Category: geek stuff

Random technical musings

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geek stuff

Forced to update my blog theme

It was one of those cascading things.  I wanted to show my tweets on the blog and that created a problem because I had a very old theme that didn’t support all the cool new features of the new WordPress.  Well, actually, I didn’t even have the cool new version of WordPress either.  One thing led to another thing and I find that I had to change everything to get the features I wanted.  At this point most everything I want to work is functional, although I’ll probably still make a few changes yet.  For instance, at the moment I can’t see my custom made header with the cool cartoon shark that is my favorite image.

I suck at graphics and as you can probably see, the old header image doesn’t just plug in:

Old header
Old header

I might have to find someone talented on ITH to suck up to…

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geek stuff Uncategorized

Finally! I advance to Day Two of WSOP Event #12.

I have made it through to Day Two of the $1,500 limit poker event. I think somewhere in the area of 180 players remain and a bit less than half of those will get paid. I had a great level nine and a grueling level 10. I ended the day at 18,300 where average is around 14.5k or so. Early on, my edge on the field was comically vast. Many of these players had a very limited grasp on some fairly basic limit concepts. As Matthew commented to me, by the first forty minutes he had seen at least one mistake by every player at his table. There were so many hands I don’t think I can even remember most of them.

I made some plays that I consider fairly standard that seemed to put other players on tilt. In one hand on level 6, I raised with TT from the hijack and the SB three bet. I figure he wants to isolate me and price the big blind out, so I four bet him which he caps (five bets is the cap here). The flop comes down AK5 and when he bets, I raise. My thinking is that if he has QQ or JJ, I might get him to fold to continued aggression and if he doesn’t then I might get to showdown cheap. This seems like a pretty normal line to me, but he really hated it. The turn is a Jack, which gives me a gutshot draw to add to my collection, so I check behind with three overcards on the table. The river is a Queen, giving me the nut straight. He bets, I raise, he calls and shows AK for top two and he develops a significant attitude problem. I also made some three bet isolation raises with small pairs that also tilted people and some very standard calldowns with middling pairs on boards that missed their range most of the time.

One thing I saw was that river bets were usually extreme strength or total bluffs. If you have a good idea of their range, you can often tell which it is.

I think I pretty much kept my stack above average the whole way down. I was the last man standing at my original table, which never broke all day long. Barry Schulman was one of the last ones to bust from my original table. He was a pretty good limit player, much better than the average standard, but he was still fairly predictable post-flop. I’d say he didn’t put me in a lot of tricky situations post-flop, like many Stars players at 30/60 and above will do. As the tables broke, my table got considerably tougher. I played with a guy who looks a bit like Mark Newhouse (but isn’t) who was clearly a fairly skilled limit poker player. I’m pretty sure one of the two Asian lags at my table is a name pro, but I don’t know him.

Its obvious to me that Limit poker is my best game. I felt quite confident I knew what I wanted to do and what the other players were doing pretty much the whole time.

Matthew busted sometime after the last break. He stopped by and said that he had Aces cracked. Hopefully I can keep it up tomorrow.

Categories
geek stuff poker

Interesting trivia from my log files

In the comments to this post, Nuke asked my opinion of a few of the regular players in the 10/20 and 15/30 games.  He named three players and I named one additional player.  Today, I was looking through my referral logs from Google and discovered an interesting fact.  Two of the four player nicknames mentioned in that post were used as search terms in Google and linked from Google to that post.  Both times it happened exactly once.  If I had to guess, I would bet that both of the searches were by the players themselves, so that goes to show you that it is a small world.  One of the players (who I play against all the time) spent a couple of hours reading through all my posts.  I’m going to guess he has a better book on me now, if he was able to work out my Stars nick.  Its a small world, after all.

Categories
geek stuff

Spammers have become so complimentary

Here is a sampling of the great things they have had to say about my blog lately:

“Your site is a refreshing change from the majority of sites I have visited. When I first started visiting web sites I was excited by the potential of the internet as a resource and was very disappointed initially. You have restored my enthusiasm and I thank you for your efforts to share your insights and help the world become a better place.”  That’s going a little too far, don’t you think?

“I found your website after I have been surfing the internet to be useful”  This one is like a little word puzzle.  Did he find my website only after he stopped bring useful?  Perhaps after he stopped surfing the internet, although that is a logical contradiction.

“Thank your for the hard work you must have put in to create this wonderful facility.”  It would be so much more effective if you knew English better, I think.

“Logging into this website should be a requirement for anyone knowledgeable on earth these days…”  Even for your typical egomaniacal blogger, this is a bit strong.

“I came accross this website today searching for any informations. I did not find them, but your site was very interesting.”  I think there was an insult in there somewhere.

“Your site is a much needed addition to my life. THANK YOU!” Now we’re talking!

“U’ve got good pics, the site could use a tiny bit of work (no offense) its still awesome”  Now I’m sure there is an insult in there.  Besides, I don’t think I even have any pictures.

