasonable profitable usage of my information, and I would much rather see them as a leader in how to do it right than have them cringe under privacy advocates' sensibilities).

I think what the privacy people fear most is that no one cares what they think they know or have to say. Most of history's greatest thinkers were among its most open (and thus vulnerable) people; you almost have to pity the people who hide from this kind of information.

In any event, the infomation age is upon us. While some will say that it's been here for at least ten years, I'm going to mark the launch of google SMS as something of a turning point. Now, any moron with a cell phone, a thumb, and a dime can access any text information they need from the most reliable source of all things reliable. That's not even touching the potential of real-time google map-based navigation devices, or linux-based, $100 laptops running nothing but Firefox with a few choice extensions capable of blowing away office & windows-based systems. We're way past the point where new features in office are of use to most people; every new capability they tack on serves to cover up three that were almost debugged to begin with.

I'm more than a little perturbed by some publishers' reaction to the Google Print project, which aims to scan every book ever published and make exerpts and ISBN information available online. It has the potential to save thousands of out-of-print (such a quaint expression) titles from obscurity, and make billions of dollars for copyright holders of unpopular books. I don't remember which site I read this on, but one publisher, when asked why Google's generous offer to leave out any publisher who wanted to opt out (despite a more than legitamate fair use claim) said something along the lines of, "We have no idea what books we may have published or have a legitimate claim on." So, at present, they stand to make all of no money from those works, whereas, with cheap print-on-demand and ebook readers in every cell phone and PDA (except mine), they stand to be dripping in caviar. People like that need to be expunged from the planet for the good of humanity; if you stand in the way of education, especially when it's on the verge of being universally, freely, globally, and instantaneously available, I have no use for you.

I won't speculate on the future of Google Video, which looks like it may have further to go, but I'd keep an eye on it if I were you. All they need to do is cross-reference scripts with TV shows, put bookmarks corresponding with keypoints in the script (or better yet, allow users to do it for them), and basically all of television and film can be indexed and catagorized as easily as print news is today.

Information wants to be free. I want to be free. I want to be informed. I also want to have as much distance as possible between me and those that don't. Unless they're playing poker.