Wasn't Kidding...

Re: my earlier post:

Six feet 'til it's the largest arch in the Western hemisphere!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8186262.stm

The Dream Defined

It occurs to me I haven't yet articulated the dream! So without further ado...

Penthouse suite, floor to ceiling windows, going to bed at breakfast, waking in the afternoon, exercising, sushi lunch, then recording/practising/writing (songs/code/poetry/novels) before either playing in the poker room or in the lounge until the crowd goes, then watching the sunrise from the spa tub before doing it all over again. Charity on Sundays, followed or preceeded by brunch and shopping - but not for accummulation, for replacement; what gets replaced goes to friends, family, and charity.

Of course, everyone will want to come visit so I'll have to adjust for going to cabaret, hanging out with the cast, and after-show parties, not to mention all the travel required from playing the professional tournament circuit, book tours, music excursions, and charity events. I wonder where I'll find someone who'll want to come with and see one by one, the major European cities?

So that's the dream... we're not there yet, but we're close enough to smell the caviar!

Spanish Palms, where I stayed before, is IMHO, the nicest off-strip place to be in Vegas, full stop. Perfect location, in Las Vegas, but not far from the strip. It's like an Oasis in the desert, with lots of trees, shade, grass, and water.
http://lasvegas.craigslist.org/search/hhh?query=spanish%20palms

Cheaper than Indiana too! $950 for a 3BDR! In Castleton 2BDR (smaller, not as nice) was $1250.

Where I'm at now is similar, but with fewer trees, bushes and grass. Still nice though.

But of course, if you're going to live on the strip, there's a few key residences:

Panorama Towers
http://www.panoramatowers.com/

and

Sky Las Vegas
http://www.skylasvegas.com/

Mostly high-rollers, strippers & escorts live there. No kidding, that's what the doormen tell me! But both pale in comparison to what is currently being built/furnished, which is a massive tower complex on the strip, in the middle... grocery store, everything INSIDE... the idea being you never have to leave the tower complex. It trumps the other two mainly because it's right there in the heart of the strip that's most like Europe... lots of little shops/bars and all foot traffic.

Here's a blurb about it:
http://www.lasvegas-highrises.info/High_Rises_on_the_Las_Vegas.html
at the bottom - it's Cosmopolitan... once finished, there simply will be no better address on the strip. THAT is where Clio will be living. (She'll also be driving an Infinity G37 for trips out to the desert to stargaze.)

But it's like the Vancouver dream... there one finds a few perfect high-rise condos on the edge of Stanley park... if you're going to do that kind of living, those are the places with the most pros and fewest cons.) If you're going to do it in Vegas... Cosmopolitan and Veer towers.

But could I really make enough money playing poker? Pay for housing, what-not?

Yes! I've spoken to what names I know out there (to help with/confirm strategies, but more on that later). There are two main approaches here, but the bread and butter is pretty much what I described to you:
1) go to the "tourist" casinos (Mandalay, MGM, Bally's)
(preferably, wide-awake, sober, late in the night)
2) buy for the max amount in the low-limit game
3) wait, be patient, only play premium hands
3.1) when get one, make my play for max $
3.2) only very occasionally, when the situation
is perfect (ask me), and only if I think it will
succeed, do I ever bluff.

That is basically the approach the local Vegas pros use. They obviously avoid each other because they know they won't get any money from each other if they "chase" a hand. In other words, they don't make long-odds plays against fellow locals because if they make it, they won't get long-odds winnings from it- that requires a tourist in love with his/her hand. I'll spot the locals quickly, and I'll be perennially playing the role of the bubbly tourist "looking for some late-night (poker) action". My "boyfriend" will probably be an unnamed pro playing somewhere else and I'm just bored being left alone. In fact, thinking up/rehearsing the role/background was fun and helped kill time while driving out there.

