Jason's Incredibly Lame Blog: 2005

Friday, December 23, 2005

Wooohooo!

Finally some poker luck (sort of)

Haven't been playing much this month as time always seems to be at a premium in December, but when I've had time I've been plugging away at the Party Poker ministeps. I managed to get myself 2 freerolls into step 5 tourneys and played one today. Got to heads up and took a bad beat when my opponents A8 outflopped my KK, but oh well, 2nd place is still $1K so it's all good. Hopefully a sign of things to come.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

New website I stumbled upon.

Well, it's not new, just new to me because I hadn't been there before:

http://www.damninteresting.com/

I made the same face when I saw this picture.

Because it makes me laugh, I present Wil Wheaton in a funny sweater:

Wil has also started his own weekly podcast "Radio Free Burrito" which has been somewhat entertaining so far.

Rant Time

Some things that are currently pissing me off:

Satellite Radio

Specifically Canadian satellite radio. Both Sirius and XM started providing service in Canada on December 1st. I was all psyched to go buy a radio and sign up with Sirius so that I could listen to Howard Stern when he jumps to satellite in January, but became more than a little pissed off when I found out that Howard 100 and Howard 101 won't be carried by Sirius Canada. At the same time XM is broadcasting Opie and Anthony, who while not quite as famous or abrasive as Stern, have racked up a healthy number of fines from the FCC over the years.

Why no Howard, you ask? I have no idea. Sirius made a statement where they said "The CRTC, who we are licensed to, would eventually force us to take Stern down, because we have standards we have to abide by in this country when you own a broadcasting license". To me that smells of BS.

Satellite radio isn't like regular radio, you can't just stumble upon something you find offensive. To receive the show you need to:

purchase a satellite radio
fill out all the paperwork and pay a monthly fee for the service
search through 100+ stations to find the one containing some Howard Stern goodness.

To use an example from Satellite TV, I can subscribe to Hustler TV, which shows a nonstop schedule of honest to goodness hardcore pornography (not that there is anything wrong with that), and the CRTC doesn't seem to be threatening to shut down ExpressVu or Starchoice. Yet for some reason Sirius doesn't seem to want to risk a run in with the CRTC, while their only competition is providing a similar show. This was perplexing to me, as Sirius Canada is partly owned by Sirius US, who are paying Stern $500,000,000 over the next 5 years to provide 2 channels of content. You'd think that they would want to make the service available to as many subscribers as possible to recoup that huge expenditure. But wait, I did say Sirius Canada is partly owned the US parent company. Who else owns Sirius Canada? A little research shows the other parts are owned by Standard Broadcasting (a large media conglomerate) and the CBC. Hmmmm....so the federal government decides to hand out 2 licenses to satellite radio operators and shockingly one of them goes to, a company partly owned by the federal government, oh how I am shocked. And in exchange for this little favour, Sirius Canada has seemingly agreed not to do anything that could cause the CRTC a headache instead of doing everything they can to attract customers, well isn't that nice of them.

I'm not 100% sure I had a clear point in there, but basically I'm saying I want my Howard Stern damn it, and I shouldn't have to do it by downloading the episodes off the net or buying a grey market radio and signing up for service with a fake US address. I'm an adult, I can decide what I do and don't want to hear, so let me do it, legally.

Winter

Fuck Winter.

The Federal Election

Earth to the morons who started up the non confidence vote and caused this mess: You aren't going to form the new government. The Fiberals are going to form another minority government, and everything will be the same except it'll be 2 months later and nothing will have happened in parliament during that time. Great use of taxpayer money chumps. Oh and could someone with the conservative party let me know where they are going to get the money to replace the $4.5B/year that dropping the GST to 6% is going to cost us?

Ok, I feel somewhat better now.

Monday, December 05, 2005

YIkes...

Almost a month without a post...I'm being negligent.

Let's see, what's going on.

Birthday - I had one, I'm getting old. Sat in my favourite Brew Pub on Saturday night surrounded by friends and family and knocked back several pints of beer and mead, had some interesting conversations, accidentally punched my cousin in the nose and made him bleed. Let him have one free shot at me to make it even and we're good. Got some presents, including a Rubik's Cube, some books I'd been wanting to read, a pocket knife and a multitool and a DVD (more on that below). One more year until I hit the big 3-0.

