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!

Slime, Stunts, and Source (code)

Felt a little down today. Been doing an awful lot of work for little or no reward and though I try not to feel the stress of rent and phone payments, still, it is there. I did get $100 for a day's work, so Burger king wages for PhD work. Sigh...

I met with a guy who wanted a photo in response to my ad seeking a roommate. He wasn't too slimy, but my presence obviously made him and his friend uncomfortable. I didn't mind. :) We had a business meeting regarding poker. When I had spoken to him earlier, I mentioned the reason I was in Vegas (and why I wanted to stay close to the Strip - he wants a house in BFE). He mentioned that we would consider staking me for a world series event. Turns out, all he really wanted was an excuse to see me again. He wasn't serious about the offer, but figured I could be bought. I declined.

Oh, in good news, I did meet some teenagers yesterday. They were doing bike tricks out in the parking lot as slimy brought me home (car still in shop) and I was a receptive audience, so they did tricks for me! Later, I saw the same one (who has both ears pierced and has pretty big black spacers in his ears) sitting in a car with a girl and they were jamming out to some heavy metal sounding music. I zipped around the corner on rollerblades and when he saw me, his eyes lit up and he smiled wide at me, much to the chagrin of the girl with him in the car. Teehee. Once I got to the top of the stairs, where they could see me through the trees, they gave a glance upwards seemingly as if they expected me to express disapproval at the loud music. I held my middle and ring fingers pressed down with my thumb and gave them an encouraging few head bangs. They loved it! Tee hee. If they are out again, I might go out and do rollerblade tricks with them (yes, I'll get some protective gear! ... eventually)

Other than that, there has been little contact with humans, but that's fine, I'm preoccupied with (quickly) becoming an expert in Drupal. Yeehaw!

She Does the Maths

When I first studied poker, I read lots of books on poker written by the smartest people in the game I could find. I don't mean celebraty books, which the market is currently flooded with and are basically just glorified opinion pieces, I mean the people with Ph.Ds in mathematics who studied the game, the probabilities, and the strategies.

There are three such books I consider gold. Most people can't get through them for they do require a strong background in mathematics, like, major in college strong. Nevertheless, I keep them to myself because since most people haven't read them, that gives me an advantage.

However, one book that is well-known (but again, tricky material written by a PhD in maths) is Mason Malmouth's, "Gambling Theory and Other Topics." In it, he spells out the maths for poker, what one can expect in terms of fluctuations, bankroll requirements, and bluffing strategy. It's brilliant. I recently started re-reading my poker books and decided to do the maths for myself.

The result is a bit depressing.

Now I haven't yet recorded enough results from my playing sessions, so I approximated them based on my winnings last year. I came up with a win rate of $28.5/hr and a standard deviation of $305. Now you might think that with a positive win rate, you'll always make money, but that's where the standard deviation comes in. All my results should lie between three standard deviations. That means in any one session I could go home as much as a $1,000 winner or loser, despite having a positive win rate! (Of course statistics doesn't know I'll quit if I'm down more than $400.) The good news though, is that the deviation should go down the more data I collect, assuming my play is consistent.

Believe it or not, it you know your win rate and deviation, there's a forumula you can use to find out how long you need to play in order to guarantee a win! At a $28.5/hour win rate with a $305 standard deviation, I'll need to play for 1,032 hours to assure a win. Ouch! That's like, 1/2 a year of 40 hours/week!

And that's not the depressing part. Taking the derivitive of the above formula and solving for zero finds for you when you can be at your lowest. The lowest point in my bankroll (statistically speaking) can occur at the 258th hour, at which point I'll be $7,357 down.

In other words, to assure I'll never go broke, I'll need just over $7K.

But that's with incomplete data. Hopefully, these numbers will go down (except the win rate, which hopefully will go up!) as I record more sessions. Also, those numbers assume no risk. They go down considerably if say, I am willing to say, "How much money do I need for a 95% chance of never going broke?" then the number of hours required to win drops to five weeks and the bankroll needed to just under $2,000, which amazingly enough, is the amount I wanted to start with.

Math is kewl.

Muscle Memory

Unix aficionados, especially back in the day, fell into one of two camps, depending on which text editor they preferred: vi or emacs. Emacs was fancier in that it was programmable and customizable, while vi was simply a very powerful, but tersely obfuscated (or so I thought at the time), editor. I was a vi fan; never used emacs.

