Germans are weird

Had a friend over for dinner last night, she turned us on to this popular German viral video. I mean, I find it pretty amusing, but she really really seemed to enjoy it (even after having seen it many times). The funny thing is, she's got a pretty good sense of humor, but I think there's some other level of humor that strikes a chord with Germans.




The words are something like:
baby shark, doo doo, doodoo doodoo, baby shark, doo doo...
little shark.....
big shark.....
white shark....
girl swims....
shark sees....
girl sees....
shark attacks....
girl swims....
shark attacks....
girl screams...
shark eats, yum yum....
bad shark!

Yes, my German classes are really paying off.

But lest you think that only lame things come out of Germany, remember that somewhere in this country lives the awesomeness that is the Techno Viking.

The Google Phone

So, apparently Google is going to come out with their own phone - personally I've seen this coming for a while now, and I've got some ideas as to how it would work.
Actually, I can't say I really predicted Google coming out with their own device - I figured that they would only come out with their own phone if they couldn't get partners to agree to supporting their vision on the Android platform; since Google's building their own device, I'm guessing they couldn't.
So, how will it work? From a user perspective, here's how I think it'll go.
I want to talk to my friend, John Doe, and I'll just dial "John Doe" on my phone. The GPhone will automatically see if he's on Google Chat / Voice, and if so directly connect me to him that way - entirely via IP - if I'm on a wifi point then it'll use that, otherwise it'll use my data carrier. If John isn't on some kind of IP-enabled system, then it'll dial him by regular old phone, but of course doing it in a Skype / Calling-Card kind of way, using VOIP to get to the closest POTS switch and then dialing from there. If I want to dial a phone number directly without going through this username mumbo-jumbo, then I'll just dial it like a normal phone - the difference is that I'll be paying for that, either as a direct payment or by using up minutes in my plan. My guess is that Google will make calls to a persons Google ID free of charge, even if they're really doing some Google Voice mumbo-jumbo behind the scenes.
From a receiving standpoint, the phone will do the same thing - I'll have a Google Voice phone number, which will be tied into my Google ID - when someone calls my number or my ID, that'll get piped to my phone. I don't know if Google will charge for minutes when someone calls my number instead of my ID, but I suspect they might in order to further persuade folks to keep it all within the Google IP universe.
This phone's going to mark yet another change in the way we view communications, one that I think we're ready for. Not that long ago, we had to remember (or write down) people's phone numbers. Once cell phones came along, we slowly adjusted to not needing to remember numbers - I don't know about everyone else, but I haven't memorized a phone number in quite a few years (with the exception of my own or my wife's, and that's just so I can give it to people quickly). Over time, the association of numbers to people has even started to fade; I mean, if I think about it, I know that a person's entry in my phone is tied to a number, but I don't actually _think_ about it - if I send an SMS, I just send it to that person. I think part of Google's vision is to capitalize on this thought trend, and get people to stop caring about phone numbers entirely. If you get a person's phone number, you can call their phone; get their Google ID and you can IM (GTalk), send them email (GMail), see their public calendar (GCal), see where they physically are (Latitude), and, or course, call them on the phone - why would you ever bother to get a phone number again?
The only think that I wonder is where Google will find a carrier who is willing to support this device - after all, voice calls are the bread-and-butter of mobile telecoms, and SMS is the icing on the cake - the Google phone would destroy all of that. In order for this to work, Google needs to partner with a carrier that's willing to give folks a pure data plan that's going to have a _lot_ of bytes shoved through it, for a price that more than competes with a traditional plan - what carrier in the U.S. is going to willingly sign up for that? I'm guessing not Verizon, or else this would already be standard on the Droid (OK, maybe not "standard", but the phone would at least have some apps to replicate the functionality I'm talking about). Or, maybe Google has some plan to shift most of the data burden to something else that they control? Only time will tell, but expect we're going to find out RSN.

yay new meme!

I don't know why this didn't become an Internet pastime sooner. Start with the self portrait of 18th-Centure painter Joseph Ducreux:



Man that's a pimpin' pose? Why not slap some modern pimpin' lyrics on top, such as "I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one". Or, even better:



Loving it! Check here for the whole shebang.
And, of course, some folks just have to cross the streams, thus creating a delightful meme mashup:

Dumbing down my poker

I've been on a very bad run of poker lately. It's been impossible to get a read on anybody. Every time I get some playable cards, I encounter raises and re-raises and re-re-raises. Every time I have a monster, everyone folks to my modest raise. My bluffs fail: I go through a lot of trouble to set up a tight image, but then everyone calls my raises, no matter how infrequent they are. Every bet / semi-bluff / bluff I make gets called or raised, despite my telling a beautiful, well-crafted story about exactly what I have. Nobody else's bets make sense; they're folding good hands and pushing all-in with nothing. Add to this a general card-deadness and lack of hitting draws, and you have the recipe for a very bad losing streak.
After about a month of failing, I read this post, which gave me a moment of clarity: I'm thinking too deeply. I'm trying to represent a particular hand or image to folks who aren't even paying attention. When I make that check-call with two hearts on the board, then bet big after the third heart comes in, folks aren't paying attention. Conversely, when I over-bet the pot on a board with two to a flush, folks are calling it with flush draws. Basically, I'm giving everyone too much credit. I mean, in a sense, I knew this already, but it hadn't really registered. So, now I'm back to basics: tight play, sit around and watch the other folks until I get a really good sense of what level they're thinking on. The only problem with this is that the donkeys' money tends to go to other folks who are willing to make questionable calls earlier on in the game. Since making this adjustment, things are going much better. Oddly enough, I now seem to also be getting better cards in better positions - or, maybe now I'm just calling at the right time, after taking the time to carefully analyze how my opponents are playing. At any rate, I'm enjoying it again, and that's what's important. Seriously considering heading down to Salzburg or up to the Spielbanken casino one of these weekends for a session.

The bank / tax debacle

The problem with not writing for a long time is that after awhile so many things build up that you have no idea where to start. There's life developments, job developments, tech developments, poker developments. I guess I may as well start with the life developments, then see what else happens.
So, let's start with my latest FML moment. A bit of backstory:
After I transferred to Munich, someone forgot to mention to payroll that I was no longer working in the U.S. As a result, I was getting paid in both the U.S. and in Germany. I figured this out pretty quickly and did the appropriate thing: I notified H.R. I pestered H.R. after each U.S. paycheck until they told me (nicely): it's being dealt with, don't worry, now piss off. A month after that, I told my boss, who really set off the alarms and fixed the issue.
Since I'm a responsible person, I figured that my employer would eventually figure out the mistake and ask for the money back. The money had been going into a bank account in California, which had remained our principal bank account even after moving to New York, and had been used to pay all our bills / mortgage / etc in the U.S. After moving to Germany, the bank account never got used, so I kept the money in it (along with some savings that was there before the debacle started), untouched, waiting for my employer to ask for it back. See how responsible I am? I didn't get any indication from them, but then again it's a very large company, and I assumed - no, I KNEW - that someone, eventually, would notice, and I wanted to be able to say I did the right thing and even tell them "just take it right back from the same bank account". Flash forward to 6 months later...
Right before taking our vacation to the U.S., we (Clau and I) realized that there was a potential problem with our ATM cards for our bank in New York. As a backup procedure, I grabbed the ATM card for the California bank and went online to transfer some money from the savings account to the checking account (again, to avoid touching the mistaken payment money). To my horror, I discovered that both the checking and savings accounts were empty. Heart racing, I called up the CA bank and asked what had happened. After quite a few phone transfers, it was determined that the great state of California had seized ALL my money for reasons unknown.
Some phone calls later to the CA FTB (franchise tax board), I was told that I had not filed a CA tax return for 2005, which was the year we sold our house in CA, after a year of renting it out and deciding it wasn't worth it. Apparently, if you sell a house in CA, you are required to file a CA tax return for that year, regardless of your state of residence for the year. Ironically, Clau and I filed our taxes with H&R block that year for that EXACT reason: we didn't know what we were required / supposed to do, and we wanted to make sure there were no screwups.
(Side note: H&R block are a bunch of idiots, set up for people who are too stupid / lazy to fill out a 1040. Don't give them anything more complicated than that or they WILL screw it up. They supposedly offer a warantee that will reimburse you if you get audited and found wanting; I'd be curious to see if that warantee has EVER been successfully used. Also, their "rapid refund" service is just a patently evil scheme designed to further screw folks in need to the wall. In retrospect, I should have just fronted the cash and time and gone to a real accountant. Lesson learned.)
Getting back to the story, apparently someone in cash-strapped California had noticed the house sale from 2005 and decided that CA was entitled to taxes on the SALE PRICE of the house, which of course added up to a boatload of money. So, they took all the money from my bank account (for which the bank charged ME $100, but they were at least kind enough to subtract that from the bank accounts before giving the remainder to the CA FTB).
The folks at the CA FTB were surprisingly nice, and cheerfully told me that all I had to do was file a retroactive tax return for 2005, and they would happily send me a reimbursement to my address (in Germany!) after receiving my return. Needless to say, I filed the return post-haste and sent it certified receipt mail from CA while I was there.
What the CA FTB failed to mention is that they take their sweet time with retroactive returns; I've called once every two weeks and each time the response is "we haven't even opened it yet. Check back in a month." Somehow, I have a feeling that if there had been a check enclosed in the return, they might have gotten to it sooner.
I really don't like this, of course, but then again, the money was just sitting there waiting for my employer to eventually ask for it, so in this case I'll survive. Of course, imagine if that wasn't the case? What if that were still my main bank account, as it was when Clau and I lived in New York? We would be all kinds of screwed - Clau's salary wasn't enough to cover all the bills - we wouldn't have been able to make our mortgage payment (ironically to the same bank that couldn't hand our money to the FTP fast enough). All our family and friends would be receiving candy bars for Christmas gifts. Seriously - how can the CA FTB do that and get away with it? Particularly when everyone agrees that I ultimately should be receiving the money back?
So, that was bad enough: here comes the kicker. A week or so ago I get an email from one of our neighbors in our old apartment building in NY, saying that a FedEx package had come for me. Turns out that my employer had, after all, figured out quite a while ago that they had been paying me twice, and had been sending letters to my OLD address (despite my having updated my address in all applicable areas in my company) asking for the money back. The FedEx envelope contained a "final warning before collections" letter. And now, of course, the money is not there. F.M.L.
For those who might be concerned, it's all gonna work out OK. My company's payroll dept has been really nice about the whole thing, especially after confirming that they had, in fact, been sending the letters to the wrong address. I was also quick to point out that, had they sent the original notices to the correct address, or via email, or given me a phone call (I still have the same extension), they would have received the money. Now, they just have to wait. It has, however, cost me a lot of time, which fortunately I have an abundance of lately. More on that in subsequent posts.

