Railbirding

I don't play poker or have much interest really anymore but on way out
from EDR I stopped for a minute and saw what seemed to be a play from
early party poker days.

I was standing behind big blind in 5/10 no limit game, and first
position called bb, 2nd position popped to 30, and everyone instant
called until small blind dropped out. At this point there must be
about 210-ish on the table, first position woke up and made it 250.
Original raiser folded, then 4th position went all in for about 900
more than the 250.

Folded round and guy who had made it 250 thinks for a minute so he
didn't have aces obviously but he did make a nonchalant call.

Board gets dealt out and its all low cards except for one king on the
turn. Ten seconds goes by and 4th position finally turns over his
pocket kings, original reraiser folds by throwing his cards into the
muck, and reaches into his pocket for his gangster roll of hundred
dollar bills and counts out enough to match the bet.

Just one hand on one table in one poker room. It was fun to watch. ;)

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Gambling for the Economy

As a guy who lives in Las Vegas and works for the biggest Clark County employer, I have some opinion about this article.

If someone can vote at 18... and can serve in the military at age 18... then why can't they drink or gamble at age 18? They're an adult on probation? That just makes no sense to me.

Do I think the age 18-21 crowd are a prime market segment for the casinos? Probably not, huh, since their income level won't generally be at a point that they make much of a dent on the economy. Sorry, folks, but when I was 18, I was eating macaroni and cheese for 89 cents, not thinking about throwing down money on red or black. Those who are going to college in those years are typically strapped for cash...

The same thing with cruise ships - from age 18 to 21, even though you're an adult on probation, you can't hop on a cruise ship vacation by yourself unless you're with a spouse. Wait, you're not married, you're not allowed!

True silliness.

WoW

I admit, I have a problem. I have a lvl 56 Horde hunter and recently have gotten up to lvl 43 Ally rogue. I've been having a lot of fun with the rogue... Today, tho, on my vacation day... Blizzard chose of all maintenance days to have an extended downtime.

I logged in this morning after maintenance, and went to check in-game mail, hoping to see the 60+ gold that was transferring from AH before I went to bed last night... INSTEAD, my entire mailbox was empty. This seems to have happened to not just me.. within 10 minutes, the "SHUTDOWN IN 15 MINUTES" bright yellow warning came up.

Dang mang.

This seems like a bad time to have such an outage as they are launching WotLK tomorrow... I wonder if it will have big impact on launch or not... I guess well find out tomorrow.

Xbox Streams Netflix

I'm the first to admit that I'm not fully utiliziing my Netflix account... I have seriously considered getting one of the new Netflix players to allow to play a bunch of their content... but this leans me closer to just buying an Xbox...

I guess we'll have to wait until it's officially released.

The Article I'm referring to.

AIX training

So, two weeks ago and this week, I've been sent to AIX for unix professionals training along with many of my coworkers. Man, this stuff is dry.

Unfortunately as is the case in most technical training of this type, it's not directly relevant to our environment. For example, we spent two days on all the ways to slice and dice locally attached storage and yet in our environment we will be 100% using SAN storage...

Oh well. It's good to get training... especially at a time when layoffs just hit the Company for which I work for, I'm very thankful to have full time employment. Some of my friends have been hit earlier and harder in this recession than I have... for example, one guy in PDX had to work for 3 weeks for free since his Company couldn't "afford" to pay them.

As we get closer and closer to the election... I doubt more and more whether either republican or democrate candidate brings anything worthwhile to the table. One way we'll go more socialist, the other will continue the socialism. Errrr.........

Hard to say which is worse.

Vegas news

Vdara has its nametag on.

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Sent from my mobile device
edited from my not-mobile deviec

Update on wireless...

Cricket wireless has been going great. Communication breaks down
while driving, so my son is a little disappointed that websurfing and
driving doesn't work so great, but overall the product works great for
what we are doing with it.

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Sent from my mobile device

He's Guilty

And the news channels go wild with shouts of "OJ's Guilty!"

Now on to sentencing......

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Speed Report

Even if it's just for myself to look back historically, here's the speed report I did at DSL reports.

Joining 2008 - the mobile broadband revolution!

It's the year of the mobile broadband, and I'm joining the legions! My wife is getting a new job where she'll be traveling around town and her boss requested she get a broadband card for her laptop so she can work wherever she's at...

Well, being that we don't like contracts, I remembered hearing the Cricket wireless commercials with no contract, so of course it makes sense to us to try them out.

I called the closest Cricket number and the rep took my info over the phone and had my contract ready when I went into her store. Easy as pie, I had my modem and was off. She knew I worked in IT so she kept the mumbo jumbo to a minimum... but did warn to install drivers before plugging in the modem...

After installing the software, you're guided thru as to when to plug in the USB modem, and voila, it activates, and boom, I'm online! Seat of the pants speaking, speeds are comparable to web surfing at home on cable modem.

Download speeds from here in Las Vegas to the DSLReports flash based speed tool out of San Francisco put download speed at 262Kbs, with upload speeds of 549Kb/s. Latency is 104ms.

Since wife will only be updating Google Docs and doing light web surfing, this is stellar performance...

There is a utility that shows bandwidth used for the session. I don't know that will be of much use but in 35 minutes of being online, I have sent out 1.9 MB and downloaded 11.1 MB.

Overall, fantastic first impressions of Cricket wireless and the card.

Out the door I spent about $148 with tax... that includes first month service, and there is a mail in rebate for $50 that I need to send in for the modem. I actually opted to pay for the modem insurance which is unusual for me but if it breaks anytime in the next 30 months, it will have paid for itself, so my monthly service fee is $45.95. Not bad in comparison to $79 a month for other service providers we looked at plus they wanted us in 2 year contracts...

Unless anyone knows of a better deal... I am really excited about Cricket... I can't wait to see how well it works while we're driving!