Poker - Poker is continuing to kick my ass. I can't win lately, if there is one card in the deck that can save someone, that's the card that shows up on the river, every time. I know it will turn around and I'll get that money all back in the long run, but this month was one kick in the balls after another.

On the upside, the friendly people at Party Poker decided I hadn't played there in too long so they gave me $100. I've been using it to play some of their step tournaments in hopes of getting a big payday by winning a Step 5. For those not in the know, the party step tournaments are basically the pyramid scheme of poker. The tournaments are comprised of 5 steps and you can buy in at any level, the mini-steps I've been playing cost $6 to play and are a 10 person tournament, if you win one you get to move on the level 2 (or you can buy in to level 2 for $22), if you come in first or 2nd you get to move on to level 3 etc. and there are other consolation prizes at each of the levels that generally consist of free rolls at the same level or one of the lower levels. The big pay off comes at the top of the pyramid, 1st place in a mini-step 5 pays $2000. I've turned my free $100 into enough free rolls at various levels in the pyramid that I'll probably be playing them for the next few weeks, and hopefully I'll take down the big prize in one of the step 5's, and if I don't it was no biggie because it was free money anyway.

TV - I'm not going to do my standard TV reviews this time around because it would take to long to catch up on the last month. For me, the break out hit of the year is My Name is Earl and generally people seem to agree, it's getting excellent ratings for a new sitcom, the critics are very kind to it and NBC has enough confidence in it that in January they are going to move it to Thursday night, as they try and rebuild their Thursday night "Must See TV" comedy line up. I hope it sticks around for a good long time and that the writing stays as consistently excellent as it has been. I'm 3 episodes behind on watching Lost, I'm going to catch up this week. Note to ABC, give me back my Boston Legal right now you bastards.

Movies - For my Birthday, my wife bought me March of the Penguins on DVD and we watched it the other night. It is a documentary about the mating habits of the emperor penguins. I had wanted to see it in the theatre, but didn't get around to it. It was excellent. It's amazing the lengths that these birds go through to keep their species going. The males tend to the eggs and go for over 4 months without food in the harshest conditions on the planet to keep them safe and warm. It was very awe inspiring and I highly recommend it for all the documentary fans out there.

A lot of my time has been spent lately playing board games online. Spiel by Web has several games online that you can play for free. They are all turn based games, and the site alerts you by email when it is your turn to play. For the most part people tend to make 1 or 2 moves a day, and a game can take a week or two to play. I of course am crazy and have about 40 games on the go right now :P

Well that's enough of that, I promise to be more diligent with updates in the future.

Monday, November 07, 2005

I hate play pokah, pokah sucks.

Just played one 3.5 hour disaster of a session this week. Lost $300. Huge hand after huge hand sucked out on left and right. For the record you don't want 5 donkeys at your table in a limit game, one of them will always catch their miracle card. Oh well, this week should be good. My local casino is hosting a series of tournaments this week so there will be a ton of side games going and a chance to play with people other than the regulars.

Monday, October 31, 2005

I like play pokah, pokah is nice....

It looked like it was going to be a bad week on the green felt but all turned out well.

Played Wednesday night, managed to lose $200 fairly quickly. Looked like I might be in for another bad week. Bought back in for another $200 and more or less stagnated around $150 in front of me for the next 2 hours or so and then bang bang bang, 3 good pots in a row and I'm back up to a little better than even on the night and decide it would be best to not tempt the poker gods anymore for the evening. $44 to the good.

Went back and played Thursday night and got off to a fast start, flopped a straight on the 3rd hand of the night to take down a fairly big kill pot that put me up close to $200. Then from there it looked like my fortunes were changing for the worst again, hand after hand I'd start with the best cards and get outdrawn. Finally I decided I'd had enough and was about to leave about $50 ahead, but then changed my minded and opted to play one last orbit. That was a good decision, as I took down the next 2 pots in a row which put me back up over $200.

