Soul Searchings

Exactly one month has passed since my last entry, but strangely it’s felt like it’s been even longer than that with everything going on.

First off, I found out why the hacker only did it with $200 - it’s because that’s the maximum you can bet on a hand on PartyCasino’s Blackjack. Of course, if he had lost that $200 hand, there was nothing stopping him from trying again and again to lose my entire balance. But that seems to be over and done with now.

I didn’t have much time to play poker in April, and managed to only get in four sessions that added up to 7.5 hours total. I actually had a pretty bad month, and lost $130 from the actual gameplay. Most of that was on PokerStars, which I just started playing on. I have not yet had a single winning session there yet. However, I did do one $100 bonus at PartyPoker, and with the addition of the $200 the hacker won me, I guess I still ended up $170 in the black.

For those that actually read my entries, you may recall that I got a traffic ticket for "unnecessary noise" last August when the officer felt that by having taken the turn at speed, my tires made too much gripping sound. Even though the fine was only $109, I decided to dispute it out of principle. Well, today was the scheduled court date, and I got there a little after 1pm. This was my first time attending traffic court, and I found out that the scheduled time you receive is not your own, but rather shared with a bunch of others. In total, there were about 10-12 cases to be heard between 1:30pm and 4:30pm, and the ones that are fully disputing the tickets usually go last, while easier cases are taken care of at the start. Those cases include people that may have been cited for multiple infractions, but came to an agreement with the officer to plead guilty to one, but have the others dropped, or those that would like to plead guilty, but just want a reduced fine.

The first four cases involved officers that were not present, and as such, the tickets are automatically dismissed, even when the offense in question is cut and dry. For example, one of the dismissed cases involved someone being cited for hitting a parked vehicle and then leaving the scene. Also, I don’t know about other judges, but the one presiding over the cases this afternoon was fairly lenient. While he didn’t dismiss any of the tickets issued by officers that were present, he reduced the fines where he was able to in every single case without exception, usually to the minimum. There were two cases of people that got cited for driving without insurance, and the original fine was over $500, but in both instances, he was willing to lower it a bit over $300. For another person that got cited for a level two speeding ticket for driving approximately 100kmph in a 50kmph zone, the judge was willing to reduce the fine to reflect the violation being driving no more than 20kmph over the speed limit. My case was the second last to be brought up, and the judge completely understood where I was coming from, but the problem is the way the bylaw in question is worded, it’s completely subjective and open to interpretation. There is no concrete definition of what "loud" means, or what "unnecessary" means. In the end, basically what came out of it was that if the sound is audible and an officer decides to issue a ticket for it, the ticket won’t be dismissed, regardless of what his definition of loud and unnecessary is. At the very least, it wasn’t a complete waste of time, as following his modus operandi, he reduced my fine to the lowest amount, which was $50.

Of course, I have been following the Canucks closely this whole last month. It’s ironic I’m writing for the first time since the playoffs began on the night that they got ousted by the Ducks. When the tickets for the second round games were released on Ticketmaster, I joined the frenzy and actually ended up buying four single tickets to game 6. I’m not sure why I even did that. Perhaps it was because I thought I could flip it easily for some profit since demand exceeds supply. But I quickly found out it wasn’t anywhere as lucrative as I thought it to be, especially for single tickets. If anything, I guess I was somewhat relieved when the Canucks lost tonight because now I won’t have to worry about getting rid of my tickets. I spent over $1000 on those four tickets, including one in the second row of the lower bowl that cost over $400. I also managed to buy one of the cheapest tickets at $105, which I was planning on using myself, but alas it wasn’t meant to be for me attending my first every playoff game. Maybe next year…

We’ve also started practicing for the 2007 Asian Invitational volleyball tournament. Once again, I’ll be playing libero, which is definitely where I’d be most useful. Our team is pretty much the same as last year, except Wing is setting instead of Thi, and minus Ed, because we simply had too many players last year. Being honest, I’ll be quite happy if we made it as far as we did last year.

The sport that I’m more excited about right now is actually soccer. A few months ago, our company started booking an indoor field at Sportstown BC every other Friday afternoon for an hour, and we would go out and play a quick game amongst ourselves. However, near the end of March, we ended up getting a match set up with MDSI, which is another company in our building. They scored the first goal, but we took over from there. I scored a natural hat trick to get a 3-1 lead, which was plenty as the final score ended up being 7-2 in our favour. Four weeks later, we booked another match, this time against UTStarcom. At first, we were a little intimated with them showing up in their company uniforms, but we held our own just fine. I scored the first two goals of the match, which included the eventual game winner again, as the final score ended up being 5-1. I actually brought a camcorder out to those games and had the action recorded, and after watching the highlights over and over, I’ve got to say I do miss playing soccer competitively. We have another game lined up later today, against Mobidia. Hopefully we will take our record to 3-0!

Tonight, the most extraordinary event unfolded before my very eyes.

Just after 10pm, I was logged onto PartyPoker (but not playing) when I received a popup alert saying the software had to close because I had logged in on another computer. I found that odd, but thought maybe it was just an error on their side, and didn’t think much of it.

