I've been using Google Reader for nearly a week, and I love it. The latest thing I've discovered is the ability to "share" posts I'm interested in, and, more to the point, I can include them in this blog.
So, at the top left, is snippets of articles I've decided to share with you. At the moment there's just one, but given the number of blogs I read, I'm sure that will soon grow. You can set the number of posts you want to show - I'm leaving it at the default of 5 for now.
It turns out the General Manager's vacancy does exist. Don't know what it pays, but I'm sure it will be more than I'm on now. I've told my line manager about it, and he's been really supportive. I've also spoke to one of our new bosses, and he's also encouraging me to apply. Just got to get my CV sorted out. When you've worked at the same place for 20 years its not something you often think about.
Magnus Petersson dropped the hammer in style, during the final table of the EPT event in Copenhagen. He went all in with 27o. To his horror he was called, with A9. A flop of 2-5-Q gave him a pair (just!) and a king and a jack following failed to help his opponent, doubling Petersson up and crippling his opponent.
Petersson went on to win the event.
Work has suddenly become very interesting. Not sure yet if it is in a good way or a bad way.
The company I work for has just been bought out by a PLC. We have gone from being a successful independent company to a small part of a large national company. The major shareholders have left, and the new owners are moving in.
We don't know how the management of our site will be organised. Apparently every other site is run by a General Manager. I've got my eye on that position. I think I'm the best person for the job. However, in the mean time, I have heard that there is a vacancy for a General Manager at another site, close enough to home that I won't have to relocate. It seems to me that, though I'd rather be General Manager where I am, this probably won't be decided for a while, and I have to grasp the opportunity at the other site. Even if I don't get the job, it raises my profile, and notifies our new lords and masters of my ambition.
Having worked here for 20 years, working my way up the greasy pole, it would be quite a wrench to leave; though, in some ways, it is probably easier to take on a position like that where you are not known, where you haven't been promoted over the heads of your colleagues. It has happened to me throughout my career. I am now over many people I used to work alongside, or who I even reported to. Most of them don't have a problem with it; a few always will.
British citizens, sign up here on a petition to the Prime Minister to stop software patents.
I've just blown 25$ buy-in over a period of 10 minutes. I played terribly. As an example, I knew the guy had caught a straight on the river, but I still called his big raise with my two pair! What was I doing? I just seemed to be in self-destruct mode.
I don't like rebuy tournaments.
Unfortunately this afternoon I wasn't paying attention and signed up for a $5 rebuy tournament on TonyG.
I hate the looseness of play that rebuys encourage, and the fact that you make a good call, bust someone out, and they buy straight back in again. As this was a guaranteed £150 prize pool with 12 entries, the rebuys did nothing for the final money, just dragged out the whole tournament.
Then comes the break, and the add-ons. You've really got to go for the add-on, because everybody else left in does. So you maintain the status quo.
However, despite my dislike of rebuys, I came second in this tournament, without having to rebuy myself. $34 prize, so a decent profit for an hours play. I might have won it, but I was running out of time towards the end, so I went all in with a marginal hand and lost most of my stack. I then doubled up 3 times, but finally busted out.
Your results:
You are Spider-Man
| You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.  |
Both the WPBT and Pokerworks have announced that they intend to run Blogger tournaments on Sunday evenings. Well, Sunday evening if you are in the States. Monday morning if you are in Europe. I'd love to play, but when you've got work on Monday, starting a poker tournament at 2:30am is a non-starter. I could just about deal with a 7:30 EST (12:30am GMT) start. I probably wouldn't be playing for long anyway!
My play continues to vary in quality. I am still making some stupid calls. I also seem to be going through a long period of being totally card dead. It's guaranteed at the moment that If I'm holding AQ suited I get a flop of K rag rainbow. But I shouldn't really blame the cards - I'm not making the most of what I get. Need to keep my concentration up.
Got "Thud", the latest Terry Pratchett paperback for Christmas. Finished it by the 30th. Actually read most of it by the end of Boxing Day. Its another book featuring the City Watch, which are far and away my favorite Discworld books.