Saturday, the casino was hosting a satellite tournament to win seats in their $1000 buy in event on November 12th. Buy in for the Satellite was $110. Both me and my dad played but neither of us had any luck in the tourney so it was off to the poker room for some $5/$10 action. Dad got there a while before I did and was playing when I got to the room. I only had to wait 20 minutes or so for a seat to open up. Didn't have much luck in the first seat I was in and managed to get stuck about $75 in 20 minutes or so, but then a seat opened up at the other table, where my dad was playing so I decided to see if my luck was better over there. Sure enough first hand I sit down for is a kill pot, I get dealt AJ in middle position and limp in, a couple of others limp as well and we see a flop of J73. I'm pretty happy with this flop and also happy that the guy who is first to act bets. I'm next to act and raise, one caller behind me and the original better also calls. Turn is a Q. First position checks and I bet, guy behind me raises and the guy in first position folds. Now, I've played a lot of hands with the raiser and I know that he has a tendency of overplaying a lot of marginal hands. I'm pretty sure my jacks are good here but I can't be certain that he doesn't have something like QJ or even J7 so I just call. River is a brick, I'm first to act and just check, villain quickly throws a bet into the pot and I go into the tank, studying him. He definitely doesn't look very comfortable, and I know that he isn't good enough to be trying to give off a false tell so I call and he swears under his breath as he flips up AK, woohoo, first hand at the new table and I'm back above even.

From there I more or less took control of a fairly weak table, If I told you how many times I got paid off on the river by someone with A high or 3rd pair you wouldn't believe me. There were multiple people in the game who would call bets all the way to the river with almost nothing and didn't seem to have any concept of things like starting hand values. I left after about 4 hours or so, up about $340.

This new part time job is working out good so far, for the month I'm up about 4 big bets an hour, where else could I find a job that paid that well where I get to set my own hours?

An eventful bye week...

It's rare for a football team to be front page news on their bye week, but the Riders have a certain knack for getting unneeded press at the wrong times.

Early Friday news broke that 7th year import linebacker Trevis Smith was arrested at his home in Regina on charges of aggravated sexual assault in a case involving a woman in BC. Speculation began immediately, what were the mitigating circumstances that elevated the charge to being aggravated? We only had to wait a few hours to get that answer. He is apparently HIV positive, a fact we can assume he didn't share with his sexual partner in this case.

This is not the first time that the off field actions of a player have made front page headlines during the regime of head coach Danny Barrett and GM Roy Shivers and I for one am sick of it. It's not bad enough that they seemly completely inept when it comes to fielding anything that vaguely resemble an offense on the field, but they have also lost complete control of their locker room.

Regina is a fairly small community, and members of the Riders are something of celebrities around town. They stick out in crowds, and it doesn't take long for the grapevine to get going when one of them is seen doing something they shouldn't be. I believe it's time the management and coaches lay down the law with the players and let them know that in no uncertain terms will negative publicity be tolerated any longer. I'd like to see the players submit to frequent drug testing and be made to adhere to a strict code of conduct when they are in the community. Once the off field problems are solved, it should be easier to fix the problems on the field.

One crappy week of TV

YAWN...Is it too much to ask that we don't get reruns for at least the first 2 months of a new TV season?

My Name is Earl, Lost, CSI...all repeats this week. Were they really so concerned about going up against some crappy baseball games?

Boston Legal - Not the best episode of the series, it was a bit flat, but still head and shoulders above just about any other show on television. Sad to see Betty White go, I really liked her character. Note to Entertainment Weekly TV "critic" Mark Harris: If you don't find this show funny please have a funny bone transplant, yours is clearly malfunctioning.

CSI: NY - Not even qualifying it anymore, this is without a doubt the best series of the CSI franchise. Solid and consistent every week.

Smallville - Lana Lang: Vampire....uhhhhh...ok...For some reason I didn't hate this episode even though it was possibly one of the most retarded concepts the show has done yet. Kudos to the writers for that.

Looks like everything but Lost is back with new episodes next week.

Monday, October 24, 2005

F**kin' Zebras

The CFL has the worst officiating of any professional sports league, this should be an undeniable fact. But even by CFL standards, Dave Yule and his crew of morons should be ashamed of their performance in the Saskatchewan/Calgary game this afternoon.

Several incredibly bad calls killed any hope the Riders had of pulling out a victory against the hated Stamps today. Now don't get me wrong here, the Riders didn't do themselves any favours by not bothering to score any points in the entire 2nd half, but it is pretty hard to develop any momentum when the officials seem to have money on the other team.

Apparently it is now a penalty in the CFL to pat an opposing player on the head after a play, unnecessary roughness. Of course out of the several times that this happened in the game it was only called once - to extend a Calgary drive.

