| pre Swat 98 reunion post |
[Jun. 5th, 2008|05:05 pm] |
Man, I haven't updated this in ages.
I'm about to head off to reunion, where I expect to run into some of my LJ friends, including some 98ers who I may not have seen in 10 years...
A quick recap of the last few years:
1) I'm now married to the lovely ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) tapas
2) We bought a house in San Antonio, which we're slowly attempting to furnish.
3) I've left the UR PhD program in English and am now a fulltime poker player; it's been my source of income for about five years now.
4) I'm forming a Swarthmore poker team with my friend and gambling associate, The Amazing Ben '98. We're going to be starting play in Las Vegas in July, just after this year's World Series, and by next year we should be ready to enter the team members into the holdem events for the 2009 World Series. |
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| lit geek challenge |
[May. 18th, 2006|09:48 pm] |
OK, I've gone to the Amazon entries for 10 of my favoritest novels and picked out some of the "statistically improbable phrases" from each. Your job is to guess the novel! All written originally in English. Some easier than others.
P.S. Don't google, it's too easy.
1. matrimonial gift, charming soubrette, quaker librarian, pike hoses, seaside girls, croppy boy, old sweet song
2. inkvine scar, factory crawler, little maker, death commandos
3. cried the corporal, seven castles, dear jenny, political romance, salient angle
4. greenish soapstones, nameless scent, cosmic fear, black seal
5. airborne toxic event, stadium steps, feathery plume
6. savage reservation, emotional engineering, mental excess, pleasant vices,
7. nucular bum, looseleaf folder, poor momma, lumber jacket, flannel nightshirt, minimal wage, hunting cap
8. black mahn, white mahn, ole lady, leg chain, tank room
9. waxwing slain
10. prochain train, tennis academy, addicted man, oral narcotics |
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| a guide for the perplexed |
[May. 3rd, 2006|08:14 pm] |
OK, here are the remaining songs ungotten. I've edited #1.
Instructions: From jere7my: Whip out your music program, click the random button, and pick out 10 songs. Alter the name by turning it into a convoluted, wordy synonym. For example: Silent Night = Nocturnal Time Completely Lacking Noise. When someone guesses the title correctly, italicize the convoluted one and put in the real title and the person who figured it out.
1. Alhazred & Buttkicking Jones in 2020?
"Abdul and Cleopatra", Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. superbacana
2. Second original Klimt or Rodin or Munch piece
"Another First Kiss", They Might Be Giants. jere7my and sonatanator
5. Swinging cape with Jesus' face on it
"Veronica", Elvis Costello and the Attractions. m_elsner
6. Stann or Franck's Dominion
"Tin Angel", Joni Mitchell. superbacana
8. A valley girl, one for remembrance, and the uplifter of loves
"Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts", Bob Dylan. superbacana, with an assist from belecrivain
Groups represented are
They Might Be Giants
Elvis Costello
Bob Dylan
Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers
Joni Mitchell
One of the songs is one word, a name. Two others have two names in them. It will also help if you know your Latin and your Hamlet.<i |
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| how best to get back into LJ? MEME! |
[May. 2nd, 2006|05:10 pm] |
From jere7my: Whip out your music program, click the random button, and pick out 10 songs. Alter the name by turning it into a convoluted, wordy synonym. For example: Silent Night = Nocturnal Time Completely Lacking Noise. When someone guesses the title correctly, italicize the convoluted one and put in the real title and the person who figured it out.
Here are my ten.
1. Alhazred & Jones
2. Second original Klimt or Rodin or Munch piece
3. Cause of Constantine's conquering
"The Sign", The Mountain Goats. cataptromancer
4. Male issue indicated, litigate
"A Boy Named Sue", Johnny Cash. superbacana
5. Swinging cape with Jesus' face on it
6. Stann or Franck's Dominion
7. Your bare ass, the guy that removes leaves from it
"Moonraker", Shirley Bassey. superbacana
8. A valley girl, one for remembrance, and the uplifter of loves
9. Aurally, it came to me in the vineyard
"I Heard It Through the Grapevine", Van Morrison. kyree
10. Throughout the Panama that belongs to me
"All Around My Hat", Steeleye Span. superbacana |
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| impale all terrorists |
[Jan. 13th, 2006|04:48 am] |
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Another professional wrestler is running for governor of Minnesota. But this one is a practicing vampyre who "co-owns two covens" and plans to gruesomely murder criminals, Vlad Tepes-style. |
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| rereading prince caspian |
[Dec. 31st, 2005|03:29 pm] |
tapas points out that Lewis tends to proceed in a no-nonsense manner with his Narnia books: people immediately get going to where they are going, there is no "token-collecting" (gotta get the magic sword here, meet the reclusive magician there, travel the labyrinth here....). I'd forgotten how short the books were as a result.
