lumrant
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
John Diet 2004 Update: Pulling Away!
(click for larger image)
Even after a day (yesterday) of binging on Reese's Cups, my progress is unabated! Perhaps I have been helped this week by the massive amounts of fruit and vegetables that I purchased in anticipation of a visit by my folks. Now the folks ain't coming, but I'm still stuck with a ridiculous fridgeful of produce, so it's been mostly salads and fruits for my meals this week!
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
John Diet 2004 Update: Neck-and-Neck
(click for larger image)
After a series of disputed weighings at Knave and Alyssa's place in Virgina, I may have pulled back in front.
Since Knave has no scale in his house, I prevailed on my parents to lug one down from Pennsylvania for the occasion on Saturday. I stepped on the scale first with some trepidation and was pleased to ring up a 183. Then, fully expecting to clock in around 190, Knave stepped on and...and...rang up a 183! Damn our twin-ness!! That evening saw much gorging on ice cream and sundry other crap (followed by a nmber of Tums for me the next morning). Subsequent weighings the next day showed us both back up in the 189 zone, so I've split the difference for the graph above.
My Road to 175 continues!
Monday, February 16, 2004
Retro-blogging here...I should memorialize my exciting first-ever online poker efforts.
The way I see it, I need to find out if there's any hope of my winning money in this manner. Something tells me it's a forlorn hope that I might make a "career" out of it, but it would be nice to find out that I can win a few hundred bucks every month if I wanted. Or lose that much. Considering that I cannot explain my success at Hold'Em down in Austin with actual people, I had no real expectations that I would be any good at an online version where I can't see anyone.
Anyway, first things first: I decided to go with PartyPoker. I went with these guys mostly because I had seen them advertised on TV a lot (World Poker Tour on the Travel Channel), and I figured that my money would be safe with them (as long as I wasn't actively engaged in losing it playing poker, anyway).
Actually, 0th thing 0th: it's going to be "The Cadillac of Poker Games" for me: Texas Hold'Em. Maybe Limit, maybe No Limit, not sure. But there's no other option, game-wise.
Next: after some sleuthing, I found a compelling bit of software called the Online Poker Inspector. It costs some $60 or $70 for a fully-functional version, but it's possibly a great tool for the online play environment; I haven't bought yet, mostly because I haven't figured out if I'm really going to spend any time pissing away my money in this manner yet. Here's the basic value proposition:
- The software "watches" you play online by literally doing screen captures of your poker app (the PartyPoker window, in my case)
- It constantly assesses the relative strength of your hand based on your two hole cards, the community cards showing, and the number of community cards left
- It gives you a real-time heads-up display with an impossible amount of detail, including the exact number of hands (and percentage of possible hands out there) that can beat you!
- To make things easier, it shows a little "stop light" that says at a glance whether you should be confident or worried. For instance, if you have a pair of aces (diamond and heart), but four clubs have come up on the board, it'll give you a red light and tell you to hurry up and fold--helps point out obvious bad situations.
So anyway, I'm fascinated. The discussion forum and the support behind the app seem decent, so there's an OK chance that it'll be updated as the PartyPoker app gets updated. The thing also does all kinds of simulation, helps me track opponents I run up against, etc. If I were a serious player, I'd be using the crap out of the thing and presumably deriving an advantage; we'll see how it shakes out.
What's the drawback, other than losing my money fair and square to other online ne'er-do-wells? Well, as you might have guessed, PartyPoker takes a percentage off the top of every game or tournament, similar to the "rake" that a real casino takes. Depending on your stakes, this rake varies from 10% (low-money games) to less than 5%. So, in order to make money, I've got to win more than I lose, and I've got to make at least 5% on top of that. Sounds doable.
OK. All that behind me, the only remaining thing is to put some real money on the line and get started. So, I pony up $300 to the PartyPoker Cashier and I'm off! In fact, I've made money right off the bat, because good old PartyPoker gave me a $13.50 bonus as a first-time signer-upper. Hell, I could quit now, cash in, and boast that I had made money playing online poker! I sit at $313.50.
I decide to start out with low-stakes, No Limit, Single-Table Tournaments. The deal: ten people buy in for X dollars worth of chips and pay an entry fee (for tournaments this fee is the "rake," above) on top of that. Options range from $10/$1 up to least $200/$9, and probably higher in some cases. In these single-table tournaments, you keep playing until you've either lost all your chips or you've beaten the other nine guys ("guys," I say), and the top three finishers make money. The split is 50%/30%/20%, so if I were to win a $10/$1 tournament, I would net $39=((10 x $10) x 50%) - $11), accounting for my own buy-in and entry fee. Clearly, you can't make money fast playing $10/$1 tables no matter how good you are, but it seems like a good place to start.
I start conservatively at a $10/$1 table, play impatiently, and finish 5th. Later, I step up to a $20/$2 table, play with a little bit of patience, and finish 3rd: I've made my first bit of money, and, for the moment, I'm honestly in the black! Exciting! Next, I step up to a $30/$3 table, go all-in pre-flop on about the third hand, eventually lose to a straight, and I'm back in the red overall. For good? We'll see.