A few minutes later, at 10:11pm, my GMail Notifier displayed that I had just received an email from PartyPoker saying I had purchased a gift certificate for US$200. I had done no such thing, so this got me a bit concerned. I checked the email over, and it looked legitimate. My next step was to check my PartyPoker balance. From earlier, I knew my balance was US$2640.31. I log in and see that my balance… was still US$2640.31. Okay, so all of my money is still there. Maybe somehow their system got messed up and sent me that email by mistake.

I went to look at the email again. The only problem was, the email was being deleted from my account right in front of my eyes. When I tried reloading it the first time, it gave me the option of undeleting it, which I promptly clicked, but alas, the email disappeared without a trace. What in the hell is going on here?

I decided I had better call up PartyPoker right away and see if they could shed some light on what’s going on. When they told me what had happened, I was flabbergasted. They said the logs for my account indicated somebody had taken US$200 to a blackjack table, left with US$400, then went and purchased the US$200 gift certificate. When I informed them that I had in fact not been the one to have done these transactions, they reversed the gift certificate purchase and promptly put a hold on my account so that the security investigations team could look into the situation.

While that was being done, I still had access to my account in the meantime, and when I checked my transaction history, I did indeed see that US$200 was taken to a blackjack table at 10:08pm, and the very next minute at 10:09pm US$400 was taken away from the table. So it looks like the perpretrator put the US$200 down on a single hand, and just so happened to win. At 10:11pm, he ordered a gift certificate in the amount of the winnings, US$200.

I was told to write an email to the PartyPoker investigations team to explain exactly what happened, and then I would get a call back in 24-48 hours after they have had a chance to look into it. I took a couple minutes to assess the situation, and decided I needed to take action immediately and change all my passwords for every single poker site and online wallet, and make them a lot more secure than they used to be.

After that, I wrote up the email, sent it off, and called PartyPoker up again just to confirm that they received it. Now, all I could do is wait for them to call me back. Fortunately, they were very dilligent on this case, and I got a call back from their security department within half an hour. The person on the other end of the line was very pleasant to talk to, and we discussed the situation in detail. He was able to give me the IP address that was used to access my account, and I did a quick lookup and it traced to Eastern Canada, possibly Ottawa. However, he also said they couldn’t link that IP address with any other account, because that IP had never been used before by anyone logging into PartyPoker. One thing I was wondering is why the hacker would have only done this with US$200, instead of my whole balance of US$2600. The procedure would have been the same regardless of the amount. Because of this, and some other factors as well, the security guy was saying it would seem like this was the work of someone that knows me, and was just trying to make a quick buck but not wanting to lose all my money. But try as I might, there just isn’t anyone at all i could think of that would match the profile.

During our conversation, I explained to him that I am actually a systems administrator myself, and am, in fact, quite well versed on employing proper security measures and avoiding scam tactics such as phishing and malware. Those couldn’t have been the avenues the hacker used to compromise my account. I have not shared my account password with anyone, and I simply could not come up with any answer as to how the hacker was able to get a hold of my login information. Even worse is, the fact that the gift certificate email got deleted meant that the hacker had access to my email account as well. Now this part really concerned me. If he had access to my email, he could have potentially gotten the passwords to my online wallets as well. It dawned on me that yesterday, I had received a lost password email from Moneybookers, and I had never requested that either. But my Moneybookers account was never touched, as the only thing that could be done with that email was to reset my password, and I know my password never changed. But Moneybookers was the least of my worries, since I had no money in there currently, but Neteller was a different story. Fortunately, not a penny was out of place there either.

After I ensured the security guy I had taken measures to protect my account, he released the hold on it. In light of all of this, combined with the fact that Neteller is closing shop for all Canadian gamblers, I decided to withdraw a large chunk of my bankroll out. It’s going to be much more difficult to make transactions to poker sites now, so I imagine I may start playing less and less as time goes on.

Being in my profession, instead of feeling violated, I couldn’t help but to primarily feel embarrassed about this having happened to me. The worst part is I still have no idea how the hacker could have possibly gotten hold of my login credentials, not only for PartyPoker, but for GMail as well. This is quite disconcerting because even though I have beefed up the security of my logins, I don’t know whether that is enough to prevent it from happening again. My only guess at this point is that they managed to hack into one of the sites associated with poker that I’m a member of, such as PokerSourceOnline or PokerSavvy, and found some information through there. Other than that, I’m pretty much drawing dead.

I guess this whole ordeal opened my eyes to the fact I need to start employing better account security in general. I actually came out of all this very lucky, as it could have been orders of magnitude worse.

If at that time, I didn’t happen to be in front of my computer, logged into PartyPoker, and have GMail Notifier, I may not have known that any of this even took place, because my account balance would have ended up being exactly the same, and I would have never seen the gift certificate email.

Also, there was nothing that stopped the hacker from being much more reckless with my money. PartyPoker’s policy on this is that since their system is secure, and that the breach occurred on my side, if the hacker had lost my money, there would be no eligibility of compensation. If the hacker had lost that US$200 hand of blackjack, or put my entire balance on the line and lost, I would have been completely shit out of luck.

Ironically, as it turns out, since the hacker actually WON US$200, and I acted quick enough to cancel the gift certificate he ordered, I get to keep that money.

This is definitely US$200 I could have done without.

