The Daily Blink!

In any case, the year so far has been fairly calm save for one major initiative on my part to try out a project that I’ve had on the backburner for a couple years, and that would be the comic known as The Daily Blink. This was an idea I started back in 2007 and it quickly got put aside for other things, but my recent WoW adventures have caused too many ideas to be cast aside again. I’ve teamed up with my friend CP to put out three strips a week, and now the site is up and purring like a kitten.

We’re both pretty excited about this, and it’s our hope that WoW players of all stripes get a kick out of what we’re up to. If I could make one request of everyone for my birthday, it’s that you tell at least one person about the comic strip. Even if you’re not into WoW yourself, statistics would seem to dictate that there’s a good chance that you know someone that is. That would make my day far more than any gift card.

Photo by Optical Illusions

I have a bad track record with New Year’s resolutions. My problem is that I like to make broad, sweeping statements that affect a solid portion of my daily life. I never fail to touch the big ones: Be a better husband, get in better shape, become a better poker player, be more organized, achieve more at work. I have done some of those things, and I have not done others. These are never resolutions that are done in a day, they are constant battles that start the second I get up in the morning and continue the entire day. They require hard work and determination, something that I like to think I posses in most of the tasks I take on, but become easy to shrug off when other priorities demand attention and I take the easy out of pretending that it’s an either/or situation. ”No gym tonight, work was exhausting.” That’s a statement I like to toss off.

So this year I’ve researched – trying to find a different spin on my New Year’s resolutions. Not to avoid picking the hard ones, but trying to find a better way to wrap my head around them. I’ve poked my head around the internet to see how others would set their goals, and not been satisfied to mirror their methods.

I found my answer while I was doing my daily browse of The Huffington Post today and stumbled across the story of Joey Graziano – the son of a NYC Firefighter who went from being the first in his family to attend college to playing baseball through multiple injuries, tutoring fellow students, being responsible to his family, and winning the prestigious Mitchell Scholarship while attending Georgetown Law. Throughout the entire article, Joey’s peers and mentors laud his time management and work effort, and questioning how it was possible for him to take on his daily life and still earn a 3.9 GPA. Upon concluding the article, I was forced to sit back and ask myself the question, “Do I really know what true hard work is like?”

There are countless anecdotes from business leaders and politicians alike which beat into our brains that it isn’t always the most privileged or cerebral that achieve the most, rather those that see the road ahead of themselves and take it on head first. Being a person that always desires to be something resembling a junior polymath (and holding a job title that requires it to survive), it can be difficult to find that extra focus to go the additional step in the goals I hope to get closer to and eventually attain.

And so, knowing the multiple goals I already have for myself for 2010, I will not recite them here, or bore you with numbers related to weight gain, bankroll growth, life savings, or salaried income. Instead, I will encompass them into one driving hope-

This year, in all things I will try harder.

At the end of the year, I won’t have to make a recap post explaining the results. No matter whether I succeed or fail, it will be evident to both you and I just how well I did.

Photo - Morten A. Lines

(As time goes on I’ll be sharing some of my best content from my old hangout, This is Not a Poker Blog. Enjoy.)

Six Sigmas Straight to Hell
April 20, 2006

When dealt two cards in Texas Hold’em, your odds of having pocket Aces are 220:1. Once every 22 orbits, you should pick up Bullets.

I’m on hand 1,000 and I still haven’t seen them. I’ve been playing .50/1 NL for the last two days, and despite having tons of pocket pairs and AK more times than I can keep track of, AA has eluded me, and I’ve began to announce it to the table.

“We’re on 1,000 now boys, any minute now,” I type. Coyote, a solid player who won 5 buyins the night before, has been witness to this entire chain of events.

“Just wait, you’ll get it twice in a row to compensate,” he offers.
“Nah, just watch, I’ll raise and pick up the blinds,” is my retort.

Right now, I’ve been playing pretty tight, so there’s the fear that I might not be too far off. I’ve made a few blind steals and people have believed my continuation bets. I called Coyote’s raise on the button with QJs and after he bet out on a queen-high flop, I raised him a nice amount. He showed KQ and mucked, and I obliged and showed mine.

Just in case those Aces come, I reason.