The referees are also now clairvoyant, once a player is hit, there is simply no need to wait and see if he is going to go down, might as well just blow the whistle now instead of letting the opposing team scoop up the ball he just fumbled and return it for a touchdown.

Intentional grounding? What's that? Apparently in the CFL you can't get called for it as long you have a receiver in the same stadium as your QB.

It's been bad all year but this game takes the cake. Heads should roll, but they won't. All will stay the same, because the CFL is just not proactive when it comes to improving the onfield performance of it's officials.

This is the avatar I'll be using on all the football forums I post on for the next while.

I am not a poker god

It figures that I would follow up one of my best weeks of playing poker with one of my worst. Simply nothing went right this week. Played 2 sessions for a total of about 8 hours and ended up down almost $300.

I alternated between runs of either getting zero playable hands for multiple laps of the table or, picking up nonstop decent starting hands only to never have them develop into a winning hand. I didn't keep track, but I'd guess over that 8 hour period I won less than 20 pots.

Oh well, such is variance. Next time will be better, it can't be worse.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

A useful website

Found a link to this over at digg.com. It's basically a do it yourself comics page. You pick which comic strips you want it to show and it makes up a page for you with those comics on it. Very cool.

http://darkgate.net/comic/

Monday, October 17, 2005

Another week on the felt

And the hot streak continues, man is it going to suck when the bubble bursts and I have a losing session, but at least I've gotten myself far enough ahead that I can drop a few buyins when I run cold and not have it be disastrous.

Played 3 sessions this week all 5/10 with a kill:

Wednesday night I played about 3 hours in a game that featured a few of the regulars and was rounded out by some tourists, one from Saskatoon and the rest from the US, who were up here on a hunting trip. Played well all session but didn't hit a whole lot of playable hands but the ones I did get I think I milked for as many chips as possible. Ended up booking a $170 profit.

Thursday night I played for about 2 and a half hours and got smacked in the face with the deck the whole time. Have a pocket pair? Flop a set. Have suited connectors? Flop a straight flush draw and finish either the flush or the straight on the turn. Flop a set? Have 3 other people flop straights and fill the pot with money for when the river finishes off my boat. It was pretty sick. Finished the night $430 to the good.

Saturday afternoon is the session of the week I'm most proud of and it's not because I made the most money (it was my worst session of the week in that regard) or because I made some brilliant plays (everything was done very straight forward this time out). It's because this is the session where I show how much I've improved my discipline. I started out the session catching good cards and decent flops but someone was always outdrawing me on the river and taking the pot away. In the first hour or so I managed to get myself stuck $151. There was a time when I might have gone on tilt and played fast and loose with the $49 I had left in front of me trying to get back what I had lost as quickly as possible, but that time is not now. I stayed focused and folded and folded and folded until I did eventually look down and find AK of clubs. I got a couple of clubs on the flop and finished my flush on the turn and managed to take down a pot that put me back to within $30 of being even. From there I continued to play my best and ended up making about $120 in 4.5 hours (I feel this is probably about what I should be making in his particular game).

TV this week...

My Name is Earl - I hadn't been watching this show but my uncle recommended it during Thanksgiving dinner last weekend and he usually has excellent taste in TV programs so I figured I'd give it a try. I downloaded the first 3 episodes and watched them in preparation for this weeks 4th episode and I must say I'm hooked. The show is the story of Earl, a small time petty thief and all around jackass who comes to the conclusion that bad things always happen to him because he does bad things to others. He writes himself a list of all the bad things he has ever done and sets about making them right. I highly recommend this show.

Boston Legal - A stand out episode of a show that is consistently one of the best shows on TV. William Shatner committing the shotgun murder of a fish is just great TV. This episode also provides the best line on TV this week:

Alan: This book, "A stain upon the sea", it's all about these sealice.
Denny: Interesting
Alan: They call them Cling Ons.
Denny: Did you say Klingons?

Lost - I liked this weeks episode. Which probably means I'll dislike next weeks. It's nice to see that Rose was in fact right and that Bernard did survive the crash. What happened to the other survivors from their group though? Did they cannibalize each other? Did the others kill them? How come their bunker seems to suck compared to the one that Locke found on the other side of the island? How long will Claire make that jar of peanut butter last? Some of these questions may or may not be answered in the next episode.

CSI: NY - As much as I complain about my job from time to time, at least I know I'll never be asked to fish through a barrel of tiger poo looking for body parts.