The last couple weeks, a bunch of us have gone for bowling at Revs on Tuesday nights - Chanh, Clara, Gary, Mimi, Will, Thi and myself. Shoe rental costs $4, the first game costs $3, the second costs $2, and every game after that costs just $1. On Monday nights, the pricing structure is completely different, but ends up working out to be pretty much the same. Shoe rental is only $2, but the first game costs $6, and every subsequent game is a buck. If you work it all out, it just means for those that bowl one game, it will be a dollar more on Mondays, but for two games or more, there’s no difference between the two days.

However, for those that have their own bowling shoes, like myself, Tuesday is the cheaper night. The cost of one game is $3 instead of $6, and for two games $5 instead of $7. They both go up by a buck each for every additional game, so two bucks is the difference. Just from these last two weeks, I’ve saved $8 from shoe rental costs. I highly recommend getting a pair of bowling shoes, even if you don’t bowl very often. I picked up my new Brunswick shoes for about $30 on eBay a couple years ago. It has pretty much paid for itself after just a few uses, and I know the only feet that’s been in them are mine, and not hundreds of others. Now I’m wondering whether I should get my own ball or not. Consistency is the key to bowling, and when using balls that vary greatly from session to session, it’s hard to get into a groove.

I haven’t bowled very much in the last few years, usually just once or twice a year. Back in high school, we used to bowl often, when we had our summer bowling championships in 1998 and 1999. We bowled pretty much every week during those summers, with those 2-for-1 T&C coupons, and some weeks we even went twice. I kept meticulous stats for those sessions, and in fact, I still have them on my computer and was looking at them just a couple nights ago. Doing these bowling stats probably led to helping me know how to use Excel a lot better, which has proven useful over the years.

During the 1998 season, we bowled 20 official games between July 1st and September 3rd. Here are the stat highlights:

• Highest single game score: 186 (Me, 14th game - 4 strikes, 5 spares)
• Most closed: 9 (Me, 14th game - 4 strikes, 5 spares)
• Most strikes in a game: 4 (Gary, 3rd game; Will, 5th game; Thi, 11th game; Me, 11th game; Me, 14th game)
• Most consecutive strikes in a game: 3 (Will, 8th game; Me, 11th game)
• Most spares in a game: 6 (Ken, 12th game)
• Most consecutive spares: 4 (Will, 3rd game; Me, 5th game; Me, 15th game; Ken, 15th game)
• Highest average of closed frames per game: 4.25 (Me), 4.21 (Thi)
• Highest average of strikes per game: 1.71 (Thi), 1.70 (Me)
• Highest average of spares per game: 2.55 (Me), 2.50 (Thi)

That 186 score was quite the anomaly at that time, as the next highest game during the season was only 156, which was also by me. Ken got the third and fourth highest scores at 155 and 154, while Will and Gary shared fifth with 152.

The highest score for the girls was a 119 by Elaine.

I won the 1998 championship with an average score of 115.85, with Thi coming second at 111.71.

It’s actually quite remarkable how much the skill level improved overall during the following season, as the stats will show.

During the 1999 season, we bowled 23 official games between June 29th and August 23rd. Here are the stat highlights:

• Highest single game score: 209 (Me, 22nd game - 5 strikes, 4 spares)
• Most closed: 9 (Me, 9th game - 4 strikes, 5 spares; Ed, 20th game - 2 strikes, 7 spares; Me, 22nd game - 5 strikes, 4 spares)
• Most strikes in a game: 6 (Gary, 10th game)
• Most consecutive strikes in a game: 5 (Me, 22nd game)
• Most spares in a game: 7 (Ken, 17th game; Ed, 20th game)
• Most consecutive spares in a game: 5 (Ed, 20th game)
• Highest average of closed frames per game: 5.26 (Me), 4.29 (Ken)
• Highest average of strikes per game: 2.48 (Me), 2.24 (Thi)
• Highest average of spares per game: 2.88 (Ed), 2.78 (Me)

Gary was actually the first to reach 200, and he got to 200 exactly on the 10th game, when he registered the six strikes. On the final day of our so-called competitive bowling era, I surpassed it with my 209, powered by my five-bagger. The third highest score was 188 by me, while the fourth highest scores were a pair of 185’s by Ed and me again. I also had the sixth and seventh highest scores at 181 and 180.

The most consecutive strikes we’ve ever had was actually six, and that was accomplished by Elaine. I don’t recall when that occurred, but it must have been outside of our championships, as I don’t have it recorded. I also can’t remember what her final score ended up being, but it was definitely over 200. I don’t think she beat my score of 209, because I’m thinking I would have remembered if she did, but Elaine thinks she may have gotten higher.

The highest official score for the girls was a 159 by Justine.

I was the winner again of the 1999 championship with an average score of 138.30, with Ken coming second at 122.41.

What’s impressive is that three others (Gary, 119.42; Ed, 117.88; Thi, 116.35) all had higher averages than the previous year’s highest average. Elaine was right behind at 114.87.

I find it pretty interesting how I progressed through the two seasons. Breaking the averages down further shows the following results:

First ten games of 1998: 105.6
Last ten games of 1998: 126.1
First ten games of 1999: 130.7
Last ten games of 1999: 150.8

Before now, I never realized that I had actually ended up starting to be able to average 150. Since the summer of 1999, we hardly ever went bowling anymore, so my skills went into a decline, to the point where I feel like I had completely forgotten how to bowl, and was back to being about a 110 average bowler.

