Archive for November, 2005
Tricks for the body
Nov 29th
Esks Win!
Nov 28th
What a wild weekend.
Friday night was a pretty calm night as I pretty much just stayed home and watched the hockey game (an exciting game between the oilers and flames ending in a shootout Oiler win… yay!). I also won another $75 player poker that night. Full tilt has been an awesome room for me this week.
Saturday morning I had to be up to get to first aid training. I needed a recertification, so this was the second of two training sessions. Thankfully, its over now – the course definitely isn’t all that exciting. The best parts were laughing at the acting jobs of the people in the St John’s ambulance videos. Some of their “painful groans” were really funny.
Saturday evening my parent’s had Diane and I over for dinner – an offer I couldn’t refuse. One of our family friends was up from Calgary and so her and my mom and my sister all went to the Opera that night after dinner. Elizabeth got a chance to see my condo on the way and she seemed pretty impressed 
Diane and I spent the evening together. We had intended on going to see Harry Potter, but ended up missing the show we wanted to see so we just hung out. Its pretty wonderful to spend an evening with my sweetheart
Sunday was crazy busy. Elizabeth, mom, Diane and I all went to the UofA mixed chorus dress rehearsal for their yearly Christmas concert. I understand its tradition that they put on a show at Strathearn United Church every year before the actual concert at the winspear. It was pretty cool to watch. Then, we wandered down to Rutherford house where we had a lovely little lunch.
After that, Diane and I parted ways with the rest of the group and went south to join Leanne and Jon’s grey cup party. It was a pretty intense game and there were many moments where we were on the edge of our seats hoping that the esks could come back. Next year’s grey cup has little chance of being this exciting!!
Afterwards we needed to leave so I could get the car home, but it was a very fun party and a super exciting game to watch. I’m still amazed at how it all turned out!
All in all, a busy weekend. Now I’m tired and need to sleep But I have to get through today first!
Heraldk
+EV
Nov 20th
Wow was tonight ever an awesome night for poker!
I played for a couple hours this afternoon and had a pretty non-descript session where I won about $22 or so. I then wandered off and watched the football game (esks are on their way to the grey cup! hoorah!). Then I came back and started winning money. The players tonight were just TERRIBLE. And wonder of wonders … I got cards to cost them money. It helped that I was hitting everything in sight. I hit several straights, flushes and sets throughout the session. Even when someone sucked out on me with his flush after I hit a set of eights, the hand afterwards I punished a guy with pocket kings.
Beautiful.
All told, after I had received my next $20 bonus increment from full tilt’s deposit bonus, I was up over $120 after only a couple of hours of play! Insanity. So today I made $140 playing poker. Sweet deal!
Heraldk
iTunes and non standard pricing
Nov 18th
This is a really interesting article: This guy is claiming that the real reason the record companies want to change pricing at the iTunes music store is because they want to establish ‘image’ that a higher priced song is ‘better’.
It makes a lot of sense.
The iTunes music store currently sells all tracks at $0.99 a song. If the record companies get their way, then they would sell more popular tracks for more money. But now what happens? If popular, ‘good’ tracks sell for $3.00 a song, then what kind of song is a $0.89 song? You or I might might be able to say that it doesn’t matter, but the majority of people will automatically go for the higher priced songs because they are what are ‘cool’, ‘popular’ and … ‘good’. Now the record companies have another barganing chip in their deals with artists. Don’t want to agree with what we want? We’ll price your songs lower.
You know, I like music, but at times I wish I didn’t like it so much. I really like to support artists I listen to, but when most of the money I pay for their music goes to these damn record companies, it makes me feel kinda … unclean. Maybe I don’t know how everything is from their side of the issue, but really … when every move they seem to make is an attempt at keeping their wallets padded, I can hardly show feel like they have the best interests of the music artists at heart can I?
Heraldk
Floor Hockey playoffs
Nov 17th
So I’m a member of the computer science grad school floor hockey team. We’re playing in a division that isn’t high on the competitive scale, but of course everyone likes to win. We finished the regular season (all of three games) with an 0-3 record, but I don’t think that record was fully deserved. We actually played pretty well, and didn’t lose by more than 2 goals on any of those games. For those unfamiliar with the campus rec floor hockey league, the games tend to be high scoring affairs with many lopsided wins happening. Our games we played had scores of 3-1, 5-4, and 5-3. Amazingly low scoring, tight games for the league! Had the ball bounced in our favour a little more we would’ve potentially won all three of our regular season games.
So last night we played our first playoff game. If we won, we would go on to the final. We came out firing … scoring three goals in the first period. We only had 7 guys besides our goalie, so we tired ourselves out pretty fast. But after getting up 3-0, we were able to hold the opposing team to only one goal in the 2nd period. Our goalie played fantastic, and we ended up winning 4-1. Several hilight reel saves from our goalie and some pretty clutch defensive plays including a penalty kill in the third period were what backstopped our win.
Oh, and I scored my second goal of the season, which means I’ve now scored more goals this season than all others combined. Haha. I’m not exactly an offensive player. In fact, I’m lucky that my shot this time around actually made it in, because I had a huge amount of net to shoot at but I hit the post instead and it bounced in from there. *whew*. I like to play a defensive minded game where I knock the ball off my opponent’s stick and send them running back for it. I leave the fancy plays for those who can make them 
So we’re on to the final next week. Wish us luck! We could win our second campus rec t-shirt in as many years!