Mr Vimes is now a family man, and without fail, must be home by 6pm to read to his son. In amongst this he has to deal with the aniversary of the Battle of Koom Valley, which is stirring up all the dwarfs and trolls in the city.
I won't spoil the story for anyone (if anyone is reading this!) but would just say - buy this book now. Its another fabulous Discworld story.
My poker play seems to be horribly cyclical - I play a particular format, I have some repeated success at it, and then I start to lose!
Trying to look at it dispassionately, I think I have put my finger on the problem - Confidence. As I gain confidence, my play seems to loosen up - the tight-aggressive play that brought me success in the first place goes out of the window - I see more flops. call more raises, get involved more. Of course receiving some fracking awful cards like I did last night never helps, and people calling my KK all-in (flop 752 rainbow), they show 8 10 off suit, and turn and rive bring 6 9! But enough of blaming the cards - When I'm playing well I can make something of crap cards, when I'm playing too loose, the best cards are useless, as I devalue them by playing too many marginal hands.
After mixed results at the single table SNGs, I have been playing two table six handed SNGs on CD Poker (part of the same network as Titan, amongst others), and have been rather pleased with the results - played 6, won 4, placed second in 1. Real shame about the second place, because there is a jackpot paid out for winning 4 in a row! The short handed games seem to suit me in tournaments, whilst in ring games I seem to do better with a full table. Because there are 12 entries, the prize money is worthwhile.
I have modified my SNG playing style, making use of tips in postings by Joanne and Gary. What I was particularly pleased with in these games was my heads up play. In the past, I've alternated between limping and all-in. In these games if I entered a hand it was with a raise, if I had nothing worth playing I folded my small blind. As Gary says in his post, eventually the opponents get frustrated and throw everything at you, and you snap them off. Of course if I'm running short of time then I'll push with any half decent hand and hope to get lucky - whilst winning is good, the money for second place makes it worth my while anyway.
I've installed the 64 bit version of Edgy on my laptop, and have got wireless networking going using the BCM43xx drivers, along with wifi-radar. The network is connecting during boot-up.
Wil has blogged about an article he has written entitled "Five Books Every Geek Should Read".
His 5 books are:
I Robot - Isaac Asimov
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Ringworld - Larry Niven
The Hacker Crackdown - Bruce Sterling
The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
I haven't read Neuromancer or The Hacker Crackdown, but the other three would certainly be in my top 5 books for Geeks. My other two must have books would be:
Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham (1951)
narrated in the first person, the book opens with Bill Masen waking up in hospital, his eyes covered after an operation, to find that a strange meteor shower has blinded the majority of the Earth's population. He emerges from the hospital to find society has disintegrated overnight, as people struggle to survive without site. This has left them prey to a recently discovered plant, the Triffid, which can walk and has a deadly sting. It had been cultivated for its oil, and by many people as a curiosity, with its sting regularly docked.
Apart from its references to the Soviet Union, suspected of genetically creating the triffids, this book still seems fresh, and could easily be taking place today.
This was one of the first science fiction books I read; it came in a compilation of sci-fi books, which also included I Robot and The Demolished Man.
Also by John Wyndham - The Midwich Cuckoos - all the women are impregnated with strange blond haired, golden eyed children, possessed of mental powers; The Chrysalids - a post apocalyptic world, where mutations are common, and are not tolerated. Those found with mutations are driven out, and the women are sterilized. A group of children find they have mental powers, and eventually, these abilities are discovered, and the children flee.
Dune - Frank Herbert (1965)
Set far in the future, on the desert world of Arrakis, the only place in the known universe where the spice melange can be found. Prized for its life prolonging properties, and also for giving starship navigators the gift of prescience, allowing them to safely guide their vast ships through the folds of space.
As part of an interplanetary feud, Duke Leto and his family are forced to move from their native home to Arrakis. Responsible for gathering the valuable spice, they must combat huge desert storms, giant sandworms, and the plots of their sworn enemies, House Harkonnen. The story follows Paul, son of the Duke, as his father is killed, and he is forced to seek refuge amongst the native Fremen. Brought into the vast story are politics, religion and planetary ecology, as Paul leads the Fremen against the Harkonnens, and eventually, the Emperor, ruler of the galaxy's feudal society.