Anyway, the pros look to make around $80/hr this way. It's probably the closest to a "sure thing" in the long run because you are minimizing risk. However, it can be a tad dull. I hope to liven it up by playing my role as social lubricant (thereby enhancing my "looking for action" image) and perhaps by blogging about it - just for you - in a format that maybe you might want to eventually do something with. Music will help, and I might even get into books on mp3 once I get into a groove. Just so long as I'm able to achieve maximum focus with minimum fatigue.

The other way to make money - one that I've had mixed success with - is the tournament approach. You've heard my rationale about the WSOP being the only tournament structure that enables solid cash game players to consistently get in to the money (skill over luck), however, Bob, the guy I met (and outlasted) at the local tourney told me he's played 35 tourneys at Ceasers. Each one is like, $75 to enter but pays like $3,000 to the winner. He's won 9 of them and placed in the money 25 times. Obviously, he's on to something and can make a living doing that, but my experience has to date been to win only occasionally, just barely offsetting my not winning frequently. IOW, I've made money with tournaments, but the swings are wider and seem to rely (although not in Bob's case) more on luck.

In my Jargon, I'm a solid cash game player, but so-so in tournaments. If I get into the money, I usually do quite well (from cash game experience) and I have been known to devestate final tables (the key is to be fearless, and when you do play, balls-to-the-wall aggressive), but the trick is getting there, and I could probably gleen that information from an hour's conversation with a local tourney pro if I tried.

In either case, until I get more than a few month's worth of scratch liquid, I'll no doubt be pimping websites or hitting the pavement looking for gigging bands.

If I figure $1200/month living expenses, I'd have to win around $300/week, or alternatively, working full-time at Panera (with no money to play) - basically, what getting a job at Panera in Plainfield would have amounted to).

Let's say I can average $40/hr, that's 10 hours of poker for a month's living expenses, so yeah, that's reasonable, don't ya think? One can win $300 on a good "average" night and lose $300 on an average "bad" night. One can win $1,200 on an average "good" night and lose $100 on a bad "average" night. Does that make sense? That's based on my experiences from last summer anyway. I rarely lost more than $200 and usually won more than $300 - remember the keyboard story?

And now that I've discovered that there are there are theoretical limits to let me know if I'm a winner or loser, stay tuned for more maths! :)

Sarah and Melanie

Went to bed at 1:30 am. I literally could not stay awake any longer. That comes as a surprise to those who know me as a creature of the night. What surprises me is that I haven't seen 3am once all last week! Even if you assume - after three weeks here - that I'm still on EDT, that's still before my normal bedtime. But I have a good reason.

90 million miles away, there's a ginormous ball of fire and right now, we're pointed right at it. Granted, it's not like the top of the world (Alaska) where the sun just spins around in a circle on the horizon and back up again, but when we spin around and face it, there's a lot of energy comes to Earth!

Here, this process starts around 3:46 am, where it's light enough to read outside, and by 6:30am, the sun is over the rooftops and shining directly in my big bedroom window. That's my reason. And the clouds don't help. Because Vegas is in a valley surrounded on all four sides by mountains - okay, foot hills, but they are mountains compared to the Appalachain mountains! Anyway, because of this, the clouds are really, really high (and thin) compared to back east.

The result of this interaction is that if you're used to seeing me pale... well, I still am, but now I look like a Trill from Star Trek; the skin on all the top-most areas of each limb is covered with hundreds of little brown dots. Freckles, they're called, and they're filled with melanin.

No doubt you've heard about Sarah Tonin, and how when she's not around, one tends to get depressed. Well, her sister, Melanie (everyone calls her Mella) lives in your eyes, and yes, in those freckles. When she's around, one tends to be sleepy. Unlike Sarah, who is a foodie and comes out whenever there's food around, Mella (like me) avoids the sun and leaves when your eyes (or freckles) are exposed to the sun.

Did I mention the sun's rays are out at 4am here?

It's a bizarre feeling... to once again be going to bed tired... to once again be asleep within minutes of hitting the sheets... to be asleep by 2am... and then awake by 7am. And the wakey times just keep getting earlier! Today I was up at 6:30! Hardly the crack of dawn, but can one really get all the rest they need in just 5 hours of sleep a day?