Smallville - A good mythology episode. Let the fan speculation over who is going to die this season begin. My guess is that it will either be Chloe or Pa Kent, and I'm leaning towards Chloe if for no other reason than because she was an original character created specifically for the show thusly making her the most expendable from a DC Comics/Warner Bros perspective. Clark has go to have the discussion about his powers with Lana pretty quick or I'll never believe that she has an IQ over 60 again. She sees him die then an hour later she doesn't recoil in horror when he is standing in his house looking like he just came out of a burning building? What the heck kind of story did he come up with that had her defending him to Lex in the next scene and why didn't we get to see it? Could it be that the writers couldn't come up with anything that wasn't completely retarded either? And as if she isn't going to want to check out the scar from his gunshot, chicks dig scars.

CSI - Still feeling blah about this season. Hopefully this Warrick is married storyline is going somewhere. Are they really going to find some tight claustrophobic space to shove Nick into every week?

And that's your week in TV.

Another week, a bunch of posts

Ok, this week I'm going to break each topic into it's own post...Eventually I'd like to archive them in this way so that people who only care about one thing can just read the posts about that topic without wading through everything else.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Another long post about not much...

Let me start off by wishing all of my fellow Canucks a happy Thanksgiving. I hope you all got to gorge yourself as much as I did.

And away we go...

TV (spoilers ahead)

Boston Legal - Wow, didn't see the ending coming. I hope that this isn't the beginning of the end for Betty White's character, she is such a great foil for both Alan Shore and Shirley Schmidt. Hopefully the Black Widow will knock off another hubby, can there ever be too much Heather Locklear on TV?

Lost - Another episode that I felt was a little lacking in excitement...Maybe it was all the flashback segments with Locke. Locke on the island seems like an interesting character. Locke in the real world, not so much. It will be interesting to see what happens when they eventually miss entering the numbers in time.

CSI:NY - Another solid episode. Not as good as last week but still top notch. This is one of those shows I wish had a new episode on everyday.

CSI - I finally caught up! Unfortunately it was sort of a mixed blessing as the first episode I hadn't seen was last season's season finale. Quentin Tarantino is a master and that was 2 of the best hours of TV I ever remember seeing. The scenes with Nick trapped in the coffin were so claustrophobic that they were hard to watch. George Eads deserves some sort of award for conveying how shitty it must be to get buried alive by some psychopath. In comparison this seasons first 3 episodes have been a little bit bland.

Smallville - Ho Hum, back to the previous seasons pattern of Freak of the Week with little or no motivation. This time we get something a little different as Clark has to out think his adversary instead of just punching him through the side of a barn, but still. It was worth watching this episode just to see Clark finally crack Lex across the jaw, damn that guy needs a serious beating.

Whew, that's a lot of TV.

Poker

As you all can see from the post before this one, I'll be playing in PokerStars blogger championship. It's an online freeroll with a trip to play in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure tournament as first place. However if I can't finish in first I hope to finish a few tables from the top. I already have a monitor I'm quite happy with and have no real interest in an X-Box 360, but I've been jonesing pretty badly for one of those swanky new iPod Nano's to load up with podcasts.

Week one of playing all of my real money poker in live cash games went quite well I'm pleased to report.

I played 2 fairly short sessions this week, both in $5/$10 games with a kill. On Thursday night I played for 2 and a half hours against a table made up mostly of regulars whom I've played a lot both in tournaments and cash games, a lot of whom I have fairly good reads on before I sit down. The game featured 3 players that are know to play quite loose, 2 of whom I had position on almost every hand. I finished the evening $155 to the good, not bad for under 3 hours work but it is of course a win rate I know isn't actually sustainable over a statistically significant number of hands.

Saturday night I went and played for another 2 and a half hours and was fortunate to play against what is basically a dream table of opponents. I'd never actually played against any of the players in this game before and in fact didn't even recognize most of them. I'm pretty sure atleast 3 of the players were in a casino card room for the first time in their lives and with only one exception out of our starting 10 players all of the players at this table were very very weak. I wish I could play against this table every night and that none of them ever develop their skills further than they are now. Ended the night $250 up.

Hopefully I'll have more free time this week and can get in a few longer sessions.

Beer

If ever you are in Regina the place to go for quality brew is Bushwakker. The first Friday night of every month is "First Firkin Friday" for which they bring out a small keg of beer which is only available for that night. This week featured Mitch's Deadhead Red a variation on their very popular Dungarvon Irish Red suped up by new brewmaster Mitch.

