Semthex

He seems to be the official unofficial OSx86 kernel guy. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing.

Um, I played poker again. Not much happened. One thing of note is I cbet a shortstack and called with an underpair. Not the end of the world but still an annoying turn of events. I only cbet because I didn't see how short he actually was. This is my third session today. I might play a 4th. I should have played over 1000 hands today, maybe. I haven't checked pokertracker but it feels like I'm playing winning poker. Tried making video, didn't work. Dropped the framerate to 10fps now.

Played a 4th. No video, something was really lagging my computer. Um, outcome: Not so good. Don't think I won a hand, which is nice and quite typical. Memorable hand: Crazy LAG opens, I 3bet AQs OOP and he calls. Flop 568r, I bet, he calls. 4 on the turn, I check, he pushes. Possibly I had the best hand but I certainly can't call there. That was about it. Sometimes I raised and people would fold to cbets. Sometimes I raised and didn't cbet. Sometimes I raised and they didn't fold to cbets. Very dull. If I work out how to make a video without massive system slowdown (think restarting vmware or even rebooting), I will make one tomorrow. On that note, I watched LuckyChewy's CR video and thought it was pretty good. Even though I think his move with A9 against that guy was pretty ill-advised.

Just found this Natalie Portman rap on BoingBoing's best of 2006. Hilarious! "I wanna fuck you too!" Really? I'm so there!

OSx86

Hmm. First things first: Watched The Fountain yesterday. The quality of the release definitely detracted from the film but...so did the quality of the film. It is meant to be grand and epic sci-fi, unfortunately, it doesn't get there, IMO. It really, really tries, though. Golden man in ecospheric spaceship with his tree, rhesus monkeys, Queen Isabella and 16th Inquisitors. However, it's just lacking the spark that it needs for greatness. Lots of comparisons to 2001, which I think is fair. FWIW, I don't like 2001 either...Sure, it's a classic but, well, it's not enjoyable, it's art.

Now I'm watching The Good Shepherd. Interesting but very slow paced. Damon is great as the quiet Edward. Good supporting cast too. Distinct lack of Jolie's nudity but, apparently, we've seen the last of that now. How unfortunate.

Anyway, OSx. I am seriously considering using, or at least trying it on the new system. Of course, I have severe reservations about it. Mostly, I just don't think it's going to be very stable, robust, or well supported. Also, I am not entirely sure it will work nicely using parallels with poker. Or VMware for OSx (Fusion). I will be able to keep *nixy stuff on this desktop. Another downside is OSx86 seems to be leet and is full of all those warez morons that I left behind. E.g.

OSX 1048 AMD FINAL

Requirements SSE3 or SSE2 cpu, PATA HD on nforce4

Notes:

SSE2 support is still not 100% perfect but it works so even jews with a ghetto cpu can use it :P

512MB Nvidia Cards aren\'t working, don\'t install the nv40 package if you have one

Merry Christmas and a big fuckyou to apple and its X86 clones with a broken bios and partition table. Hopefully you\'ll go out of hardware business asap

Um, great.

Tentacoo

EHM, hello there! If you don't know what Ghastly's Comic is, well, it's not entirely hentai...

Unfortunately he's announced that it's dead. And he's now drawing Polly from his new comic topless...with a gun embedded in her thigh. At least he didn't draw her with a cock...

Oh, and according to Slashdot that link element should have a NSFW attribute. Also according to Slashdot, I probably am infected with Toxoplasma_gondii, which would actually explain a lot. Seriously, it's pretty likely that I did become infected since I used to love cats. As a teenager, I had a cat that slept on my bed. I definitely had the necessary contact. This sucks, brain parasites killed my IQ and my future.