Some of the ones I agree with: 😉

“My god u kept me entertained.”
“Boy, this is some high-class site”
“What a great web site…”
“I love this site, there is so much information to be found. Thank you.”
“I really, truly am glad I found this site. It has answered so many questions for me. I will be back. Thank You”
“This is a very beautiful website, I have enjoyed my visit here very much. I’m very honoured to sign in your guestbook. Thanking you for the great work that you are doing here.”

Of course there are a few where I’m not sure if I agree or not:

“Schöne Seite”
“Super Informationen verpackt in einem tollen Design.”

I still don’t like spam, but I dig it when they are polite.

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geek stuff

The magical Google power of the word “jerk”

Ever since my post entitled where I declared that Jamie Gold appeared to be a jerk, I’ve been innundated with Google hits.  The most common combo is “Jamie Gold jerk”, but I’ve also got “Leyser jerk”, “Molina jerk”, “Jamie Gold is a jerk”, “Jamie Gold poker jerk” and sadly “shark jerk”.  I don’t know if he was hoping to make some jerky or if he was making a comment about my lame posts.  At first I felt ashamed of my limited vocabulary, but now I’m thinking I should just say jerk all the time.  Who knew it was a popular Google-term?

Categories
geek stuff poker

In praise of Akismet and more thoughts on my blow-up Sunday

First of all, Akismet is the coolest thing ever. It is a comment spam eating plug-in for WordPress and it is absolutely phenominal. So far, not one spam has made it through to my blog and not one real comment has been flagged as spam. I think it has eaten 97 spam messages so far. If you have WordPress, you absolutely have to get Akismet. It is the coolest thing since beer (because sliced bread ain’t that great). It uses a hive mind approach where once one user tags a specific post as spam, it knows that post is spam every time it sees it. It also apparantly has the usual array of filters, because it does an awesome job. If you use WordPress, get it. Now.

On the 53o bluff hand that I talked about last time, I think I learned some useful stuff. The other player posted his thoughts on ITH and he said that my betting confused him — it didn’t tell a story that he could make good sense of, so he called it. I knew that my bet would seem odd, but I would have guessed that when bets were confusing that people would tend to fold. He pointed out to me that when bets are confusing they chance that they are a bluff goes up and people tend to call. I think I should be able to use that information in the future, if only to avoid donking off all my chips next time. A better bluff where the read of what you hold is clear and perhaps weird bets with monster hands might be a better way to go.

I shouldn’t bother with the freeroll tonight, but it is like crack to me now. I’m going to play.

Categories
geek stuff

Computers can be a pain in the neck…

I had pretty much everything working on the site, but there was one little thing that annoyed me.  When you referred to my blog as www.nsidestrate.com/blog it wouldn’t load.  You had to say www.nsidestrate.com/blog/index.php for some reason.  Nobody else who uses WordPress has that issue, so I knew that I had something weird.  My site was being hosted as a virtual domain inside another domain that I already owned and I suspected that was the problem.  I chatted with the WordPress gurus on IRC and played with a few configuration items, but I could never solve it.  There were some poorly written Apache rewrite rules on the server that I couldn’t see which probably made things worse.  I tried to hack something together with .htaccess, but it was ugly and still didn’t seem to work the way I wanted.
I decided to just bite the bullet and make www.nsidestrate.com a regular domain and avoid this whole issue.  It seemed like a simple fix and my webhost assured me that it would be seamless and invisible.

Wrong!  All my old mail went the way of the dodo, the blog no longer worked and the forums produced a very long list of unhappy messages.  After several hours of tweaking and arm wrestling and cursing, everything is now working again and you can just type www.nsidestrate.com/blog so I’m happy again.

The unfortunate side-result is that I played zero poker and didn’t get any sportsbets down either.  I did watch Suited play for a while and offered advice that turned out to be wrong every time I gave it.

On the plus side, we had a great dinner last night and I told Suited my new philosophy was that I was going to drink the good stuff when we had a nice meal instead of keeping it in the cellar forever.  So we popped open a 1993 Beaucastel that we picked up in France several years ago.   The general consensus is that you should hold it 10 years at a minimum.  The great vintages will last 30 years and the more ordinary ones will last 20 years.  1993 is not considered a stellar year, but a bit above average.  I can tell you at 13 years old that this bottle could stil have been held for several more years.  It was still a bit tight and tannic, especially when we first opened it.  I think that the whole decanting thing and letting wine breathe is often snobbery, but in this case it absolutely got better and better after it had some time in the glass.   and Chateauneuf du Pape in general and Beaucastel in particular are among my very favorite wines and this one was no exception.  Complex and a bit sweeter/jammier/fruitier than other Beaucastels I’ve had from stronger vintages, I would still rate this one high on my lifetime chart.  We were trying to take very small sips at the end to savor our last tastes of this bottle.  It brought back a lot of happy memories of our travels and reinforced our resolve to get back to Europe and load up on some more good stuff.