The Irish Thug

I have found that weigh station do far less weighing than their name implies.

Dear Kurt Loder and John Norris

Maybe you missed it when you got your last physical, but you are old. 51 and 47, respectively. You should have been exiled from MTV when I was five. How do you not kill yourself when they are putting wrinkle cream on before you go in front of the camera? Neither of you are Dick Clark, you are aging, and not well. A wise man once said, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” This does not apply to you. It’s weird and disgusting. Please retire from all things involving young people.

Sincerely,

Patrick

I am officially 0 for 4 on getting everything done in one trip. While the DMV is much better as a whole, today’s excitement came out of the fact that they don’t take credit or debit cards. I know, new technology, it’s tough for them to keep up.

So when I realize I’m 5 bucks short, I go on a very exciting journey through Wayne trying to get money. This involved one out of order atm and one back that was so small it couldn’t do cross-bank withdrawals. Finally I broke down and went to buy a pack of gum and empty their register getting cash back. The gum was very good, but hardly worth the $3 I had to pay because you need to get that much in order to get cash back.

With my wallet now containing enough to get my new license I headed back. After another short wait I was handed one of those messed up sideways licenses. Under 21 for less than two more months and now I have to use one of these stupid things. The question is: Is it worth it to head back to the DMV at the end of the year and get a normal one or just explain to someone every time I go to buy alcohol or go to a casino that, “Yes, I understand what the picture looks like, check the date.” for the next 6 years?

So one of the guys I work with looks just like him. Whenever I see him, I always end up saying part of that conversation to myself. I’m like 80% sure he heard me today. I wonder if he’s gonna try and kill himself, but then get hit by a truck?

With “more than 2 blogs created each second of each day” [source] it was bound to happen. What is IT? IT is that the president of Iran would start a blog. Yes, that’s right. The president of the country we most likely going to screw up next just started his own blog. It can be seen at www.ahmadinejad.ir. I say seen cause it’s written in Arabic. BBC News says it can also be read in Persian, English and French, but clicking the English button doesn’t seem to be working correctly.

I’m so going to get owned for spending so much time clicking around on this blog while i’m in a building that has classified army equipment and data.

Update: Home, and it works now. The site was loading some hosting site earlier.

Another Update: Ok, so i again forgot to mention what makes this story EXTRA awesome. Luckly no one reads this, so they won’t know i keep coming back and adding more. But yeah, Iran has one of the tightest censorship programs on the internet. Our friend the president has spoken out against public blogs before entering office.

The quick fox jumps over the lazy brown dog.

Side Note: Up until now, I’ve been calling it Theories and Practices. Never really took the time to actually read the title.

I started reading the book at the beginning of the month. I’m making an effort to pay very close attention to everything as I read. I’m taking notes that fall into a couple of categories (will be talked about below).

2+2 started a book club that is running this month. (Link to Week 2. Link to Week 1 can be found in the Week 2 thread.) I’m working of their sections, however I’m not staying up to their section/week pace. The section is a nice approach because it allows me to be focused on certain aspects of what is being discussed. I’m also re-reading the section when I finish before I move on to the next. Again, this is just a better way to focus and maybe catch something that was not seen the first time around. These posts, which I will be making after each section, are just another way to force myself to think critically on what I am reading.

The first section is the first 60 pages and includes chapters on (Note: The table of contents has a really poorly laid out hierarchy, so I’m just making my own section groupings.):

• The Skills of Success – A general explanation of 5 important skills.
• Thinking in Terms of Expectation – Discussion of expected value and an example of how it can be used on the river with the nuts.
• Pot [Magnitude] Philosophy – Concepts on how to control the pot. Looking for situations where you want to build it and ones where you’d like to keep it smaller.
• The Importance of Implied Odds – Looking at what future bets will be from both your perspective and that of your opponent.
• Bet [Magnitude Assessment] – The many things to think about as one chooses the amount to bet.

