The future is now. I set up my mobile blog so I can now write posts on my phone from wherever i’m killing time (like i am now). They’ll probably be short though- predictive text is alright but i couldn’t type on this all day.

Pandora is the coolest radio station ever created. This is why the internets were created. If record companies hadn’t been so freaked out panicing about file-sharing, we would have seen something like this when I was still in college. Now I can cross off that dream of owning a radio station. I always wanted to own one so that when I’m in my car and they get to a song I don’t like, I could just call them up and say “turn this shit off” or if I just tuned in I could say “hey, start the song over, I missed the first minute”. I don’t think my radio station would have had many listeners anyway.

I just found out I have high cholesterol, courtesy of my free blood screening. I think the country omelette I had at IHOP for lunch today may be contributing to my high cholesterol. Or maybe it was all the peanut butter I put on the pancakes. Either way, it’s time to learn the Truffle Shuffle.

So I’ve been playing on Titan Poker lately and so far I’ve been extremely happy with the results. I do however have some problems with their poker app.

“Dear Titan Poker-

I can live with the idea that your developers don’t know anything about user interface design. I mean, people spend years upon years in college learning how to do that. I don’t even care that your app isn’t pretty. Graphic artists are hard to come by unless you live in any major city where you will find an ample supply of them preparing to slit their wrists as they work for large engineering companies that have little need for anything more than having someone change the background color on a picture of their products.

I can live with the fact that you didn’t bother to do any multithreaded testing. Multithreaded testing is hard because it opens up the flood gates on a bunch of different scenarios that you don’t want to have to worry about. Just release the first version and wait for users to complain about the obvious failings in the alert capabilities when you have two windows open. Or the fact that 70% of the time the second table will simply never blink, come forward, or make a sound when it’s your turn. You shouldn’t worry yourself with this stuff. What are the chances that someone would play two tables at the same time?

But what I can’t live with the fact that Titan eats away the battery on my computer when I have it open for more than half an hour. It’s called sleep() motherfuckers, look into it. Or better yet, look into event programming. And remove every line of code that looks like this:

int i = 0;
while(i<1000000000)
{
   i++;
}

it’s eating my battery alive and it’s apparently sprinkled throughout your source code. And I don’t even want to think about what kind of memory leaks you likely have.

After you’ve taken care of that nonsense, fix the betting options on the no-limit games. When I click the slider it should go from min-raise to 2xBB, 3x, 4x, etc. it blows that I have to go to type into the text box every time I want to raise to 3x BB. And on top of that, when I’m in the small blind, the options when I click on the slider should still be 2xBB, 3x, etc. It makes no fucking sense to have it be 2xBB + SB. Oh yeah, and if your going to be eating 100% of my CPU, you should at least have the decency to update the bet amount on the bet button.

That’s all for now.
Hugs & kisses,
gus @ the metroplaza”

With the past thanksgiving holiday Kat and I managed to find a way to get some gambling in. So we (with balki in tow) headed over to Coushatta as a stop on our way to spend the weekend in Baton Rouge. I’ve had extremely bad luck there. I don’t know that I’ve had a winning session there in the three or four times that I’ve been. This was no exception. The space has gotten a little nicer. The room manager pays attention to the games and the dealers in general seem to be better than I remember. But it still takes forever to fill a table because they give everyone a generous amount of time to show up after their name is called. They’ll actually call you over the entire casino PA to and give you enough time to finish your craps roll (if you’re an unlucky bastard like me). Nice for people waiting, shitty for players waiting to have their table filled.

Either way, that has little to do with my experience. I had a terrible run of cards and took some beats. Not really much to say on that front, it just flat hurt. So Sunday evening when I got back, I had to fire up Party, FullTilt, and Titan to remind myself that I actually do know how to play poker. And I did so after a short five hour $20 NL tournament, where I took 22nd out of 1780. I was really happy with my play here because once again once I got into the money I was on the short stack, so surviving another 140 places was an accomplishment for me. I also managed to pull out some ring game wins on both Titan and Party, but my continual losing streak on FullTilt continues.

I think the people of Lousiana have put a curse on me since I threw up in the Waffle House parking lot (a place which all know to be holy to the Louisianans) which keeps me from winning money at casinos there. That’s the only logical explanation I can think of.