CPAN Module

You may recall my earlier post complaining that Amazon has not created a Perl module to sign AWS REST queries, so I ended up writing my own. It was a good exercise for many reasons; writing your own module gives you a better overall understanding of how the whole process works, and of course helps much later on if you need to debug something. Also, I'm ashamed to say this, but I was never a big fan of OO programming before - generally if I wrote a module, it was going to export functions, because I was just used to my way of thinking (just write functions, export them, and use them with arguments when required). Since I'm not a trained developer, I saw no reason to force a paradigm shift upon myself. Writing a module, of course, forced me re-write my AWS code in an OO way, and now I see the light, or at least I see how for many things that's a better way to go.
Anyway, I wrote this thing a couple of months ago, and I figured it was only a matter of time until Amazon released an official mod to sign requests, but they never did. When I was in NY, Matt encouraged me to submit it to CPAN - if nothing else, it's a resume-builder, plus I'm so dependent on CPAN for everything, it would be nice to give something back. So, I cleaned it up, added a method to create SOAP signatures (since I figured that at least some people would want that), and submitted it to CPAN. Actually getting that module into CPAN, however, was a lot of work: besides creating an account, I had to submit an official request to have the module added, then I had to make sure it was stable and portable, plus I had to write it the "right" way and have it vetted by the CPAN testers. I had no idea it was so much work! But, at the end of the day, I got it in, and until Amazon decides to write their own, I guess I'm the official owner of the Net::Amazon::AWSSign mod. W00t!

Updates

First things first - the vacation was awesome, albeit brief. Clau and I spent as much time as we could enjoying New York, I went to California and Nevada and Clau went to Canada to visit Tatiz. Got to see Adrian, Dottie, and Alistair in Berkeley, then Ted and I went to Reno for two debaucherous days - I had a really, really bad day at the poker table, and although a little voice in my head kept saying "Just leave the table, already" I couldn't really let it go, since I only had two days there. So, not a good gambling time, but nonetheless we still had a great time. After that, went back to Oakland, spent a couple of days seeing Dad, Ania, Neil, and Cora, then back to NYC. Sam had a b-day party with a "white" theme - white clothes, white food, white sangria, white russians, white-themed music. Overall I'd say it was a tremendous success, and also an opportunity to see all the lawyers and other awesome folks that Sam and Matt are friends with. After that, saw our old neighbors in Chelsea and wandered around, then on Monday we flew back. Like I said, far too short, but very sweet. Matt and Sam were wonderful hosts, and hopefully it will be less than another year before we see them again.
Since we got back, I've been having some serious jet lag - can't seem to get my body back to Germany time. I haven't been able to get to sleep until 3am most nights, and waking up at 8 is a bit rough. Slept in till noon on Saturday before getting up to run errands, which in retrospect was probably a good thing, since we went out to Bootie Munich that night. We had a fantastic time, but I have to say the DJs and mashups were not as good as I had hoped. The DJs were all German, which meant that there were lots of mashups with bits of popular German songs, which I actually dug, but they seemed to all be keen on playing lots of recent stuff from German mashup artists. As Pete (the guy who turned me on to Bootie Munich) said "I've got nothing against the new stuff, but I also want to hear the good stuff."
On the work front, we recently had a bit of an organizational shake-up, and the new man in charge of my area (who I like and respect a lot) is doing a re-org, but is taking a little while to get a more detailed picture of what everybody does and how some other folks can better work together. So, right now we're in a holding pattern: no new projects, and since we didn't have anything we were currently working on, it means that we're all taking the time to do documentation and close loose ends.
In semi-related news, I authored my first CPAN module. For the sake of separation of tech- and life-related posts, I'll make that a separate post.

Busy week

One of Clau's friends visited us last weekend, we walked all over the friggin' place showing him Munich, and on Sunday we went to Oktoberfest. Wow, is that a lot of people and stuff, huuuuuge tents crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with drunk smoking Europeans. I can, however, make a few observations about Oktoberfest:

• The Dirndl is a remarkably flattering item - seriously, just about every girl looks really good in them.
• Oktoberfest beer is really, really tasty and also quite strong.
• Extra-salty fried chicken is one of the best drunk foods ever.
• Germans have a tremendous amount of songs that they bust out for Wiesn, and never listen to for the rest of the year. Certain songs, like "Country Roads" (yes, the one by John Denver) seem to never go out of style, whilst others may fade over time. The one that I keep hearing over and over is "So a schöener Tag" (a relative newcomer), which is very catchy the first ten or so times you hear it, but loses its charm over the course of the event. As far as I can tell it was a children's song that someone did a more pop-centric remake of, and is now played incessantly - seriously, if you spend more than an hour in a tent, you're going to hear it. Ditto for "Ein Prosit". But at least "Ein Prosit" is short.
  

Check it out:


You can stop once you hit about 1:45 because it's ALL THE SAME after that.

So anyway, what else this week: I started a German class on Monday - I have class 2x/week, so hopefully I will learn and practice - I still end up in situations where I understand absolutely NOTHING but I can occasionally have basic conversations. My ideal plan is to speak relatively well by the time we decide to leave (or one of our companies makes us an offer we can't refuse to move somewhere else). We'll see how that goes.
Yesterday I went to football match - it's generally fun to see FC Bayern, but they were playing some podunk team in a smaller division, and it was pretty sad. Still, glad I got to go since the FC Bayern games are generally sold out months in advance.
Today, another German lesson.
Tomorrow, TWO Oktoberfest dates - one for my work and one that we bought tickets for ages ago - not sure which one I'm going to go to - or, theoretically, I may end up trying to do both, which would probably be a VERY bad idea. But, knowing me, after a couple of Maß I might decide it's a good idea.
Friday we head to Madrid to see our friends Alexis and Luis, who are there on vacation. Yeah, we're totally busting in on someone else's vacation - that's how we roll.

And, of course, in early October it's off to NYC, Reno, Oakland, NYC, back home! Woohoo! Can't wait.

My life is so often like this...