In fact, during these past two weeks, my game felt terrible. I had no control of my shots anymore. I couldn’t hit the head pin on most frames, and couldn’t pick up easy spares. During the second game this week, I started to actively look for ways to change my delivery to get my game back on track. In the past, I learned to line up by stepping on the second arrow from the left with my right foot. I came to realize that the arrows at different bowling alleys are not the same distance from the lane as they are at T&C, which completely throws me off. At Revs, after I take my three steps from the arrows, I’m still way too far behind the line, and it causes my release to be completely inconsistent and awkward. Towards the end of the second game, I made the adjustment to start half a foot forward, and switched down to a 11 pound ball from the 13 I have always used. It made a huge difference, and I was able to feel it immediately. Even though I still only finished that game with a terrible score of 85 - quite possibly the worst score I have ever had while bowling for real - I felt I was ready to come back into form in a big way. I was almost ready to proclaim I would bowl a 150 for our third and final game, even though I can’t remember the last time I’ve reached that mark. Turns out my feeling was right on the money.

I started out great, with a strike, strike, spare, strike combination. I already had 94 through five frames - more than I did in all of the previous game. I continued bowling decently and closed another four frames to finish with 179 - by far the highest score I’ve had since being in my prime.

While I don’t expect to be able to bowl that well all the time, I hope I can at least get back into form to average about 130-140. I feel fairly confident my adjustments were not just a one game wonder. I will find out next time!

It’s been a full month since the last entry, and the time seems to have just flown by.

These last four weeks have been incredibly busy at work. The most time consuming project has been putting together and setting up everything inside our cage at MCI. They are our new colocation facility, and are located at Waterfront Center. I now know first hand how ridiculous parking is downtown, after having to park there about 15-20 days in the past month or so. At Waterfront Center, the price is now $3 per half hour before 6pm, up to a maximum of $16, and $5 flat rate after 6pm. Despite the price, there was one rainy Monday afternoon where I couldn’t find an empty parkade within a two block radius. Every single one was jam packed. Finally, I found one a little further away, and had to park about a hundred floors up. At least that’s how high it felt from the number of times needed to circle up and down each floor.

Anyways, besides the daunting task of physically setting up our four server racks, complete with about $80K worth of networking equipment, and $100K worth of servers, we needed to configure everything too. With very tight deadlines to work with, we’ve had to work long hours everyday, and through most weekends as well.

In the past, with a much simpler setup, the entire operations department really consisted of just myself and one other guy. In the last two months, our department has more than tripled in size to seven employees, but yet there is never a shortage of tasks that need to be done.

Of course, it’s not only our department that’s been growing, and with every new face that comes to the company, I’m pretty much solely responsible for getting their equipment setup and ready to go. This has usually involved procuring them a new laptop, monitor, keyboard, mouse and IP phone. Generally, I’ve been helping the company buy most of these items first, and then expensing them later. For January, I managed to rack up almost $10K in company expenses, and for February, I bested that figure with over $15K. Suddenly I find myself with a lot of PC Points to buy groceries with, and Starbucks points to drink coffee with.

Being as busy as I have been with work, I didn’t find much time to play poker, and my final February stats show a net profit of a little over $300 in under 14 hours of play. That worked out to almost US$23 per hour, tax free. Not bad.

In all my life, I had never played a real game of foosball - until a couple months ago. We have a table at the office, and people started getting into it, and naturally I decided to give it a whirl. Well, it turns out I’m not a natural at it, and in fact, I sucked pretty good. A few of the players are pretty good, so I was determined to get to the point where I’m at least half decent and wouldn’t be a walkover. Well, I did get better after some practice, and have managed to be on the winning team a few times, but overall I’m still pretty weak.

I’ve been sick during the last week, but fortunately I think I’m on the recovery trail now. No longer do I feel physically weak and mentally out of it, but I still have the remnants of a cough. It seems that usually some phlegm will remain with me for weeks, sometimes even months, after I’ve gotten over a cold or flu. Hopefully it won’t be like that this time.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’m very good at saving money when it comes to buying stuff. I will always do my research and get what I’m looking for at the best possible price. By doing this, I’m sure I have saved thousands over the years.

Strangely, while I’m good at saving money, I’m not very good at making my money grow. I’ve never done any investments, and even when I have some decent money saved up, I just let it sit in my savings account, which has next to no interest. Just this weekend, I’ve finally looked into putting some money into a RRSP, and I finally realize how much of a tax break this can result in.

February marks the one year mark of employment with my current company, and I got a nice raise and a bonus to boot. That was a very pleasant unexpected surprise.

For me, I think the saying is true - money only matters when you don’t have any. I find that I’m a lot less diligent in keeping track of my money now that I don’t have to worry about whether I have enough. Since my company is expanding and hiring a lot of new employees, I’ve had to help buy a lot of new equipment on my own credit cards, before expensing it. In this last month alone, I’ve rolled almost ten grand on plastic for the company. I’m so unconcerned about the money, that I keep putting off submitting my expense sheet. Also, I’ve been so lackadaisical with keeping track of all the purchases, that I wouldn’t be surprised if I missed expensing some of them. Hopefully I didn’t miss any of the large items, but I’m not sure why I’m not even that concerned about it.