As I'm installing drupal, I find myself back in the Unix command line and I'm amazed at how quickly the fingers remember what's what.

I start the editor and view a large document file. Instantly, my fingers go to CTRL-d for page down (CTRL-U is page up). The fingers also remember h, j, k, and l, the commands to move the cursor left, up, down, and right respectively.

O inserts a line under the current line, $ moves me to the end of the current line, a appends at the current spot, and A appends at the end of the current line.

It's both bizarre and a testament to how efficiently vi's interface was that one can just re-remember these long forgotten commands. I was surprised to find it was just like riding a bike. VI was one of the hardest programs I learned how to use because it required you to become an expert user - or keep with you a list of VI commands like the one below.

By the way, if you're wondering the significance of the dog cartoon... that cartoon (from the New Yorker) was hanging on the door of the Unix system administrator's office during my tenure as an undergraduate at Ball State. I didn't search for it, it just came up, so there must be some cosmic relationship between it and VI.

BrawlMart

The car goes into Oren early in AM, and at midnight, I suddenly realize I have no food! Doh! So I figure I'll swing by the grocery and then drop my car off after and rollerblade home. Pretty boring daily (or in this case, nightly) chores.

I go to the Walmart on the street where I live, even though it's probably a mile further than the one on the other street where I live. When I lived with Brad, we'd go to the later one (the one on Rainbow) so I thought I'd try out the one on Charleston.

It's not like the Camby Walmart... everything was arranged differently. It was like... the Muncie and Anderson Meijers. The produce was right by the front door (typical) but the frozen food was right after. The pop was all the way in the back, in a little tiny corner. Actually, now that I think about it, it's like a mirror image of the Muncie Walmart too.

Anyway, I only shop out of four or five aisles at Walmart: the canned veggies, the condiment aisle, the "international" aisle which is either with the condiments or the rice, or both, and the frozen fruit aisle and the frozen veg aisle. That and the produce is pretty much it. Imagine my disappointment when after finding that all five of those aisles are right next to each other, but all were closed so they could wax the floors. I asked one of the guys in charge how long it would take before they would open the aisles. He tells me 5 hours. That seemed a bit excessive and thinking of how hungry I would be w/o getting groceries, I ask him if he would get an item for me. He tells me to wait 20 minutes and then go in and get what I need.

So, I plop down on the new merchandise and wait 20 minutes. The moment I go in, some short, stocky black woman gets right into my face and tells me I can't be there. I tell her that I was told I could, but she doesn't believe me and basically harasses me into leaving.

Now I'm not the only one who was inconvenienced, and the aisles were abuzz with comments about how they should only close one aisle at a time, and not 10 like they were doing at once. I don't know why, but on my way out, I decided to speak with a manager about the whole thing. Maybe he'll get me some spinach.

The first worker I ask says she can't do anything, "ask someone with a headset." The first person I see with a headset is the same guy who told me I could get what I needed the first time. I ask him to speak with a manager and he tells me there isn't one. I said, okay, I would like to speak with whomever is in charge. He puffs his chest and says, "I'm in charge." I ask him if I can get some spinach and he tells me that he already said I could but now I couldn't and wants to know why I didn't get it earlier. Meanwhile, the lady who was the reason conveniently walks up at that time, so I point to her and say, "she made me leave." I then turn to her and say, "this is the guy who said I could be in the aisles." and at that she wigs out. "That bitch better lay off me or I'm gonna kick her ass."

Did I just hear that right? I said, "excuse me?" and she says, "climb over this fence bitch and see what happens!" And at this point, the guy is holding her back as she puts on a show, threatening to fight me and calling me names.

I don't back down, but I also figure I might as well go to the other Walmart, so I leave without further confrontation and head for the checkout. As I'm checking out, there gets to be a gaggle of managers around the register next to me. Apparently, a couple overhead the exchange and they were aghast at the employee's behaviour and were sticking up for me. I guess I never showed any aggression, so they probably thought I was scared to death and decided to make a report.

I just wanted the whole thing to be dropped, but now I get the managers coming over to me asking for a statement. I say I don't want to make a big deal out of anything, but they insist, "every employee is a representative of Walmart." I felt like I had cheerleaders as I was recounting the whole story; it was bizarre... I kept thinking that poor stupid woman probably had kids and now was going to get fired.