Amazon gripe

OK, let me start by saying that I'm a total Amazon fanboy, or to be more specific I'm a total AWS fanboy. They've got some great services out there (queue manager, SDB, S3, EC2) with excellent documentation, and they also have a _lot_ of functionality in their APIs for their store, along with pretty good documentation - my only complaint about the documentation is that sometimes it's pretty tough to find what you need.
Amongst many, many other APIs, AWS has an API to get info for a particular ASIN. Every item in Amazon has an ASIN, which is a unique identifier for that specific product. You can actually just enter it in the search bar if you want to find something quick and you happen to know its ASIN (like, for example, if you want to see the info for "Wang Dang Doodle" by Livin' Blues, just pop B000008652 into the Amazon search field).
Combine this with Musicbrainz's XML Webservice (which often has the ASIN for an album as part of its metadata) and a lot of elbow grease, and you theoretically have a relatively quick way to look up all those one-hit tracks that you ripped or downloaded 10 years ago, before people were concerned about tagging or filename conventions or any of those nuisances.
There are other uses, too; unless the album is quite rare (or the song was only released as a single, as often happens with older tracks), Amazon will probably have a decent-quality picture of the album art. I use iTunes for everything, and one irritating thing about iTunes for me is that when you use iTunes to rip a CD, then get the album art, the album art is stored in iTunes and not in the files themselves. So, if you migrate those albums somewhere else, or (as I have done once or twice), screw up something to the point where you have to delete your whole iTunes DB and rebuild it, the album art is gone. Unacceptable! I want my album art embedded in my files dammit!
So, anyway, I've written a lot of scripts to search and tag songs / albums based on what's available in Musicbrainz and / or Amazon. I've gotten past all the easy ones, and now I'm onto the really weird, hard stuff like Hoots Mon and am having to manually search Amazon / Wikipedia / whatever for just about everything.
Anyway, I digress (seriously!). The point is that I'm a huge fan of AWS, but I'll get to the gripe. AWS recently added a requirement that all queries to AWS be digitally signed with your AWS account secret. I received warning emails for about 2 months before they made the official switch, so I can't say I wasn't warned, although when I skimmed the emails I thought it was only for advertising calls, which makes sense (to prevent abuse).
Now, the process of signing a REST query isn't very difficult, but it's a really big pain in the ass; you have to deconstruct the query, add a timestamp, sanitize it, re-order it, build a hash from it and your secret, base64 the hash, add the hash to the arguments, and re-order it again. Not rocket science, but it still took me a good 2 hours to write subroutines to do it. Which makes me wonder - why on earth doesn't Amazon distribute modules for the main languages (Perl, PHP, Ruby, Java, maybe Python, and whatever the IIS folks are using nowadays), or at least C source or Java byte code to do this? Pretty much every developer who works against Amazon APIs has had to do the exact same thing that I have, and if Amazon changes the signing process, then all of us are going to need to re-write our code. That's ridiculous!
Anyway, I'm writing my own damn Perl module (already have the subroutines, just need to clean it up and make it OO), and if I end up having sufficient free time I'll submit it to CPAN. Even though my code will be crap, maybe someone will use it as a jumping point to make it better. But, I ask again, why the hell hasn't Amazon done this?

Combo locks

I had a few old Master combination locks lying around and decided to retrieve the combinations as described here. Being a geek, I wrote a script to help me keep track. Using this I was able to get all combos at less than 10 minutes per lock. Of course, it took me a good 20-30 minutes to write the script, but that was more fun than spinning a combination lock.
Also, this is far from an advanced shell script, but the nice thing about it is that it's quick, dirty, and easy. You can actually do a lot with bash very quickly once you get to know it, and one nice thing about bash vs. Perl is that it's really easy to get a gut feeling when bash isn't going to cut it and Perl is the way to go, for example when you need to parse a huge amount of data or do some really complicated regex work.
Anyway, if this helps you, then great, if not then at least it's documented somewhere...

[Edit: sorry if feed readers got this multiple times, I had to fix a couple of typos...]

##########START#############
#!/bin/bash

# Bash script to print out all likely combos for a master combo lock. Rough and ready but it works
# Written by Nate Aiman-Smith (http://staunchtech.blogspot.com). To be run as-is by a non-priviliged user.

## Variables
# One argument - the last number.
# See http://www.fusor.us/lockpick.html for a simple explanation on how to get it
thirdnum=$1

# File to keep track of tried combos. Replace with your preferred place if required
trackfile="/tmp/triednums_$thirdnum"

# Difference between first and second numbers that we'll print out - more than 24 is, in my very limited experience, unlikely.
# With more practice could probably get a better number.
fastdistance=24

## Functions

verify_nums() {
num=$mod
while [ $num -lt 40 ]
do
if [ $num=$thirdnum ]
then return 0
fi
num=`expr $num '+' 4`
done
return 1
}

print_valid_firstnums() {
num=$mod
while [ $num -lt 40 ]
do
echo -n "$num "
num=`expr $num '+' 4`
done
echo
}

print_combos() {
mod=`expr $firstnum '%' 4`
mod=`expr $mod '+' 2`
mod=`expr $mod '%' 4`
num=$mod
while [ $num -lt 40 ]
do
# Swap the two lines if you want to get the _unlikely_ combos...
if check_distance
#if ! check_distance
then echo "$firstnum $num $thirdnum"
fi
num=`expr $num '+' 4`
done
}

# To facilitate, let's try to stick to second numbers that are
# less than $fastdistance away from the first
check_distance() {
secondnum=$num
# Equal numbers always fail
if [ $secondnum -eq $firstnum ]
then return 1
elif [ $secondnum -lt $firstnum ]
then
secondnum=`expr $secondnum '+' 40`
fi
diff=`expr $secondnum '-' $firstnum`
if [ $diff -gt $fastdistance ]
then
return 1
fi
return 0
}

##Main

if [ ! $thirdnum -lt 40 ]
then
echo "invalid number"
exit 1
fi

if [ -f $trackfile ]
then
echo "Found tracking file $trackfile - hit ctrl-C, delete the file, and start over if you want to start fresh"
fi

mod=`expr $thirdnum '%' 4`
for valid in `print_valid_firstnums`
do
if ! grep "^$valid" $trackfile &> /dev/null
then
echo "Combinations for $valid:"
firstnum=$valid
print_combos
echo "Press return when done, hit ctrl-C if you bail"
read blankline
echo $valid >> $trackfile
fi
done
############END################

Multitracking

One cool thing about youtube is that it's helping lots of folks push the multitracking envelope - like for example I didn't realize that this was possible:



I mean, that kid is REALLY good on all 4 parts.

Or, another one is this:



And while admittedly there are different folks singing, the (18-year old!) kid playing all the instruments is unreal.

More to come later, just been busy with otehr stuff...

Simply Red

Forgot to write about this - we just got back from the Simply Red concert. I didn't really want to go but I'm glad I did - it was a good concert.
The lead singer looks pretty old but he was absolutely phenomenal - I don't think I've ever sung that good in my life and I doubt I ever will. Every single note was spot on, and he just sounded amazing.
In other news, Clau and I realized that we live in a fantastic location for going to concerts - 20 minutes on the subway and we're there. Nice.

Vacation!

Finally taking that vacation - we leave for Thailand tomorrow, two glorious weeks of solitude, beach, tropical fruits, and scuba diving. Really, really looking forward to this...

Poker hand on my mind

OK, just got back from Salzburg, among many other things I went to the casino last night and played some poker. One hand in particular sticks with me.
The table's a mixed group, 7-handed. Twice have I have watched one fellow get all-in when he had the other opponent absolutely crushed, and the other guy sucked out on him. One time a opponent hit a two-outer on the river after being put all-in on the turn, and the second time the opponent actually hit a runner-runner full-house. I don't even know what you call that, when the opponent needs two specific cards on the turn and river and hits them both. I call it "time to call it a night" but I'm sure there's a more technical term for it.
So anyway, I'm playing 2/4 NLH, the only game available at this swanky place, and I've got maybe 120 in chips in front of me. I look down at AKo (that's Ace-King off-suit) in about 4th position. The aforementioned guy in 1st position limps in for 4 along with the fellow behind him, I raise it to 12, everybody folds, and they both call the 12. Flop comes Jh-4c-Th. I now have two over-cards and a gutshot straight draw. Not particularly great, but not terrible, and even if one of these guys has paired the board I probably have 10 cards that will give me a better hand (any A, K, or Q). Both players check, I c-bet out 30 (about 2/3 of the pot), unlucky bastard smooth calls, the other guy bails out.
Turn is a rag, something like 5d. Unlucky fellow checks. The only thing that really makes a lot of sense here is that he's chasing the flush or less likely a straight of his own. I figure if he's chasing the flush, I'm gonna make it totally unreasonable for him to do so. I bet out 60 this time, which is a bit more than 1/2 the pot (leaving me with only about 35 in front of me), and he...calls. So this doesn't make any sense, unless he's just willing to chase the flush at any price. I mean, I know not everyone thinks about odds and all that, but I saw this guy make spectacular shoves before and get screwed, so I have no idea what he's doing. River card is a very unfortunate Qh, giving me my straight, and most likely giving him the flush. He looks at me and says "I put you all in". At this point it's about 35 more to call, and there's already about 200 in the pot, which means that I kinda have to call, even though I fully expect to get beat. I shove my chips in and patiently wait for him to show his hand. Eventually he turns over two tens, for a flopped set. I guess he misread my immediate facial expression (confusion) for defeat, but I very promptly turned over my AK for the rivered straight. He gets a completely disgusted look on his face and starts going off about folks sucking out on him on the river. I said something like, "sorry man, but I had to make that call".
Here's what really confuses me. Thinking about this from his perspective, what should he have assumed I had?
Pre-flop - I've been playing pretty damn tight at this table, so I gotta have something pretty good to be raising on top of two limpers in middle position here - at minimum a med-high pocket pair (like maybe 99) or else two paint cards like AK, AQ, AJ. When the flop comes with two high-ish cards and two hearts and I c-bet, and he's flopped a set, then by far the best thing for him to do is to raise me. Actually, he probably should have bet out in the first place, but check-call is about the worst play he can possibly do. Best to just bet out or check-raise after the flop and put the pressure on me to decide if it's worth it or not. Maybe I've got a flush draw, in which case I'll either call or fold, maybe I've got two overcards, in which case I'll either call or fold (but more likely fold), maybe I've got JJ and I'll re-raise him, and maybe I've flopped a pair or already had an overpair, in which case I'll come along like a lamb to the slaughter. If he just check-calls he's really got very little idea, particularly when it's a c-bet. But, I'm guessing he wanted to milk it - not a good idea with a textured flop (two connected cards and two hearts). Same goes for after the turn when a completely unconnected card showed up - he should have just put the pressure on and forced me to go all-in or fold right there. Now, admittedly he probably thinks I've got an overpair here, so maybe he's just letting me hang myself with my own rope, but a set's not enough of a powerhouse hand to get away with that, unless you've got a completely unconnected board and you've got top set, and even then you're living a bit dangerously.
The final big screwup is when that last card shows up. Puts three connected hearts on the board, and should definitely be a warning sign. I could realistically have a few hands that just connected, like QQ or AK or even AKh for the royal flush (I didn't, but I could have!). So, at that point, perhaps he should have played it ever so slightly safer and just checked, figuring that he'll call if I push all-in. Or, to put it another way, what could I possibly have that would mean that I would fold to the final all-in bet (nothing that I can think of) vs. what might I reasonably have that would beat him?
So, to summarize, he played that hand terribly. I think he got a lot of sympathy based on what other folks had seen before, but anyone who seriously thought about it would probably also conclude that he did a bad job of it.
Incidentally, the session went really interestingly. I started with 125 in chips, at one point was down to about 60 or 70, mostly from just giving away the blinds when the cards were not coming and from a couple of times where my promising pre-flop hands went nowhere. I lost a quick 20 on AcQc when the flop came down with Kc-xQs-x and two cowboys started getting into a pissing match (but at least I got out of the way quickly, needless to say I would have lost it all if I had stayed in) and was starting to wonder if I wanted to try to use my ATM card in Austria or if I should just call it a night. With about 40 or 50 left in my stack I limped into a pot in 1st position with Ac7c with about 5 other players, the BB popped it up to 12, three players call including me. We see a four-way flop of A-3-7 rainbow, BB checks, I push all-in (less than the size of the pot, but the only thing that would make this a bad call is if someone happens to have 33 or 77, and hopefully someone has Ax and wants to come along for the ride), everybody folds to BB, BB calls me with KK, meaning that there are exactly two cards remaining in the deck that can save him, or to put it another way making him about a 10-to-1 underdog. Amazingly he does not suck out on me (this guy had been on a serious suckout roll and I think everyone was actually expecting a king to show up), and suddenly I'm back to about my starting stack. That and the hand I described earlier put me at about 325 when the casino shut down at 2:30am. I got there at about 12:30am so it was definitely a good session!
I just love playing live - it's so much more fun than playing on the computer. I met a young guy there who lives in Munich, he said he comes down once in a while since it's only about 75 minutes away. I might have to start making Salzburg road trips more often.

