My fantasy football team had an insane weekend, racking up the most points I’ve ever seen in a league. 170.

I also played quite a bit of online poker and did pretty well. I took second in a pot limit omaha hi/lo tournament which had 50 players buyin was $109. Second place was $1000 so I was really happy. But when it got down to two players, I got outplayed in a way that I didn’t think was possible, especially in that game. He had a 4-1 chip advantage, so my chances weren’t that great, but he still really embarrassed me. It was literally like he could see my cards. Every time I tried to steal a pot with nothing, he’d reraise me and force me to fold. Every time I had a good hand, he’d check and fold.

Poker fun: I went to Bay 101 last night. Kojo and I were there and for most of the night he sat right behind me. It was a mostly loose passive 3/6 table typical of a low limit Bay Area game.I ended up exactly even because of a few plays like this: I have 66 in middle position. It has been quite a while since I’ve played a hand and it is folded to me, so I raise. There is one other player at the table who plays loose, but can be reasonable and a bit tricky, he three bets behind me. Loose person on the button calls, I call. Flop is Q55, 2 diamonds. I check, tricky player bets, button calls, I check raise. Both players call. Turn is a 6 of diamonds. Now I check, and both players check. River is a T, now I bet out, tricky player raises, button folds. I think for a bit and say, “ok, you got me, I raise”. He calls with TT.

Let us review how well we played this hand. Preflop: Almost certainly I should play here, raising isn’t terrible, but it’s unlikely to actually take down the blinds or shut too many people out because this is low limit, once he three bets I have to call. Grade: C. Flop: I put the tricky player on something worse than an overpair here, maybe a smaller pair or AK. The checkraise into two players is only really good if I’m pretty sure I’m ahead of both players or my draw is good enough that I’m planning to see a river with any two, and I want to play it aggressively. Grade: D. Turn: Well now I have a really big hand and it’s well disguised and maybe one of the two made their flush draw too, what a perfect time to trap. I should try for the checkraise again, unfortunately no low limit player is going to bet after I checkraised the flop unless they did actually make their flush draw, so of course they check it around. Grade: C-. River: I have to get some money into this pot, so of course I bet. I am pretty sad when he raises, I can’t imagine he would have 3 bet me preflop with 33, so that leaves his only likely hands as QQ or TT, or a total bluff. My 3 bet on the river is only good if he’s very prone to making stone cold bluff with AK or he had a AA or KK, or he checked his flush on the turn. The question is how tricky is he, and the clear answer is: not as tricky as I think. I have outfoxed myself into bad plays on every betting round. Grade: C-.

I’m playing 3/6 like it’s 20/40. People aren’t as tricky as I think they are, they just want to gamble and have some fun at 3/6. This is a case of not adjusting my game and thinking way too much.

Well it’s turkey time and Tracy’s parents are in town for the weekend. Tracy of course cooke a fine meal. As usual, I provided extensive moral support and a small bit of dishwashing for her.

I finally finished HL2, and the ending isn’t that amazing, but the game overall still is amazing. After I got that through with, I went back and finished the 2 hours I had left in Half Life Opposing Force.

Poker: I started playing on PartyPoker again. I made a little bit of money. I need to ration my playing time. I go into phases where I play too much and it bores me then I start to play bad and it hurts my results. I like Stud8 more than I used to, but I still think Stud Hi is a terrible game.

Some fantasy football related notes: Peyton Manning is absolutely insane. His numbers for this year are ridiculous, he’s on track to crush the single season TD record. Thank god he’s on my team. He is leading me to the highest number of total point in my league, though only the 2nd best record. Antonio Gates was the surprise hit of my team. I had missed several rounds of my draft and Yahoo! automatically picked him for me. I had never heard of the guy, but Y! ranked him as one of the best tight ends, and lucky for me, he actually turned out that way. I was lucky that Duce Staley got hurt because I had Jerome Bettis and without Duce, the Bus became a starter for the impressive Steelers. I was correct in valuing Manning, Corey Dillon higher than other people valued them. I got lucky to pick up the Detroit Defense(which includes special teams) just a week before their special teams scored several TDs. I made an excellent deal by picking up Drew Brees just as he started to play really well. He wasn’t much good to me because Peyton is so amazing, so I traded him away for Marvin Harrison. Still a few weeks to go, but I’ve locked up my spot in the playoffs and my team is impressive..