I know it's weird to feel bad for her, but I had no hard feelings toward her. Truth be told, I wasn't really bothered at all, save a little shaking from the flight or fight adrenaline response that my body was now dissipating.

In fact, that was the first time in my life someone wanted to fight me where I wasn't afraid... it felt good! Before I always had the instinct to run, but this time was different. I felt like I could defend myself. It's hard to be mad at someone you never felt threatened by. Heck, she even made me feel good about myself!

As I'm talking to the cashier at the second Walmart, she tells me it's a crazy night. I told her my night too, was crazy, and at that she says, "it's just in the air then. Crazy for everyone." I then said, "My advice to you honey, don't back down!" Not knowing anything about what happened, she was still laughing as I was leaving. It was just one of those nights.

Home Sweeter Home

It's amazing what $15 and craigslist can do. I found the desk for $5 and a chair for $10 and suddenly, the room is transformed into a music studio, a coding office, and a home theatre. Save the chair, it still all fits comfortably in the Stratosphere. It's not perfect, but it's a good start.

It also got me up into North Las Vegas for only the second time. Not any closer to the mountains, but further up in the valley, I noticed a lot fewer trees around. Still, beautiful views abound. I got the desk where the further car was parked.

The chair took me even further north, to million dollar homes. I feel so exposed up here. It's so far away from Vegas! It seems strange to have such nice houses in suburbia... in a desert.

The rest of the day was spent trying to find a male-male 1/8th inch mini-plug cable. Between Radio Shack wanting $15 for a $2 cable and stores having no clue what I was asking for, I finally found what I was looking for after going to two Radio Shacks, Target, Office Depot, Electronics World (which is more like H.H.Greggs), Home Depot, Family Dollar, and in the end... Walmart had what I was looking for, and it only cost me $4!

Shoe Crack

E sure knows how to pick 'em. From the pool area, I noticed there are only 14 units in the entire complex that have a view of the pool. Hers is one of them. And location! We're like 5 minutes from anything you'd ever want, and if you want more, just 15 minutes from the same stores duplicated a little further away.

Cool stores. Like, Vegas auto plaza, like a farmer's market, but for mechanics. And a discount liquor store that is like Walmart for booze. $5 for a Shiraz from Aussi? Doesn't it cost more to ship that over here? Both of those are just around the corner, on the same block, and also on the same block... SHOES!

I don't dare enter. Not without reinforcements. Not without a job first. Then again... maybe just one shoe...

Maybe they need a website?

Goodbye, BBC

You were never unbiased. But you were unbiased in your bias, and I respected that, ya know? But then you started giving inches to your "senior" staff whereby they proceeded to sound like morons talking at great length about topics they had no clue about about. Front page news is no place for some old guy to ponder about if he should use Twitter or not. Bill Thompson, you're not the only one, but I'm singling you out, because you had the gall to - incorrectly - go public saying I was wrong. Yeah, I'm talking about the BBC Radio 4 interview I did on "Smart Tags" and I casually mentioned that RFID tags existed that were just a bit bigger than a grain of (cooked) rice. You went out of your way to say that was "wildly inaccurate" and that the smallest RFID tags at the time were measured in inches. What you failed to understand (besides a basic understanding of how RFID tags work and the privacy issues associated with them) is that I was holding one such tag in my hand during the interview as I said it!

But I overlooked that, because it was obvious you were more interested in people seeing the photo of you with your garish-colored scarf than actually knowing what you were talking about. But then, others followed your lead, and the BBC started putting your opinion pieces scattered throughout the site, and in order to boost views, there were often disguised as actual news events.

Still, I overlooked this, it was easy to, you guys weren't that clever about it. You might have changed the headlines, but your authors were still too egotistical and required their photos next to the headlines.

Then I had to endure the painful process of watching the BBC sell itself out. First to RealPlayer, for making everyone who wanted to watch video news install their outdated crappy player, then to Hugot, pasting their watch ad on every page you could, with all the finesse of a cow in a chinese restaurant. Wait, scratch that, bull in a china shop. Still, I overlooked it. In fact, I installed an ad blocker so I wouldn't have to be embarrassed by your ineptness at selling out. All the while, I am still pushing others toward the BBC over local American news outlets.

But now, you've gone too far. What with Google ads at bottom and banner ads on top and on the side, well, you make CNN look like legitimate news!

