Mattazuma's Revenge

WPBT #8: HO was very good to me

The bad news was there was only 6 people signed up for WPBT event #8: Pot Limit HO (Hold em & Omaha).  The good news was I outlasted the other 5 people for my 3rd blogger tournament win of the year.  I only had one semi-brutal suckout against Schaubs heads up to propel me to the win.

Thanks again to Columbo for setting up these tournaments. It is a thankless job & he has done a great job this year despite the lack of participation the last two months.

Cab v. BMW

Saw this late last week on a rare walk around Chicago with my camera.

I missed the accident but saw the aftermath, here's the after picture of the cab:

And here's the BMW:

I think the cab won the battle.  Note the side curtain airbags in the BMW.  I am assuming no one was hurt in either car since there was only one cop there and he was only talking with cab driver.

I saw a stranger accident last month on Lake St.  A car somehow ended up inside of a brick building.  I wish I would have had my camera with me.

Don't buy Infrant Products (anymore)

Infrant, who makes the nice ReadyNAS line of RAID network attached storage drives (NAS) was recently purchased by Netgear.  This has turned out to be a bad thing. 

I convinced my boss to buy one for our office for our main data storage drive.  Two weeks later, one of the drives dies.  I call Netgear and the nice person I talk with says they can't help me at all.  Netgear doesn't have any hard drives to send out. None.  The guy tells me to go to the hard drive manufacturer for a replacement drive.  Which will take weeks. 

So I get to tell my boss we have to go out and buy a new hard drive for the new NAS drive we bought two weeks ago.

Do not buy one of these NAS drives from Infrant/Netgear.  At least wait until 2008 when (maybe) Netgear will have their act together.

Online (and offline) Narcissism

Otis has a great post up, about the current batch of "kids" in poker.

Several months ago I spent a lot of time reading 2+2. While I got a lot of enjoyment and a sense of community from reading poker blogs, I felt like there were a lot of other voices and ideas in forum communities. I never posted on 2+2, but spent a lot of time lurking around the legislative and online poker forums.

One day, there was a particularly good post about the legal implications of the NETeller pull-out and what it meant for online poker players. It stretched down the page longer than the average forum post, but was insightful and I felt more educated for having read it.

The very next post in the thread spanned five letters:  TLDNR.

I looked at the acronym and felt old. I had no idea what it meant. I checked in with Google and discovered the acronym stood for "Too long, did not read."

Go read the whole thing

I see this everywhere these days.  On Digg, people will vote stuff onto the home page without actually reading what they are Digging.  It can be total garbage, but if the Digg title is funny or negative enough people will Digg it based on only the title.

Leo Laporte killed the comments on twit.tv because he got tired of the negative comments.  Every episode is "the worst episode ever" to somebody and it eventually got to him.  I don't blame him at all.  Everyone wants to be Comic Book Guy on the message board and saying you hate everything is much easier than an honest comment.

Some of the people I know couldn't be bothered to read a story that's more than 3 or 4 paragraphs long.  They aren't stupid or burnouts either, they have just become so mentally lazy that they can no longer be bothered to read something that may even directly pertain to their lives if it is more than one page on their monitor.  They just put on the "life blinders" and keep moving forward.

It just makes me tired after a while.  I've always wanted to know more.  That's why I love The Economist, it has great stories every week on stuff I knew nothing about before reading their article.  It's Time magazine for literate people. 

The people who actively don't want to learn anything I can't relate to and don't understand.   As far as I know we only go through this life once, and I'm not going to spend it with my head in the sand.

Mr. Walken Cooks a Chicken

Christopher Walken cooks a chicken:

I was surprised by how simple his kitchen is.

I want a Grand Central Invite!

I would really like an invite for Grand Central.

It is a new VOIP+++ phone system that was very recently bought be Google.  You get a new phone number that you can use with all of your existing phones.  You can tell the system what order to ring your other phones when a call comes in, or have it ring them all at once if you want.  The service has visual voicemail for smartphones, like the iPhone (kind of).

One of the coolest features is you can listen to voicemail while it is being recorded, like on old answering machines, and you can interrupt the message and start talking to the person if you want to.  I think that would really freak people out.

I really really want to try this out.

I have 4 Pownce invites currently, I'll trade them all for a Grand Central invite.