I also noticed that the foreign country names seem to be greekish and latinish:
Telmar = tel + mar = far sea?
Calormen = calor + men = hot xxxx? people? |
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| break from poker |
[Dec. 7th, 2005|10:55 pm] |
I had a big hand yesterday. I had stepped up to a higher-stakes table than I usually play. I had two aces, which is the best possible hand in hold'em poker. I bet all my money at the table, $5000, before cards were dealt, and two people called my bet. I lost. I later calculated that I had a 75% chance of winning the $15000 pot.
Oh well.
I ended up losing another $11000 at the high stakes tables. I won some of it back at lower stakes tables, and I'm still ahead for the month of December, but I was at it for about 20 hours straight and that's just not in the holiday spirit.
Time to be done with poker for the year, I think.
Hopefully I will now find time to post about more interesting things in the next few weeks. |
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| Solar Decathlon! |
[Oct. 12th, 2005|02:44 am] |
The Solar Decathlon is now taking up about half of the National Mall. Instead of wandering around the Smithsonians, I spent most of today touring houses that GENERATE energy rather than using it and talking to earnest young college students who want to spend their lives doing environmentally-friendly design work.
Sometimes the world makes me happy. |
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| another poker life post |
[Oct. 7th, 2005|02:55 am] |
So, this is how I spend most days when I'm in "poker mode":
Wake up in the afternoon. OJ, cereal and soy, couple sections of the paper, maybe the whole thing if I'm in the mood.
Sit on the couch, pull out the laptop. Check the poker site to see if it's juicy. If it's not, catch up on livejournal and email, then check again. If it is, settle in for a few hours. Possibly read the paper waiting for a good game to appear. In any case, start playing once paper, email, and lj are done.
Play for a couple hours. Go for a swim. Take a shower. Play poker until tapas arrives.
Possibly play poker again late at night, or while tapas is catching up on HER email and LJ. Perhaps read or post to the poker strategy forums at www.twoplustwo.com.
Since I've been spending a lot of time traveling over the last six months, I haven't really averaged a certain number of hours per week. I used to try to play 20 hours a week. I don't think I played more than 30 hours total for the whole of September though.
The other time I play lots and lots of poker is if I lose. I haven't had a losing week of poker in a year and a half. Some weeks I break even, some weeks I don't play, but no losses. That's because when I lose I refuse to accept the fact and keep playing and playing until I've won it back. This is actually one of the warning signs of a compulsive gambler, and it may be a bad habit. I haven't decided.
Poker players talk about "tilt". That's when you make a mistake, or lose a hand in an egregiously unlucky manner, and all of a sudden your play starts to deteriorate. You start making unwise gambles, large bluffs, and in general hemorrhaging cash. Sometimes you'll get extremely lucky, win a large pile of money, and that will "cure" you of tilt. Often you'll just keep losing. For a long time I didn't recognize the warning signs in myself, since I very rarely get into this mode. But now I look back on certain bad spells (where I'll lose several thousand dollars in a couple hours) and realize that I was not making good decisions, that I was not at my best. I also realize that this tends to happen when I've been playing into the night and take some sudden downswing when I'm already tired. So maybe I'll keep my hours shorter.
My worst two swings have been over ten thousand dollars to the bad. They involved playing short-handed, that is, with fewer than the usual ten players at the table. When that happens, you need to play more hands and be more aggressive than usual; it's not a skill I've fully mastered, and every once in a while it comes back to haunt me when I decide to play anyway. So far, I've managed to make good the losses over the rest of the week, but 10K can be daunting.
These days, when I play, I'm usually looking for specific opponents that will make a game good. I play four tables of poker at the same time when I see good games. I usually sit down at no limit tables where the ante is $10. Sometimes I'll sit at a table where the ante is $20, sometimes I'll sit at smaller games if the big games are not good. (Not good = lots of regular, strong players, few players in every pot; good = lots of players in every pot), I've played a game with $50 antes, but now I mostly just observe that game and see how it goes. I play very few tournaments; sometimes I get free entries into tournies that I play, but apart from that it's all no limit cash games, 10 people to a table.