Mashups

I am soooo into mashups. I really need to thank my buddy Matt for starting me on this road. You already saw the youtube mashups, which I still think is one of the most genius things ever. My buddy James shot me a link for this video and it's also brilliant. Here's the youtube version for those of you without facebook (the FB version is much higher quality, though):



Also on the mashup front, I may have mentioned earlier how in love I am with the 2007 Best of Bootie album. Go download it, it's free, and listen to "Funky Goes to Hollywood" or "Tequila Lip Gloss". I am constantly on the lookout for new and awesome mashups though, so send them my way if you have any good ones...

Chillin' - gettin' paid

After the NDTV project finished, I've been doing probably an average of 3 hours of work per day, and the rest of the time is dedicated to cleaning, errands, catching up on blog posts and TV, etc. It's been grand.
My in-laws are in town for the next few weeks, then Claudia and I are heading to Thailand on vacation. We have booked ourselves into swanky places the whole way though - it's a total red-carpet situation and should be very relaxing.
After we get back from vacation, we have about a week free and then my mom will hopefully be coming to see us. She's never been to the continent before so I think she'll like it.
After that, we'll see. I really, really want to work out a trip back to the states, but that will probably have to wait until late August, since plane fares for June / early August are ludicrously high.
And, of course, at some point there will be another project! Till then, I'm mostly chillin' and gettin' paid...

Cars for po' folks

While they're not generally my type of folks, I have over the course of my many years become friends with some pretty right-wing people. Of these, a few (maybe 5-10) are people that I am truly happy to call my friends, the rest are folks who I ended up meeting or working with and occasionally keep in touch with for whatever reason.

So, a post from one of them (not one of the close friends) got me thinking - he was referencing this article (which in turn references this article) and he had this to say about it:

Disgusting. The state ought to have no part of this - I have no problem with private charities and enterprises taking up the cause of providing for those who are lacking the resources to get by, but tax dollars that are automatically deducted by payroll cannot and should not be used for this purpose. I'm having a hell of a time paying for the car I have already and saving for a minivan, I'm not about to go buy the poor people in my neighborhood cars!!!Which, sadly, is so often the conservative approach to things.

So, my response to his post (which, due to a fat-finger, I didn't send):

From TFA: "Kehoe defended the program, saying the state breaks even by cutting welfare payments to the family - about $6,000 a year."
So I guess it evens out, although since there's apparantly a 20% recidivism rate (for lack of a better term), it still ends up being about $1200/yr/car, and at the rate of 65 cars/year, that's still a net cost of $78k/year for the program.
Also from TFA: "To get the cars, they must be unable to reach work by public transportation and have a clean driving record. The program is only available to families on welfare with children."
You know, this always bothers me; people come up with ideas like this, and in general I think they're a good idea, but could we PLEASE try to come up with a control group?!? I mean, I'm guessing there are a lot more families that qualify for the program than actually receive a car, so can we try to get some stats on families that qualified but for whatever reason (didn't ask for a car, a car wasn't available, etc) didn't get a car. Take the differences in control group vs. families who got cars, and if the cars statistically cost less than the amount of welfare payments you're _not_ giving to the families who receive them, then it's a good deal. If not, then it's a expense that needs to be seriously examined. Why can't we ever get data on these things?!?

I continued on with some other stuff (before I accidentally erased it), but you get the gist. I often wonder about government programs; I mean, it's impossible to account for all the ramifications of these things when you're talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of people, but at least small program like this, you could try! 65 cars per year, the program's been running since 2006, so let's call it 200 cars so far to make the math easier. Spend 10 minutes following up on each family that received a car, you might come up with something like this:

Out of the 200 families, 40 ended up losing the job within the first year but keeping the car. Out of those, 2 ended up re-employed and are no longer receiving welfare assistance. Out of the remaining 38, we're pretty sure that 15 of them intentionally gamed the program just to get the car. The rest, we don't know.
Out of the remaining 160 families, another 10 lost the job after the 1-year period was up and are back to full-time welfare assistance.
Out of the remaining 150, 100 families have been completely without state assistance since receiving the car. Out of those, 5 have risen to a family income of more than $60,000/year (or whatever middle-class benchmark you want to use), etc. etc.

To get most of that data would be a simple matter of looking up the case files of the folks who received cars - for the rest, you would have to talk to 200 families or case workers to catch the really interesting details (like, for example, that one guy who started his own business using the car and is now a successful entrepreneur, or those 10 families who realize that they were actually better off before they made the deal to get the car, and would gladly go back in time and reverse it if they could). Call it an average of 10 minutes per family / case worker, and you're talking 2000 minutes, or about 30 man-hours to get a decent picture of every single family who participated in the program - throw in another 40 hours (and I'm being pretty generous here - it's probably a lot fewer hours) to run data analysis and write a report on it, and you can have a detailed picture of this government program, what works, what doesn't work, and how it can be tuned to improve. Or, if the data is not at all encouraging, then maybe the program should be scrapped.

I've kinda lost momentum with this post due to being forced to work (gasp!) many times during the writing of it, so I'll stop here. I guess if I had to make a conclusion, it would be this: I expect people to be reasonably good at what they do, particularly when there's theoretically some sort of hurdle or test (like an election) that they need to pass in order to get the job. I would expect that folks who come up with programs like these would have a process and resources in place to determine the program's efficacy, hopefully accounting for some of the factors that can't easily be expressed quantitatively. Maybe everything I've described is already being done, but I'm guessing not...

Simply awesome

Just about done

So, we launched at the beginning of this week and it's been surprisingly smooth since then. Some issues have come up, but nothing major and nothing that has anything to do with me. I think I'll actually get a couple of days free before I need to head back home.
Since launch I've gotten three consecutive nights of 6+ hours sleep, and it's been fantastic. I feel like a totally new person - I was so stressed that I was about to bite everyone's head off, and I was letting the pressure of the project get to me. My work actually started to suffer - I made a few rookie mistakes because I just wasn't thinking clearly. But, we pulled it off in the end and everyone's happy - the customer, my boss, his boss, his boss, etc. Overall it was a definitely success.
I definitely have some wrap-up to do, but I'm hoping to focus today solely on the stuff that has to get done while I'm here. If possible, I'll also write up some "buttons" in case of emergencies (like breaking news events) so that I rather than talking folks through the process of changing settings, I can talk them through pushing the button. And, if I get that done, then I can just chill here in Delhi and enjoy myself on Thursday and Friday! W00t!
Oddly enough, I have no desire to see the Taj Mahal. I do, however, want to get a feeling for some local culture other than this office building (although it has been interesting to work in an industrial area, where there is not another blond head ANYWHERE). So, assuming I actually get done today, I will check out Delhi for the next couple of days - or, I might just check out the pool and the television tomorrow and check out Delhi Friday with a coworker. At any rate, it feels good to be done!
And, of course, starting Saturday I have to focus on all the personal life that fell by the wayside for the last few months...

so f'in foreign!

