Get a little financial education ....

Take a couple hours and get yourself some education. At a minimum look at the first link to get a real grasp of what it means when you move orders or magnitude from million, to billion, to trillion.

See what $1,000,000,000,000 (One trillion) physically looks like.

Learn how money is created through debt.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
  

Watch I.O.U.S.A - One Nation. Under Debt. In Stress.

This has been my argument against Democratic policies all along ...

CNN Money Article on Obama tax plan to fund health care.

It's really a simple question I'm asking, when catastrophe strikes, who helps more ? ... the government or private individuals ? Heck, even when it's not a catastrophe, who helps more ? ... people or the government ?

When Katrina struck, who gave their time and helped those in need and rebuilt ? I'd argue that Oprah helped out more than any government agency. And how are those individuals or collections of individuals able to help so much ? They became successful business people and individuals, and now they have the resources to help out.

If we taxed Oprah or Bill Gates to death, how would they be able to amass fortunes and now be in a situation to help out as much as they are ? On top of that we all know how backwards the government is and when you run a business like a business you get efficiencies and not bloat.

Just had to get that off my chest. You don't have to "incent" people to give, they do it already, but surely don't hinder. The top 1% earners already pay 40% of the tax burden. People just don't see that or refuse to believe it.

I'll never forget the day when I helped a young single mother do her taxes when I was in college. She wanted me to double check all the figures because she was only getting $1,200 back on her tax refund. I looked at her return and she had only paid $900 INTO the system. She was complaining that she wasn't getting enough back !

Yes she was struggling, yes her neighbors were always there to help out, yes she was already getting government assistance in the form of programs ... but to COMPLAIN that the system somehow OWED her MORE money than she PAID IN.

Played with Dmitri Nobles tonight ...

Yeah, another "famous" player to add to the list of people I've played with, including Huck Seed and Phil Gordan. You should remember him from the 2006 WSOP main event. He had a monster chip lead on day 2. Here's a reminder of how he plays :-)



He was very friendly, except when he was physically trying to steal my chips :-)

I seem to have left some money in Vegas ....

.. so I'm off this weekend to see if I can find it. I think I know exactly where I left it, so just a quick trip to go and pick it up :-)

I'm bringing these three tools to help find it ...



Can not highly enough recommend Harrington on Cash Games, great books. I hate that there is so much great information on poker these days. I just always hope that my friends at the table have not consumed too much of it, or that I can always deduce how much they have consumed and what level of thinking they are on. So much work just to have a little fun :-)

Going to keep some detailed notes this time, and good/bad/ugly I will share them all.

MicroBlogging Addict .....

I've become a micro-blogging addict. Twitter started easily enough at work as a way to get the word out to fellow geeks. Stuff from trade shows, blogs, whitepapers, demos, etc. The more I used it, the more I found myself communicating over it rather than email or phone.

So if you really want to know what I'm doing at any given moment, follow me on twitter. Go ahead, give it a try, you only have all the free time in the world to lose ! :-)

And here's a quick script that someone wrote that shows you all my current followers, cool !

Windows 7 Beta on Dell Mini 9

So I planned on some elaborate post with intricate details on installing Windows 7 Beta build 7000 on the Dell Mini 9, but I decided on this ....

Just do it !

I booted the DVD from a USB connected drive and everything worked as expected. No driver issues, all network, sound, video worked like a charm. I installed the Ultimate version and it used 9.36GB of disk space.

I installed the Win 7 Beta update that was on MSDN and let it connect to find about 847KB of other updates, then let it sit for about an hour to see how much RAM it utilized with a base build. It settled on 460MB. Not too bad, but I'll probably do the 64GB SSD and 2GB RAM upgrade this weekend.

So shoutout to @ye110wbeard on twitter for telling me to not be a chicken. I had planned on backing up my current config just in case, but in the spirit of all that is geek, I just dove in :-)

Fun day being "off" ... cleaning out office

What a fun day of being off. I decided to clean out my office closet at the house. Wow, what a pile of geek junk !


If you want any piece of this pile, I've listed it all on eBay. All bidding starts at .01, there's some great deals in there, especially for the Slimp3 player.

Whew, now let's pick something easier on the Honey-Do list :-)

W00T ! Vegas Poker trip in T-Minus 6 hours ......

Headed to Vegas to play some poker.  Main reason ? ... Professional Rodeo Cowboys can't get off of top-pair, top-kicker hands and are uber-aggressive with them :-)

I'll have full trip report when I get back, I'm taking my Dell Mini 9 with me, so maybe I'll blog along the way with key hands.

Most likely play the Venetian $550 deep stack and the $330 Caesars tourney.  Then mix in some $2/5 cash with the cowboys, and if there's any juicy looking $5/10 I'll throw some of that in too.

Wish me luck ! - Jeff it's not too late to jump on a plane, Rob, you too !

Ssshhhhh ! It's a SURPRISE Party ....

Luckily only my mom reads my blog :-) ..... the party in Vegas is a surprise ! ... so hush you ding bats.

Headed to Vegas in a few weeks ....

My brother-in-law is having his birthday bash in Vegas this year.  I'm going to head out a few days early and do the usual "sit forever at a poker table and try to fleece the locals" - thing that I do.

Maybe I'll do some house hunting while I'm there.  See if the market has hit bottom, but I think it still has a little further to drop, especially if the deflation rumors are true.