Naturally, I'm keeping a record of my progress (or my demise; we'll see). Here it is:
John's Poker Log (Excel)
How long until my account hits $0? Only time will tell!
Saturday, February 14, 2004
Diet Update to come in more detail tomorrow, but the initial findings are not good:
1. I step on the scale and clock in at 183
2. Knave steps on...and clocks in at 183! Horrible.
There is speculation that the scale has some hysteresis, and we will attempt to get a Second Opinion on some scale tomorrow.
Knave sez:
This blog is the dumbest goddamned thing ever.
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Saturday, February 07, 2004
John Diet 2004 Update: Back in Front!
(click for larger image)
Har! It's looking like there will have to be some Hurling in Sterling in order for Knave to catch me before our next weigh-off, slated to take place this weekend at Knave and Alyssa's house (or "home," as they say). Go bulimic, Knave!
The other activity next Saturday--doomed to be photo-journalized--will be Cheek Swabbing. Once and for all, the Lum Boys are going to find out whether they are identical twins or not! All it will take is some gentle cheek cell-harvesting, a postage-paid mailer, $250, and 7-to-10 business days, and the fine folks at GeneTree DNA Testing Center will give us the straight dope.
"Why bother testing?" you might profitably ask. Isn't the truth obvious to all? Well, various members of the Lum Clan (read: Knave and my parents) believe there's a pretty good chance that we're not identical, mostly thanks to some ridiculous argument that our teeth developed slightly differently when we were 12 years old. Personally, I'd be comfortable betting Molly's Life on the fact that we're as identical as the day is long.
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
John Diet 2004 Update: Slowly Recovering from Super Bowl...
(click for larger image)
A sampling of the fare that my brother and I chowed down on over Super Bowl Weekend:
- Reese's Cups
- Kit Kat Bites
- Wretched Onion/Mustard Pretzels
- Sandwiches
- Potato Salad
- Baked Beans
- Ice Cream (vanilla, chocolate)
- Potato Chips
- Corn Chips & Salsa
- Nutty Bars
- Milano Cookies
- Oreos
Still screwing around with my new Verizon phone. It's paying off a little bit; for one thing, I found that I can access the Web for free and don't have to pay Verizon a goddamned cent for this privilege! Guided by this and other Web content, I have set up my phone to use a free WAP proxy, and indeed things seem fairly good. Good enough that I called Verizon today and told them to shut off my (now pretty much worthless) MobileWeb service, which was going to cost me $5/month otherwise.
The down side is that, other than the obvious things like managing a home page full of customized links, there must have been some other subtle things that their damned proxy did for me, because my phone now refuses to load up certain sites that it used to be able to load--for instance, http://www.etrade.com . Now I get all kinds of messages like "too many redirects" and "text content" and other such crap whose causes I suppose I'll have to explore more deeply. I suppose my dreams of trading thousands of shares of NATI at the press of a few keypad buttons are going to have to wait...
Why, you may ask, do I care about Web access on my phone? Well, it's mostly because it's there. I mean, I like the concept of always, in principle, having some device handy that I can use to access the Web. I've done stupid things like send e-mail and check the weather. My dream is to be able to quickly pull up the show times of my local movie theater at the drop of a hat, so that Jeanie and I can make instantaneous decisions to go see movies whilst driving or eating or whatever. Sadly, Yahoo's movie site is one of the damned WAP services that doesn't seem to work properly on my phone now that I've ditched the Verizon WAP proxy! I must either locate an alternative or else figure out the problem here. If nothing else, my screwing around has at least kept me vaguely close to the cutting edge of wireless. I now know a small about of WML!
Without further ado, here's my exciting homepage--the one I see now when I fire up the old 4400's Web browser--which is hosted on the www.johnandjeanie.com site:
http://www.johnandjeanie.com/wml/lumwap.wml
(see emulated version)
Note that you need some sort of WAP emulation to be able to see it properly, and IE surprisingly doesn't have that built in. The Opera browser does have it, and there are also third-party tools out there to view WML pages. Or, you can fire it up on your own mobile phone, if you can figure out how to load an arbitrary Web page. That was another huge annoyance I ran into: my goddamned phone's Web browser does not include any sort of default function to "load URL," forcing me to resort to making the Google WAP site (which has such a utility) my homepage until I added "load URL" functionality to my own WML homepage.
This really is still the infancy of wireless Web access on small devices, and it's certainly possible that there will not be any adolescence. Instead, small devices might get good enough to use regular old HTML more effectively. In the meantime, though, it's wretched how the various wireless service providers are charging John Q. Public $5 a month for this "added" benefit. It makes me realize how lucky we are in the US to have such low-cost Internet access; they're not so lucky in other parts of the world, and I figure it would have been the same here if the whole movement hadn't been driven at the university setting.
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
Just because I can,i am posting using my cell phone! So what if it takes forever to type a single sentence?
I can do it, dammit!
