Elect Me Vice President in Charge of Volcanoes

I just finished reading Cat's Cradle, the first Vonnegut book I've ever read, and loved the cynical quasi-sci-fi feel, and will be on the lookout for more at the used bookstores as soon as I finish reading the rest of the stack of books I've accumulated. Today's post title is brought to you by chapter 9.

I've been playing a lot of online poker lately, finally giving in to the temptation to play for real money (and so to play 'real' poker). It lacks the interaction of sitting around with buddies to play a game, but then it makes you care less about the money you're taking in if you win, after all the ideal buddy game sees everyone at even money in the long run anyways. By that definition though, even the poker I've played with friends haven't really been 'buddy games'. What I mean though is that there isn't the same ability to read people, or feign strength or weakness. And trash talk in a chat window inevitably comes off as some blend of obvious, lame or immature. Again, I suppose to so much different from home games, just with less feeling.

Anyways, after having any and all plans for my weekend dissolve, I spent most of the day yesterday playing poker while Carolyn worked and actually made money in the more traditional sense. When you play electronically, you end up getting a sense of unjustness in the way the cards are dealt cause there's no physical deck there to reinforce the real logic. But yesterday was a day where I felt I was getting the short end of the deck. Despite playing for real money, I'm still playing in the lowest stakes games on the site, and getting realistic play is still a bit of a challenge. Suffice it to say, its very hard to 'bluff' people out when you don't have cards (as was most often the case) and when you do have the best cards, its almost inevitable that they will be in with a crap hand that ends up getting the cards they need to make theirs better.

All that said, I am at a pace now of winning just enough to keep playing a few games at a time, kind of like winning a free ticket in the lottery. Its annoying, and I think its time to move to slightly higher stakes so at least I make better players beat me for my money, rather than beat me with luck.

/end poker

I've also been looking at a site tracking some local blogs, which I have from time to time looked for over the years. Infact, I've thought for a while of maybe trying to create something along the 'ist' line of local blogs for the Waterloo area (see Gothamist,LAist, or Torontoist). But between living in the shadow of London and Toronto which actually have venues capable of/willing to host decent music acts and the like, its been more of a whim than anything. However, seeing some of the quality of blogging out there (clearly far superior than anything you'll find here), if someone could get them all on board, there could be the makings for a decent collective blog. Anyways, probably another whimsical idea (my homebrew is going down rather smoothly at the moment), but look for some updated links to some local bloggers in the near future.

I've Come So Far

Found on Raymi's blog.

Mailing It In

Mailing it in is trendy, but i fly in the face of cutesy. See: Tony, Nick, or Anthony.

The Best Part About Being 'Tragically Uninteresting'

The best part about being "tragically uninteresting" is that I happen to catch incoming links from sites like this one in my site stats. It seems that someone's taken the time out of their much more interesting lives to make a blog with what appears to be the sole purpose of trashing other UW blogs he comes across.

What's startling is that one would take the time to read through a blog they describe as boring and dribble, and even follow outlinks to its last.FM account to look at my musical preferences. What's more amazing; that they do this for a number of blogs, actually spend money on an internet domain name like 'uwspectator' to give some sense of credibility or self-importance (and yet not posting even a first name or pen name anywhere on the site), and then further take time out of their exciting lives to write summaries for each of them (mine's here)! You really have to commend the man for his efforts, after all, the only thing better than a boring blog, is a boring summary of a boring blog.

Putting aside the far too simple gay jokes though, and the apparent dislike for people who are critical of the current government's policies, instead of simply allowing things to be foisted upon them, regarding this as Conservative hatred, I have to honestly give it credit for its humourous approach.

One has to wonder though, why someone who hates Waterloo so much would choose to go there, or not move elsewhere, and instead wallow in their bitterness, and lurk around a whole bunch more websites from people at Waterloo with so many other better, and admittedly far more interesting and well written sites out there.

These G-Strings Ain't Shakin'

At the end of the summer I worked on my best Bob Vila impression, renovating the converted room in the back of my garage. At the point I left it off, there was some carpet down and an otherwise empty room. For the first bit of this term, while it was still warm, I let the room serve as a room for my buddy and I to crank our amps, or to host games of poker.
Since the onset of the cold weather however, the poor insulation back there, combined with the unrelated piling on of course work, has seen me go back there less and less frequently. I've since moved the weight machine that was acting only as a threat to toes everywhere as an obstacle back there, and not used it as much as is warranted either. I've found a little time to pluck away at my mid-range Washburn acoustic that otherwise hangs on display in my room, but other than that my guitars have been neglected. I haven't touched my electric since early October, or put new strings on either since perhaps late August.

But after I finish the lab work for my thesis on Monday, I plan on stopping at the music shop on the way home to grab new strings for both and doing something about all that. None of this means anything of course because I still have no intentions of ever playing for anyone but myself, but I still find my fun. Infact, I probably should have taken the time out from work more often this fall to plug in the guitar. Few things work quite as well for releasing tension as cranking the gain, and thrashing out some old school speed Metallica riffs, with no care for the quality.

Aside from the guitar, and its neglect, I've switched to Foobar for playing my music collection. Its a simple, plug-in oriented music player that I've known of for years but was unwilling to part with Winamp over. Winamp started pissing me off, and Windows Media Player is, in short, trash, so here we are. Foobar works well, with far fewer resources than either of the above, and has also lead to me re-tagging most of my collection, and starting to add track numbers to the tags to facilitate the excellent sorting options that it offers. The advent of mp3s has for most meant a lean away from listening to albums front to back, as some of the greater ones of all time were originally intended, but Foobar is getting me away from that again.

If you're not gonna give Foobar a try, at least buy/'legally' download the new Emily Haines (of Metric; I wonder how long that qualification will last) album, as its well done.

Oh, and I switched to 'Blogger beta'...we'll see how this goes.