RSS FeedRevisiting poker as a hobby
For the past few months, I have played remarkably little poker. Yes, I play in the monthly tourney at my house, but other than that, not too much. I don’t know if it’s the fact that summer is approaching which means the World Series of Poker is about to descend upon Las Vegas again, but for some reason, I have been jonesing to play poker all the time.
The past two Fridays in a row, Chris and I have gone to play the Friday night 11PM tourney at Sam’s Town. I’ve cashed in both of those events, so it’s no wonder that I’m a big fan of the tournament. Though, I’ve played in two of their 10AM tournaments and haven’t cashed yet, so I’m not as big a fan of that tourney.
When I first went in to the poker room at Sam’s Town, I was pleased to find that they spread a 1-5 Seven Card Stud game. (1-5 means that you can bet between 1-5 dollars any time it’s your turn to bet.) I have to say that after playing Texas Hold ‘em exclusively for the past couple years, playing something else was quite fun! I’m sorta hooked on Seven Stud right now, so I’ve been back to play a few times now. I wish I could tell you that I’ve had winning sessions each time, but that would be a lie. Honestly, I’m still learning the ins and outs of the game. I’m considering my first few sessions a relatively inexpensive lesson.
Speaking of hobbies, digital photography is something I’ve always been interested in. Thanks to an upcoming trip, I felt it was finally the right time to purchase something better than a PHD (push here, dummy) camera. I ordered a Canon Digital Rebel XTi and am anxiously awaiting it’s arrival this week. I’ve been spending a lot of time on Flickr.com checking out photos taken with the XTi, and have to say, I’m really really excited at the opportunity. I realize I will likely not be taking amazing shots on my first outing, but I definitely plan to take a few hundred (or thousand) photos before our trip. I’m really interested in learning what works and what doesn’t. Learning what the hell the ISO setting does, shutter speed, light sources, aperture, etc…
One of the final deciding factors for selecting the camera I chose is the fact that it has a setting for taking time lapse photos. As luck would have it, I signed up for the RSS feed from Digital Photography School just in time to see this AMAZING movie that was shot with a canon digital SLR using time lapse photography. I hope to one day be able to produce something even half as awesome.
Get ready for a flood of photo blogging. It’ll start soon, I’m sure.
Rock Band Foot Pedal Reconstruction
Last Friday I got home from work and played a few songs on Rock Band. Right as we were finishing up the rock star ending on a song, the foot pedal on my drum kit broke in half. It was a sad, sad day.
Over the weekend I made a half-assed attempt at finding a replacement drum kit. When that didn’t work I resorted to the answer to most every problem… eBay. Within minutes I found a repair kit for the foot pedal. As it turns out, I’m not the only one who has broken their foot pedal. OK, I knew I wasn’t the only one. I saw postings about broken drum kits within the first week of Rock Band’s release. Honestly, I’m surprised mine lasted as long as it did.
So, here’s some before and after shots of the food pedal:
Broken in half.
Replacement parts to the rescue.
Take the foot pedal apart.
9 screws later, we are ready to rock.
Thanks to eBay seller rasehead for an excellent product that’s priced right! Twenty Six bucks including shipping and I’m back to rocking my face off. Woo Hoo!
Almost rock stars
Thank you Todd for another great recommendation! Air Guitar Nation was
a fun movie to watch. You absolutely forget how ridiculous it is and
get hooked on the competition. I asked my mom if she wanted to watch
it and she says, “I may pop in for a few minutes.” she sat and watched
the whole thing with me. Ha!
On another Almost rock star note, my foot pedal on my Rock Band drum
set broke on Friday. No rockin’ for me for the entire weekend. So sad.
I need to work on that
It has become apparent that I need to work on the way I respond to people when I’m a slight bit agitated. It seems I have pissed off (and hurt feelings of) a few people that I love recently with the way I reacted to a seemingly infinitesimal event. Some details, if you please.
This afternoon I went to pick up sandwiches for lunch. When I returned my mom was in the dining room using using her computer. The kids were upstairs and Chris was working with something in the kitchen. The TV was on in the (currently deserted) living room. I set the bag of sammys on the dining room table and Chris came in and started sorting out the wrapped-up goodies. I grabbed mine and headed to the living room. As I sat down I reached for the remote control and quickly changed the station away from some modeling reality show on MTV that I have never seen before and, as far as I know, it’s a show that nobody in my household watches. 5 seconds after I changed the channel, it became abundantly clear that my mom and wife had been watching the show. It’s at this point in the story where things are up for interpretation. I clicked a button on the remote to take us back to the previous station and said something to the effect of, “there was nobody watching the show.” My exact words and tone were likely a bit harsher than that, stemming from the manor in which I was informed of my wrongdoing.