Wow, things are different here. Little things I hadn't seen in quite some time, like extremely persistent beggars, most of them old women and small children, some of whom are trying the old trick of "you distract him, I'll pick his pocket". Thankfully I'm wearing relatively tight jeans and not carrying much with me, anyway.
Just ordered room service from the hotel, ordered a drink called "Jal Jeera" billed as a "refreshing summer drink". It tasted like spiced saltwater, but I figured "hey, I should see this through - maybe I'll acquire the taste by the time I get to the bottom of it." Needless to say, that didn't happen, and as I finished it I found myself wondering where the water to make it came from. I guess we'll find out tomrorow.
Lots of other interesting things so far; lots of programming, particularly soaps, seems to be in a strange Hindi-English pidgin. Of course there are no subtitles for either language, which makes me wonder; does everyone who watches TV speak both languages?
Tomorrow I start in the office - even though the travel time has sucked, it's actually been pretty good to not be working for a couple of days....

My life lately

Yes, I have basically dropped off the face of the earth as far as friends and family are concerned. Here's why:

• Work - the project I'm currently working on is in full balls-out git 'er done mode. Clau was in England a couple of weeks ago and I literally worked from 7am till about 2am for that week (which, in retrospect, was stupid, because I'm still not fully recovered and there is still much to do). This crazy time started about a month ago and will continue for about another 6 weeks. After which Claudia's parents come to visit for a month. After which Claudia and I will take a well-deserved vacation. The vacation thought keeps me going.
• Moving - that week that I worked from 7am-2am? That was the last week in February, and I kinda lied - I only worked Mon-Thu, and on Friday the movers FINALLY came and brought our stuff from NYC to our new apartment. WooHoo!
• Settling in. I believe I mentioned this before, but in Germany an apartment is basically just an empty shell - it's up to you to fill it. As of last night, we officially have a full-on Ikea kitchen and closet, which puts us at about 30% done with filling the shell. Couch and sofa are on their way and hopefully will arrive before Claudia's parents. We still need a desk for my office, a linen closet, shelves for the bathroom, etc etc the list goes on and on. All of this, in addition to being outrageously expensive, is absolutely exhausting.

So, once one of these things (work project / moving project) is done, life will be a little less crazy, but right now they're intersecting perfectly. Really sucks to be me at the moment.

If this is really what it looks like...

Then it's genuis!

Comics times table

I don't know why I think it's so awesome, but I do...

http://creebobby.com/timestable.html

Brain teasers

For some reason, I often think of little puzzles in the shower - probably because showering itself isn't terribly exciting. Here's two of them (they're not particularly difficult but they were good for the length of a shower):
1) I have a digital clock that expresses time in 24-hours. Just for fun, let's say you have no colon or spaces in between the digits, so midnight is 000, 9:15am is 915, 12 noon is 1200, 3:35pm is 1535, etc. How many times during a 24-hour day would the number look exactly the same in a mirror as it does on the face? So, for example, 12 midnight (000) would be the first. The answer turned out to be more than I thought as an initial guesstimate.
2) For whatever reason, I have two dice and I want to pick a random month of the year. What's the best way to do it?

Love this video

Like Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" but better (the video I mean):

Oren Lavie - Her Morning Elegance
Uploaded by IgnitionVM

Two other things

1) Germans have almost no sense of humor, particularly sarcasm. They have no concept of when you're joking around, and as a result you must be serious with them at all times. It can get a little tiresome.
2) Germans have weird, weird taste in music. Exhibit A:



Tell me that's not fucking weird.

And, of course, for those who still doubt, let's not forget they made this guy a superstar:



I rest my case.

More fun facts about Germany

More fun facts (well, technically, observations):

• German foods border on the decadent. After seeing the size of the lunches that they eat and the fattiness of the food, I'm just completely flummoxed as to how they're not all fatter than Americans. Claudia, incidentally, has lost about 10 pounds since moving here, whereas I have gained about 10 pounds. I have no idea why this is the case. She suggests it's because of the lack of processed food, which maybe my body was immune to. This one still stumps me.
• Case in point re: decadent food. I got a frozen pizza and cooked it only to discover that it was not a pizza, but rather a Flammkuchen. Flammkuchen is just like pizza except that it uses creme fraiche instead of tomato sauce. Yeah, you heard that right. Oh yeah, and the classic toppings are onion and bacon. And these people will eat about a 10" one of these, by themselves, for lunch.
• The biggest minority here, by far, is Turkish. How this came to be is kinda complicated and is written up very nicely here, but the essense is that lots of Turks came on guest worker programs when Germany was being rebuilt, and they stayed, and they multiplied, and their families came too. Generally, you will see plenty of them around here (although to be honest I can't tell a Turk from an Indian from a Persian, but it's kinda like, in California, if you see a Latino, it's probably safe to guess that he's Mexican). The amount of Turks I see here is roughly the same as Latinos or Blacks in New York; they definitely have a presence, but they're very obviously a minor percentage of the population. Anyway, what really amazes me is how blatantly and unashamedly prejudiced the Germans are about the Turks. When we were looking around for an apartment, we were trying to get a sense of costs relative to neighborhood etc. Our agent told us that it depends, and started going through neighborhoods in terms of quality and price. When she got to the bottom, she said "of course, you could find someplace cheaper, like a Turkish neighborhood, but you wouldn't want to live there." She said this in a way as to suggest that a Turkish neighborhood would be your neighborhood of choice only if there was nothing available directly under the airport runway flight path, or near the sewage treatment plant. Come to think of it, those neighborhoods are probably Turkish.
  

More stuff coming as I think of it....

Today's games

So, today was a pretty good day, despite the fact that I probably lost more (theoretical) money today on FTP than any other day. Back in my early days of figuring out what the hell I was doing, I used to occasionally partake in the $6.60 token extravaganzas on FTP. These are actually a pretty good deal on FTP if you're willing to put in the time and have a substantial bankroll (which I don't, and therefore am not messing about in these tourneys anymore - furthermore, if I had the bankroll I probably wouldn't be willing to put in the time), although just like so many other low-limit games on FTP there can be some crazy moves that will drive you nuts. Anyway, from those early days, I had three $26 tournament tokens lying around (hey even the donkeys win sometimes), and I've been determined to use one in a real, non-turbo, preferably deep-stacked multi-table tournament (MTT) while Claudia was in Brazil (since one of these tournaments can easily take 5-6 hours to finish, assuming you get that far).
Anyway, today I woke up early and decided that today would be the day to spend that token - I entered a deep-stack, multi-table tournament with 450 people, and finished 88th - sadly, I still had quite a few spots to go to take the money. Overall I was happy with the way I played except at the end (well, hell, I can almost always say that!) - I simply got frustrated with not playing and watching my stack go from well above average to "all-in or fold" mode; I must have folded 35 hands in a row pre-flop because I was either getting nothing, or a decent hand that wasn't good enough to justfy the two or three raisers in front of me. The couple of times I had something decent with position, I'd raise it up and completely miss on the flop, then have to decide whether to C-bet or leave it be. Every time, I seemed to make the wrong call. I ended up calling a 3-bet with AJ on my BB - the board had nothing noteworthy on it, we checked it down to the river, till I finally pushed all-in for about 3/4 of the pot, and he called me with AK. Ouch.
Still, like I said, I'm happy with it, and it was nice to play in a tournament with a deep stack, slow blind structures, and good players who weren't just shoving all-in all the time. It would be nice to have the money to do that more often.
So, after that, I chatted with Clau some (always one of the highlights of my day), then went with my friend Stefan and his friends to the Munich-Dortmund football match. Jan (Stefan's friend) apparantly had some friends who had business seats, and they were willing to sell them to Jan. I have a feeling that I was invited out of sympathy, but that's cool! It was kick-ass. Muenchen won with a goal in the final minutes of a game that had been tied 1-1 for the entire 2nd half, and man the place was rocking. The stadium holds 69,000 and apparantly it's sold out for the entire season. Crazy. Oh yeah, did I mention that we were center court (slightly on the Muenchen side, naturally) in the EIGHTH ROW?!? The tickets were 65 Euros each but totally worth it. I got lots of snaps on my blackberry, hopefully some of them came out good. The only problem was it was really, really cold - I'm still feeling a bit of the chill. Overall, though, a fantastic experience. Afterwards, Stefan and I grabbed one last beer, then headed back, at which point I started writing this post and got totally sidetracked in that last post about the fool sucking out on me with a gutshot straight. That one's gonna burn for a while.
But, today I watched Muenchen trounce Dortmund along with 68,999 other people and I loved it, so that's the happy thought I'm going to bed with.