I am so sad to say goodbye to you. For years, I championed your site and encouraged everyone to get their news from you because you were ad-free. But now, you're just like all the other greedy money-worshiping so-called news sites. You're tainted. I can't trust you; you've lost your journalistic integrity.

So farewell, and good luck with that.

As for me, well, 7 years of reading the world news hasn't done much for me. I think I'm going to read books instead.

Highs and Lows

What a day!

It started off well enough. I had stayed up late (2am) working on the site for Oren, and in my sleepiness, forgot to wear the sleep mask and earplugs, so why my roomie decided to do laundry at 7am, well, I got up too and finished the site. I made it into Oren's for the 3rd day in a row at 9am, but this time, I had a completed site for him. So, I get my car fixed. Yay, I felt empowered at getting repairs on my car with no money. I went home and cleaned the house for E. It's kinda scary how easy I fall into domestication mode.

Feeling good, and on the recommendation of another poker player, I went to Bally's for some afternoon poker. The game was quite soft, and I picked up $80 before the game broke up. Feeling like it was time for a celebration (new home, new mechanic, good game) I went to my favourite sushi place for an early dinner. $12 got me stuffed on the freshest fish I've had since I left, save that one joint in Seattle on the Amazon fiasco. Everyone was happy to see me again and it was good to be back. Felt like home; I missed the company and I missed the sushi. Well fed, I changed into evening wear and went to Mandalay. That game was crazy good. There was over $5,000 on the table.

I turned $300 into just over $500 in an hour and was well on my way to the $850 goal I had set for myself prior. The last hand I played, I was dealt the 4 of hearts and the 5 of hearts on the button. I know I haven't yet explained how to play the game, but bear with me, you'll get it. There were 5 other players in the hand with the $2 customary bet raised to $7... it would cost $7 to see the flop. Normally, 45 suited is not a hand you'd play, but with 5 other players and in last position (last to act on all betting rounds) it's a great hand. What you hope for is to hit your 45 with someone else having a big pocket pair, like Kings. I call the $7 with just the lady to my left to act. She raised to $21. Now I already had her pegged; s. She had a big pair. Surprisingly, everyone called, and if I called the $14 raise, the action would stop. Against an opponent you know will give you action if you hit, this is the perfect place to play 45 suited (if there are 4 or more players). If you don't hit the flop, you fold, if you do, well, that's gravy. Most of the time you'll fold, but that one time you hit you make it all back plus more.

The flop comes 458. I've got two pair. She bets out $80. I *know* she's got a big pocket pair. How do I know? Because I watched her play. I watch everyone play when I'm not playing. Everyone folds. She has about the same amount of chips as I do. Now truth be told, I want her to fold, I want to win the pot right there, but if she does call, she's a huge underdog... I'm an 75% favourite to win.

Now, people say poker is gambling, but let me explain once and for all why I don't consider it so.

I'll illustrate with a simple game. Let's say you and I play a game where we each bet $100 and roll just one die. If a 1 comes up, you win. If a 2, 3, or 4 comes up, I win, and if a 5 or 6 comes up, we just roll it again until one of us wins. Hopefully, it is clear that this is not a game you should be playing! You're giving 50-50 odds (we each bet $100) but you are only getting 25-75 odds. Sure, you might win once in a while (1 in 4 games, to be precise) but I'll win most of the the time (3 out of every 4 games). Got it? The key here is in the long run. You might get lucky and win 4 times in row, but that's really unlikely (0.25 x 0.25 x 0.25 x 0.25 = like, 3%), and if you keep playing that game with me, you'll go broke and I'll take all your money.

Now as a poker player, I only put myself in those kinds of situations. If I'm not at least a 75% favourite to win, I'm not betting. Yes, in poker, if you know what you're doing, you can do just that, and I do, and that's why I don't consider it gambling.

But back to the game. I'm a 75% favourite to win, and I'm already winning, so I just want to take the pot now... it's $200, not a bad hand. So I overbet the pot to try to get her to fold. I bet $550 - all I have left. She calls and groans loudly when I show her my two pair after she shows me a pair of queens. It was a loose call, a skilled player would have put me on trips, two pair, or a straight and folded.

