That’s right, I’m about to start my workday. I already worked 10 hours today, but I’m going to power through and try to get some stuff finished by tomorrow. Why don’t I just go to work early tomorrow?? Because I need to get this shit finished, and the only way I can do that is if no one else is in the office. And right now, it’s just me, the security guard, and the mexican cleaning crew. No questions from anyone. Hopefully, I can get something done and actually make my trip to Oklahoma. And that link is the real deal, Oklahoma’s Official web site. None of that unofficial shit. Rock Geocities, Rock!

I had a terrible experience at Wendy’s on my way in. I convinced myself to go there for food because I’m a sucker and I responded to those stupid ass commercials where the guy asks for a baked potato instead of french fries. It seemed perfect. Chicken sandwich with chili. But of course they had to mess it up. Instead I got a a biggie sized order. So I didn’t want french fries in the first place and now I have a plethora of french fries. Apparently when I said “chili instead of french fries” they heard “It’s me, lard throat“. I guess I can understand that.

File under “should have been sent to lowbrow.com“:

What’s nasty?

Listening to your co-worker take a nasty dump in the stall next to you.

What’s nastier?

Hearing him walk out of the bathroom without washing his hands.

Remind me never to shake hands with anyone. Ever.

---

What ever happened to that Jim guy?

---

I had a shoe blowout this weekend at soccer. I blew a hole in my right shoe about halfway through a game. Now while I generally enjoy buying shoes, buying a new pair of soccer shoes is the biggest chore in the world for me. I think it has to do with the fact that soccer shoes cost me a lot more than I spend on my everyday shoes, so it feels like a much larger purchase, but at the same time I’m terrified of the “break-in” period. I hate those first few games when my shoes aren’t tied quite right or broken in at all and I end up having it fall off at the exact wrong moment. awk. It makes me feel like that idiot who can’t figure out how to tie his shoes. There was a guy like this at the indoor arena last week. I played a game against him on tuesday where he didn’t have his shoes tied well enough and ended up kicking it 20ft away from himself. Thursday his team was playing before my game and sure enough, it happened again. Learn how to tie your shoes buddy! This might be a good start.

Oddly enough, I just stumbled across that website when I thought to myself, “Surely someone has devoted an entire website to lacing shoes.” But damn was I surprised. Holy fuck. A whole world of shoe lacing that I had no idea about. But if you want to be really amazed, check out this link: Monte Fisher. This guy has a patent on a shoe lacing method. That’s right, a U.S. patent.

---

That’s all for now. No real poker news. Work is busy as hell. Oh yeah, and if anyone has an idea how to take an existing directory structure and adding it to a Microsoft Visual C++ (7.1) project, drop me a line. It’s been killing me for the last few days to have to look at all this source code through windows explorer when I should be able to automatically import it all into MSVC will little trouble.

It’s funny that charr mentioned Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels in a comment on my previous post. In my quest to learn every gambling game out there (See “If you want to gamble, follow the Chinese guy“), I was awake late one night last week and decided to look up the poker game they were playing in the movie. It took a bit of searching, but the game is called 3 card brag, and it’s one really fucked-up poker game. The thought of playing it for money terrifies the hell out of me. It’s a game where you can basically continue raising indefinitely. I won’t go into all the details of the game, but the other fact that I found extremely interesting is that the cards are not shuffled unless a hand is “‘seen’ and won by a prial.” Unbelievable. That means that card counting can play a significant role in the game, kind of like seven card stud, but even more so because it would go for multiple hands. I’ve got to see this game played live.

In poker news, after all the traveling and other bullshit with the holidays, I decided to play some tournaments this weekend. Saturday I woke up and decided to play the $9 Guaranteed Quarter Million Qualifier. I played decently well, and hit a couple good hands and managed to win a spot in Sunday’s Quarter Million Guaranteed tournament. I was extremely ecstatic about this finish because I finish 7th out of 315, which is the biggest tournament I’ve ever played in. It was quite a confidence boost too. I’ve been sucking somewhat lately, so it was nice to feel good about my poker skills again. So the tournament was on Sunday. As is the case every day, I couldn’t sleep on Saturday night, so I stayed up playing San Andreas until around 3am. I had a 8am soccer game by the airport, so I stumbled out of bed at 6:50 to make it in time. We beat the crap out of a shorthanded team and I scored an amazing goal from 25 yards out that I attribute to my new bubblebee socks. I came back home and passed out for a few hours before playing the Quarter Million Tourney. When the tournament started with 1417 people I was a little intimidated, but I was feeling pretty good about my table. There was a guy four seats to my right that would call any time I had a good hand. A couple nice flush hands and I was doubled up, and chip leader of my table. Then the guy directly across from me started hitting hands like crazy. He busted out three people which definitively better hands and bluffed out for a whole lot more. He was doing a tremendously good job of bullying the table. I did my best to avoid going head to head with him. Two hours into the tournament, There were only 500 people left and my chip stack was a little over the average. Then the trouble started, I got into a bad situation with a flush draw that didn’t work out against the bully across the table. Unfortunately I couldn’t convince myself that he actually had a hand and I called a huge raise on the river that I shouldn’t have. That took me down to 900 in chips, with blinds at 100/200. Luckily I picked up some good hands and got myself back up to 3000 in chips, when it finally happened. I hadn’t gotten a good pocket pair all day, so when I got KK UTG, I raised it up to 1200. Everyone folded except for the button, who thought about it for a long time and then finally raised all in (with more chips than me). I thought about it for a while and then decided that I really needed this to work out and went for it. Of course I had run into AA and the board didn’t help. I finished out the tournament in 374th place. It was disappointing to not have made it into the money, but it was definitely a good learning experience for me. It’s made me anxious to continue playing larger tournaments in hopes that my no-limit play will get better.