Right now I have money sitting on three different online poker sites and one online bank. Putting money into a poker site is an intricate dance; since poker debts are legally unenforceable and can be written off, credit cards refuse to process transactions to poker sites, so you need to deposit money into a "middleman" banking site, like PayPal only sleazier, and then from there to the poker sites.
I've been advised by my accountant that when I travel, if I stop at a casino, the cost of the trip is deductible as a business expense (since I declare my winnings as a gambler to the IRS.) So I've taken to stopping at casinos when I go places, and that often means traveling with enough cash to play a big no limit game. There are stories of pro gamblers being searched at an airport and having to explain the $50,000 they are carrying. Police can just confiscate cash as "drug money" unless you have a good excuse for it. So far, no one's searched me when I'm carrying a lot of cash, and I'm now used to walking around with thousands of dollars on me, but it made me a little nervous the first time I took a bus(!) back from the casino with several thousand dollars shoved into my sock.
When I have a good week, I often call it quits three or four days in. Right now, for instance, I'm done for this week. I've hit a new record win for me, and I'm a little burned out.
That's a quick summary of the poker life. Not very glamorous. Now I know what stockbrokers feel like. It's somewhat intellectually satisfying to know that you've played the game well, but it's not rocket science. And the money still feels like points, |
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| Alternate history taken to impressive levels in Quicksilver |
[Oct. 6th, 2005|01:21 am] |
I'm finally working my way through Stephenson's latest bloated epics after finding them all at Half-Price Books.
Anyway, there's a passage in Quicksilver which mentions the CABAL, King Charles' II's advisers,
John Comstock, Earl of Epsom
Thomas More Anglesey, Duke of Gunfleet
Knott Bolstrood
Sir Richard Apthorp
General Hugh Lewis, Duke of Tweed.
Now, trivia hounds and scholars of the English language (like me) might remember that the word CABAL was indeed applied to Charles II's advisers.
However, none of the characters listed here ever existed, they're fictional equivalents of the original crew, who are, according to Wikipedia, Sir Thomas Clifford, Lord Arlington, the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Ashley, and Lord Lauderdale.
Puzzling and impressive legerdemain, something I only questioned because I would've remembered someone named "Knott Bolstrood" if he had existed. This is the sign of someone having lots of fun in their writing game, because really, most readers are just not even going to notice the move. Makes me want to actually finish the work, even though I've got like 2800 more pages to go. |
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| fun FEMA factoid |
[Sep. 6th, 2005|05:00 am] |
Apparently Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, was originally hired as deputy director of the agency. The director was his college roommate.
Before that? Brown was fired from a job overseeing horse shows. |
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| this took a while. |
[Aug. 27th, 2005|05:32 pm] |
Warning: frustration ahead due to bad interface and ridiculous high scores. |
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| like a 9-to-5 job, but gamblier |
[Jul. 29th, 2005|03:12 pm] |
So I've basically taken the summer off from the internet poker. I played for a couple days in June, then I was in Vegas for July for the WSOP and got in two days of online playing there (booking a $5000 win after losing $3000 my first day). Last week, after we got RoadRunner, I played for a solid week and ended even, after being down as much as $7000 at various points.
So this week, I set a target. $10,000 would cover my WSOP costs, and put me nicely ahead for June and July.
I just got there. Yippee! I've been playing mostly during daytime hours, and the games are pretty lousy at my usual site during the day; may have to explore new territory and other sites. But I keep saying that. Still, enough decent games to put me ahead $10K, and I don't think I've been luckier than average. This is even including several thousand in gross errors I made. I haven't even put in that many hours, probably about 25. I almost took today off and called it quits at $9000, but I saw a bunch of fools sitting down at a high stakes table and said, need to play, and so I picked up my last K in about 20 minutes.
I doubt I could average $10000 a week over the long run at the stakes I play. Still, telling myself that I was gonna win 10K proved to be enough to get it done; maybe that positive affirmation stuff Scott Adams talks about is useful, and it's within my reach. But if I could win 10K a week, it might be hard to convince myself not to, although it would involve an AWFUL lot of poker. 'Cause, I mean, $500K a year, that's like, real money or something. |
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