The night also saw my first experience with bartender Scott's new creation, which we have dubbed Jagerilla, 2 shots of Jagermeister in a pint glass of their homebrew sarsaparilla, mmm mmm good.

I had planned on posting some pictures from the evening but they turned out a little fuzzy, that's drunken camera work for ya.

Football

All was not well for the beloved hometown Saskatchewan Roughriders this week as they played host to the Montreal Alouettes. A very close game basically came down to one huge play. trailing by a point with less than 2 minutes left in the game we had the Al's backed up 2nd and 30 deep in their own end and our usually impeccable defense chose that moment o lay a huge egg and give up a 65 yard passing play that all but ended the game. Oh well it was a fun 5 game winning streak while it lasted.

Now I have to try and avoid choking on my own vomit on Monday when I'll be forced to cheer for the much hated Toronto Argonauts as they host the Edmonton Eskimos. An Argo win means that we maintain our 2nd place tie with the Eskimos and are inching closer to a home playoff game.

Enough for now.

J.

Friday, October 07, 2005

Poker Championship

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

This event is powered by PokerStars.

Registration code: 5061910

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Podcasts

So my current addiction is downloading and listening to internet radio shows and I figured I'd share some of my favourites with anyone who might have accidentally stumbled across this blog while looking for something more interesting to read.

Diggnation - Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, who were both on air personalities on TechTV before G4 sucked the soul out of what was a great TV station, host a weekly show where they drink beer and discuss the top stories from Digg.com.

TWiT - This Week in Tech also harkens back to the days when TechTV was good. Leo Laporte hosts a weekly show about all things tech with a revolving panel of co-hosts including John C. Dvorak, Kevin Rose, Patrick Norton, etc.

Fan Boy Radio - An always excellent, hour long, weekly show about all things related to comics. They have some truly outstanding interviews with some of the biggest names in the field.

Rounders - The best poker show I've found. Recent guests have included T.J. Cloutier, Chris Ferguson and Mike Matusow.

Does anyone have suggestions of other shows I should kill time at work listening too?

Mental dump...

So much to cover, man I should update this more often.

TV

BEWARE: SPOILERS ABOUND!

Boston Legal - I simply can't get enough of this show. This is William Shatner at his finest, and his interaction with James Spader is the best on TV. They both greatly deserved the Emmys that they recently won.

Lost - Well that was a much better episode than last weeks. I don't know why but I just couldn't get into last weeks episode, it just seemed really flat to me. This week was completely different, it had me sitting on the edge of my seat the entire time. The scenes with Michael and Sawyer on the raft were amazing. I can't wait for this weeks episode and more details on who the guys with the clubs are. My guess is leaning towards them being descendants of the crew and slaves of the Black Rock, of course my track record for guessing things on this show is pretty weak, so I'll probably be completely wrong.

CSI: NY - Great. Perfect. Consistently one of the highest quality shows on TV and hopefully this season doesn't suffer from the dreaded sophomore jinx.

CSI - Still haven't started to watch this seasons episodes...maybe I'll just keep saving them up so I have something to watch next summer :P Ok, Ok, OK, I'll try my best to catch up this week.

Smallville - Wooohoo. Now that's jam packed season premiere. The Fortress of Solitude is created. Clark finds out Chloe knows his secret. Clark and Lana look like they are headed back into relationshipland. Lionel is coocoo for Coco-puffs. Oh, and then there is all the stuff that happens in the other 75% of the episode. This is looking like it could be a great season.

Whew...I'm kind of glad that my other 2 favourite shows, The Shield and 24 won't be on for awhile, it's hard enough keeping up with these.

Poker

Well, I think it finally happened. The morons have spoiled online poker for me. I accept the fact that bad beats happen, but lately online it hasn't been so much about the bad beats as it has the COMPLETELY RETARDED beats. I can handle situations like having AA cracked by KK, that's no big deal, it happens. Lately however I just can't figure out what the fuck some of these morons are thinking and why it's working for them. I've had people call off their entire stacks preflop with K7 suited against my KK only to have the flop come down 977, the case K doesn't fall and I am done. I've had AA run down by A6 suited, AK cracked by a smaller A more times than I an count. And it's not like these have been in $1 Sit n' Go's, it's been in $22 or $33 multitable tournaments with prizepools well into the thousands of dollars.