The current state of my online poker playing

At this point, I've got about $200 in my Full Tilt Poker (FTP) account. I generally play low-stakes turbo multi-table tournaments (MTTs) - low-stakes because of my relatively low bankroll ($200), and turbo because I tend not to have a lot of time. And before anyone points it out, I know that $200 is less than the amount of money I budget to lose on gambling in one trip to Nevada, but this is supposed to be a cheap hobby, and I'm determined not to reload on FTP until I've burnt through it all, and to always base my decisions on that bankroll (most of your monetary limits are based on the size of your bankroll, so I won't enroll in a very expensive tournament just because I could afford to top up my account if I wanted to). Anyway, one of my favorite tournaments is the $3.30 90-person KO SNG tournament - it just sells like hotcakes and I _never_ have to wait more than 5 minutes or so for the tournament to fill up, it's at the threshold for my bankroll (theoretically I ought to be capping out at about $3 for a MTT but I cheat since it's limited to 90 players), and it almost never lasts more than 2 hours, even if you take it to the bitter end.
For those unfamiliar with tournament types, a KO tournament is a tournament where you get a bonus for busting a player out of the tournament, typically something like 1/6 of the buying - in the case of the $3.30 tournament each KO gets you 50 cents. A SNG is a sit-n-go tournament, where you always have the tournament ready to run as soon as X number of people sign up for it - in the case of this particular tourney, that number is 90.
The problem with playing so many low-limit turbo MTTs is twofold; first, because it's a turbo tournament, the blinds go up really, really fast - hence the tourney almost never lasting more than 2 hours - by the time you've passed hour 2, you're dealing with huge blinds and antes and even just limping into a pot will probably cost you 5-10% of your stack. The problem with this is that a typical raise might be 2 or three times the BB, and with blinds so high you can easily get pot committed just playing a drawing hand. I mean, there's still some skill involved, but the luck/skill slide meter is way on the luck side towards the end of a turbo tournament.
The second problem is the low stakes - for the last few days I've been running bad from being impatient, and just when I get my shit together again, something happens that totally makes me lose my shit. Here's an example - you can watch it now, then I'll go over what was going through my mind:



This is how I busted out of a MTT - for some historical background, this was a KO tournament for FTP points (frequent player points, which you can use for swag or to enter promotional tournaments) - you put in 50 FTP points and you get 50 points for every player you knock out. I had been doing decently at my first table and was about 1000 dollars up (not actual money, but rather "tournament dollars"), although I hadn't knocked anyone out, and had gotten moved to this table about 2 orbits (18 rounds or so) before. "Player 5" had been using his big chip stack to bully the table for a few rounds at this point, frequently raising and following through with continuation bets that would put most folks all-in. At this point, he's got almost 8k in chips, and I'm a distant 2nd with about 4k. All the other poor bastards have just been caving in to his bullying (the idea is that he can raise with just about any two cards - for example, $400 is only about 5% of his chip stack, whereas it's about 25% of most folks' chip stacks, and if they put in 25% of their chips with anything less than a premium hand then their time in the tournament may very well come to a quick end). On my big blind (one player always has to put in the minimum bet before seeing his cards, and it was my turn) I was dealt two 9s, there was one limper (player 9) ("limping in" is the term for just putting in the minumum amount to be involved in a hand) and the bully raised it from 60 to 270 (a very large raise) when I had the big blind, which is basically his way of saying "give me your chips, unless you feel like risking your survival in this tournament". So, on my big blind, I decided that I would call with my 9s and see what happens (perhaps this is poor strategy on my part, but when I have two cards on the upper side of "marginal" in the BB and someone tries to steal, I tend to just call rather than raise and see what happens on the flop - this is probably because at lower limits folks will often respond to a re-raise with an all-in shove, and I do _not_ want to go all-in with 99 against a raiser - I mean, if he turns over some semi-bluff like queen-ten then it's still a coin-flip!).
After I've made this decision, player 6 decides to come along for the ride, and then player 9 (the original caller) calls as well.
Now, the basic premise with just about any kind of pocket pair is twofold:
1) If it's relatively low, you're hoping to hit three of a kind (aka a "set") on the flop - the odds of this are about 7 to one, and even then it's possible that you'll end up in a shit situation - for example, if I call with a pair of nines, and the flop comes out 7-8-9 of spades, then even though I've flopped my set, there are still plenty of ways I can get screwed. The more players you have coming along for the ride here, the more likely that one of them has got at least one spade or at least one card to complete a straight. So, sets can get you in trouble, but more often than not they're really, really good, because most people don't consider pocket pairs when wondering what you might have.
2) If it's a high pair (like, for example, QQ), you're looking for a flop that doesn't have overcards (i.e. no kings or aces) and isn't too flush-y or straight-y. If you hit that kind of flop, then you tend to press it hard.
99 is kinda in the middle between those two - it's definitely possible for three under-cards to appear on the flop, but really you're hoping to make a set.
Now, where things get really tricky with pocket pairs like 55 or 99 are concerned, is that you also need to consider what you'll do if it works out, and if it's worth it. Here's the simple version: your odds of making the set on the flop are about 7 to one. Let's call the odds of a "safe" set (i.e. something that you'll feel comfortable pressing with) at about 9 to 1. In that case, you need to feel like there's at least 9 times your investment available for the taking if you hit it. So, that means that if you're only going to be up against one other person, both you and him better have at least 9 times the amount of money you've got to call. In this case, in order to make a call of 210 extra chips, I need to have a potential windfall of at least 1700 or so to work with. In this case, everyone seems to fit the bill, so I call. Actually, I would have called anyway, since 99 is a pretty decent pocket pair, I wanted to stand up to the bully, and there were already two callers (which means that someone is likely to come along for the ride if I make my set).
So, before we even see the flop, the pot is up to $1100. This is definitely a dangerous situation and I'm probably bailing at my first opportunity if I don't hit my set (even if there are no overcards).

So, the flop comes out just the way I want it: 8d-Qd-9c. I've made my set, but there are two things to be aware of:
1) There's an overcard there - the queen. I'm not all that frightened of anyone having a pair of queens (giving them a set of queens) for a couple of reasons: the bully could have it, but he's been raising pre-flop constantly lately, and he really could have any two cards of ten or higher, or a pocket pair of his own - him happening to have QQ this one time would just be really shit luck. The other two players, seeing as they're getting a little low in chip stacks, would probably have re-raised with a hand like QQ to to increase their chance of a heads-up with the bully, or else force him to let it go right then and there. Much more likely, though, in the low-limit world, is that either one of these players would have just shoved all-in with QQ (which wouldn't have been a bad move considering the situation). At any rate, if someone (including the bully) shoves all-in on me then I'll revisit it, but for now I really don't think it's a possibility. Potential bad news for me, but in this case I think I'm OK.
2) There's an overcard there - the queen! This means that someone who called with a hand like AQ or KQ is now in deep shit against me, because he/she is going to have what's called "top pair, top kicker" or TPTQ. This is a hand that gets folks in trouble all the time, and can be really tough to walk away from when the board doesn't look dangerous. Good news for me.
3) There are two diamonds on the board. This, more than anything else, concerns me. There's a potential flush draw out there, and with three other players in the pot, one of them just might have A-x of diamonds or a suited connector (like 5d-6d). Flushes are the great set killers, since folks just love to draw to flushes, even when the odds can't justify it.

