Mattazuma's Revenge

200 CD Jewel Cases

I am in the process of reorganizing all of our CDs.  I got the idea from the This Week in Media podcast.  The host, Alex Lindsay, said in one of the episodes that when he gets a new CD, he rips it, then stores it in a binder with CD sleeve inserts and tosses the case.  We have over 600 CD here and a relatively small condo, so this seemed like an excellent idea.  So far, I have put artists A-J in binders, and it looks like 15 sleeves (with 8 CDs per sleeve) will fit comfortably in a 3" binder with all of the liner notes.

When I'm all done, I'm going to make a jewel case pyramid.

On Vox: My $32 Salamis from Mario Batali's Dad

      

       

Sometimes I do rash things. In this case I was watching the "No Reservations" show on the Travel Channel. Anthony Bourdain, the host, was up in the Pacific northwest, Portland and Seattle mainly, and near the end of he show...

   

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Spinal Tap - Shilling for AmEx

First Nigel does a commercial for VW.  Now AmEx is using the Spinal Tap song "Gimme Some Money" in a new commercial.

Check it out:

Online Poker Funny Money

Well, there's no longer an easy way to put money in or take money out of online poker sites. All of the money transfer sites have cut off US players.

This whole debacle has really put me off online poker for the most part.  I've only been playing in blogger tournaments, basically donking off my money to better players.  I played in Hoyazo's tournament tonight.  Through a dumb play on my part, I knocked him out of the game.  Hoy had QQ on the previous hand and stupid me, I thought that his raise on the next hand was some sort of bluff.  I had JJ, which is a good but not excellent hand.  So I reraised him, and he pushed all-in.  I knew I was in trouble but it wasn't much more to call so WTF.  He had AA, and of course I got a J on the river.

I've knocked out Hoy twice now and both times it was on really dumb moves on my part.  I get out of practice, and the crappy play comes out of the woodwork.  It also doesn't help that I'm typing a blog post, IMing my sister and listening to Studio 60 in the next room.

On some level, the money on these sites is gone, and I don't think I'll see it again for a while.  So I'm not acting like it's real.  Which also doesn't help my play.

I figure I'll play in the blogger events and the occasional SNG until the money is gone or they shut me out.

Back to the game...

Great NY Horse Racing Blog

I'm probably not giving him enough reach, he covers races all over the country, he's just a NY native. The blog is called "Left at the Gate".  He has done a great job covering the NY racetrack management mess and he's a pretty good handicapper, as well.  Reading his blog at times makes me miss living on Long Island, which is saying something.

I miss three things from Long Island, pizza, deli sandwiches and beautiful Belmont Park.

Reminds me of the good old days going out to Aqueduct and Belmont (as well as Roosevelt, the Meadowlands and a Jai Alai fronton in CT) with my friend Rob in high school. One story from those days:

So, about half a dozen of us were at Aqueduct.  It's February or March, if I remember correctly.  We end up talking with an older guy and he takes a liking to us, either because we're great people or because we had a could of girls with us.  At one point I hit a lame $2 win bet for $6 and the old guy offers to trade his ticket with mine.  Two things to remember, A. I'm a dummy and B. I only have $20 for the whole day to bet with so even a $6 score is still important.  So I turn him down and he shows me his exacta ticket worth $12.  It's 20+ years later and I still remember that.

Malaise

Yeah, I stopped posting.  Other than a dumb post about annoying computer issues.

It's the post Vegas malaise.  I got back from Vegas and "normal life" isn't much fun.  Christmas was good, I always enjoy spending time with my family.  Work is ok, but we could use more to do this time of year.

So all-in-all I didn't have much to talk about.  Sorry.  I haven't even been playing poker online much.  Blah, blah, blah.

I did get a cool poker chip for signing up for (and then not running in) the Las Vegas half-marathon.  who schedules a race to start at 6AM in December in the desert?

On Vox: iPhone Worship

This picture is priceless: The phone was taken from Flickr.Hat tip, Merlin Mann.

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IE7, Office XP & Unintended Consequences

Happy 2007!

A few weeks ago, the secretary/accountant/office manager person asks me if she can install Internet Explorer 7 on her PC.  From what I have read, I know IE7 is much better than IE6 so I say go ahead.

The next week, she tells me Word and Excel don't work.  Sure enough, they crash when I try to open them.  I start to reinstall Office when I notice the "more information" link in the crash reporting screen.  The link says I need to install Service Pack 3 for Office XP.  After I install SP3, Word and Excel work fine.  Somehow IE7 breaks pre-SP3 installs of Office XP.

Today, there was a new problem.  The database that we use to store all of our jobs is on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive.  She tried to open the database today (she hadn't needed to for a few weeks) and got a strange error message about a potential security problem with the location of the file & Access wouldn't open the database.

After about half an hour of searching in Microsoft's knowledge base I found this article.  It turns out in order to open the file in Access I had to open IE7 and add the IP address of the NAS drive to IE7's "Intranet Zone" and uncheck a box in the Intranet settings.  How the heck would any non-geek know to do that?

I never would have thought that IE7 would be able to break other Microsoft software so thoroughly.  If you are using Office XP (AKA Office 2002 or Office 10) don't upgrade to IE7.  It's not worth the potential headaches.