I raise you one blog

OK, check it out. PokerStars has a special tournament set up only for bloggers. It’s an interesting concept. I’ve registered, you should too…

Poker Championship

I have registered to play in the
Online Poker Blogger Championship!

This event is powered by PokerStars.

Registration code: 2532527

and here I thought I was good…

So, I’ve been playing a LOT of Pac-Man lately. I found the pattern online and away I went. So, the other night I got my highest score ever. Then, today while checking out Twin Galaxies, I found this story about a guy who became the 5th person in history to get a “perfect score” on Pac-Man. Turns out, his score is just about 30 times as high as mine… I’m a sad pup…

OK, can’t write much right now. I gotta go practice.

Back to the world of the living

Man, what a crappy week I just had. The trip to “urgent care” was an especially fun part. Thankfully, they were able to get me in and out pretty quickly. The lady registering me had asked if I had been treated there before. I said that I had. She looked up the records and found that indeed I had… it had been 10 years since my last trip to urgent care. That’s pretty darn cool. I’ve been to the Dr. since then. I’ve even been to the emergency room at a hospital. If all goes well, it’ll be another 10 years before I have to visit urgent care again…

My buddy Chip took me to the Kings vs. the Avalanche game at MGM on Saturday night. OK, technically speaking, since Chips car accident and subsequent surgery, he can’t drive, so it was ME that took CHIP to the game… Since he was injured, he contacted the MGM and they exchanged his tickets for seats in the handicapped section. This turned out to be such a great thing. The seats were good, they were right inside the front door, the bar was close and so was the bathroom. You couldn’t have asked for a better combo!

Took the kids to go see Corpse Bride. This is the new Tim Burton movie. It’s got a lot of the same look and feel as the Nightmare Before Christmas. And, if you know me, you know how I feel about THAT movie. Well, Corpse Bride is very good as well. From about the 3rd musical note you can tell that it’s Danny Elfman who did the music. OK, this wasn’t a surprise really as I think he’s done all of Tim Burton’s movies. The “weirdness” of Tim’s films and the… the…. oh, I don’t know what it is about Elfman’s music, but if you’ve seen movies he’s done, you probably know what I’m talking about. He’s good at what he does, no doubt.

My wife always says I find ways to “geek up” just about everything…. I don’t know exactly what she means by that… oh, wait a sec. Yes I do. Here’s a great example… The guys at work that I go to lunch with and I have trouble figuring out where to go to lunch. So, what do I do? Write a script, of course! It chooses randomly from a list of 30 places we like to eat. We have started running it 3 times and then choosing one from the abreviated list. Geeky? Perhaps. Effective? Definitely!!!

OK, so why do I bring this up, you might wonder? Well, as I mentioned a few posts ago, I’ve been playing MAME games a bit lately. It dawned on my to search for the patterns for the original Pac-Man game. After finding this great page, I spent about an hour re-familiarizing myself with the patterns. And then, my teenage days came flooding back. The pattern came back to me like the memory of a crack addict’s first hit. I was in the zone. I think I may have even bested my all-time high score on the game. 125,000 (or so) I was on the 5th Key level. Now that I have the pattern back in the front of my mind, I think I’m going to try and reach the 256th key level. Apparently this is the limit of memory on the game and reaching that level basically ends the game. half the screen turns in to gibberish. I’ve seen screen captures of it before, but I’ve never done it. So, with some luck and patience, I think I’ll be able to do it. I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve searched high and low!!

A few years back, when I actually watched Saturday Night Live on any sort of regular basis, I saw the funniest fake commercial of all time. It was sexual in nature and it was only aired during the live show. When it came time for the re-run, they cut it out. So basically, it was shown on TV one time ever. Some of you may have heard of it. If you’ve never heard of it and never seen it, man are you in for a treat. At long last, with no further ado… I present to you, the Mercury Mistress.

Enjoy!

a bunch of new tools

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve found some really great tools. Some are things I’ve wanted for a while and some are things I never knew I wanted, but am really glad to have found. So, here’s a list of some tools that you may also find cool.