In a recent conversation with an acquaintance that I haven’t seen in years, an awkward conversation about my company ensued. I’ve been trying to put together what all went wrong and here’s what I’ve come up with.

First off, unless I know you fairly well, don’t tell me about getting turned down after interviewing with my company. There’s no good way to respond to that. “Gee, sorry we didn’t like you. Maybe you don’t interview well.” Or I could respond with a little more bite to my response. “Well, as I remember from college, you’re a moron. I’m actually surprised you managed to get an onsite interview in the first place.” I’ve actually had this happen multiple times. The worst part though, is when someone is fishing for a job. For some reason, people who are fishing for a job (usually with very obvious desperation) do two things wrong: They spend half of their conversation with me complaining about how bad their current job sucks. “I have to work overtime all the time and I don’t get paid enough and the fluffer only comes by every two weeks.” I guess some people think that if I feel sorry for them, then I’ll be more likely to give them a hand at finding a job (pun-tastic!). Not true. The other thing they do, that I can’t quite explain, is they insult my company. It always goes the same way: “I’ve been trying to get into your company for a while.” “Yeah, we have a pretty rigorous interview process.” “Well, I think you guys have some pretty bad age discrimination. I know a guy who was older that got turned down by your company.” Once again, a.w.k. What the fuck am I supposed to say? Oh my god, my company discriminates? ” I have worked for my company for five years will blindly leave the company because you heard from some guy (who probably heard from another guy) that my company discriminates! I haven’t seen you in four years, but I completely believe you. I’m going to march down to my office tomorrow and submit my resignation.” Or maybe I wouldn’t do something so forceful. “I’m going to fix this right now. Give me the name of the guy who got turned down and I’ll make this right. I’m sure his emotions weren’t playing a part in his statements after he got turned down for a job!” It’s not always age discrimination that people accuse my company of; otherwise I’d start to be concerned about it. It’s just always something. And while I won’t say that my company is perfect in every way, we actually have a more fair process for interviewing/hiring than I’ve seen at any of the previous companies that I’ve worked for. That’s not to say that people don’t fall through the cracks. We make plenty of mistakes (and I’m just speaking about the stuff I know about), but they are mistakes and not discrimination. What people need to realize is that interviewing is a human process . Mistakes will be made.

As an aside, just in case she happens to read this: I’m not talking about you Ann.

…and whoopi goldberg is unavailable for comment. I’ve tried everything, but focusing on work is difficult today. Oddly enough though, I’m getting a lot accomplished. Or maybe it just feels like it because all of my peeps are finally back in the office. Here’s my special things-to-do for people suffering from a post-holiday lack of motivation:

1. Eat a giant pixie stick. Supposedly the sugar is supposed to wake you up. (side note: this hasn’t started working for me yet. Or maybe it has. Now my stomach hurts a bit, which I guess is keeping me awake).
2. Delete old email. Particularly if you’re company is like mine, we have a max limit on the amount of email you can have stored on the server before they lock your account. I’ve still got 15 MB to go, but with the amount of SPAM I’ve received over the holidays (even the SPAM blocker summaries are around 1.5 MB) there’s a lot that I can simply delete.
3. Make plans for watching the Orange Bowl. Though I’m not a huge football fan, I’ve still gotta watch my team win it again.
4. Do not take a long lunch! It’ll just make the day seem longer. Take a short lunch and get the hell out early.
5. Ask everyone that you can tolerate how their holiday went. Make sure it’s people you like though. There’s nothing worse than being trapped in a conversation wishing you could be blankly staring at your monitor.
6. Check out the webcast archives on xfm.co.uk. New music makes the time go by faster.
7. Shop for shoes at zappos.com. I got the first pair I ordered yesterday and I must say, I’m extremely happy with it. They had a free shipping offer (2nd day air) and after reading through the info that came with the shoes, they have an extremely generous return policy. 365 days. Perfect for pocrastinators like me.
8. Envy Chris at Twenty-One Outs Twice. I don’t know this guy, but I’ve been reading his blog over the last couple weeks and he’s going to Atlantis, which is definitively the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. He also has an impressive attention span because he can play 8 hold’em tables online at once. I have a hard time with 4, partially due to the fact that my resolution is too low to have them all visible at once. It’s impressive nonetheless.

This list may be hitting you a bit late, in which case you can change some of the time critical info (ie-rather than planning for the Orange Bowl, make fun whichever team lost, curse the BCS system, or make rude remarks about how weak the PAC-10 conference is). New Year’s trip report coming soon. So, how was your New Year’s?