Yesterday was another futile situation. Besides the AA drought, I must have had 26 pocket pairs and only one flopped set. However, I got my mileage out of it: 44 hit a 455 flop against KK and I doubled up. You better believe I almost broke my Caps lock on that one.

Hand 1,025 and I’m pleased to see a free flop in the BB with Q9. I’m even happier when the flop comes JT3, but there’s 4 people in the hand besides me so I’m forced to check. But everyone follows.

The turn is a 5, and puts a 2nd heart in the board. I wonder what’s going on and make a bet. 4 bucks into a 5 dollar pot. If someone raises me i’m done with it, if not I’ve built something nice to possibly hit on the river. Two guys come along, and now the pot is something worth caring about.

The river’s a glorious eight, but wait — It’s a third heart. God, now what to do? If i bet out, and I get raised, I can’t call. At this limit, someone chasing is more than conceivable, and the guy in LP i’ve seen make some really bad chases in the past. I check.

The more solid guy bets out 10 bucks, and LP raises up to 40. I swear audibly, almost waking Kori up in the process. I know I’m making a good laydown here, but I feel like a pussy. Fold. For some reason it doesn’t on the first click, and I slam my finger down on the mouse on the second try, which works.

The guy in early position thinks for a very *very* long while and calls — and LP shows TJ for a flopped two pair. EP mucks.

I look up and at that exact moment, Bill Gazes is on TV, watching the AIS crack his aces with a flopped straight and cheat him out of a few hundred thousand dollars. Despite the situation, it actually takes me a few minutes to admit that mayyyyybe Bill has it worse than I do, kinda sorta.

Well, this is prerecorded, so at *this* exact moment…

“I folded the straight.”
“Q9?” Coyote asks.
“Yep. Queen Freakin’ Nine.”
“Shoulda bet the river.”
“Thanks, Mr. Hindsight.”

A few minutes later I’m busy watching a guy four years younger than me take down a WPT title on TV, so I almost miss Hand 1,033: Pocket Aces. I quickly do the math in my headfigured it out later, there’s a .9% chance that you can go that long without getting Aces. But now, I have them, and I’m in the big blinds.

And there’s a fold.
And another fold.
And a few more after that.
And it’s folded to the button, who takes 15 seconds to decide that stealing isn’t a good idea.
And then there’s the whiny bitch dude who screamed for 20 minutes last night because someone hit his gutshot, and I haven’t let him forget how much of a whiny bitch he is. Perhaps he’ll take his revenge now. Perhaps I’ll receive that which I now desire most, now that I have aces: Action to go with it.

He folds, and I show my Aces to the table with an extreme amount of pride. Coyote laughs.

“Dude, you were right, you got the blinds.”
“Bow to the intimidation of my posted big blind.”
“Yeah, I read you for strength the way the animation did it.”

I played maybe an orbit before signing off, as I’d cleared my bonus.

Would you ever guess from the tone of this post that I was up for the last three days?

From a more innocent time (Credit: Bill Rini)

It has been a frustrating year for poker. I’ve been playing along with my buddy Duke and doing nothing but losing. I’ve been concentrating on playing tournaments and SNG’s because I think it’s where I do the strongest, but I can’t shake the bad beats and seem to take them at the worst time.

There has seemed to be a few phases of this cycle of losing, which seem to mirror the 5 stages of grief:

1. Denial. “How the hell does he call there? 80% of his stack with Ace high and I’ve only showed down winners!”

2. Anger. Like the kind where my wife starts to question whether I actually enjoy playing poker because she hasn’t seen me celebrate a cash in a few weeks and I only seem to curse the cards I’m dealt.

3. Bargaining. Maybe if I only play *these* tournaments. Or am I not playing enough? Am I not paying enough attention? How about if I just play straight ABC poker because nobody’s paying attention anyways?

4. Depression. Straight ABC poker didn’t work. Clearly people can’t be on a cold run for this long, it’s obviously because I’m a donkey and shouldn’t be winning anyways.

5. Acceptance. Because online poker is rigged anyways.

Duke, bless his heart, has witnessed or listened to every bad beat that I’ve taken during this time and still offered words of encouragement or disbelief at my bad luck, while he himself has skyrocketed through an upswing the likes of which I’ve never experienced. At the beginning of all this I thought we were of similar skill level, and while he still believes it, I don’t. The worst feeling of all of this is that I have played poker and studied the game ravenously for five years now, and I seem no closer to any kind of breakthrough than I did when I first thought that starting a blog about the freerolls I was playing seemed like a good idea.