It’s been more than a month or so, but I got a really bad haircut from SuperCuts. I knew right away it wasn’t going to be that great, but I didn’t want to complain about it, because I wasn’t sure if she would understand or would be able to fix it. Oh well, what can you do, they are usually OK. I pay $14 for a haircut, I don’t expect too much, but Tracy does a better job than this usually and she does it for free.

World of Warcraft is out. I would play if I were unemployed, but I don’t have the time right now to pick up an MMORPG. The launch has supposedly gone pretty smoothly, which might be a first for a heavily hyped MMORPG.

There was an interesting discussion on NPR about the problems of Social Security and Medicare. The confluence of several factors is driving the national debt into record territory and worse, there is no end in sight. The retirement of the baby boomers and the ever increasing life expectancy means that in a few years about 1/3 of the population will not be working. When Social Security was created, the number of working people supporting each retired person was closer to 1/12, the number right now is closer to 1/6. This is of course a disaster waiting to happen. Of course cutting Social Security or restructuring it is a political nightmare. Older people don’t feel a need to give anything up and they vote very reliably.

The value of the average Social Security and Medicare benefit would be about $1,000,000 if done by a private insurer. This is money spent on people who will be less economically productive for the rest of their lives. One point they made was that the money would be much more economically effective for educating children rather than support retirees. These days, many people are living for 20-25 years beyond retirement, and the value of those premiums continues increase dramatically with the soaring costs of health care and living longer. The best way to fend of the insolvency of Social Security is to encourage people to work longer beyond the age of 60 or 62. It is a strain of course, people have been lead to believe that they should be able to retire at that age. However with better health and life expectancy it’s not so unusual to continue working.

HL2 lives up to the hype. I have only played 1/4 of the way through and I can say that it is one of the finest games I’ve ever seen. Level designs, graphics, texture, engine. It has it all. Enough said.

I’m really surprised that modern Linux distributions(Suse 9.1 and Fedora 3) don’t include VPN support. I tried connecting to our Exchange based VPN and it’s really much more difficult to setup than it ought to be on both those distributions. It’s a tough to convince someone that Linux integrates perfectly into a windows environment when you have to install kernel modules to connect to your work network.

The other day Tracy dressed up because they were taking pictures for work. She overheard someone say about her that “she can be a babe”. It’s the sort of thing that sounds like a compliment but you aren’t really sure. It’s like someone at Dave’s wedding told Mike(after his very funny and excellent best man’s toast) him that they had “very low expectations for his toast, but he exceeded their wildest imagination” or something to that effect. Is it good that their expectations were so low?

Things are looking pretty good for Michigan football. There could be a Michigan vs Cal matchup in the Rose Bowl. I foresee opportunities to talk smack with people who went to Cal.

We got a new piece of furniture for the kitchen. It’s a small, free standing kitchen island. It gives Tracy some more prep space. It looks good and seems pretty functional, and it wasn’t expensive at all.

To pay for the kitchen island, I used a Visa gift card which I had received from work through icardsystems. I’m not one to turn down free money, but it was kind of a hassle to redeem that card. First they come in fixed demoninations, so I got a couple different cards. Then I had to call their phone system to activate it. It’s a Visa, but tied to a debit account. So now I have to keep track of how much I have left on the card. I can do that either by phone, or on the net. I tried to use it for a couple different purchases, but it got declined a couple times. One decline was because the retailer couldn’t figure out how to split up charges between two different cards, twice it was declined for unknown reasons.

Oh and the biggest news of the family is that my cousin Ed is working again. After taking some time off from working(which turned out to be 4+ years), he is doing some contract web work for the University of San Francisco.