A friend from Alaska was telling me about how when you go there in the summer time, for like a week, you go on none or just a few hours sleep a day until you get used to the idea of sleeping during daylight. I feel a power nap in my future... perhaps after the sun rays no longer have line of sight to my window.

Mc Luxury

So I can't help being awake at 7am... why not get some exercise? Hey, I could blade down to McD's and get some bfast too! Feeding two birds with one egg biscuit, as it were.

There are three Mc'Ds equidistant from me. One is to the right, about a mile down, on is a few blocks past Oren's (right turn, right turn), and still another is also a mile away, but straight to the left. All three are unlike any McD's I've ever seen. The Camby location was pretty nice, and even had free WiFi, but these... are like restaurants. Warm dark hues have replaced the kiddy yellow, soft, abstract paintings cover the walls, slow curves replaced the straight lines, little barriers with glass windows that rise near to the ceiling help to really add a sense of separate rooms with awesome fung-shuai, and soft, plush seats have replaced the hard plastic. Here's some more images:



It's not your childhood McDonald's... it's grown up... like me. Or not, since I'm the only one I've ever seen in McD's rolling around on inline skates, posing as the spitting image of the girl in blades who used to adorn their cups. Maybe there is something to that advertising thing...

Anyway, figuring that the left McD's keeps me on the sidewalks the whole way there, I go with that option.

Lots of people have wondered what death looks like. I was holding hands with him the entire time on the way there. Death looks like pretty, shiny metal boxes cruising along an 8-lane road (sometimes a 4-lane each way boulavard) at 50+ miles an hour. Vegas was never about being for the faint-hearted. One small trip on the sidewalk could send me toppling into oncomming traffic.

These thoughts are in my mind as I'm working my way to McD's, but fear not gentle reader, for I'm quite comfortable on wheels. I can even do like, tricks and stuff. So don't worry. I'll drive everywhere once the car is back from the shop.

Did I mention Vegas is flat? The roads are laid out mostly in a grid system, meaning that if you stand in the middle of one, you can see all the way to mountains on each side. In all directions if you stand in the middle of an intersection (which I don't advise, but instead, swing your head round 360 while in the passenger seat)!

But... I'm working harder than I expected; about a quarter mile in, I'm wondering why it's so hard? I feel like I'm going uphill; I can't get any momentum going. I look behind me: flat. I look in front of me: flat. Hmm... maybe my wheels are gunked up? I keep going. I figure it's for the best, as this is new terrain and although Vegas is reknown (to me) for having rollerblade-able sidewalks with no bumps, one can never be too careful!

Half-way in... I'm breathing harder and in danger of breaking a sweat. I look behind me again: flat. I study in front again: flat. I press on.

Finally I arrive at McD's breathing as if I had just jaunted up 4 flights of stairs. Not panting, but unable to keep a conversation going with occasional gasps for air. Just in time too; I could feel moisture on my skin evaporating (cause it's cold - the body's natural cooling system works in spades here). I didn't expect to sweat for moving so slowly. I look behind one more time: flat as a pancake.

Inside I get my food and notice a newspaper lying on a table. Awesome! When I pick it up, it feels like there's something heavy inside. It's a magazine titled, "Luxury Las Vegas" and has a photo of a personal jet by Icon, about the size of a Geo Metro on the front, laid out in grays and blacks. A boy-toy mag, I figure, but what the hey, let's see what's inside.

Inside was ... luxury. (online version) Multi-million dollar homes, expensive jewelery, and sexy cars adorn every page. And then... there's an interview with Annie Duke. A role-model for the poker world if there ever was one. She's a pretty amazing woman and I can't help but feel a connection with her, as if she was a sister living out my dream, challenging me to rise up and inspire even more.

She's raised millions for aid to Africa. I just donated $0.19 to the Ronald McDonald house. Hmm...

Her biggest regret is leaving school just before getting her PhD, mine was coming back (from a year of playing poker) and finishing. Hmm...

She's one of the most well-known, respected, and professional players in the world. I'm one of the most unknown. Hmm...