The next card (the turn) is a 10 of clubs. Now I'm an 80% favourite to win... she can only win if a Queen, Ten, or 8 comes (because then she too would have two pair... higher than my two pair). At best, there are 2 queens left, 3 eights left, and 3 tens left. That's 8 cards of the remaining 45 cards left. 8/45 = 0.2 or 20% at best. That means 80% of the time she'll lose.

By now you can probably guess that the final card was a ten, and she got lucky and took all my money.

Now here's the thing. If I had $2,000 and this happened, I'd rebuy, congratulate her on a hand well played and encourage her to keep doing that - because I want her to do that because I'll win most of the time.

But I don't have $2,000, I only had $300, enough for 1 game (the buyin for the minimum game is $300). So I'm out. I'm not out because I was gambling, I'm out because I didn't have enough money to sustain early bad luck losses like that.

Yeah, I gambled in the sense that I wouldn't need $2,000, but again, with a bankroll, it's not a gamble. 4 nights out of 5, I'd have walked away with her $500, and 1 night out of 5, I'd go home a $300 loser. That would - if I had enough to keep playing - mean I'd make $2,000 and lose $300 for a net gain of $1,700. That's why it's not gambling. If you understand the game and players to only put yourself in >75% chances of wining, you'll be a winner in the long run.

But you have to have the bankroll. I didn't have a bankroll. It cost too much to drive out here and get one month's rent; I only had one shot... I rolled the die, and it came up a 1. That doesn't mean I'm a loser, it doesn't mean I'm a bad player, it just means she got lucky.

It also means I can't play anymore, which now that I'm out here really stings. Losing money used to hurt. It didn't hurt this time because I understood the math, but being out the game, well, they don't have a pill can make that stomach ache go away.

The Barter System

http://orenishi.prettygetter.tv

(I changed the URL on the 1/100 chance Oren is slimy and tried to copy the site before he did the repairs.)

Wot u think? Not bad, for a sum total of 10 minutes of interaction time, eh? (Told you he was high-energy!)

So the deal is, I drop the car off on Monday am, rollerblade home, he fixes it, hopefully same day, and I have wheels again. I also left the door open for doing more web work for more repairs.

It's official, Clio has a mechanic. :)

Now Clio needs a desk, my back is KILLING me!

Car Pay Diem

$600. That's the total estimate to get the Stratosphere back in working condition. She's intermittently overheating and oozing ounces of coolant in the process. A desert is not the place to have an overheating car; I need to get it fixed.

Oren was pretty cool about the whole thing. I just had a feeling about the place as I drove by. Call it female intuition, or a sign, but I knew this was the place to go. He was high energy, not something you often see in mechanics, and it was obvious he loved running his own shop.

"I don't have $600," I replied, my car still 6 feet in the air.

I want to crawl into a hole as he tells me about "diagnostic fees." He thinks I'm trying to stiff him, or just shopping around for a free diagnostic. Reasonable, given this town. I assure him that I'm sincere about getting the car fixed, I just literally don't have $600. He already knew I just drove across the country, so he pauses at this, and takes me for my word.

As he's typing up the diagnostic report, he asks, "How did you come by my shop?" I told him I follow my intuition, and as I drove by, it made his store shine and that's why I went there. (Hey, it's Vegas, where else is one so justified in following their intuition?) He pauses at this again. I mention that I knew I was in the right place when I saw he was left handed too. (Lefties watch out for each other!) I continued, "After driving by, I looked you up online, got your number, and voila."

"What did you think of the site?"

It's pretty slick, but has some glaring HCI issues. "It's very classy, but doesn't have your hours listed anywhere on it." I didn't tell him about the other errors.

"Oh, now that I'm where I am in the Google ranking, I don't dare change it."

An opportunity?

"But you can edit your page to add your hours; that won't affect your ranking. Trust me," I added, "I used to design and build websites back East."

We talk a bit more about websites, and he tells me that he got his present website by bartering with a woman for repairs who like me, didn't have the money. There it is... that's the intuition seeing the opportunity before I was aware of it. Hallelujah!

So... now I go home and build a few websites (so it looks like he is multiple stores) and hopefully tomorrow he'll look at it all and go, "Wow! That's great! Bring in your car and let's get it fixed!"

(fingers crossed)

$5 (Sticker Shock)

Woke up after sleeping for 15 hours and went to the grocery across the street. Imagine my shock when - used to Walmart prices - everything I saw was $5!