Me and my brain parasites tried to play poker. I'm not sure which one of us deserves the blame for how badly that session went. Two hands stand out: I call a raise with KQs OOP (because I thought I good play it profitably). Hit a great flop (AT8) and lead. Turn throws up another club, I bet again, he calls. River is another club. I check, he checks behind with KJs. I think I'm recalling that hand correctly. I don't know HOW he checks behind there. Maybe I'm confused and I raised IP but I don't think so. Um, another KQ hand, I open, he calls JTxr flop. Aggro guy check/raises me pot. I call since I'm in position...Don't know about that. He bets the turn after it misses me. I think about shoving since he is so aggro and, later on, he donates money with, IIRC, ace-high against broadway (aggro might had A9, possibly a pair of aces).

So, yeah, it was a pretty terrible session. Especially on that table. I did cut it short. I intend to play another 3 or so sessions of similar length today. Maybe I will video one. In fact, I probably will just to test performance. Not sure if I can be bothered commentating.

Presents

Super Sophie! Grab the .nzb on page 3, enjoy 7GB of Sophie Moone. That's a lot of porn.

The busto ordeal

Whew! Scraped by the Cave of Ordeals. That thing is a freaking bitch. Very little health and a shitload of enemies. The three darknuts at the end were just a nightmare. I used up all my rupees with the magic armour. Had I not read about the bomb-arrow trick to knock armour off these guys from a distance, I certainly would never have made it. My technique, once they had lost their heavy armour, was to use a jump strike to close and make them drop their guard and then just slash at them. Trying to jump away before they counter. It's actually brutally effective against a single darknut but against more than one you often still take damage from the others.

But, by jove, I did it! So now, once I finish Hyrule Castle I will have absolutely completed the game. That's not to say I won't play it, especially since Mario64 is such a disappointment.

Poelease

Crap. Missing two Poes. That means...ugh. I know I'm missing three from the Cave of Ordeals. Fine. Should have 57 but oh no...55. Looking down the list, I am pretty sure I have them all...but well, I don't so that means rechecking every fucking one that I'm not 100% sure about. I'm not sure I got the 'rock formation' one on Snowpeak. Although, I think I may have gotten it on my initial ascent of the mountain.

100% list: 1-5, 9-20, 23, 36-40, 44-48, 50-60. It's possible I missed some in the never ending cave in Lake Hylia, Kakariko Village/Graveyard (nope, got them), or Hyrule Field (YESH, got 1! One more to go!). God, what a pain in the ass.

If I had been smart, I would have not killed any Poes in my completion of the main quest other than those that were essential (I think that's 5). Okay, found one of the missing two. Technically that's an improvement but it just makes tracking down the last one even more annoying.

Hooray, found it. That was incredibly lucky. Now only have the Cave of Ordeals to go.

Nearly time

So my desktop is old and crusty. I need a new system but I don't have that much to spend. Yeah, a hot rod would be nice (a god box nicer) but I need some level of customization. Also, I'm going for AMD.

• Case: Coolermaster Centurion 5, probably. Not overly in love with it. PSU will be something semi-cheap and reliable. Antec EarthWatts 430W maybe. A little expensive for a PSU, though.
• Mobo: Abit KN9 Ultra, or equivalent at time of purchase. This is a brilliant board with great Linux support.
• CPU: Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5200+...when it falls to closer to £100. Also need some cooling to go with that.
• GPU: Nvidia 7600GT.
• RAM: 2GB PC6400 DDR2-800.
• Hard drive: 250GB Caviar SE. At least one, maybe two.

Damage? ~£100 case + PSU, ~£70 mobo, ~£100 CPU, ~£100 GPU, ~£100 RAM, & ~£100 on hard drives. Total: £570. Considering this is a 'barebones' system, that's stupidly expensive. It's not like I can buy CPU+RAM one month, GPU+HD the next. Even if I scale down on the GPU and only get one hard drive, that's not a huge saving. I could get it on finance, I guess. Hell, I could get a Mac Book Pro on finance...

Although, technically, ebuyer doesn't stock everything I want so I couldn't get everything on finance.