1. Konfabulator - “Whatever you want it to be” is their tag line. They aren’t kidding. Konfabulator is a tool that lets you install “widgets”. These can be anything from a simple emailing tool to movie listings in your area, currency converter, games, search boxes, on and on and on I could go… Oh, and almost all the widgets are cross platform compatable so you Mac users (both of you) don’t have to feel left out. Oh, did I mention it’s totally free? Check it out!

2. del.icio.us - This happens to me all the time. I find a link while I’m at work and I want to send it to myself at home to investigate later. but, that requires sending an email or (yeah, right) writing it down… Ha! No more! Now, I have a little button in my Firefox browser that sends the current page to my del.icio.us account. Plus, you can add tags to the link so it’ll be available for searching by others who are looking for items of that category. Again, totally free. (this will be a recurring theme in this post) - Oh, one of the coolest parts, create your own “inbox” and give it a list of “tags” you are interested in. Then anytime anybody lists a new link and uses that tag, it’ll show up in your inbox. Plus, you can set up an RSS feed for your inbox and get alerted any time you get a new link. What an awesome way to get cool links to things you are interested in spoon fed to you, huh?

3. rssreader.com - OK, fine… this is just an rss reader. But, it’s free and it’s simple to use. I’ve also started using the Google home page where you can add your own content. I’ve added a few RSS feeds to that as well, but rssreader.com is the place where I have the entire list of rss feeds (and more are added just about every day lately…)

4. Spam Karma 2 and Bad Behavior. These are both plug-ins for WordPress. I have been seriously battling an issue with comment spam. If you run a blog, you probably already know what I’m talking about… comment spam is when people write tools to search out blogs that allow comments to be added to their posts. Then they send tons of fake comments that send links off to other sites in order to boost their link popularity. It got so bad, I had turned off comments all together for a while. But, thanks to my good buddy Doug who wrote about these tools in his blog, I have installed them on my blog and now all you comment spamming bastards can kiss my ass! While Spam Karma requires you use Word Press, Bad Behavior will stop spambots from attacking your blog as long as you use DotClear, Drupal, Geeklog, MediaWiki or WordPress. Probably some others, too.

So, there ya go. That’s my list of goodies for the night. Hope you find at least one, if not more, of these tools useful. Let me know what ya think!

Damn, my eye hurts

For the past couple days I’ve had a stye in my right eye. I’ve had them before so it wasn’t any great shock to see my eye lid puff up a little yesterday. I got some medicine and applied it a few times during the day and then again right before bed time. When I woke up this morning, I looked like I had gone a few rounds with Mike Tyson. My eye was swollen almost completely shut. What was worse was the fact that it absolutely hurt like hell. The only thing that didn’t hurt was laying there with my eyes closed. So, that’s what I did for much of the day.

This afternoon we watched a pretty entertaining movie: Monster-in-Law. It has J-Lo, Jane Fonda and Michael Vartan in it. But, Wanda Sykes steals every scene she is in. She is so damn funny! I won’t bother you with what the movie is about. Check it out if it’s on cable some time. I wouldn’t go too far out of my way to see it, but it’s entertaining enough…

So this evening, I’m feeling a bit better. I think the swelling has gone down a bit but my wife says it looks as bad now as it did this morning. Gee, that’s comforting. Well, I guess we’ll see what it feels like in the morning.

Finishing a project feels goooooooood!

If I could only tell you how many programming projects I have started over the past 5 years that have never seen the light of day. At one point last year, I owned almost 50 domain names. It’s a bit much, really.

Well, over this past weekend I actually "finished" a project. gotjacks.com is an online resource for poker tournament listings in the Las Vegas area. The site is free to use. Be sure and check it out some time.

Of course I’ll be designing some t-shirts that will be available through CafePress. I’ll update you when you can flock to get yours!

:)

Back at the virtual table

I haven’t played much poker online lately after having an absolutely awful 6-8 weeks which saw me lose most of my bankroll. So, I decided to just take a break for a bit. Then, last night while doing some work at my desk, I loaded up my poker software and saw that a $25 tournament was getting ready to start. There were already about 150 people in so I figured it would be a good size field and a good sized payout to win it. When the tourney started, there were 210 total players. I played fairly tight for the first hour or so. Was trying to avoid any big confrontations. I dumped a bunch of hands that I might have normally played (K/J, Q/T, etc…). I just sorta kept to my game plan which was to lay low for the first 2 hours and only put my money in the pot when I knew I had the best of it. This worked pretty well and I built up from my 1000 chips to about 3500 at the end of the 2nd hour.