Orange juice? $5.
Doritos? $5.
Soup? $5.
A frozen meal? $9.50. Okay, that's not $5, but it's like, $5 more than what I was used to paying!

Eeep! I hunted for the cheapest stuff I could find and left with a few days worth of food. I guess I'm going back to Walmart.

Le Retour de Clio

With a roof over my head and a bed under my bod, I turned to the reason why I came out here: poker. Maslow's needs were met, it was time to get back into the game.

I forgot how in Vegas, you get dry almost instantly stepping out of the shower. It makes hair care much simpler, and now that I could take showers, that meant I could get away with funkier styles that in Indiana would have left me detangling for hours over a warm pan of microwaved water. It felt good to get back into work clothes again, I'd been casual for far too long.

In preparation, I took a little disco nap in the afternoon and arrived fresh at 11pm. The Mandalay Bay poker room was packed, but I got a seat quickly at the front. It didn't take me long to figure out that there were seven (7!) local semi-pros playing, two tourists, and me. "What the heck," I thought, "this is an AWFUL game to be in, but let us see how it goes." I wanted to see how I stacked up against the local pros.

As I said, it was an awful game. Right off the bat, my second hand, I get pocket aces. Cool! I'm next to last to act, and there is a lot of action in front of me: one player called the $2 minimum bet, then another raised it to $7. There were 4 other callers, making there about $30 in the pot when it was my turn to act. Now aces is a horrible hand against a lot of people at once, so of course I raise to thin out the field - hopefully going heads up with another player.

I raise: $50. They'd have to be crazy to call. Four other people were crazy! With nearly $250 in the pot, the flop comes 789. I know I'm folding as soon as I see the flop, but the betting in front of me confirms it: someone flopped a straight and my hand is a loser. So right off the bat, I'm down $50. Not a great start. Turned out, three (3!) people flopped a straight! One had 56, one had 6T, and one had TJ. Calling $50 preflop with those hands? Money didn't mean much at this table.

A new tourist sits down wearing a red shirt with the letters, G E O R G I A on them. He instantly becomes known as Georgia. He's drunk and playing very aggressive. I've seen this behavior time and time and time again, and it works well. Just bet a lot of money every chance you get and people will fold to your aggression every time (in these kind of weak games, anyway). He built up quite a stack doing that, betting with absolutely nothing. The man understand aggression and played it well. Unfortunately, he didn't understand much else about poker and soon was sporting a bulls-eye right on his forehead. Everyone was playing snake in the grass... waiting for a good hand, then striking to take all his money.

But that didn't happen. I played a few more pots, folded on the flop, then made a score against Georgia for $100 putting me back to even. Shortly thereafter, the game broke up because it was just me and the locals. They all left in disgust that the game was so bad (LOL) and the four of us left were moved to different tables.

The second table was awesome. A GREAT game, both in terms of entertainment and potential winnings. I ended up staying at that table for thirteen (13!) straight hours. Since this was my first time back, I was pushing limits, seeing how the marathon session would affect my play. Answer? Not much. Once I got into a zone, I was fine. It wasn't until my vision started getting blurry that my concentration started wavering, but that wasn't until 2pm the next afternoon.

In the end, for that marathon session, I was down exactly $100. That's like, -$7.60 an hour, not a very good wage, but hey, it was the first time back in over a year, and I learned a lot, not just about me, but how the game has changed since then. Over the course of 16 hours, I played about 20 hands, folded most of them on the flop and won all the ones I showed down, so I felt really good about those stats. I should have played more hands, but it was my first time back, and I didn't have any bluffing money. I was down most of the night and never got more than $10 up or $200 down. I wanted to keep playing, but it was getting hard to focus my eyes on the cards, so I figured it was time to go home. I barely made it before crashing hard. All in all, a good night.

It's great to be back!

Home Sweet Home

I had to buy a bed, so I bought a $30 blow-up one from Coleman at Target, just like the one I slept on in New York. And, that rolls up to the size of the box that the computer is sitting on, so I can take it with me. Literally, have car, will travel.

My office is a bit lacking, what with there being no desk or chair, but the wall works and the blanket makes it feel like not so much sitting on the floor as sitting on the floor on a blanket. Playing the piano standing up is trickier, but it should just make my playing sitting down better.

It ain't much, but it's in Vegas, it's quiet, it's got trees and grass outside, and it's close to all kinds of good places. Not sure how long I'll be here, but for now, it's home.