Heraldk
Successful Poker Party
Nov 15th
Well I’m glad for all the people who were able to make it to my poker party on Saturday. It was quite the event! We held two tournaments, the first before dinner and the second afterwards. The first was a full 10 people and the second was 13 people large! Congrats to Curtis and JR who won each respective tournament. Also, congrats to Kepi and Curtis who made the money in both tournaments.
I think (hope) that everyone had fun. The food everyone brought was amazing and it was nice to have people over finally. I hope to hold more parties soon.
Heraldk
Poker!
Nov 7th
Well, its been awhile since I last talked about poker. So I guess I will have to now won’t I?
For the record, I’ve been playing online poker for almost a full year now. I started playing .5/1 tables, and it didn’t take more than a couple months for me to do better than break even. I lost about $30 at party poker whilst getting my chipset, and then I broke even (not counting the sweet $300 bonus) at the gaming club. After that, I started making money at each site I played playing .5/1.
I’ve since started trying to move up in limits to 1/2. I’m sad to say that I have not had near the same success here as I did at .5/1. I think part of my problem was that I got myself into a little bit of a downward swing, and then frustration would cause me to lose more than I should have. This happened at a couple of sites and its taking me awhile to analyse my game and read some more about the game before I started to feel like I’ve got my game back. Now, I’m almost finished digging myself out of the hole I made, and am feeling a whole lot better about my game. Hooray!
Keeping this in perspective though – my downward swing was not dangerous in any way. It was only endangering money that I had won at lower limits. My neteller account holds the money that I’ve won – the money I initially deposited is sitting safely in a USD savings account, and I don’t expect I’ll ever need to pull money from it again.
I find myself wondering what people think of my poker habit. There’s a lot of people out there who view and gambling as a negative thing. I can’t quite imagine what Diane’s mom would think, for instance, if she knew how much money I was wagering in online poker. I’m not too sure if it matters that I’m up around $1400 US in a year’s worth of play (not counting my winnings in that CPT event in January, nor does that count the several hundreds of dollars worth of PSO gifts). I don’t think it even matters that I’m taking a studious approach to the game – an approach that requires some heavy reading. The underlying problem though is that Poker is gambling, and thus it is bad. Its odd, and even more odd that it kinda makes me feel guilty for playing. And yet, that guilty feeling has no practical basis!
I guess the main thing is that poker will never be more serious for me than it is now. At the moment, its a fun game that I can spend some of my free time playing and studying. I think everyone in my situation ponders the idea of playing pro … but that is way too far outside my realm of reality that there’s no way I’d ever consider it. I’m pretty sure that the game would lose its fun value the instant it became a job. Plus, I like to do other things besides play poker
Oh, and I hit a royal flush the other week. Its about time! I’ll post a screenshot sometime soon.
Heraldk
Confidence
Nov 4th
It seems like life is all about confidence.
If you are confident in who you are and what you are doing, you will tend to succeed at the things you do. Not only that, succeeding breeds further confidence and from there you go onto doing bigger and better things. But confidence is a fickle quality. If, despite your confidence, you start to fail, then watch out! And just like gaining confidence breeds more confidence, losing confidence breeds more lack of confidence.
I have found that through the earlier portion of my life, I have taken many a hit to my confidence. I have now started to realize that my confidence levels at this point in my life are the highest they have every been. Its not hard to see why. I’ve got a big scholarship, a caring family, keen interests in several areas including my field of study, and most importantly, a loving relationship with Diane. When looked at this way, I can’t help but feel a little proud of what I’ve managed to accomplish. I am loath to say anything particularly good about myself. Frankly, I hate boasting, and I try to keep my ego in check by realizing that there are so many people who better than me at anything that I can claim any measure of skill at.
Still, my record looks pretty. Or at least shiny. Well … maybe not even that.
My life is an interesting story. There’s a whole lot more to it than I’m entirely willing to put up here on my blog for everyone to read. Lets just say that throughout my life confidence in myself has been … probably a lot less than is probably healthy. My low confidence levels led to moodiness, over self-examination, and low comfort levels around other people. I found myself retreating away from people who I didn’t understand – which turned out to be nearly everybody. I found my niches of interests and found people who shared some of those interests and we hung out where the geeks hang out. Away from popularity.
Its taken me a long time to embrace who I am. Even now, at the highest level of confidence ever, I still find that I feel awkward around people. I find that I feel like people are judging me. Evaluating who I am based on the actions that I take. I’m pretty sure that people don’t do that. But I can never be sure – and until then I find myself always careful about what I say. I feel foolish when I say something that could be misjudged and whenever that happens I find that I will closet myself up to prevent it.
Its really odd thinking about confidence like this. Lately, I’ve started to feel really confident in myself. Its an amazing feeling … one sometimes wonders just how long it will last.
Heraldk
List of Online Services
Nov 1st
Boy this is awesome.
Its a really really long list of available internet services for doing almost anything you *can* do on the internet. I’ve already found a couple of ones that I might very well start using – one is an online calendar that looks like it better suits my purposes than remember the milk does.
Excellent!
Heraldk
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