Before I go into the categories into which my thoughts feel, I just have one lead in comment. This section will most likely have the fewest comments because it’s still the beginning. This isn’t to say that there are not very important topics covered in the initial part of the book. More just that fact that the introduction was included in this section and that some concepts (ie. the EV section are slightly repetitive for anyone who’s read a good poker book before.)

Things that I do that are bad:

• Betting Standard Amounts. This came from the bet [magnitude assessment] section. Pre-flop I always raise 4 times the big blind plus an additional big blind per limper. Though this doesn’t hold true for when I play live. The established standard raise is smaller, however I do still raise different amounts. I don’t know why I lean towards doing this live, but stay standard online. The book is more talking about post-flop play in this section, but I think the same should apply for pre-flop. They probably have a section on it that I haven’t gotten to. The point does also hold true for my post-flop play. Very frequently I will just bet 3/4 of the pot or 1/2 of the pot with out specifically thinking why am I betting this amount and what am I trying to accomplish. Recently I’m looking more at what the flop texture is and how that affects me, but not enough.
• Big Pots with Small Hands. In correlation with my last sentence, I often find myself bloating pots where my hand is good but not necessarily extremely strong.
• Making Big Calls on the River, or All-in. This is one of my other big leaks. I tend to make bigger calls when it closes the action of the hand. I talk myself into believing that I am ahead or I have a read even if that means ignoring some of the pot odds.

Concept Point:

• The wider the range of hands the opponent holds, the wider their implied odds are.
• The more implied odds a person has, the larger your bet should be over what the pot odds would dictate.

New Ideas:

• Start with the final bet, then plan the bets you will make working backwards from there.
• When out of position and your opponent often continues on the flop, let them do so when you flop a strong hand.

Other Random Thoughts:

• Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention in past books, but I think this is the first time that a book regularly refers to the opponent as a female.

FUCK INTERNAL SERVER ERRORS.
WORST. ERROR MESSAGE. EVER.

“This is a ‘catch-all’ error generated [from the] Web server. […] something has gone wrong, but the server can not be more specific about the error condition in its response to the client. In addition to the 500 error notified back to the client, the Web server should generate some kind of internal error log which gives more details of what went wrong. It is up to the operators of [the] Web server site to locate and [review] these logs.” [source]

I don’t have access to those logs at work, which makes debugging the code I wrote lots of fun. The method of debugging that I am stuck using is:

• Comment out the last line of non-commented server-side code in the file.
• Reload page and see if an internal server error still exists.
• Repeat as needed.

Another fun fact is that since the project I am working on is for the Intranet, it means that I can’t tell someone who might hire me to go there and see an example of work I’ve done.

No worries, cause in two weeks I’m back to TPRS full-time (read full-time as in addition to school).

What new movie will he be in? No, the guess was wrong. The correct answer is Star Wars [VIII + III]
“I’m sorry Spock, I don’t remember.”.

So there are pancakes on the McDonald’s breakfast menu. I should have been told. Not that I’m running out the door to go have McDonald pancakes, but what the fuck? I thought of all places, McDonald’s is not gonna be the place where I find something new that surprises me.

Edit: Wow, I suck at the alphabet. Y is the 25th letter.

So as stated before my external hard drive half died. All attempts to rebuild the structure failed. First I had to transfer all 2000-ish tracks, that took a couple hours. The other fun part is that ipod doesn’t keep the files as is. Tracks are sorted into numbered folders at random. In addition, some file names are not changed. But others are truncated and some are changed to a random combination of 4 letters. I think last night I go through maybe 160 tracks. It’ll speed up once I have all the folders set up for each individual album.

I also put some of The Circuit tracks onto my ipod to listen to at my job. But, none of the tags had been filled in, so I had to scroll thru every letter to get to T.

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Everyone remembers the horse head scene from The Godfather. Turns out someone thought that might be a good idea. Not mentioned in the article, but I heard on the radio this morning. About a couple days earlier, a “adult toy” had been glued to this person’s car.