Since I'm in the BB and the SB folded, I'm first to act after the flop. Whether to bet your set or slow-play it (i.e. get cute, just check, and see if someone else wants to bet in order to extract some more chips out of your opponents) depends on the situation every time. At this point, we've built up a nice pot of about $1100, more than 1/4 of my current stack - I'd be happy to take it right here! Besides which, those diamonds scare me.
The trick with betting out against a potential flush draw is to not give your opponent incentive to draw, or at least to make it a bad idea mathematically. In this case, a bet of about $1000 ought to be enough to scare at least the short stacks away - since it's likely that they won't make their flush on the next card, it would be a bad idea for either one of them to pursue the draw with such a large percentage of their stacks, and even if they do then I'll be firing another bullet if the turn card isn't a diamond, and they know it. If we were all deep-stacked, or if the pot and bet sizes were ten times smaller, then it might be worth it, but that's another conversation.
So, I bet out $1000 with the intention of having everyone fold right there and then - at this point my stack is down to $2805 and the pot's up to $2100. Sure enough, the short stacks fold, but the bully calls.
The call doesn't give me a lot of information - if he had raised me all-in then I might have had to reconsider the QQ possibility (although I very likely would have called - I don't think he's got QQ for the reasons I described above). If he had raised me anything other than all-in then I probably would have put him on some kind of queen, but not a pair of them, and I can change my focus to extracting as many chips as possible from him. At this point, my guess is either he's on a flush draw or he's got either TPTK or two pair. I'm leaning toward the second scenario but I can't discount the first.
Just for reminder here - pot is now at $3100 and my chip stack is slightly less than $2800.
Turn comes, it's a beautiful and non-threating 4h. Now's the time to really fire the cannons - either he's got nothing (and he'll fold), the flush draw (and he'll fold), or some kind of two-pair that he can't let go and he'll call or push me all-in (which would be fine). What I don't want to do here is give him a free card for a flush draw and have him hit it on me. If he wants to see the river card, he'll have to pay for it.
I throw in a bet of $2000, taking my stack down to a dangerous $800. Why didn't I just throw the whole thing in? Well, I'm not really sure, except that generally I don't like pushing all-in - I tend to base stuff on the size of the pot, and I often like to give folks the idea that they're getting pot odds, even if they're not. In the case of a flush draw (which I'm becoming more and more sure is this guy's story), I like to make them think about it - now, having to call $2000 to win $7000 is _not_ good enough to call on a flush draw, _particularly_ when your opponent has only $800 left in his stack. Put it this way: if there are two diamonds in your hand and two diamonds on the board, then there are, as far as you know, 9 cards left in the deck that can give you the flush. With 9 diamonds left, the odds of the next card being a diamond are roughly 1 in 5 (or 4 to 1 if you prefer to think of it that way, which I actually don't but it makes for better storytelling). Therefore, if you're getting more than 4:1 odds on your money, then it's worth it to call. Of course, you always have to think about "what happens if I get it?" If you've got a nutjob who keeps betting, and you think you can extract even _more_ money out of him if you hit that flush, then maybe it's worth it to keep going, even if you're not getting 4:1 odds just from the bet. So, if the pot's $1000 and your opponent bets $500, then you need to call $500 to win an extra $1500, which is 1:3, which is not good enough. On the other hand, if you think that hitting the flush will enable you to extract an extra thousand in the final round of betting, then you're actually talking about betting $500 to win an extra $2500, which is right on the cusp of being worth it. These are known as "pot odds" and "implied pot odds", and nobody (including me) except maybe the pros ever gets it right all the time. At least, that's what I tell myself since I have trouble doing these on the fly while trying to pay attention to everything else.
So anyway, back to this hand: my throwing the $2k in there makes the pot $5110, so the villian needs to bet $2k to win $5k, so he needs roughly a 2:5 chance to win it for it to be mathmatically correct. The odds of getting a diamond on the river are about 1:4, and I've only got $800 left, so there aren't a lot of implied pot odds here. Even just a basic guesstimate will tell a person that it's not worth it to call this on a flush draw, and I expect him to either fold (most likely) or shove all-in. If he puts me all-in, then at this point I absolutely HAVE to call, even if I think he's been toying with me with QQ the whole time - the ratio of the amount of money in the pot ($7900 if he re-raises me all-in) to the amount of money I have left ($800) is simply too big to let go. This is what we call "pot committed" and it's a state that you want to avoid, but I seem to always end up in (hey I'm still an amateur and I don't think quite far ahead enough - I'm getting there).
Instead, he calls. I'm now totally flummoxed and can only imagine that he's chasing the flush draw, or maybe he's been really stupid and he's been calling with A-K this whole time (A-K leaves 6 cards that could potentially give you the winner, which makes you about a 7:1 underdog - definitely not the kind of hand you want to bet $2k to win $5k with). With anything concrete, it would make the most sense to put me all-in - I mean, at this point, what can possibly happen on the river that will make him decide not to bet $800 when the pot's already so huge?
The final card comes - Jc. If he was chasing the flush or the A-K draw, he missed on all counts. So, knowing I've got the best hand, I have two options: check or go all-in.
If I check: either he checks (most likely), sees my set of 9s, and I win, or else he bets my last $800 in a silly bluff attempt (very unlikely, since given the whole pot-committed thing I just described plus the fact that I've been the bet initiator the whole time, there's almost no situation in which I'd fold), I show him my set, and I win.
If I bet: he either folds and I win without showing him (and the rest of the table) what I've been working with (again, unlikely given the ratio of my remaining stack to the pot size, but it's always better to win without showing your cards), or most likely he calls and I take the whole thing.
Obviously betting is the better choice here. So, I bet my last $800, he calls, and shows me his KT of SPADES for a king-high straight.
Knowing what his cards were, let me just replay the action after the turn from his perspective. I called his big raise behind one other caller (so I knew I would be facing at least two opponents on this hand), I put out a healthy bet in first position after the flop, and I put out another bet that pretty much pot-commits me after the turn. I am definitely NOT betting with nothing here. The cards at this point give him King-high, in other words nothing. He has no flush draw, although there is one on the board. The ONLY cards that can give him a likely winning hand are the four jacks in the deck. Let's be generous and say he's put me on a single queen, maybe something like AQ. In that event the three remaining kings could give him a POTENTIALLY winning hand. So, being generous, let's say he's got 7 cards that he thinks could give him the winner (the four jacks plus the three kings). Even so, that translates to about a 15% chance of hitting one of those cards, which is about a 5.5:1 underdog. My chip stack is basically gone - if he calls this bet, he's not going to be able to to extract much more out of me to take advantage of his good fortune. Therefore, putting in $2000 to win $5100 is NOT worth it, not by a logshot. Heck, putting in just $1000 to win that same $5100 wouldn't be worth it, and again that's assuming that I just had the queen (and, of course, no king). And yet he called - and hit. And my time in the tournament was over.
This hand had me practically screaming at the computer. Suckouts happen all the time in FTP - you go all-in with AA vs. 95 offsuit and they beat you with a straight - it happens and you move on, secure in the knowledge that if you had it to do all over again, you would do it the same way. Some of them, like this one, just stick with you.
Of course, for every one of these losses, there's also two losses that I genuinely deserved, either because I made a mistake, I was bored and/or impatient, or someone simply played better than me. I've identified some key leaks in my game, although I've discovered that it's a lot easier to identify a leak in your game than it is to fix it, which is weird - I thought just finding them would be the problem. Maybe I'll get to that in another post, but this one has taken more time and energy than I planned, and even so I haven't written the post I meant to write in the first place when I started this one - that post will be next...

The law

So, I'm watching the Daily Show (available streaming online, sooooo awesome although I do wonder why on earth Viacom allows it to happen since they can't make any money from it), and there's a big section about the stimulus package and how the Senate's debating it. Which led me to an interesting question - I've always wondered why it's possible and even common for a bill to have a seemingly unrelated rider, and how that comes to be. Although I don't live in the U.S. anymore, I try to somewhat keep up with the news, and as I recall the stimulus package was turned from a 3- or 4-page document from the Fed to a bloated legal behemoth. And now, of course, the thing's got to get debated, but I'm getting distracted - back to the original question:
How are these riders getting through? It seems that both parties in both houses are guilty of this - how do they get away with it? For example, check this story for a Democratic abuse, or just look at how the Real ID act came into existence (although there are maaaany examples to choose from, these just popped up first in Google for me). I also found this gem of an answer where an Irishman asks this question in plain and simple terms, the response to which is a (admittedly pretty good) summary of the two legislative houses and their functions and interactions. Later on, as an update, someone points out "nice explanation, but you didn't answer the question" and the response is "It happens, deal with it". Nice. Thanks for making me read your summary of the legislative branch, asshat.
Anyway, any legal types or those who hang out with legal types or especially those with hard-working friends in Washington, please feel free to let me know how things like the Real ID act (or, if you don't want to pick on Republicans, use this as an example) can make it into seemingly unrelated bills. I don't recall this part of the process being described when I received my early education about law...

Comments about Hulu

Well, every time there's any sort of article / press release / etc about Hulu, there are always a boatload of people squawking about how they can't watch it in their non-U.S. country and how Hulu is a bunch of evil bastards who don't think that anybody outside of the U.S. even matters and it's all so damn inconsiderate of them to block stuff. Well, if you've read ramblings about distribution contracts and such, then you know that the true reason is that those distribution contracts I talked about only apply to the country in which they're made, and Hulu was created by two media companies who have distribution contracts in the U.S. (and not outside of it). One comment I recently read on one of these bitch sessions:

I love how every article about problems in the USA is flooded by a horde of foreigners claiming how glad they are proud to live in whatever country they are from. But when we have something minor and stupid like hulu they start clamoring about how they have some right to access it.

We have to put up with all the crap here, let us be able to stream old episodes of Airwolf in peace

That having been said, the amount of work required to make Hulu functional outside of the U.S. would not be insurmountable. Without divulging anything that could even be considered proprietary, let me just say that Hulu restricts playback based on the location as determined by your IP address. Some foreigners circumvent that by finding an available U.S.-based proxy and piping Hulu through that, although that sucks up the proxy's bandwidth pretty darn quick. At any rate, the problem isn't so much the technical aspect, but rather that each different country would require:
1) Checking to make sure that the piece of content was licensed to be played in that country
2) Determining who was the licensed distributor for that country (i.e. who gets paid when we roll an ad)
3) Making an ad call specifically for that region (i.e. an ad in the local language etc).

Of course, there are also other problems, such as audio tracks - programming in most countries is dubbed as opposed to subtitled - there are exceptions of course (for example, if memory serves correctly, most content is subtitled in the Netherlands, whereas almost all content is dubbed in Spain), but that means that you have to, at the very least, have a corresponding CC file for the local language, and more likely you need to have an audio track in the local language. This is assuming, of course, that you're determined to use the same video file for all locales, as opposed to just having multiple copies with different languages.
What I'm getting at is that there's more to it than might be apparent at first blush, but it's not impossible. I think that if Hulu wanted to bring their content to a new market (say, for instance, GERMANY), then their best strategy would be to simply create a German version of the site, more or less from scratch. I know it can be done, and probably in a matter of a few months! Of course, that's only addressing the technical hurdles - I think that the business side of it would be the really difficult part.
I'm also completely ignoring the distribution partner aspects (did you know that Hulu content is available on AOL, Yahoo, MSN Video, Fancast, and MySpace video?), which have helped drive traffic to Hulu - even after it seemed like everybody and their brother on the Internet knew about Hulu, I still only had about a 25% success rate when I talked about it in meatspace.
At any rate, speaking as an expat, I didn't really appreciate all of the instant gratification services available for my entertainment on the Internets until they were gone. Hulu truly is fantastic, as is the Netflix instant viewing. I can only hope that markets in other countries start following suit.