Not much to be recycled from my old system other than audio card and mouse/keyboard. Plus, if I want to take full advantage of Gigabit ethernet, I'll need to upgrade the rest of my network. Maybe one day.

Heroes

It started, as it often does, with me reading a Slashdot post yesterday. This is how I discovered Firefly and Ghost in the Shell.

Being a "Bad, bad pirate" I downloaded the first three shows, watched the first one, and downloaded the other 8 too. Then I watched them back to back this morning. Obviously, I was watching as I was downloading but it's still a lengthy process.

Um, it's good but kind of stupid. The premise is the pseudo-scientific rubbish that we've seen so many times before. It's not particularly important, though, because the characters are very strong. From the cheerleader to the X-men rogue male nurse, they're all pretty good. The secondary antagonist, Mr. Bennet, is also rather good as "The Conspirator".

1. Claire Bennet. Good character as she could easily have been terrible. Sort of has a love interest/sidekick in Zach, the geeky HS student that is probably heavily identified with by everyone on Slashdot. Although, whether Zach is going to be in her life anymore looks doubtful. Actress Hayden is gorgeous, of course, however, 5'1" tall? Really, what is it with these tiny women who are otherwise perfect (e.g. Aguilera)? Yes, she's 17 but she looks to be, uh, fully developed. Shame, really, because otherwise she is flawless.
2. Mr. Bennet. Good creepy guy with some depth. Does sinister and menacing rather nicely. When he's in a scene with Claire he looks to be 7' tall, though.
3. D.L. Hawkins. MEH. Not a particularly strong character. His power is also...not that interesting, in all honesty. Maybe that's just me.
4. Isaac Mendez. Precog. Now this is pretty damn cool. He needs (needed?) heroin to enter his precognitive trances. Nice touch. His ex-girlfriend/love triangle thing is not that interesting but w/e.
5. Hiro Nakamura. Hiro has the strongest power by far. He's also so cute, funny, and likeable. Has a sidekick too! He's got to be one of the best characters on the show.
6. Matt Parkman. Telepath. I love Greg Gunberg and he really makes the character. However, his power is pretty weak and the women he's with are a) relatively ugly and b) not that likable. Okay, Greg's no oil-painting but COME ON casting, don't be this cruel.
7. Nathan Petrelli. He can fly. That's probably the least interesting thing about him. Very steely Congressman (well, not yet...) with a lot of depth. Also, he really looks like a superhero.
8. Peter Petrelli. Absorbs other's powers temporarily, aka-Rogue ripoff. I actually thought this was the actor that played Simon in Firefly but it's not. Likeable character, good depth, and fits well with his brother. His power, however, always struck me as being pathetically weak since it's so dependant.
9. Niki Sanders. MEH. ZOMG, evil twiness! Sigh, whatever. I like Ali Larter, she's pretty awesome, and eminently fuckable but EVIL TWIN!!1
10. Mohinder Suresh. Geneticist investigator guy. I hate this character. Sorry.
11. Eden. Well, she's dead but she was pretty cool. Very weird looking though. Sometimes she looks pretty, sometimes she looks like a bug.
12. Haitian. Stronger telepath than Matt. Um, he doesn't speak but now he's talked to Claire. He's not particularly sinister which I think he's meant to be.
13. Sylar. Serial killer superhero who can permanently absorb powers by eating (?) others brains. Currently known to have strong telekinetic abilities. He's the main antagonist, his face was only shown in the last two episodes of the show. He's not very deep but he is pretty insane which will suffice.

So...quite a mix up. Some characters are a hell of a lot weaker than others (Niki, D.L., Mohinder) in ability and their story. What carries the show for me is Claire, Peter, Hiro, and, to an extent, Matt's storylines.

Um, was it worth bingeing on the show like that? No, not really. It's not that good. It is quite good, though, and I will follow it in future. FWIW, it is miles better than Torchwood. I would stop watching it altogether but there's only two more episodes (due next week). After those, I'll probably call it quits. To quote The Guardian: "It contains swearing, blood and sex, yet still somehow feels like a children's programme."

