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.
Friday, December 23, 2005
Wooohooo!
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:
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.
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