For most online poker pros, Sunday is the most important day of the week, with Stars running absolutely massive tournaments of varying buy-ins, and other sites also joining in to capitalize on the multi-tablers. For me, Sunday is usually spent sitting by myself at 200/400 and 500/1000 limit hold'em tables waiting for someone who is stuck and tilting to dust off some money to me.

But today I decided to play the Sunday tournaments today for the first time in a very long time. Stars' guarantee of two million turned the Million into the Sunday Three Point Six Million, so I decided that was worth it. I also wanted to play a satellite for APPT Sydney. I like this tournament and have had great results in Sydney, but availability is such that the host casino is charging something like $700/night for their remaining rooms. It seems a bit silly to spend $1000 on a flight and another $5000 on a room for a $5000 tournament, but I figured a satellite would be great. While playing these two events, I also played the Sunday $500 buy-in and a PCA satellite.

The PCA satellite was very uneventful. The Million started off okay until I ran AK into AA. The Sydney satellite was going well though; I hung around long enough to become the short-stack 3-handed, then started picking up a bunch of chips. I started heads-up play down 2-1 and wanted to buy out my opponent for the only seat only to find that Stars had disabled chat for this satellite. :( The match went a very long time and I felt I had great control over my opponent. I was playing excruciatingly small ball to try to take advantage of his mis-steps, but eventually he started getting wise and just jamming. Despite having him all-in and short multiple times, I never closed and his Q9 ended up outracing my 33. I was very tilted since I probably would have offered him a good deal given the hotel overlay, but I never got the chance.

But while I busted out of that, good things started happening in the Sunday 500. I swapped a small piece with Gavin when we both had 100k in chips and about 100 players left, then both of us started rocketing upwards. We finished 80th and 78th respectively...

And that's why I don't play the Sunday tournaments! :D

Tomorrow: $1000 BCPC NLHE event at the River Rock casino, 20 minutes from my house.

Tags: online poker, poker
Current Location: Vancouver, BC

Former Congressmen William "Cold Cash" Jefferson (D) was sentenced to 13 years at ClubFed this past week. Jefferson, as you may remember, kept $90,000 hidden in his freezer.

No liberal MSM bias? Newsweek's cover for November 23rd: "How do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah [Palin]? She's bad news for the GOP--and for everybody else, too." That's unbiased...not. I think it's #44 in my current list.

Thank you, adb_jaeger for his post noting the report that the Health Care plans would slash more than $500 billiion from future Medicare spending and "...would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for millions of others...." Jaeger's point is dead-on: You know it's bad if they dropped this bomb on a Saturday. What government agency is actually open on Saturday?

Current Mood: amused

Playing that today (in via satellite). This thread will be used to report on it.

As seen on Ellen:

Ellen: H-2-O is better known as what?

Contestant: Blackjack? 21?

Fortnately, the game is called "Know Or Go," and if you get the question wrong, you "go" when Ellen presses a button and you drop through a trap door. This contestant was the first to get a question wrong, so she was completely shocked when Ellen did just that. Don't you wish you could do that in real life? :D

(Alas, Ellen didn't catch herself earlier when she asked, "What state is New Orleans in?" and the same contestant answered, "New Orleans?" She let it slide and just moved on to the next question.)

Current Mood: amused

Danvers High School says students can’t say ‘meep’

A quote from the article in the Boston Herald:

The Salem News reported Principal Thomas Murray banned the word after school officials got wind of a student plan brewing on Facebook to stage a major disruption on school grounds using the “meep.”

Thank god they're protecting us, and the children!
( full article here, in case it goes poof )

This is basically a political, global cooling, etc. post, so it's all in the cut below.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

Tags: bugs, csi wii, fck, lj_cares, lj_photophile, notes, rte, writer's block

Vegas was a fun diversion. I did nothing in tournaments, but I made up for it in cash games. I decided to have fun, and I mostly played $1/$2 nlhe. My win rate was about $100/hour. Yesterday's session included being berated for this hand:

I hold 22 in the sb. All the players on the hand at least $300 (I had ~$500). An early position player raises to $15 (blinds $1/$2), 2 call, so I make the easy call [1]. The bb folds, so four to the flop.

Flop comes 982r. I check, raiser makes a continuation bet of $45, one call and one fold; I check-rai to $115 or so; he shoves, other player exits and I call. His KK doesn't catch.

After the hand, I get berated by him for a few minutes. [2] "How can you call a raise to $15 by an early position player?" I wanted to answer, 'By throwing $14 more into the pot;' however, I declined to respond. I did win most of his rebuy, too....

[1] Anyone who thinks this isn't an easy call given the implied odds, see the book mentioned below.
[2] I was quite pleased to see that the intelligence and decorum of many live poker players hasn't improved.

---

After I got to Vegas, Nick Christenson calls me. "Russ," he begins, "Have you seen Two Plus Two this morning?" I tell him no, I haven't. He then tells me, "Mason Malmuth said of our book, 'I'm about 40 percent through the book Winning Strategies for No-Limit Hold'em by Nick Christenson and Russell Fox...What I have read so far is excellent, and assuming the complete book is of the same quality, and I expect this to be the case, it will receive my highest recommendation.'" I told Nick that I didn't believe him, but he swore it was true. It is.

---

Is China headed toward collapse? Thoughts?

---

A client sent me a link to an economic blog that appears to be interesting: Charles Hugh Smith's "Oftwominds." Thoughts from the econ geeks?

Current Mood: busy

If I've overheard this once, I can't even imagine how many times the actual parents have had to deal with the stupid.  At a street fair last Friday, I was talking to an acquaintance with triplets.  A stranger came up: 

Stranger: "Aww, how cute!  Are they triplets?"
Mom: "Yes."
Stranger: "Were they born on the same day?"
My Brain: *breaks*

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.