My main credit card is a PC Financial Mastercard, which gives 1% back in PC Points to spend on groceries at Superstore. I have like $400 worth saved up, just from expensing so much. I only have about a $5500 limit on it, so sometimes when I have to buy a lot of stuff in a short period of time, like last month, I need to defer to my Starbucks Visa card, which gives 1% back to spend at Starbucks. They give nice perks with this card too, where often they include coupons for free beverages or food with their statements. I’ve hardly put any personal purchases on the Visa myself, but I still have almost $100 to spend at Starbucks.

On the poker front, this month has been pretty good so far. I’ve only played five sessions, totalling about 7.5 hours, and I’m up $273.75. I haven’t had a single losing session yet, but one of those sessions, I finished up only a nickel. In the past, a significant portion of the money I’ve earned from online poker is by way of being a bonus whore and just clearing deposit bonuses, while winning only small amounts in doing so. This month, that figure represents basically pure winnings, so I’m pretty happy about that.

As for an update on my hockey pool, it looks like I’m well on my way to winning the $120 pot as well. I’ve been leading the pool since November, with the difference to second place ranging from between 80-30 for the most part, but just in the last week or so, it has grown to over 100, and barring any catastrophes, I can’t see anyone catching up. My lineup now consists of:

1. V. Lecavalier (doing way better than anyone predicted)
2. B. Richards (not doing close to what was expected)
3. M. Nylander (doing pretty well)
4. M. Straka (almost keeping pace with Jagr)
5. E. Staal (significantly underperforming thus far)
6. R. Brind’Amour (old-timer doing better than Staal)
7. P. Kariya (well below last year’s pace)
8. J. Arnott (meeting expectations)
9. M. Savard (great pickup and exceeding expectations)
10. M. Sundin (steady as always)
11. B. McCabe (very strong start but faded off)
12. T. Kaberle (same as McCabe)
13. S. Gonchar (can’t go wrong being on same powerplay as Crosby)
14. D. Boyle (doing better than expected)
15. M. Brodeur (best goalie, period - 10 shut outs already)
16. M. Kiprusoff (second best goalie in my league, tied with Luongo)

My strategy of picking my goalies early while sacrificing my forward picks has paid off in spades. Right now, Brodeur is worth a good 30 points over any other goalie in my pool - representing a significant portion of my lead. The other key to my lead is my defensemen, all of which are my original draft picks. All four are in the top 13 point getters for my league. My forward picks were actually pretty bad. In fact, I only have four of my original ten forwards, and out of those, only Lecavalier is doing well.

For those more hockey savvy, you may have realized that I have a lot of pairs of players from the same team. With my fourteen players, not including goalies, I only have seven teams represented. I have two Rangers, two Hurricanes, two Predators, three Lightning, and three Maple Leafs. These teams all have better than average power plays, and when they get it going, I can really rack up the points fast. The best goals are on the Lightning or Maple Leaf powerplay, where for example, Boyle will score on assists from Lecavalier and Richards (which happened today) or Sundin scores from Kaberle and McCabe. Those end up being 7-point goals for me. I think I’m the only person in my league that has more than two players from any one team, so nobody else can get those 7-point super specials.

Anyways, barring any major injuries, I think I’ll just keep my lineup the way it is until the end of the season, and that should be enough to win. I’m so hesitant to modify my lineup that I can’t even pick someone to drop so that I can pick up Forsberg, now that he’s finally got his skate problems fixed.

I think all the others in the pool have basically given up now. Nobody has shown much interest in the pool in the last little while, and I don’t blame them. =)

This past Saturday, the annual Monster Jam was back in town, so as usual, I headed down there on my own to catch the show.

I paid $23 for the cheapest ticket they had available, which was near the back of the lower bowl, towards the corner section. In reality, even this seat wasn’t that bad - the angle wasn’t ideal, but the view was fine. But, as I do almost every year, I scope out where there are a bunch of empty seats in the prime viewing sections, and wait until about the first intermission, then make my way to those better seats. I’ve never had a problem doing this, since the place never even comes close to selling out.

I watched the second half from basically the best seats possible, right in the middle of the stadium, just a few rows up from the floor. Unfortunately, the show itself was pretty mediocre. There was absolutely nothing that stood out in this year’s show. In fact, I would hasten to say that while the price of the tickets have steadily gone up, the quality of the show has steadily gone down.

I remember in the good ol’ days, back in the mid 90’s, the shows were awesome. Aside from the fact that Bigfoot used to come to town, they had a much larger variety of events.