Then, during the 3rd hour, things really slow down in the tournament. As it approaches the point where people are in the money, they start playing “hand-for-hand”. This means that all 4 tables in the tournament play the exact same number of hands. If your table’s hand finishes quickly, you wait for the other 3 to finish before the next hand is dealt. This makes it so people don’t slow play hoping that people at other tables will go out while they wait… But, during that time, people with few chips tend to play really tight as they don’t want to get knocked out right before they hit pay dirt. So, it’s much easier to steal chips. And this is what I did. I made SEVERAL steals when I knew I didn’t have the best hand. But, I had chips to gamble with. Then, 3 separate times I got in to big pots after flopping BIG hands. So, during the 3rd hour I went from being an “about average” stack to being the 3rd biggest chip stack.

When the 3rd hour ended, there were 32 players left. 2 away from making the money. I decided to go back to playing tight until the bubble burst. I would only get in to confrontations with people who had WAY less chips than I did. If somebody had 60% or more the chips I had, I’d let them steal chips if I didn’t have an absolute monster hand. The bubble finally burst and then play sped up. I knocked out 2 guys in one hand when I flopped a set of 9s. Things were really going my way and I was feeling great.

Sadly, I didn’t win. Actually, I didn’t even make the final table. I ended up finishing 17th. I had lost a few decent sized pots and ended up being fairly short stacked. I picked up pocket 6s on the button and a guy in mid position raised the pot with a minimal raise. So, I figured he likely had 2 big cards. I decided to push all-in hoping to get him to just fold right then and take the pot. But, if he calls, I feel I’m starting with the best hand. Sure enough, he calls. He had A/Q. After seeing a Q on the flop, my evening was finish. But, I was rather pleased to have made the money on my first multi-table tournament in close to 2 months.

Next stop, final table…

Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire

If you read the Harry Potter books, you know already that Snape kills Dumbledore at the end of book 6. For those of you that don’t read the books, woopsie.

OK, to make up for screwing up the next 3 movies for you, here are some screenshots from the new movie and here’s a link to the trailer for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

This is honestly one of the best trailers I have ever seen. And, once again, they’ve cast some great faces to take on the important parts from the book. Cho, Cedric & Krum all look to be perfect fits for their parts… And, as you’ll see from the photos below, they have cast Ron Weesley’s dad to play the part of Ron Weesley. Holy crap, that kid looks like he’s in his mid 30’s. I guess he worked on the film only after dropping his own kids off at high school…

Well, enjoy.





Paranoia in the work place

A few years back I read a great book by Kevin Mitnick. For those of you who don’t know who he is, he’s an ex-hacker who was sent to prison for breaking in to various computer systems. After his release from prison, he did what any hard working hacker would do… started a security company and wrote some books.

The first (and at the moment, only) book of his I read is called, The Art of Deception : Controlling the Human Element of Security. If you own your own company, or work for a company that you care about, I strongly suggest you read this book. What you’ll find is that every electronic security system, firewall, encryption method, etc, etc, etc in the world is no match for a smooth talking guy (or gal) and a telephone. Kevin tells tales of breaking in to systems the easiest way possible… ask somebody for the password. Did he work at the company? No. Did he know the people he was asking? No. Was he able to manipulate them in to giving him the password (or a key piece of needed information)? Over and over again…

For most of us, it’s programmed in to us to try and be helpful. When somebody calls you on the phone, says they work in some other office of your company and is working late trying to get something done so they can get home to their kids but they’ve lost a vital piece of info, you’d be surprised how many people, without actually knowing who was on the other end of the line, could relate to the situation and would go out of their own way to provide them the help needed. All of this without so much as confirming who was on the other end of the phone.

I recently found that Kevin has another book out - The Art of Intrusion : The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders & Deceivers. If it’s half as informative (and eye opening) as the first, it’ll be well worth the read.

Next Page →