As for me, well, I finally ate Christmas dinner today and now I'm feeling crapulent. The terrible thing is all I want to do is sleep. I guess I will but I want to, need to play poker and make that video.

I also picked up my present: Wii points card + Wii classic controller. I'm pretty disappointed with it, in all honesty. It's exactly what I wanted but...VC doesn't play nice with my setup. My VGA transcoder doesn't support 480i which means I have to play VC in 576i using composite cables, and it (Mario64) just looks awful. Plus it's a major hassle to switch all the cables over...and then toggle 480p back on blindly (bottom left, middle right, 3 down, 3 down, bottom right -- it's like some kind of cheat code). I really don't think I'm getting yet another VGA transcoder (YAVT?) but at the same time I don't think I want to play VC under these conditions. Yep, I'm really kind of bummed about it.

Discovered that my webspace works so I may be able to host my vid there if I can keep it under 50MB. Need to sleep now, poker later.

Fish on!

Did I mention I found out how to fish in Zelda? Makes those sections a million times less annoying. I guess I should have read the manual...(even though it's not really in the manual)

Sigh

Why the fuck is everything so fucking difficult? I mean, decent screen capture on Linux. vncrec, my latest attempt, manages to dump complete garbage. I guess the colorspace is fucked up but WHATEVER. So sick of this retarded crap.

Test, test, test

Eh, made a poker video...only I forgot to record the video. Sounds good! But anyway, I did play poker. and I played...okay. Two major losses that I recall: 1) AA v. extremely passive guy's top set. I paid off his valuebet on 4 to straight board even though I knew my hand was probably no good. 2) I bluffed a on a 4 to a straight, 4 to a flush board. Unfortunately, he had the straight and the 2nd nut flush. I maintain that without either of those it's extremely difficult to call there. 3) I folded JJ as an overpair against an aggressive bastard OOP on the turn. Why? Because even if my hand is good, I have to face a large bet on the river which my hand really can't stand. Other: 1) Turned top set with KK, board was 4 to straight, 3 to backdoor flush on the river. Aggressive bastard checked to me and I checked behind. Maybe I lost value but I don't see how he can call without the straight. Turns out he had bottom pair...

I did record the voice. I sound terrible. Deleted it since it's useless now. I did ramble and fail to finish my sentences, etc. Best part is when I couldn't remember what the numbers on my HUD meant.

All-in, not a terrible session. Lost some with my bluff, gained some on the top left table. Played 'okay' considering I haven't played in weeks.

Noticed that input via my transcoder is washed out. Grr. Maybe it's a dodgy cable. Maybe it's the actual transcoder. I obviously noticed 'weirdness' before but I put it down to the brightness adjustment I made for the Wii. Guess it's worse than that. Oh well, I solved that problem. The ghosting is caused by the transcoder. Fortunately I have a spare M/F VGA cable which I can now put to good use. It does mean manually switching the cable but it's better than looking at a washed out image.

Now it's back to the video problem...It would appear that capturing 1600x1200 is far too much for my system to handle and causes massive frame loss. I assume that's what causes the clockoverlay to tick so much faster than the clock it's recording. The clocks stay in sync when the capture area is smaller.

20/20

That's all 20 pieces of heart. Woot! Collecting the rest of the bugs is trivial now because of the informative collection screen. Getting the Poes, however, even with a guide is not a cakewalk. Some only appear at night and discerning which ones are missing is not easy. I have 32/60 but which 28 am I missing? Did I miss one in a dungeon? Etc.

I beat the STAR game lvl2 first time. It seems there's a further level but it looks pretty much the same. I will try and beat it, however. Also, can't forget rollgoal! And there's the Cave of Ordeals. Yep, plenty left to do.