This year, the lineup was the following:

1. Monster truck wheelie competition, which was extremely lame. It was basically just each truck going up to the crush cars one time and seeing how vertical they can get. Most of them were pretty crappy, and no better than any other approach they do, whether in a race or in the freestyle competition.
2. Monster truck donut competition, which was also pretty lame. For some reason, they didn’t bring in any dirt at all this year for the show, which means it was bare concrete everywhere. This means the monster trucks get very little bite, which means much slower driving overall. Doing donuts on a concrete surface is nowhere near as exciting as doing donuts on dirt.
3. Monster truck racing, which was okay, but nothing special.
4. Motocross stunts, which was boring for me, since I’ve seen all those tricks about a million times. However, I was impressed that one rider actually did a backflip off the skinny ramp, with concrete all around.
5. Sportbike stunters, which was also boring for me, since I’ve seen stuff ten times better in videos.
6. Kart racing by youngsters.
7. Remote control cars playing during intermission
8. Monster truck freestyle, which was the only hope of saving the show, but turned out to be very disappointing. Most of the trucks were way too timid, and there were no exciting moments to speak of. What made it worse was that Grave Digger, as the last to go, was just starting to gain steam and potentially getting ready to do more risky jumps, broke unexpectedly.

Only three or four of those above activities could really be considered events. In the past, a single show would feature:

1. Monster truck racing
2. Monster truck freestyle
3. Motocross
4. Tractor pulling
5. Tough truck competition
6. Huge fire-breathing robots
7. Roll-over competition
8. Mud-bog racing
9. Demolition derby (which I found boring)

And probably a few other things I don’t remember. In the past, the show would begin at maybe 7pm, and wouldn’t be over until almost 11pm. This year, I got there right at 7:30pm, and just as the freestyle competition ended, I think I was out of there by about 9:30pm.

Bigfoot has always been my favourite monster truck, but they haven’t been to Vancouver in many years. They used to come to town as part of the USHRA events, but they had a fallout in 1998, and since that time, the two parties have been completely disassociated from each other. That is why Bigfoot doesn’t take part in any Monster Jam events, which is now the main circuit that tours North America. In fact, the USHRA parent company actually started buying out and consolidating a lot of the well-established monster truck teams around that time, such as Grave Digger, Bear Foot, Carolina Crusher and Monster Patrol, just to name a few. To put it in perspective, the Monster Jam brand somewhat became to monster trucks what the WWE is to professional wrestling.

Yes, I know a lot about monster trucks. In fact, at every show I watch, I’m sure there are only a small handful of people who know more about monster trucks than I do - the history, the technology, and random knowledge. Someday, I still want to drive one. =)

In general, I think the sport of monster trucks has become somewhat stagnant. For most of the 90’s, every year saw huge advances in monster truck technology, but in the last few years, I don’t think there has been any new developments at all. The trucks basically remain the same year after year, and as such, everything that can be done has already been done. I mean, for example, the world record for a monster truck long jump was accomplished by Bigfoot back in 1999. Since then, nothing has even come close to making a comparable impact in the world of monster trucks.

Sadly to say, if I can know in advance that next year’s show will be as lackluster as this year’s, maybe it might not even be worth going to.

It’s 3am Sunday morning, and I’m having some trouble falling asleep. Usually, this wouldn’t be much of an issue, as I generally can sleep in on the weekend as late as I like, but unfortunately there’s a lot of work to do at the office, so I agreed to be in by 10am.

I’ve always been a late sleeper, even back in the elementary school days. During that time, I was an avid - perhaps even maniacal - reader. I think most nights, I would read at LEAST an entire novel, sometimes multiple. One of my preferred book series was the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries. In grade seven, we were made to keep a log of all the books we read, and I know I had a ridiculous list of books at year’s end. By doing that, I think I regularly slept at 2-3am.

I was no better in high school, but instead of reading, I went on to doing other things till the wee hours, such as being on the computer. So often, I would go to school with only 4-5 hours of sleep, that I was quite known for sleeping anywhere during the day. It didn’t help that I somehow ended up being in choir from grade ten onwards, which meant rehearsals at 7:30am. Even on days I didn’t have choir, I still went to school that early because that was the only time I could get a ride. It was either that, or walk 18 blocks to school in the morning… so I chose the former. When I didn’t have choir, I would often just sit by my locker and do homework if I had any, or just sleep while propped up against the locker.

I found it pretty amusing that even though I fell asleep in class on numerous occasions, I never ever got in trouble for it. In fact, there was one time in grade 11 math where I fell asleep in the front row, and I think Sandip joked to the teacher "Shouldn’t Stanley be awake for this?" and the teacher replied with "I don’t have time to bother with that." If anyone reading this happens to have been there and remembers that, please correct me if it didn’t go down like that. =)

Anyways, since the last entry, I’ve had a few pretty good sessions of poker. All in all, I finished the month of January up approximately $750. That’s some decent pocket change!

So I did in fact stay up for the Australian Open final, and watched Federer dispatch Gonzalez in straight sets. Being that Gonzalez had more unforced errors in the first two games against Federer than in the entire match against Haas, there’s no doubt he wasn’t playing as well as he had been earlier in the tournament. In the end, it’s just another notch on Federer’s belt, and he’s well on his way to being the greatest of all time. At the pace he’s going and with no signs of slowing down in his prime, he could surpass Sampras’ 14 Grand Slams by next year. The real question is whether he’ll be able to win the French Open or not.

Okay, now I’m feeling pretty sleepy, so I think it’s time to sign off.

Until next time…

A week and a half ago, got involved in the largest poker pot of my life.

I started with $70 on the .50/$1 table, and built it up to $114 when the following hand went down.