See, in my mind, I felt as if I was jumped on for changing the channel. In their minds, I snapped back unkindly and in a bit of a pouting fashion. The end result being, my mom left the room upset and my wife and I sat and ate lunch silently while watching a TV show that neither of us had any interest in watching.
Now, like I said, this whole scene should have been a complete non-event. Honestly, going back and watching the modeling show was certainly not going to kill me. But what does bother me is that both my mom and wife were upset with me over something so ridiculously insignificant.
This isn’t about assessing blame. Quite the contrary. It’s about figuring out what I could have done differently in order to avoid the situation in the future. I believe the proper course of action would have been to say, “Oops, sorry about that. Here, let me change the channel back” while at the same time keeping all hints of sarcasm and bitterness out of my voice.
It would be all to easy for me to just say, “Yeah, well if they hadn’t jumped on me for changing the channel, I wouldn’t have snapped back at them.” But really, what will that solve? Or, I could this, “If I had asked if anybody were watching the show before turning the channel, none of this would have happened.” Hey, that sounds better. Unfortunately, I’m more likely to have the former go through my head than the latter. Yeah, I know, I need to work on that.
Consider this post part of my “working on it”.
Pinball Hall of Fame
Recently my son found out about a place here in town called the Pinball Hall of Fame and has been asking us to take him there for a couple weeks. After some quick research we found out that it’s not that far away from us [it's on the corner of Trop and Pecos]. So yesterday we piled in to the car and headed on over.
The sign out front says they have over 200 classic pinball machines and games. Woo Hoo! I can’t wait! I love playing pinball, and at one point I even owned a Funhouse Pinball machine. I was stoked to see they had a Funhouse machine as I haven’t had a chance to play the game in a couple years. Though, I’m considering buying another one from a buddy in California who has one.
They have pinball machines from just about every era. They had a ton of really old machines that I had never seen before including one, that I can’t recall the name of, that was #3 of only 11 made and there are only 2 known to still exist today.
On the very back aisle they had a bunch of classic video games including Donkey Kong, Missile Command, Tetris, Crazy Climber and a munch more. I played Donkey Kong and Crazy Climber. I did OK at Donkey Kong, but wow do I suck at Crazy Climber. I loved that game as a kid and was pretty good at it at one point. But, it’s probably been 15 years since I last played it, so I’ll cut myself some slack.
If you want to go check the place out, let me know and we’ll tag along!
I can pretty much guarantee we’ll be going back. The whole family had a good time.
The art of setting expectations
Setting people’s expectations is something that I think we all do all the time. At work I basically do it all day long. I set my boss’s expectations for how long a project is going to take and how much it’s going to earn. I set developers expectations for the workload I’m going to be handing off to them. I set advertisers expectations for the amount of traffic they are going to see for an offer. So on and so on. I set my wife’s expectations for when I plan to be home each night so that she can have a sense of when to start making dinner. Without setting expectations, well, nobody would know what to expect.
So what happens if you set expectations that are way off? Well, usually people end up getting upset at you. Tell your boss a project will be done on Tuesday and it’s not done until Friday… he’s upset. Tell your boss a project will earn $2500 a week and it ends up earning $300 a week, yep, upset again. Tell your wife you’ll be home for dinner at 5:00 and don’t show up until 8:00, you guessed it, upset.
I constantly try to set peoples expectations in ways that will always leave them satisfied. It goes right along with the saying, “under promise and over deliver”. If you tell your boss a project is going to be done on Thursday and it’s actually done on Tuesday, he’s going to be pleased. Tell your boss a project is going to earn $900 a week and it ends up earning $2500 a week, he’s pleased again. Tell your wife you aren’t going to be home until 7:30 for dinner but call her at 5:30 to say you got out early and are heading home, well, unless she’s shagging the pool boy and was counting on you being late, she’s probably going to be pleased as well.
This past Tuesday we got passes to see a sneak preview of the new Will Ferrell movie Semi-Pro. I’m a big fan of his movies, but I’ll be the first to admit that they can be hit or miss. Anchorman is one of my favorite movies, but Blades of Glory isn’t exactly a laugh a minute. When we went to see Blades of Glory in the theater, my expectations were pretty high and we walked away fairly disappointed in the movie. With Semi-Pro, however, my expectations were pretty low. I had seen several previews for it and my biggest fear was that I had already seen all the funny parts and the rest of the movie would just be filler. I can not stress enough how happy I am to be wrong on this one. First off, Will is so great at playing over-the-top characters. Even in Blades of Glory, I loved his character, the rest of the movie just wasn’t that good. But, in Semi-Pro, there are a bunch of great characters, funny scenes and a ton of quotable lines that I’m sure we’ll all be repeating for months and years to come. I’d have to rank the movie just under Anchorman as my second favorite Will Ferrell movie.
I’m a little concerned by the fact that one of Will’s next movie projects is Land of the Lost. But hopefully I’ll be pleasantly surprised at that one, too.