I’m starting to think that my primary weakness lies in the fact that when I first started to play, I played fearlessly out of ego or a simple faith in the mechanics of fold equity, and I lost a lot of money that way because I never slowed down when the signs told me to. Somewhere along the line I found the right balance, won a good bit of money, and then became far too conscious of the value of the chips in front of me and could not play the game the way I needed to. Now, my playing style is the very bad combination of understanding the math behind aggression, but being unwilling to carry through with it unless everything screams that doing so is a safe bet. The problem with this is that this becomes extremely predictable, and I get snapped off because everyone and their mom can see that I can make that move with any two cards.

Second, my hand reading ability is crap. It’s better than it used to be, but it’s definitely nowhere near the level that I should be able to conjure up when in a tough situation. I blame this on my multi-tabling, which pretty much demands an emphasis on playing the two cards in front of you rather than betting patterns of your opponents unless you’re able to take a copious amount of notes in the chaos.

I’m back to re-reading books that I’ve finished off in the past, hoping to reconnect with some of the advice that got me to where I was before. But any kind of tournament win would also probably do some good. The swagger from my game is currently missing in action, the kind of confidence that you have to have in your game in order to survive a large field. We shall see where things go from here, and I’ll be sure to share the good news should such a breakthrough occur.

Hell, you won’t be able to shut me up for a week after it happens.

Boom! Headshot!

Bejeweled Blitz now currently stands as the #1 time sink in my Facebook experience. The combination of popcorn casual play, addictive gameplay, and high score ladder among my friends list makes it so I have trouble putting it down if I have some time to kill and a friend with a score higher than mine.

I currently hold a personal high score of 443,800, which isn’t the highest amongst my friends but an auspicious enough score to earn jeers from friends about using cheats to inflate my score. I can assure you that my score is legitamite, and besides: If I’m going to cheat to get a score, don’t you think I’d push it up to a point to where I have the #1 spot on the high score list?

In any case, Here’s a few things to know when it comes to playing Bejeweled Blitz that can help with your score:

1. Start Early. There’s a couple seconds of hesitation as the game says “One Minute… GO!” You have full license to start moving jewels around the instant they drop onto the board. You might have a bit of annoyance if the graphics get in the way of what you’re trying to do, but this time period is vital to jumping out to a good score. With everyone depending on multipliers, an extra second or two head start will make a huge difference once you get into the endgame.
2. Keep Moving! In the same vein, you can continue to move jewels while others are still falling into place. This is almost a requirement in order to generate enough points for a huge score. Always be looking ahead for where your next move is going to be.
3. Multipliers. In order to reach over 400k, you will usually need at least a multiplier of 6x. This means finding a multiplier at least every 10 seconds. It can be a tricky thing to start to get a feel for when a multiplier is going to pop up, but when it does, your top priority has to be collecting it.  Interestingly enough, if one is already on the screen, a second one seems to be less likely to show, even if you’ve caused a chain that would normally make one appear. So you HAVE to get it quick! The most reliable way to find one is to have a Flame Jewel pop and start a chain. Even one extra chain score usually causes a multiplier to appear.
4. Know your Jewel arrangements. What I mean by this is that while Flame Jewels are fairly common, Star Jewels are not, and frequently you will be plowing through the round and not catch that a Star Jewel is possible. The arrangements necessary to pull one into being created can be easily confused for a Flame Jewel, and this is a huge hit to what your score could be. Since Star Jewels can be made out of L or T shaped arrangements, the variety of placements is a lot bigger than you might think. Keep an eye out for them and take the extra second to look over the board if you think you might have one on your radar. The extra second will be worth it.
5. Save Something for the Last Hurrah. I have seen friends brag about earning as many as 200,000 points in the last hurrah alone. If you don’t have at least one special jewel sitting on the board when the time reaches zero, you won’t be able to capitalize. Once you get under 5 seconds, make sure to leave a special jewel out and avoiding breaking it so that you can try starting a good chain. On the other hand, don’t bother leaving out a lot. Blowing up 3-4 jewels as opposed to one seems to actually lessen your chances of a good chain reaction, since the game will be sending down a huge group of jewels en masse, which aren’t likely to have pre-made rows of jewels ready to create more Flames and Stars.

