Category: Uncategorized

After taking last week off for holiday awesomeness with my family, the WWdN poker tournaments at PokerStars are back in action.

Today, we have the West Coast Warmup number three:

What: WWdN: West Coast Warmup #3
Where: PokerStars.
When: Thursday, December 1. 7:30 PST
Password: monkey
Tournament number: 15885231
Buy-in: $10+1

Tomorrow, we have the WWdN: ZowieZ Invitational

What: WWdN: ZowieZ Invitational
Where: PokerStars.
When: Friday, December 2. 7:00 EST
Password: monkey
Tournament number: 15886396
Buy-in: $10+1

I was doing really well in the HeyKidsItsBG Invitational, right up until I got sort of unlucky trying to bust a short stack. After a limp and a raise, I was getting 6-1 on my money with pocket fives, so I re-raised all-in to isolate the short-stack. I was in the lead, but just barely, against hands like KQ and AQ . . . until the KQ flopped two pair. Ouch. Two people went broke on that hand, and two others were crippled. Nice hand, well-played. A few hands later, I found AKo, and lost a race to a pair of eights. Here’s what I blogged at CardSquad:

He raised it 4x the BB, so I came over the top for 3x his raise, which
pretty much committed me. When he went all-in, I knew I was behind, but
getting 3-1 on my money, I thought it was a good call, since I was at
worst 50-50 unless he had an ace. Oh, there’s an 8 on the flop. D’oh!

I finished fourteenth, which was pretty awful, considering my chip position right before the debacle with presto (that’s pocket fives, for you non-BARGErs.) It illustrates the reality of a no-limit tournament: you can go from first place to the parking lot in just a few hands if you get stupid, unlucky, or both. Of course, you can also go from last to first just as easily. "That’s no limit, baby!"

Hope to see lots of players tonight and tomorrow!

Annie (who is not my wife and partner-in-crime Anne, but is my friend and ACME dance partner Annie) has updated her blog, Jesus’ Favorite.

annie writes:

"hey wil old buddy funny guy,

do i get a day off from the blog cuz of the holiday? i asked duke nickerson and he said no.  but I thought i’d try you cuz you’re way cooler and stuff.

xo,
jesus’ favorite "

ELBOW AND SEND
WAIT FOR RESPONSE

Nothing.

STILL WAITING…

He’s probably making pie and blogging about it.

Wil:  “Blog blog I love pie blog blog I went to the store blog blog I’m hot."

LEAVE COMPUTER
GO DO NON-NERD THING

Time passes…

GO BACK TO COMPUTER
CHECK EMAIL
PUT ON SHEILD TO AVOID NERD TRACTOR BEAM

Well, look at that Jesus!  King Wheat-Thin responds:

wil wrote:

    "Let me stop petting my Ewok and adjust my cape. Just  a moment.

    *ding ding boop bleep dingiddy whoop whoop DING!*

    Okay, the HAL9000 mark IV dual hyperthreaded comptromotron says no, you have to     update it every day for a week…"

Argh!  Double nerd negated.  And by big words no less.   Does that shit get you laid?

Anyway, FIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNE.  I’ll fucking post on a holiday.

This is the best bet I’ve ever won in my life. I may be the King, and Shane may be the Duke, but Annie is clearly teh funnay.

Another round goes to Sertich. Shane, we’re getting our asses kicked . . . by a girl.

Ryan and Nolan played basketball in the driveway. I had my PowerBook on the breakfast table, and I caught bits of their conversation through the open window as I worked.

". . . a freshman?" Ryan said.

"Yeah," Nolan said.

"What’s her –" A car drove up the street, and drowned Ryan out.

Her? My parental spideysense switched on, but I tried to stay focused on my work.

"That’s cool." I thought. "I shouldn’t be listening to their conversation, anyway."

For the next several minutes, I couldn’t hear anything but the bounce of the ball, and then "Brick!" from Nolan as the ball bounced off the backboard, and landed beneath the kitchen window. Ryan walked over to pick it up.

" . . . is so freakin’ hot," Nolan said.

"Yeah," Ryan said as he picked up the ball, "but she’s not your type. She’s a geek, just like me."

I looked out the window. Did he see me? No. He tossed the ball back to Nolan.

"Your ball," he said.

I closed my Powerbook and watched them play in the fading afternoon sunlight. I saw that Ryan was wearing a Mozilla T-shirt.

. . . just like me.

Pandora.com is an  incredible site that helps you discover new music. You tell it
the title of a song or name of an artist, and it will create a station
for you, starting from that selection. Pandora then plays a song from a similar artist that it thinks you’ll like, as it builds a custom net.radio station for you. The Long Tail Blog says,

"[T]hey
determine similarity not by what other people listen to but what their
small army of musicologists identify as related traits in the music
itself. You’ll get delightful stuff you never would have thought of."

I started with Soul coughing, discovered a band called
Gerling, heard an old TMBG song I’d somehow managed to never hear
over the years, and eventually heard a new band called The One AM Radio (which I LOVE, and never would have found on my own, which is the whole point of Pandora.) If you really like a band, there are links to Amazon or iTunes so you can buy the album, or explore more of their stuff on your own.

Pandora
gives you ten hours of free listening to try it out, and offers a year of service for thirty-six bucks. If pandora can stay honest, and keep
the music industry’s pay-for-play agenda out of the way, it could be an
amazing service.

(Thanks, Carsten!)

I’m giving my brain a much-needed break from the manuscript to tinker with WWdN a little bit, starting with an upgrade to MoveableType 3.2.
Man, this reminds me of the early days, back when I was working on Dancing Barefoot. It’s so fun to see this stuff come together, and it’s great to get back into a little bit of website smashing.
And that’s the question . . . I think most people read my blog via RSS in one way or another, so I don’t think it’s much of a practical issue, but I was thinking that, until I can get the real site redesign finished and live, I may temporarily use a simple, default MT template for the blog. That way the categories will work, the built-in searching will come back, if you sign in for TypeKey, it should keep you signed in, you should be able to preview comments more seamlessly, and things should just be fitter, happier, more productive.
To get all that, though, the look-n-feel we’re all used to (which will be dramatically changing soon, anyway) will have to go away. I think it’s a fair trade of form-for-function, but I’m interested in what readers think.
Thoughts?
Update: If you can read this, it means that I successfully upgraded to MT 3.2, and convereted the database. This wouldn’t have been possible without help from Jay Allen from Six Apart, and Loren Cox from Logjamming. Thanks, guys!