So, I cashed out all the money I had remaining online (except a few dollars so I can still play the occasional tournament with the friendly folks from fullcontacpoker.com) and am going to play exclusively live face to face poker against actual people. I'll update my progress here.

Football

It's like Christmas came early and I got everything on my list!

A Hamilton win against the Eskimos? Check.
A Montreal win against the Stamps? Check.
The Riders ending BC's 15 month home winning streak? OH HELL YA.

A Rider team that most (including me) had all but written off 6 short weeks ago as being done has turned things around nicely and after a 5 game winning streak sit in a 2nd place tie with Edmonton, one game ahead of Calgary. Hold on to your hat's folks, the season is far from over and things are just heating up.

This week let's hope for:

A Rider win at home versus the Alouettes
A Toronto win at home against the Esks.
A BC loss in Winnipeg. (a guy can dream can't he?)

Ok, enough for now...more some other time.
J.

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

New Feature

I added a script that automatically grabs the latest stories at Digg.com and links to them. For you non-techie types I'll translate: Random headlines will now appear on the left hand side of this page under the heading "DIGG HEADLINES".

Digg.com is a great site for finding links to stories on many different topics.

edit: I also decided to add a second section which shows the most recent stories that I have dugg.

Monday, September 26, 2005

Another week, more TV...

I now know that at least one person is reading my mindless drivel so I shall continue prattling on about nothing in particular. My goal for the week will be to have two people tell me that they like my shit.

Feeling a little under the weather on Friday night I didn't make it to the Rider game, but I did watch it on the tube. Another excellent game (except on the part of the refs, as per usual) sees the boys in green extend their winning streak to 4 games, of course it would have been nice if the Lions didn't shit the bed against the Esks, but oh well.

CSI:NY didn't end up having their season premiere last weeks, due to the world needing to stop and listen to a speech made by the self appointed leader and moral compass of the free world, George W. Bush. Hopefully we'll get to see a new episode this week.

Haven't got around to watching my recorded copy of CSI yet so I can't comment on that either...this is an exciting blog entry, eh? :P

I did watch Lost and as predicted all we got was a bunch more questions, no answers, no sign of Michael, Jin or Sawyer...only a brief glimpse of Walt, although it might not have been Walt at all. Apparently the hatch leads into some sort of museum of 80's artifacts, I really hope they find a Rubic's Cube in there, because if I was trapped on a remote island with no real chance of being rescued I'd want a Rubic's Cube.

Currently the show I most look forward to every week other than Lost is Weeds which I am forced to download because Canada sucks and we can't get Showtime (nor HBO) here because of a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit. It's a half hour drama/comedy about a widowed suburban soccer mom who becomes the weed hookup in her perfect little suburb to make ends meet. If you have the ability to watch this show I give it my highest recommendation.

Downloaded the two most recent episodes of this years World Series of Poker and I'd like to say how glad I am that the Main event isn't Limit 7 Card Stud. My god what a horrendously boring game that is to watch. Don't get me wrong, I love playing it, but it has to be the worst variant of poker there is to watch other people play. If all the big $10K buy in events were Limit 7 Card Stud, the big poker boom we are experiencing right now would have never happened.

Corner Gas wasn't quite as entertaining this week as last, but it was still great.

Two more season premieres this week of shows I never miss. First up is the now on Tuesday night, Boston Legal. I like this show more and more every time I see it and I think it was really hitting it's stride before being yanked a little prematurely last season to make room for Grey's Anatomy. The additions of Candace Bergen and Betty White really rounded out the cast nicely. Hopefully James Spader and William Shatner both winning the Emmy in their respective categories will clue ABC into what a great show they have.

Also changing time slots this year we find the season premiere of Smallville on Thursday night. Yes I am giant nerd and yes I do religiously watch Superman: 90210....wanna make something of it?

Peace.
J.

Monday, September 19, 2005

Joy

The long boring summer TV season is finally over.

A few of my favourite shows (Simpsons, Family Guy) have already had their season premieres, but the new TV season really kicks into high gear this week.

Tonight featured the beginning of the 3rd season of Corner Gas, one of the funniest damn shows on TV, my ribs actually hurt after watching tonight's episode. Brent Butt is one of the funniest people on TV, I just never get sick of this show, I'll watch the reruns over and over again just like The Simpsons.