I found KK UTG and decided not to mess around and raised to $8 right away. One player in middle position calls, and a very loose calling station calls from the big blind as well. The flop comes QdTd6s. BB checks, I bet out $25. Both guys call. Hmm, that’s not a good sign. Turn comes Jc. BB checks, I check, and now mid position bets $61 with only $20 left behind him. BB folds. The pot is now $160. I’m basically faced with calling $81 into a pot of $181. It was a very tough decision. I still have the overpair, but it was very possible some donkey had something like QJ. Two other possible hands would be QQ or JJ, but for some reason I didn’t think either had that. In the back of my mind, I was thinking if I really was behind, I still have the open ended straight draw possibility to suck out on.

I made the call. Pot size: $262. It turns out that I did make the right call, but I was definitely not out of the woods. He was holding KdJd, so he had flopped the open-ended royal flush draw, but only got a pair of jacks on the turn. If an ace or ten rivered, then we would split the pot. So I just need to dodge another J or any diamond.

Thank God the river came 7c! Because of that hand, finished the day up about $150.

A few days later, played a marathon five hour session and it was terrible. Couldn’t hit anything. In short, had AJ or better 19 times, and couldn’t hit a pair on the flop 14 of those times. Out of the five times I did hit something, I lost three of them for large pots. A good example would be having AK and raising to $5 and getting called by QJ. The flop comes KKT. I bet, he calls. Turn comes 9. Great. Thanks very much. All in all, the damage could have been much worse than just $100, but playing for five hours and not getting any luck at all takes its toll, so I took a break for a few days.

Things are getting busy at work again. Last few weeks have been pretty hectic. Have ordered about $70K worth of Cisco networking equipment, and $25K worth of Dell servers. Another $60K of Dell servers are being ordered next week. The company secured a new round of financing, so now we’re expanding again, which means lots of new faces and lots of new challenges. Things are likely only going to get busier in the next few months.

Yesterday night, went snowboarding with some coworkers, and it was the first time I’ve hit the slopes in two years. Was expecting the conditions at Cypress to be very good, considering they have a snow base of over 300cm, but we were quite unpleasantly surprised to find the runs to be completely iced over. It goes to show it doesn’t matter how much snow there is accumulated, good slope conditions require that there be NEW snow. At the very least, the weather was fantastic last night, with the visibility being perfect and not a cloud in the sky.

It didn’t help that I haven’t done any maintenance on my board. My heel edge is completely rounded, and going down any icy patches, once I start to turn my board to carve, it starts sliding on its edge instead of biting and grabbing the ice. Not good. Led to some pretty dicey situations, and I hyperextended my left elbow a bit on one of my falls. Overall, it was still a pretty good night.

We grabbed a bite at the bar in the lodge afterwards, and I’ve got to say they have the largest regular burgers around. They are all made with 1/2 pound patties, and they come with a very generous serving of fries as well. Prices are very reasonable, starting at $9. Caught the end of the Canucks game while eating, but unfortunately we lost 3-2 to the Kings in OT.

I’m looking forward to watching the Australian Open final tonight between Roger Federer and Fernando Gonzalez! Federer has just been smoking all his opponents so far, not having lost a single set, and that’s expected. But Gonzalez is playing out of his mind, and has been incredibly impressive in destroying his opponents, including the likes of 5th seeded Blake and 2nd seeded Nadal. I really believe he has a chance against Federer, if he continues playing like he has been. I still think Federer is the favourite, and I prefer him to win, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Gonzalez springs the upset.

The match starts at 12:30am, and I’m definitely staying up to watch until the end!

So I hunkered down for some more poker in the last couple days, to mixed results. On Monday, I started by playing two tables on Absolute Poker with $0.50/$1 blinds and $55 on each. Tried to play a good, tight style… but the problem was I was getting nothing to play with. For about two hours, I mostly just got blinded away until I was close to being down $40. Fortunately though, I got lucky one hand where I decided to push preflop with TT but found someone with AA. The board comes J8497 for the nasty suckout. I apologized to the guy, even though this happens to me in reverse ALL the time. With that, I finished close to even and called it quits there. I went over to Party and played my regular game, and had better luck. Won about $30 in less than an hour.

Yesterday, did a similar routine and started on Absolute. Similar result, going pretty card dead for two hours and going down about $40 before quitting and moving on to Party. Continued to run pretty badly there. Every single time I had a good hand, I would get no action. I flopped sets about 7-8 times, and I swear not once was I able to even make a dime, even if I check on the flop and bet 50 cents into a $1.50 pot on the turn with three other players. Come on, are you kidding me? Nobody has ANYTHING? On the flipside, every time I bet aggressively with say AK preflop, I never hit on the flop. Or everytime I flop two pair, someone ends up catching a bigger two pair. Or I have AA and raise it more than 6x BB, and SB calls with A5 and hits a 455 flop. All of that combined to have me down by almost $50 in an hour and a half. During that stretch, there was simply no possible way I could have been in the black. The only question is whether I minimized my losses or not. Patience is the key for poker, and if you have a sound playing strategy, you will reap the rewards in the long run. This was certainly the case for this session, where things finally took a turn for the better. First, I called almost a buck preflop with 55 and got a AT5 flop. I got a loose guy to call large bets with just A2, so I took about $14 from him. A few seconds later on another table, I had 66 and flopped QT6. There was a short-stack with $8, and he had T6, so I easily took all his money. On that same table about two hands later, I had KQ clubs and got an outstanding flop with three clubs for a flush. The small blind made a fairly large bet on the flop, which I flat called. He then checked the turn to me, and I fired out $3. He raises to $6, and I reraise all-in for another $30 or so. He calls… with 54 clubs. Awesome. Won about $36 on that one. So while I had a horrible initial hour and a half and lost $50, I won all of it back and more in a span of five minutes. It only takes one good hand to wipe away an hour’s worth of crappy cards. Patience.