In the past week I have attempted to install linux on an old P2 266 with 128MB that I have lying around. I tried 4 or 5 different distributions and invested 8-10 hours before I gave up. At least 3-4 times, the CD-RW which I burned linux onto couldn’t be read. So I was never sure if it was going to work or not. Then several installs couldn’t load up the master boot record. I was getting really frustrated. OpenBSD worked, but Suse, Whitebox, and Vector Linux all failed. The root of the problem turned out to be pretty simple. The BIOS on that machine can’t handle partitions of 2GB or more. I could find the BIOS upgrade, but I decided it isn’t worth it. I have 5 different machines already, and adding one more underpowered machine isn’t that amazing. I don’t need it, so email me if you want a little, old, piece of junk machine which might be made into a usable desktop linux machine.

Well it’s nearing Thanksgiving and that means all the consumer retailers are rolling out their must have items, especially the luxury items. Here’s some interesting things.

There’s a Robotic Lawn Mower that I saw on sale on a web site for $180. This is sort of a follow up to the popular Robotic Vacuum Cleaner.

In the PC Game market. The highly anticipated Halo 2 is already out and shattering sales records, but it’s for the Xbox only. I’m of course waiting for Half-Life 2 for PC. I have already bought a downloadable version so the minutes it is released, I’ll be able to unlock it and play. If I had more time, I’d buy and play World of Warcraft but that doesn’t look reasonable with my current work schedule.

Other random news. My fantasy football team is being carried single handedly by Peyton Manning who has put up astounding numbers by every possible statistic except wins.

I’m trying to get over my unhappiness over the election, but the great divide between the liberals and conservatives still surprises me. It’s like we live in two different worlds.

Work is going well. Our product launch is nearing. We’ve got a really good team. Our new name and brand look good. You’ll see. By December we’ll have something up and running. Then you can tell me what you think.

My brother got stiffed by someone on ebay. He asked me for suggestions on how to annoy the guy. He can go to http://www.dogdoo.com to send the guy a package of crap. I also suggested putting his name or email address on a bunch of mailing lists to get him a lot of junk email and regular mail. It wouldn’t be too hard to do it so that his email address becomes unusable. I could write up a script that does some cross-posting across a bunch of usenet news groups and then spammers will pick up the email address and he’ll get a lot of junk email. That may not work that well if his spam protection is good of course. It’s also possible to just spam him with email directly, but it’d be easier to get into trouble for that. The best option would be to send him some spyware/adware and get him to install it. There’s some incredibly annoying and persistent spyware out there.

I’m bitter, angry, and disappointed at the American public. I am astounded by the number of people who support Bush. I am frightened at the prospect of four more years. Here are the things that frighten me most about the things that Bush will do in the next four years:

• Bush will have the ability to nominate probably two or three Supreme Court Justices and I expect him to choose candidates as conservative as Scalia and Thomas.
• The continued assault on the environment, in particular Bush will attempt to open of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve for oil drilling, and roll back as many parts of the Clean Air Act as possible.
• The partisan science policies. Appointing scientists who only who have your agenda makes it difficult to have the best and brightest people.
• A woman’s right to choose. It’s clear that Bush wants to do as much as he possibly can to restrict a woman’s right to choose.

Here are some of the things that I am less worried about.

• The war in Iraq: I believe that Bush will do his best to get us out of Iraq. No one wants the conflict in Iraq to last any longer than it should, but neither can we just abandon what we have started there. I believe Kerry would have done better getting us out for the simple reason that Kerry has never alienated all our allies.
• Gay rights. I fully support gay rights, but it’s clear that American public does not. Bush will push harder to block gay rights, but he’s just following the will of the people.

In his concession speech, Kerry talked about healing the rifts between the two parties. And I heard on NPR a former Bush speechwriter say that Bush honestly felt bad about the level of partisan politics which had divided the nation. I wish I could believe him, and I hope that the two parties do a better job of finding common ground in Bush’s second term. But I’m pretty skeptical right now, so I’m not keeping my hopes up.

I can always move to Canada. A better solution would be to have California cede from the US. Oh and someone showed me this new map of North America which might be a bit more accurate.