Herbert wrote several sequels, but none of them match the huge scope of the original book.
Others
Other books on the shortlist - 2001 A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke (once I'd read the book I could make sense of the film!), The Book of The New Sun by Gene Wolfe, and the Elric books by Michael Moorcock.
After the long wait for Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) the release of 6.10 (Edgy) seems to have come round in no time, bringing raptures to the faithful. Eager to prove my worthiness, I rushed to the Ubuntu website within minutes of the release being announced (multiple times) on Planet Ubuntu.
A short one hour download later (isn't broadband great? I remember downloading Corel Linux over dial-up, it took a full day, good job we had a dedicated phone line at work ;-) ) I was clutching the blessed CD, and rushed to my desktop machine, ready to destroy the foul works of the evil one, and replace it with the Holy Ubuntu (actually I'm dual booting with Windows 2000, couldn't bring myself to delete it entirely, Party Poker doesn't seem to work with Wine).
A very quick installation later (you installed Windows XP lately? What a drag!) I was looking at the new, improved Ubuntu Gnome login screen. Slight change of colours, otherwise, business as usual. Log on, and the usual orange and brown colour scheme, tweaked slightly from the last release, is there.
First order of business, the internet. I access the web via a wireless access point, using a Linksys USB adapter. This had worked easily with Ubuntu Breezy, but with Dapper they completely fumbled the ball on wireless, and to be honest, after a frustrating effort trying to get wireless working on Dapper, I gave up. Initially I thought I was going to have the same problems. Edgy decided to install Prism54 drivers for my wireless adapter. Technically it is correct, it is a Prism chipset, but there appears to be so much messing to make them work, and quite a low chance of success, that I wasn't prepared to persist with them. So, blacklist the modules relating to the Prism drivers, and get cracking with Ndiswrapper. After a bit of fiddling, the familiar wlan0 appears, but no joy in connecting to my wireless access point. Then I remembered that I had become a bit more paranoid, and was using WPA encryption on the wireless network.
Wireless security is a huge weakness of Ubuntu (and I suppose, most Linux distributions). With Windows XP, it just works. Everything you need for WPA is there when you install your network card. Not so with Ubuntu. You have, to my knowledge, 3 choices. All three depend upon WPA Supplicant. Option 1 is to fire up a terminal, and configure WPA Supplicant by hand, editing the appropriate configuration files etc. Sorry guys, this isn't for me. Whilst I am quite happy to use the command line, and frequently it is the most efficient way to do something, I want a nice GUI interface for my wireless settings. This leaves two options - the Gnome Network Manager or WiFi-Radar. Both of these are in the repositories, but neither of them are installed by default. Why not! Come on, with the huge uptake in wireless, there needs to be a decision taken at Ubuntu to have a standard wireless security tool and make it industrial strength, so it Just WorksTM
I tried the Network Manager first. Grabbed it from the repositories, and a little network icon appears on the bar at the top right. Right clicking on this gives me options for setting up the network, including WPA key. After entering all the required information, I am asked to create a password for my keyring, where the WPA key will be stored. Here's the main problem with Network Manager. It is part of Gnome. You have no network connection until you are logged into Gnome and have entered your keyring password. You screw your X Windows setup, you haven't got an internet connection to find help, or to download fixes.
Having decided I wasn't happy with this, I moved along to Wifi-Radar. Once again, installed it from the repositories; no icon on the toolbar this time, but the program was amongst the entries on the menu. Starting it up, I am presented with a number of options. Looks pretty straightforward - network name (ssid) mode (auto, managed, adhoc etc, I chose auto), channel (auto again), key (you'd think this was your WPA key wouldn't you? Well, its not. I assume this is for WEP), security (open or restricted, I chose restricted). Then you come to a line which says "No WPA." Clicking on this changes it to "WPA Options" and you are presented with one option - Driver. I entered ndiswrapper in here, but some googling told me this was wrong, I needed to enter "wext" in here, which apparently is "Generic Wireless Extensions." There are also options for DHCP and Connection commands. I left these alone.