Her two weaknesses are having an overdeveloped sense of fairness and suffering fools poorly. She's working on both these things late in life. Well, at least we have that in common!

Oh, and she teaches too! We both thought we'd be college professors by now. LOL!

Her commitment to charity is quite inspiring, and I have only dreamed of being able to do the kind of work she does, both in life and in poker.

She also thinks poker is a great tool for learning to deal with life. Suddenly I feel vindicated for teaching my discrete math students how to play poker! Even though they got higher grades than any class before I taught it, people still looked at me with that, "what are you doing, teaching kids poker and bookie odds?" look. Now I can say, I was teaching them about the lottery so they could make proper life decisions... just like Annie does!

I keep reading... more stunningly beautiful homes greet my eyes. More pretty cars. I flip back to the front and notice the editor is a woman. Hmm... then I notice on the front cover, at the top, "CAUTION > > > > > THIS ISSUE IS TESTOSTERONE-INJECTED." I nearly snort out my diet coke. One could say that of nearly half the women here, fresh off a Saturday night.

I wonder if I should feel bad for thinking about sex while sitting in the McD's playground area. I notice it has a built in Dance, Dance, Revolution machine. That's awesome! I'd be on it were I not on blades. It also had a pop-a-shot and a few other toys along with a colossally huge (even to an adult) climbing thing with all sorts of tubes, nets, baskets, windows, and perches. My mind temporally overloads. How did I get in the kids section again? Oh yeah, all the old people were looking at me funny in the grown up section, and there weren't any empty booths.

It's time to go, and here's the funny part. From the moment I stepped out of McDs I did not make one stride. My wheels instantly started rolling towards home, sometimes with such velocity I was forced to use the foot brake (something I don't often use). I make it all the way home, right to the steps upstairs, a mile away, without making ONE stride! Hmm...

Making Drupal Your Bitch

I suspect no-one will read this post entirely unless they get here from some random Google search looking for help with Drupal. A shame, to be sure, but not unlike the thousands of lines of beautiful code poetry I've written no one will look at. Probably not unlike the rest of these post either. Still, I'mma gonna write it and call it the first page of my Drupal tutorials.

Now it's no secret that I'm building a CMS from scratch. Heck, some of you are even using the first production version of it! Well, clients have demanded feature sets faster than I can build them in the normal course of development, so in an effort to work smarter, not harder, for those few clients who wanted the moon for cheese, I turned to an off-the-shelf CMS, Drupal. IMHO, it's the best thing out there, but it's still incredibly bloated and needlessly complicated. It pains me to use Drupal for those reasons, but that said, it's still the best thing out there - for now.

So once you get Drupal installed you'll need to enable the modules you want. Don't bother configuring your site yet; we're not done installing. Most of the core modules are useful, but only enable the ones you are actually using - the more you have, the slower your site is. With today's technology even. Warned you the code was bloated and inefficient!

Now you'll need to install a whole host of 3rd party add-on modules (and a template if you're not going to build one). Right, there's a lot that Drupal needs it don't come with. Everyone has their own list of must-have modules. My essential list (based on extensive meddling) looks like:

• Administration menu 6.x-1.4
  You want this dropdown menu; should be core.
• Image 6.x-1.0-alpha4
  Can't upload or otherwise use images without this.
• ImageAPI 6.x-1.6 ImageAPI supporting multiple toolkits.
  Ditto
  
• FCKeditor 6.x-1.3
  A WYSIWYG editor instead of plain text fields.
• Image Browser 6.x-1.0-beta1
  An image browser/manager for use with FCK
  
• Meta tags 6.x-1.0
  Why aren't keywords core?
• Views 6.x-2.6
  Haven't used this powerful module yet, but modules above require it.

Getting all these modules installed is not that difficult, but FCK and the image browser are a bit tricky. Go to their homepages and read carefully. FCK requires two downloads/installs! Right, the one you get from Drupal.org is only 1/2 of it.

