Tuesday, January 04, 2005

It's Cold, I'm...Bleh

Wowee, what a way for the ‘not starting out good’ Monday to end. I’m speaking of the biggest day ever for this tiny blog, 45 hits! While I’m sure that many others get that sort number in the first hour of their day, this was over double my largest previous hit count. I’m sure that the mention from Ftrain helped out big time, so thanks man. And while I’m busy gushing, thanks to everyone who takes the time to stop by and read, it keeps the motivation strong.

Vacations are great, but there is a small part of me that almost doesn’t like them, because it’s SUCH a pain dragging my ass back to work. It was a typical first day back, putting out small fires here and there which weren’t any big deal, but then came along the big problem of the day. One of the folks in an unnamed department needed their laptop reimaged, and now I officially hate them. The images, not the person. The last three PC’s I have tried to image don’t want to take the image on. Has anyone out there used imaging and had the beaucoup problems that I seem to be regularly running into? Last night before leaving, I started some deep tissue format therapy on the laptop in question, so hopefully it will cooperate for me today.

If you’re one of the folks who could care less about technology, you may want to skip this section. If you are one of the folks who deals with this area, you most likely have more experience than me, so perhaps you have some ideas. The reason that the reimage was necessary was that CMD.exe would not run. It kept saying that it had encountered errors, Windows needed to shut it down, and to restart it (of course, restarting made no difference). I searched around the web for about 20 mins to try and read about this problem, but couldn’t seem to find anything applicable to this situation. No one at corporate had dealt with a problem like this either. Have any geeks out there had a similar problem? If so, were you able to fix it? I suspect the problem lay somewhere in the registry, something I know VERY little about. Being in an organization that seems to shun open source is making me play catch up and learn more about Windows than I would like. What a pain.

Last night my eyes hurt and I had a headache, as the Christmas/New Years holiday un-conditioned my eyes from staring at a screen for large amounts of time, so I decided to ‘Just Say No’ to poker for the evening. Even though it was sooo tempting. **mmmm, 65,000 people on Partyyyy, auuugggghhhhhh** Instead, I just whipped up a quick meal for my wife and I, and we settled in to watch Las Vegas (which seems to become more and more mediocre every time I see it) and the new show with Patricia Arquette, Medium. Not a bad show, especially for a Monday when you don’t feel like staring at a PC anymore. I wonder how long it will take NBC to try and work Paris Hilton or Tim McGraw into the script and completely muck it up.

As poker is never too far from my thoughts, the show inspired a poker related question. If you had the powers of a medium which could be applied to poker, would you use them? (We’ll assume here that such a thing is possible and that you have control over said power) Let me be more specific. You can’t see specific hole cards, but when you are facing bets, you get only one of a few indications. Preflop Indicators would be something along the lines of Weak, Marginal, or Premium Holdings. Post Flop, your indicators would be Bluff, Semi-Bluff, or Monster. The indications you get are guaranteed to always be correct. Now the question: Would using this 100% reliable intuition in a poker game make you a thief, or just another player with a HUGE edge? Based on these indicators the possibility of losing is still present, but it drops sharply, especially over the long haul.

Now, I know with enough study and experience a person can divine such things on their own without any supernatural ability. Hell, I would swear that some of the top pros abilities DO border on supernatural, Marcel Luske being just one example. Geez that guy can read a holding, it’s uncanny. I’m speaking of having an ability in which you don’t have to actually think about it and it’s 100% dead-on. Does using it make you morally bankrupt, simply stealing from the other players? Not necessarily, right? I mean, given half the chance, most would use it on you. So, there is the gray question that will give you something to think about while your working today. I think most likely, the answer to this is the same as most other poker related questions, “It depends”.

I have to cut things short for now, as it’s 24 degrees here, and talk of freezing rain and snow abounds. It’s hard to write well when you’re sucked into the weather report. Don’t forget to stop by Mean Gene to wish him a Happy B-day, and keep a bookmark for Otis in the Caribbean.

Since it’s difficult to Think Big when it’s this cold, I’ll shut up for now.