This is all I have for now… everything else is elementary. Play a lot. Compare notes with friends between trash talk sessions. And most importantly: Try not to take Bejweled Blitz as seriously as I apparently do. People will start to look at you funny.

Google Wave has been an interest of mine for about a month now and looking into the possibilities of its use. So far, other than random conversations about Google Wave, I haven’t got much productive use out of it. My office isn’t taking to it because we already have our own collaboration methods, and I’m not a member of many orgs outside of work that could get some use out of it. Still, I see the possibilities in the app and hold on to hope that all the knowledge gathering I’ve been doing on it will someday lead to a brainstorm epiphany that leads me into some creative promised land. Until then, however, most of my waves will lead with “Welcome to Google Wave! … um, How are you?”

Of course, there are others out there that are massive overachievers. I can definitely see me trying out the tabletop D&D games being played on Wave, but … let’s just say I never came close to trying something like the video below.

More changes here and there. I continue to screw with my website design in kind of bi-polar fugue of indecisiveness, hopefully this one will stick around for awhile. I have been keeping a personal blog elsewhere that has been extremely niche and I want to get back to stretching my writing skills past “So last night I such-and-such for dinner”. The resulting efforts on my behalf will probably be very wide ranging in subject and will be sure to alienate many readers as I jump between Game Theory, poker hand discussion, World of Warcraft, Live Action Role Playing, and random political diatribes. If you can make it through all of that and stay interested, then you will have earned an e-hug from me. If you’re into that sort of thing. Which I’m totally not, I just thought you might– never mind. Enjoy the website.

if ($("div#shell").height() == 444) {
	$("div.mainabout").fadeIn();
	$("div.mainhouserules").css("display", "none");
	$("div.mainicinfo").css("display", "none");
	$("div.maindirections").css("display", "none");
	$("div.maincontact").css("display", "none");
	$("div.mainlinks").css("display", "none");
}
else {
     $("div#quote").animate( {opacity:.00}, 500, function () {
     $("div#shell").animate( {height:"444px"}, 1500);
     $("div#bgcover").animate( {opacity:.70}, 2500, function() {
		$("div.mainabout").fadeIn();
		$("div.mainhouserules").css("display", "none");
		$("div.mainicinfo").css("display", "none");
		$("div.maindirections").css("display", "none");
		$("div.maincontact").css("display", "none");
		$("div.mainlinks").css("display", "none");
	});
});
};

The conditional statement took a bit of research and asking around to find the right syntax, but it all worked out. Now, the current task is getting it to work in IE just as well as everything else.

http://www.chrishanel.com/CMS

IE problems:

-The Emily Dickinson Quote doesn’t have proper transparency in IE. I know that IE has problems with PNGs with alphas, but there’s workarounds.

-The div that I’m placing over the skull background in order to fade it out doesn’t animate properly in IE. It’s supposed to go straight from 0% opacity to 70%, but instead goes right from 0% to 100% and then fades back down. Weird.

1. The site opens in a specific structure.
2. Clicking on any of the links at the bottom of the site causes elements to change in sequence before spawning the content of that link. Code snippet –

$("div#quote").animate( {opacity:.00}, 500, function () {
   $("div#shell").animate( {height:"444px"}, 1500);
   $("div#bgcover").animate( {opacity:.70}, 2500, function() {
      $("div.mainabout").css("display", "none");
      $("div.mainhouserules").css("display", "none");
      $("div.mainicinfo").fadeIn();
      $("div.maindirections").css("display", "none");
      $("div.maincontact").css("display", "none");
      $("div.mainlinks").css("display", "none");
   });
});

Clicking on a subsequent link will cause the content to switch.

Now, all of these things are individually doable in jQuery using .css and .animate functions. However, due to the fact that any one of the links, when being the first link clicked, will cause the sequenced animation to happen, therein lies a problem.

I don’t know a way to tell the system that it doesn’t have to take the time to animate the transition before spawning the new content if this animation has already happened. With my current code setup, first click works fine. 2nd click causes a pause where nothing happens (because it’s already in its finished state) for a duration and then the content finally comes around.

Help?