Saving my settings, I was delighted to see my wireless network appearing in the main window. Click on connect however, and I get nowhere. By running Wifi-Radar from a terminal, I see that it is looking for a WPA supplicant configuration file. More googling. I come up with the following configuration file (/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf - use your favourite editor, I use Vi, but YMMV. You'll need to run the editor with sudu).
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
#group of users allowed to control the interface
ctrl_interface_group=admin
#network options
network={
ssid="your network name here"
scan_ssid=1
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
psk="super secret password here"
}
Back to Wifi-Radar, click on connect, and after a short delay, I'm connected!
Now the main advantage of Wifi-Radar over Network Manager is, in theory that is starts at boot time as a daemon, so you don't have to enter passwords once X Windows starts, and you have a network connection independent of X Windows. I've yet to see this. After I've logged on, when I go into the Wifi-Radar gui, the connection hasn't been made; click on connect, and its there. It may be down to the Linksys adapter I am using. It is version 1, and often didn't connect first time under Windows 2000 either.
I'm going to persist with Wifi-Radar, but this issue of wireless networking, and in particular, wireless security, must be addressed if Ubuntu is going to tempt more people into defecting from Microsoft. The average user is not going to bother with all the messing about I've just described, when Windows Just Works!
Over at the Tao of Poker Pauly is lamenting the withdrawal of Party Poker from the US. As he says the fishing was great there.
But, being a privileged European, still welcome at Party (and thanks to them giving me some free money to play with, now playing there), the fishing has got even better. The standard of play in the US must be better than in the rest of the world, because there now are even more fish at every table. The withdrawal of our American brethren has just concentrated the Eurofish in one place for us. I can log on for half an hour, and, playing at the 0.10/0.25 NLHE tables (I know, I'm pathetic, but I am working up the limits!) I can be $20 up without very little effort. Of course, you are still vulnerable to the bad beats, idiots calling your set down to the river with King high and then they river a straight, but, overall, I'm winning.
I'm going to transfer my Mansion bankroll over to Pokerstars - I like the atmosphere and interface on 'stars, though the players are better than Mansion. I'm going to continue to dabble with PKR. Its got a fabulous looking, animated interface, with highly customizable avatars, and I think its great the way the view swings from player to player as they act, with appropriate gestures, selectable emotes and tricks with chips. I know its nothing to do with the actual playing of poker, but it looks great. Population is extremely low at the moment, but I'm sure as word gets around it will increase, and its the sort of site that will pull in the fish. You do need a decent PC to run it though; all that animation takes a lot of resources.
I tried playing Omaha on PKR last night (more on PKR later). Boy do I suck at Omaha. Due to the low population on PKR, I was playing heads-up, so of course I never got a break from the blinds. Within half an hour I had donked off nearly all of my massive $2.50 buy-in. I did manage to stem the bleeding, and fought my way back up to $1, to achieve a level of respectability. It is such a different game to Hold-em - A pair is just not good enough. I was regularly getting beaten with boats, flushes and straights.
I've got Haloscan comments working now, thanks to this blog posting.
I have also been able to apply the same principle to get Trackback working, by adding the following lines after the code given for the comments (replace XXX with your Haloscan username):
<script src='http://www.haloscan.com/load/XXX' type='text/javascript'> </script>
<a expr:href='"javascript:HaloScanTB(" + "\"" + data:post.id + "\"" + ");"' target='_self'>
<script type='text/javascript'>postCountTB('<data:post.id/>');</script>
</a>
16th August since last post. Really doesn't seem that long.
Anyway, been playing Poker on Mansion recently. I invested a massive $20 to start with, and, after dipping down to $10, I'm up to nearly $100. There seems to be plenty of fish around - all I have to do is wait for the premium hand, raise it up and some idiot calls. As an example, Holding a pair of Kings, I raised pre-flop, and got 4 callers, get a King on the flop, so I put in a pot sized raise, and get 2 callers. Board pairs on the turn, so now I've got a full house. Another pot sized raise, 1 caller. I go all in on the river, and once again he calls. Showdown - he's got the pair on the board plus an ace kicker! I take his entire stack, he rebuys and comes back for more.