Oh yeah, if you're going to have clients (and not just you using the system) you'll definitely want to configure Drupal to serve multiple sites from one install directory. Read the manual carefully; it's not hard. In fact, creating a new site is one of the nicest features about Drupal, even though it still requires a command-line interface and a few Unix commands. I felt a wave of smugness pass over me since my system is all web-based. I let it go, Smug is one of the leading sources of air pollution.

Time to setup your CSS. To do this, you need to create what Drupal calls a theme. You'll find no end of schizophrenic (manual) pages about how best to do this. Take my advice. Use the blank slate template I wrote. It's simplified beyond Stark. However, if you're HTML-based instead of PHP-based you can use the Stark theme; it's just got a bit more divs than it ought to have, but it's no big deal; just copy it, and then edit as you wish.

Okay, so now you got a CMS enabled with (most of) the features you want/need. Now what?

Well one would hope that the entire CMS is customisable via an online interface to control not only what modules are active, but what data each module outputs along with the accompanying CSS to handle the layout. Unfortunately, this process only works for the simplest of modules, and it's never a customizable as you'll want. Breadcrumbs are a great example. You can't just click a checkbox and tell Drupal not to print the darn things. Instead, you have to edit code. Don't even get me started on the User Login box.

But since we don't want to edit the actual Drupal source (cause we'll lose it on system updates/upgrades) we instead have to copy the php file (called a template) that Drupal uses to figure out what to display. Hmm... we might have to redo changes anyway when the new templates change from the old. You'll find in my template a file called "page.tpl.php" which gets called on every page draw. If you were to make it blank, all your pages would be blank. Seems easy peasy, but finding the module's source code can be a pain until you get intimate with Drupal.

Now the templating scheme is fairly clever - you can be as specific or as general as you want, and Drupal follows rules for which template files it uses based on the content. It would be nice if each module had a template, but alas, that would make too much sense (and too much facism).

To override some types of Drupal output, you need to figure out which PHP funciton in the Drupal source code is outputting the content, and then override that function and figure out where to put it. Not an easy task at first, especially since all you want to do at this point is to build your website. This was supposed to be easy, right?

But you're a superstar, you've gotten this far, the rest is a cakewalk right? We just edit the template to layout our <divs> and then edit our custom CSS to take care of the display. In theory. You're going to need to be quite the expert if you expect to do any serious CSS. Why? Cause Drupal litters the CSS heirarchy with all kinds of unnecessary definitions that are hidden, until you're wondering why for example, your <li> elements, which you've explicitly and clearly marked up in the CSS to not have bullets, shows bullets anyway (but only on non-IE browsers). Oh yeah, don't forget to override the background with "background:transparent" or you're going to get weird images appearing in your lists too. See what I mean? Oh yeah, be sure to have a "border: 0px;" command for any tables you want unless you like having borders. Who does that? Ya gotta be familiar with just about all of CSS2 and even then, CSS that works in isolation will often fail when inside Drupal and you'll have to figure out exactly what (and where) Drupal is mucking up the CSS with non-standard or extra inherited definitions (which IE doesn't seem to respect).

Are we having fun yet?

Well don't forget, Drupal 5 did all of this differently from Drupal 6, as no doubt Drupal 7 does too, so just because you become an expert, don't worry about the joy of learning... you'll have to do all this over again when/if you upgrade/downgrade! Whoopee!!!

PS - about the cover image: if that kind of thing excites you, try starting here.

Measure your HQ

Here's one of Clio's hip-quotient tests:

What do these images mean?







You can find the answer by googling: "Green Dam Girl"

Look Up

A cosmic smile for a cosmic family. That's Venus (where women are from) on the left and Mars (where men are from) on the right, with the moon (where people like me are from) inbetween them.

You want to be up around 3am-5am, just before sunrise (which is not long after moonrise) this Friday... you'll see all three celestial bodies right next to each other. Totally kewl. It's at times like this when I can really grok what it feels like to be on a molten ball of fire, circling a bigger ball of fire along with spheres of rocks and gasses, all the while spinnin' round, right round like a record baby.

There are stranger places than Vegas we call home!