Stock piling cash right now to take advantage of some bargains later into next year that will show up.  Should have had more, THANKS a BUTT LOAD WAMU and the FEDS !

A bad beat story .....

I'm not one to tell bad beat stories. After awhile you can pretty much finish any beat story once you hear the beginning :-) .... I've started assigning numbers to them just so you can tell them faster .... "Ohhhhh so you had a #16 and he had a #32, then the money got in on the river he took you out with a #89 ! .... that sucks"

The thing that sucks about all the stories is the amount of time you put in at the table, only to have it end with a sick set-up or a sick suck-out. You do everything right, you wait, you plan for the pounce, then WHAM, gone, done, out.

So this story is actually submitted by a buddy of mine that used to live on the block. It resonates with me because I'm on a fun mission right now of building a bankroll from $0. Kind of like the Chris "Jesus" Ferguson experiment. I emptied my account to pay some bills, then used my points to enter touraments to win tokens. With those tokens I entered some single table SNGs, and now I'm just playing $5 and $10 single table SNGs to build it. I'm currently at $152 from zero. I'll let you know how it goes.

Without further interuption, here is Rob's story :

So Friday night I was wasted and decided to play some online poker in a tournament. It was a 5000 person tourney on Full Tilt and I ended up winning it, which got me a seat into Saturday’s tourney.

If you finish in the top 72 of Saturday’s tourney you play in the big money tourney on Sunday where top prize was just under a half million dollars, and your boy Phil Gordon was in the big one amongst other pros.

So I play in the Saturday tourney, and I’m being tight and patient. I end up moving up the ladder in the middle of the pack most of the night but I’m stuck at this table with a guy who loves to go all in and catch cards.

Well I flop the king high flush, I watch him move in again, and I regrettably call.

He shows Ace high nut flush and I get knocked out in 318th place.

Oh well. It would have been nice to actually play in a big money tournament for free, but getting even to the second satellite was hard enough... The big tourney paid out 678th place and up, with the minimum you could win was around $800. I’m still bitter about it. Just watching this guy continually put all his chips in with nothing and catch, I thought I had him and was going to be able to hang on until top 72.

I really thought I had his ass. Especially given how I had watched him donk his chips around for six or seven hands... I’m trying to tell myself that I couldn’t get away from the hand given the player, but it’s two days later and I’m still stewing on it... I did end up going to a cash game later that night and making a couple hundred bucks, but I would have gladly flushed that down the toilet for a seat in that big money tourney...

I hate this game...

Dell Mini 9 Review

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen me get really excited on Monday, because my new Dell Inspiron Mini 9 arrived.

Some people said, "hey, it's just a laptop, why are you so excited ?!" I'm excited because I've had an iPhone for awhile and thought it would solve all my "away from a computer but still need to be connected" issues.

What I've found over the past year with the iPhone is that I mostly need something that is greater than the iPhone but less than a laptop, which is about 80% of the time....and of course there is no FullTilt poker client for the iPhone :-)

The size is perfect. The screen is much brighter than I expected, I've got it turned all the way up and it is as bright as my Dell 2007WFP widescreen in the office.

I'm running Windows XP with the resolution at 1024x600 and it is very easy on the eyes with more screen real estate than I expected. All the webpages I visit can be viewed quite nicely.

I did uncompress the drive and that seemed to speed things up. The compression was not saving that much space, and if you use it for what it was made for, you don't need that much space. The keyboard did take some getting used to, but you can actually type pretty quick once your left hand figures out to shift a little to the left so you stop typing the S key for the A key.

I've got 1GB of RAM, and using it for my regular surfing the real memory usage stays around the 462MB range, so I don't really see the need to put 2GB of RAM in it like some people are doing.

I did load MS Office 2007 to see how it would perform. The installation took some time, about 45 minutes, but the performance is actually pretty fast. It feels as fast as being on my regular D820 laptop.

So what do I do with it on a daily basis ? ... here's some screen shots.

This is the homepage of my Slimp3 player. It is a device that streams music from your central music repository (another computer), it's a little long in the tooth now, but still a great device I've used for many years. The device has a web interface so you can change the music from anywhere in the world. Sometimes I turn it on from the office and serenade my wife with a love song :-)


You can also view all the album artwork and pick songs in that manner, very easy to do with the Mini, it was a little clumsy on the iPhone web interface. Yeah, I made sure I had the screen with a Tiffany album !


The other great use while laying in bed is to watch Hulu. If you haven't experienced the greatness that is hulu.com you need to stop reading this and jump over there RIGHT NOW ! I'm not kidding, go there now.


... and of course MY review would not be complete without showing you the great "training" poker client from FullTilt. I've found that two-tabling is ideal with the widescreen. You can have both tables up and overlapped, when it is your action the other one will pop on top, but you can still click back to the other table if needed.... and don't go all-in with A3s, that's my donkey move :-)


If you have excellent eyesight, you can shrink the tables to the smallest size, as seen in this shot, and 4-table. It's actually not too bad, and you could make them a little bigger and overlapped more. I tried it for about an hour, but to be honest, 2 tables is about as much attention as I can give the game at any single time.

I've been getting about 3 1/2 hours of battery life with the screen brightness turned down and the wifi connected. The other nice thing is how small the charger is, no big "brick" ... it's about the size of a phone charger.

Since it uses the Atom processor and other low power devices, the heat generated is very low and that means no more burned laps while surfing late at night in the bedroom :-)

So all in all I'm very pleased with this purchase. I just have to keep my wife from stealing it !