The new poker game I had dreamed up was well received. I conceived of the game quite a while ago, but I’d never bothered to try to convince other people to try and play it until this weekend and I was pleased with how it did. We must have played at least 6-8 hours of it with few complaints. Dave and Mike agreed that it should be called Habu, a shortened form of my nickname Habuchan(which itself has a bit of a story behind it but I’ll leave that for a later date). The game is called “Habu”, but may also be called “Habu in the Hole”. It can be summarized simply as:

Hold’em Hi/Lo 8 or better, but instead of a community river card, each player gets an individual hole card(you can play all 3 hole cards).

It is best played pot limit, but limit is also fine. There were a few reasons I conjured up this unusual game, among them:

I feel like the domination effect is too strong in Hold’em, so I wanted to make bad aces playable.
I enjoy the interesting decisions in Omaha 8 when you are faced with a pot sized bet on the river to call for half the pot.
Unlike Omaha, you are not frequently required to get all in on a flop with a big hand against a big draw on a near coin flip, but like Omaha you usually still have outs to improve if you do.

The game has some good unanticipated side effects. Two wheel cards become strong betting hands like they do in o8. Correct turn play is I think more important because the chance of someone outdrawing you on the last card is much greater in Habu. Someone can turn over a completely disguised hand(like trips in the hole to make quads or a 3 flush with a low to scoop), but it doesn’t happen so frequently that you feel helpless against it.

Other fun bits: Getting beat on the last card is no longer called getting rivered, it’s called getting Habuchan’ed. You can play a variant with 7th street being exposed instead of being in the hole, this is currently called Exposed Habu, but we’re open to other naming suggestions. This game has the property that someone’s 7th street can lead to a ridiculously scary board. For instance on a board of KK49, if someone catches a K then everyone else bricks they just sorta look sad and fold. We are pretty sure that Exposed Habu made the game less interesting so Habu in the hole is the standard but YMMV.

So try out Habu at your next home game and tell me how it goes. I’ll attempt to get a game going at Yacht-10 if I can get off of the waiting list and into the tournament. I expect this invention to make me millions.

Just got back from an excellent weekend down in Big Sur. We ate, sat around, played poker, walked around the beach and just generally hung out. One of the highlights was a fine dinner at Stoke’s restaurant with very good food, superb service and interesting ghost stories. Other highlights were: having a wonderful wife cook some excellent meals for me and friends, lounging around admiring some outstanding ocean views and watching a beautiful sunset, inventing an excellent new game of poker(more on that later). Thanks to Dave for generously donating his house and Mike for organizing the whole affair.

Gmail has the worst spam filter ever. I didn’t realize that I was losing at least %10-20 of the mail I really want. I’m going to disable it shortly. It really has an atrocious false positive rate. Apologies to anyone who has sent me email in the past couple of months that I didn’t respond to. Even though I once flagged real estate spam from Patricia Lewis it doesn’t mean I never want to receive email from Mike Lewis(though there are plenty of separate reasons for that).

Google has released the beta version of their Instant Messenger. This review at arstechnica.com pretty much sums up my feelings. If they can get interoperability with other IM systems or get full cross platform support for voice then it’ll be fantastic, until then, it’s just another IM system.

Well subject says it all. The pundits were right. For some reason most people seemed to think it would be a boy.

I am attempting to convince Tracy that we should name our son Olaf, but it’s not working yet. Maybe if I’m persistent she’ll see it my way. Barring that, I am thinking we can auction off the naming rights to our first born son on ebay. After hearing about the stupid things that they have paid for, I would fully expect our kid to be named goldenpalace.com.

But seriously, we’re ecstatic. Neither of us were really hoping one way or the other. We just want a healthy baby and some time to spend it together.

Is it just me or has Slashdot really gone downhill? It used to be a great resource, now it’s just a pretty good one. The editors cover things with a more commercial angle than they used to, and there’s less good science in a lot of the stories. I’m liking Ars Technica as more of an alternative these days, but it’s still not quite as good.

A while ago, I posted about hedgestreet, now it looks like they’ve got some competition at Intrade. The most interesting thing I saw when glancing through their markets was the spread and volume on the various trades. By far the biggest volume trading(and thus a relatively small spread) is in the nomination of Hillary for the Democrats in 2008. I wouldn’t mind being a market maker in that just because I think it’s pretty interesting.

It used to be an application developer was forced to develop for the PC because windows was the most powerful toolkit and provided the best API’s. As the world moves away from PC-centric applications and towards a web-centric, there’s been an explosion of tools for developers to create web applications. Today we’re moving into even more advanced web applications and they require even higher level API’s to build on. The new breed of API’s are hosted web services API’s like the Google Maps API, Amazon’s Web Services API, and Yahoo developer services. Amazon is the clear leader for e-commerce web services, but in other arenas no winner has emerged yet. It’ll be interesting to see who can draw the most developers, and win the new API war.

I take my S2000 into the dealer because one of the headlamps doesn’t work. I know the headlamps aren’t cheap because the Xenon lamps are typically a $200-500 option. So they tell me the bulb is $200. This isn’t a huge surprise, the problem is that I know nothing about cars and I’m too lazy to actually figure out what I could save on the headlamp. The bigger problem is that they call me back after investigating the fix and they tell me that the in addition to the bulb and the inverter is broken and will cost me another $300 + labor. I have no idea what an inverter is or does they could be completely making it up, but I’m paying through the nose for it. I’m half expecting them to call me tomorrow to tell me that it’s going to cost me $1k to fix my flux capacitor.

I’ve decided the following about myself: I would rather spend money on avoiding things that I don’t want to do instead of doing those things and saving money to buy things that I want. So I’d spend money to let someone else fix my car rather than doing it myself and buying a new game. I also have a hard time spending money on clothes. Tracy however doesn’t necessarily spend the same way. So whenever I need a new shirt, I let her buy me a shirt that I wouldn’t buy myself because it’s too expensive. Silly yes, but I’m a deep, complex man.

Stopped by the car dealerships in Redwood City, and learned the following things: Lexus IS300 Sportcross was discontinued, so that’s out, I probably should’ve figured that out before we went. The Lexus RX330 is pretty nice, but it was already more money than we wanted to spend, and we probably solidified the decision that it wasn’t worth it. And the Lexus hybrid SUV is way out of our price range. I wanted a Toyota Highlander Hybrid, but the salesman said there was a 1 year wait list, so that’s been eliminated from contention. It’s possible we could get one sooner/cheaper out of state, but i’m probably not willing to go through the effort to do that.

It wasn’t really on my list, but we were right in front of the dealership so I also took out a VW Passat wagon for a spin. It had a nice interior, and pretty decent power, but reliability was a concern for me. I was left with a pretty favorable impression, much better than I expected going in.

At the Subaru dealer I wanted to drive an Impreza WRX wagon, but the salesman wouldn’t let me. He said they were understaffed on weekends for it because they wouldn’t let anyone drive a WRX without a salesman in it because two weeks ago they had someone total a WRX. Also when we looked at it, it was even smaller than I expected so I have pretty much eliminated it as an option. They would let people take out other cars though(without a salesman), so I took one of the new B9 Tribecas out for a spin. It was very nice, good handling, reasonable power, and it doesn’t feel too big. The 3rd row seating is tiny, but that’s expected. I left with a new car to add to my list. It’s not as refined as the other cars, but the price is better. The mileage isn’t that great at 18/23, and that’s a concern with gas prices rising. At about $39k for a fully loaded one, it’s a bit on the higher end of what we wanted to spend, but not totally out of contention.

Still to come is an Audi A4 wagon test, probably a quick look at the MDX and probably more, probably next weekend.