TV in Munich

OK, this is probably the simplest of the topics that have been burning a hole in my brain, and I thought it might be interesting for other folks.
I don't think I need to explain to anyone how TV works in the U.S., but just for kicks, let's establish a few ideas:

• Today, TV generally costs money. You pay X dollars for basic cable, with X being a function of local monopoly and economy (i.e. in NYC you get raped by Time Warner, in other areas you have multiple choices of providers for a reasonable amount of money). You can also pay extra for premium channels like HBO, Showtime, every NFL game played that season, whatever. Typically these come in bundles.
• Theoretically there are still TV broadcasts coming over the air (OTA). There are a few networks (USA, Comedy Central, CW, Food Network, Lifetime, etc) that have original programming but are not available over the air, but generally the big boys are available, at least in parts of the country, over the standard antenna. However, NOBODY uses this except for the folks on the two ends of the spectrum; folks who are absolutely too poor to have paid cable (and from a lot of books and newspapers I've read, cable / satellite is one of the things that even people in relative poverty find a way to pay for), and the techno-geeks who know that the OTA HD quality is still superior to anything delivered over a wire. OTA is free to the consumer, and is supported by advertising revenue.
• There are quite a few players in the making and broadcasting of a TV show. There are, of course, the producers - the folks actually making the shows. They're responsible for the writing, casting, shooting, editing, etc etc. The producers' final product is a tape of an episode of the show, which then goes to the distributor. To give an example, the show "Smallville" is produced by Warner Brothers, and distributed by the CW (generally, when a company owns both a production and distribution company - i.e. NBC/Universal or Fox/20th C - , the two go hand in hand, but that's not the way it always works). The distributor's job is, as the name implies, to get the content into the eyes and ears of the people.
• As you can guess, the money for all of this comes from advertisers. The business of securing and delivering advertising for a distribution network is very complex, but effectively it boils down to paying for popularity. If everyone does their job right, the show is properly marketed (which, incidentally, is generally the responsibility of the distributor), it gets a high viewership, the advertisers are happy, the distribution network is able to charge more money for ads the next time around, and the producer is able to sell the next set of episodes to the distributor for a higher amount. Incidentally, note that almost ALL the money comes from the advertisers. There are other revenue channels such as online distribution, iTunes, DVDs and other merchandise, but the vast majority of the revenue comes from the on-air advertising.
• The folks responsible for the actual delivery (DirectTV, cable company, or broadcast station) also play a part. Generally, their relationship is a symbiotic one for distributors; more delivery channels means more viewers, and when a popular distribution channel is available on the delivery mechanism (for example, when TNT is available on DirectTV or Time Warner cable), it makes the product more attractive to consumers who are willing to pay to have that TV station delivered to them.
  

Even with this being a lengthy description, it's still only a big generalization, with a lot of detail left out.
In Germany, the model is very similar, with a couple of big differences; first off, the list of TV stations that are available "for free" is much larger, due to a ubiquitous cable infrastructure. I have NO idea how this came to pass, but for some reason every apartment building has a cable box that's rigged to a central receiver; if you have a TV, you just plug it into the existing cable jack and away you go, with about 30 channels available through the standard receiver. The actual cable infrastructure is maintained by the building, and a small part of your common charges go into that. I'm not sure how it works for houses, because we didn't consider a house when looking to move.
Anyway, this is what Germans refer to as "free" TV. It's all paid for the same way as OTA broadcasts in America, although just for fun, there are also a few public stations similar to the BBC, that are supported by a TV tax. Merely owning a television in Germany makes you subject to the TV tax, which is somewhere around 10 Euros per month. Similarly, merely owning a car radio also makes you subject to a car radio tax (something like 1-2 Euros a month). If, like me, your TV is directly connected to your computer, or your radio is directly connected to your iPod, that doesn't matter - you still have to pay the tax.
The TV tax pays for the government-owned stations, and the rest of the stations are supported by ad revenue. The system still works the same way - producers pitch / auction shows to distributors, and the distributors sell ad time on their stations.
There are also a lot of "pay TV" stations - some of these are HBO-style, but most are stations that cater to a specific crowd, such as sports fans or fans of a particular genre.

Here's where things get strange; I work for a major media company that, as described above, is also merged with a production company. In America, this company is one of the big networks. In Germany, it's a collection of Pay TV stations. Even stranger, the big shows that come out of the production company are shown by the most popular Free TV networks, and the stations from my company primarily syndicate older, genre-specific programs. Since our networks are all Pay TV, the viewership is relatively limited, and we can't make much money from advertisers - the majority of our revenue comes from subscription fees. To make things even weirder, there's one person working here for the production side of the house, and he's effectively in his own little world, because his responsibility is to sell the shows, and our little networks can't even come close to matching the offers of the Free TV stations.

This, to me, seems totally bizarre. Effectively, we're just a small collection of Pay TV stations, and we make enough money to stay afloat but not do anything really ground-breaking. Up until very recently, we also owned a single Free TV network, but we just spun it off. For some reason, management has decided that the best course of action is to focus on our Pay TV properties, but I have no idea why we're doing that. I'd like to stick my nose into this, but right now I'm a little busy with my current project for the U.S./India.

Anyway, I just thought that was interesting. Next time I'll tackle the really big topic of TV distribution and independent production, which is something that's been even more on my mind than the operations of our little station collective in Munich.

Lots of thoughts

I've had a ton of thoughts spinning through my head lately, so this is a bunch of totally random stuff, each of which could be its own post. However, I just don't have time for all that so here's the outline form:

• Not such good luck with the online poker lately - can't seem to get my head into it, and experience has shown that when I'm not into it, it's not a good idea to play. Still, I forced myself somewhat, since Clau is out I don't need to worry about scheduling or anything like that. However, after stinking up the joint, I've decided to take a little break. Of course, maybe making that decision will get me in the mood again. Who knows.
• Been thinking a lot about my pathetic lack of ability to be a long-distance friend. I'm soooo terrible about keeping in touch with folks - I still keep in occasional contact with most of my friends in California and Santa Barbara, but by occasional I mean "extremely infrequent". And, now, I feel myself losing touch with the folks in New York. Sometimes I wonder if moving here was really the right thing to do. We moved to Munich because there are a lot of things that it provides that New York simply can't - a decent quality of life, easy access to all of Europe, carreer opportunities for Claudia, an opportunity for me to learn another language and culture, a chance to have a two-bedroom apartment, and the list goes on and on. But, one of the things that makes New York great is that the best of the best go there, in everything, and as a result you have the opportunity to meet a LOT of highly intelligent, motivated, interesting people. Over here, not so much; of course, there are smart and fun people wherever you go; I had a lot of similar friends in Oakland (most of whom moved to New York at one point or another!), and I eventually managed to find some similar folks in Santa Barbara, so I'm not hopeless as far as Munich is concerned, but it's certainly not as easy to find good peeps here.
• Actually, reading over that last part, I don't know if it's entirely true; Claudia has managed to find quite a few nice, interesting folks here - even her co-workers are a pretty good crowd. I guess it's more that I haven't felt like we really clicked with anyone yet - for me, the top two classes of friends are folks I like and admire, and am happy to have a beer or conversation with, and there's the top class of folks where there's just that click, and every time you see them it's a blast. We've met plenty of folks from the first category, but none from the second.
• My employer in Munich is soooo different from New York. This will have to wait for another post, because there are a lot of complexities and details.
• As often happens when Claudia goes on a long trip without me, I have re-discovered Starcraft for the umpteenth time. Nothing, but nothing, can suck me into a temporal black hole like that game; it's mental crack cocaine - I can play for hours and hardly be aware of the time. I spent most of the weekend absorbed in the Terran and Zerg missions (yes, I've finished the game before, but I honestly get just as much pleasure every time I play from the top, at least until the end of the Protoss missions when things get ridiculously hard).
• While browsing through Miro, I came across The Hayley Project. What a cool idea - of course, a lot of folks are comparing it to lonelygirl15, although I watched a couple of LG15 episodes (way back in the day, before it broke that it was all staged) and thought "why is this popular again?" As with so many other things, my interest in things like THP is not so much for the thing itself (about 75% of the acting and dialogue is good, the other 25% is pretty amateurish), as much as for the idea. To me, it's the semi-grassroots version of Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, which had some budget and (let's face it) some serious talent behind it. Again, musings on this could fill an entire post (and probably will soon).

So, as you can see, lots going on in my little brain. Actually, now that I've started whetting my appetite, I think I want to tackle one of those "this could be an entire post" topics. Stay tuned.