I actually finished up $25 or so on Party, but combined with Absolute, I was still down about $15 on the day. Given how the day started, I’m happy with the result.

In the past couple months, I had stopped frequenting the PSO and 2+2 forums. Well, it turns out that was a very costly mistake. I found out that between December 20th and the 26th, there were unprecedented bonus opportunities on PartyPoker. Generally, if you’re lucky, you might get one 20% up to $100 maximum bonus in a month. For this time period, for some reason, the bonus was 30% up to $200. The most painful part was, there was not only just one of these bonus codes available. Not even two or three. There were FIVE of these bonus codes that were available to EVERYBODY. Some people managed to use a sixth one as well. So that was potentially $1200 in free money that I missed out on. Granted, even if I did know about it, I probably wouldn’t have been able do the full amount, but very possibly I could have cleared about $600 worth. The bonuses all required 12x hands per dollar to clear, so that means each $200 bonus required 2400 hands. Five of the bonuses means 12000 hands in a span of about ten days. You would also require a deposit of $667 per bonus to get the $200 maximum, so that means you would need an available bankroll of $3335. I have just under that in my account, so I would have had enough to do four bonuses for sure. Damnit, missed out on $600 or $800 free money. *Sigh*

I received my 22" widescreen LCD a couple days ago, and have replaced my 21" CRT with it now. It might look a lot nicer, but functionally it’s really not much different at all. I’m not one of those that get the latest technologies just for the heck of it. I like to get them only if they truly are better than what I have currently. If not for my dad wanting a new monitor, there really wasn’t any reason for me to switch.

With the 22" having a resolution of 1680×1050, I gained 80 pixels horizontally, but actually lost 150 pixels vertically from the 1600×1200 resolution I was running previously. After having used it for the last two days, it’s pretty much the same, but with two exceptions.

When I play online poker, nowadays I generally play six tables simultaneously. With the 21" CRT at 1600×1200, I can fit four full size tables with no overlap, or six tables in a two across no overlap, three down with half overlap configuration. With the 22" LCD at 1680×1050, I can’t fit four full size tables without overlap, and for six tables, I can either do the similar two across, three down with a bit more overlap, or a three across, two down configuration with much smaller tables. I tried out the new configuration, and I don’t like it much. I like seeing large tables, so essentially, this new monitor is actually a little bit worse for me in terms of online poker, but I can live with it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice looking monitor and it clears up a lot of desk space, but it’s definitely not all positives. The LCD monitor has a much worse viewing angle than the CRT, and looking at it from anything more of a slight angle reduces the viewability significantly. However, one large positive is the viewing of videos. For regular 4:3 videos or watching TV, this 22" gives basically the same viewing size as the 21", but for widescreen videos, the 22" gives a significantly larger viewing size.

Speaking of online poker, I’ve been on a ridiculous heater since last week. For the longest time, I used to sit down with $15 on every table instead of the maximum buy-in of $25. I decided last week to sit with a full buy-in, and it worked out very, very well. For my first session, I played for about two and a half hours and finished up $90, after being up over $120 at one point. The next day, it got even better, and in about an hour and a half, I won over $160. It was a combination of things that resulted in such great results. I was getting very good cards, making very good plays, and also making very good laydowns. Everything was just going perfectly. Won over $250 in about four hours over a span of half a day. Excellent.

Despite that, I actually didn’t play for the next few days. I played again yesterday, and thought inititally that the doomswitch had been flipped on me when I was getting terrible cards and lost $60 fairly quickly, but I eventually came back to finish the session right at even. One particular hand helped the comeback.

I had pocket nines in late position, and just limped preflop to no raises. I flopped a monster with the board showing 977 and two hearts. Someone in early position bets the 25 cent minimum, and three others call. Even though my hand was so strong that I didn’t fear being outdrawn on the turn or river, I didn’t want to just call… but at the same time, I didn’t want to scare all of them away with a large reraise. If someone was going for a straight draw or a flush draw, I wanted them to stay in and hit it! I decided to do a min-raise to just fifty cents, hoping to get a little value out of all four of them. It worked even better than I had hoped. Someone reraised to $2. After some thinking, I decided to just push with my remaining $20+ and hope he calls. Amazingly, someone else calls the all-in, and then the the $2 raiser does as well!

They were both going for the flush draw, which is just awesome, because both of them were almost drawing completely dead. Only one guy had the slimmest of chances of beating me with runner runner kings, but obviously the odds of that happening are incredibly low. Suffice to say, I scooped up a nice $60+ pot.

So how about those Canucks? Winning seven in a row? That’s unpossible! Their good run, just like mine, must come to an end sometime…