Wednesday night is the season premiere of my favourite new show from last year, Lost. What's in the hatch? What will happen to Jin, Michael and Sawyer? What do the numbers mean? What is the deal with the island anyway? I'll be happy if they answer 1 of these questions this week.

Then without having to wait longer than a commercial break, it's straight into CSI: NY, my favourite of the 3 CSI's (but there isn't a huge difference in quality between this and CSI). I don't watch CSI: Miami unless there is absolutely nothing else of interest on and there are no movies I feel like going and seeing playing. David Caruso is just about the worst actor in the history of acting.

Thursday night we get the season premiere of CSI, which means I'll have to get around to watching last season's season finale sometime this week :P I can be so lazy about catching up on things sometimes.

Yep, it's a good week to be a couch potato.

Catching up...

Well it's been a few days since I wrote anything, and I'm trying desperately to stay awake for the last 3 hours of my shift at work, so....

Let's see, what did I do on my days off...

As per usual I spent a plurality of the time in front of the computer playing some online poker (digital crack)...no big scores of note to report on but I didn't manage to lose any money either so that's good enough for me.

Went to our friendly neighbourhood casino on Saturday to play in a live poker tournament. I do this every couple of weeks and have fared quite well in their tournaments over the last 12-18 months. But fortune was not smiling on me this day and I was out of the tournament in a speedy 1 hour and 40 minutes.

The early exit gave me time to wander past the friendly neighbourhood comic store on the way home and pick up my weekly pile of funny books. Haven't really had time to read through them all but so far out of the stuff I have read I was most disappointed with All Star Batman and Robin...so far this book has been all kinds of suck, if something interesting doesn't happen next issue it will probably be removed from my pull list.

Then I got to finish off the weekend with one of the best football experiences of my life. The much beloved Saskatchewan Roughriders were locked in a pitched battle against the evil Edmonton Eskimos. The game was a see saw battle that saw many impressive offensive drives and many equally impressive defensive stands for both sides. The game came down to the final minutes when the Eskimos, down by 1, drove most of the length of the field seemingly headed towards a last second victory. With 7 seconds on the clock they lined up their kicker to attempt a relatively simple 27 yard field goal to give them the win, but that's when something magical happened. The crowd came to life . It got louder in that stadium than I've heard it in ages. At first it sound like a roar, but slowly the sound became more unified. A chant broke out...block that kick...block that kick....BLOCK THAT KICK! Edmonton's rookie kicker hesitated for a split second as he stepped towards the ball, but that little amount of hesitation gave Omarr Morgan the split second he needed to leap into the path of the ball and knock it down. The stadium erupted. It will be a moment that will live in the memories of all the fans in attendance that day. It was simply amazing.

J.

Monday, September 12, 2005

Grrrrrr....Spam Bad!

I was shocked to see that my previous post had generated 3 comments in under an hour, then I read them and saw all of them were spam. Word Verification has now been turned on so hopefully that is the end of the spamming. All the spammers out there can go take a long walk off a short pier as far as I'm concerned.

So here it is...

So here it is, my very own blog. I created this account because I wanted to be able to comment on my friend Jim's incredibly uninteresting blog :P

But once I started going I wasted half the night screwing around with this page. I can see why people like doing this.

I hope a few people find this random missives to be interesting and or entertaining. Everyone hold on to your hats you are in for a bumpy ride. Be prepared for this space to be filled with my rants when something pisses me off, pseudo-reviews of something I have read or watched recently that I thought was good or sucked, some poker nerd content (ya, I know, there aren't nearly enough poker blogs out there :P), etc.

J.

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Links!

Alright people we have links!

These are all sites I visit constantly throughout the day.

CNN and Google News: These are pretty self explanatory, everyone should make a small effort to keep up with current events
Two Plus Two Publishing: The publishers of some of the finest poker books on the market, and home of the best poker discussion forum on the internet, reading the posts on this site daily will make you a better poker player.
13thman/Riderfans: CFL Football baby...we've got bigger balls.
D&D minis: A miniature wargame that has become my latest obsession.
Newsarama/CBR: together they provide all the info you could want on the world of comic books
comicreaders: The best damn comic shop in town and constant sink for my paycheque.

I also included a list of the comic strips I read online everyday.

My first post

This is the first post in my new incredibly lame blog.

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