It's kind of disappointing how straightforward the main quest is but I guess it's long enough. Um, also, the Palace of Twilight is such a piece of piss to complete it's laughable. Maybe not the first time through but on subsequent runs it's not a challenge at all. Sad to say.

I also have Rupees coming out of my ears and nothing to spend them on. Looks like I will have to don the Magic Armor for extended periods.

Um, enough Zelda babbling. I'm clustering my DB again. Probably not worth it.

I will play poker today/tomorrow, and I think I've sussed videoing (finally!). Not being a wise ass, but it is actually hard.

Sample gstreamer pipeline as generated by slightly hacked Istanbul:

gst-launch istximagesrc startx=147 starty=149 endx=660 endy=677 name=videosource ! video/x-raw-rgb,framerate=24/1 ! videorate ! ffmpegcolorspace ! clockoverlay halignment=right valignment=bottom shaded-background=true ! videoscale method=1 ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=514,height=529,framerate=24/1 ! theoraenc quality=63 ! oggmux name=mux ! filesink location=/tmp/gst

Most of it's a standard Istanbul generated pipeline. I changed the framerate, upped the quality to max, and added a clockoverlay. Why? Because I need a raw stream dump to work with and with those settings it's almost as good. Oh, and the clock looks cool! FYI, istximagesrc can probably be replaced with the packaged ximagesrc without issue.

Then combine audio & video mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=ffvhuff -oac copy -audiofile $AUDIO -o $output /tmp/gst, and finally run ffmpeg2theora -v7 -S0 $ouput. Whew! Glad I just discovered the -audiofile option.

Options tried and exhausted:

1. ffmpeg compiled with x11grab. Sort of worked but could only dump mpeg2 and the quality was crap.
2. xvidcap. Too many dropped frames. Very bad performance.
3. re-encode audio & video using one gstreamer pipeline. Um, this would probably be the nuts but I have no idea how to do this and got no help.

Um, now, if you'll excuse me I have some porn from 18yearsold.com to attend to...:/ Don't know why but I downloaded this as well. Probably a little too soft for my tastes.

Happy Hogswatch

Oddly I went to bed at 10pm and awoke at 2am. With nothing better to do I decided to watch "Hogfather".

Before I get into that, PT, even though I thought it was "guaranteed" to work, failed miserably. It ended up dumping all my exported HHs into the wrong database and keeping the full histories. So fucking annoying. I wish I'd have caught it earlier. Ended up dropping link and recreating it. It now seems to be shoving HHs into the right place for now. I have zero in link right now which is how it should be.

Anyway, Hogfather was about as good as it could be. Cast and production was excellent but...well, it didn't seem to have a whole lot of heart. I'm not saying performances were flat, because they weren't really, it's just Pratchett's work is pretty dry to start with. While that may be enjoyable to read, it's not that enjoyable to watch. I also found Death's voice not quite right but, face it, no actual voice is going to match the one I have in my head. Notables: David Jason was excellent as Albert, Ridcully (I'm not going to pretend to have heard of Joss Ackland), and Susan herself. Yes, lovely Susan was excellent. Actually, Susan's wards were pretty darn good as well and since I normally hate children in films that deserves special mention. Uh, the O-God of Hangovers was kind of a negative. No offence to the actor. It's just not very funny, Mr. Pratchett. Sorry. In fact, I was kind of disappointed with just how unfunny most of it was but, meh, maybe I've grown out of Discworld.

New crush: Michelle Dockery. She seems to be pretty unknown but clearly she enjoys Discworld and is stunningly beautiful. She has more even features than Elisha Cuthbert whom she closely resembles. Smallish chest but I'm talking about a crush here not some depraved erotic fantasy. I have more than enough of them.

...K. I see that I'm not up to date with my Discworld novels. Oh, that's okay, it's just a children's book. Forgive me but I haven't read Wee Free Man or Hat Full of Sky either.

Sequel? Maybe. I would say it would have to be another Death/Susan/Auditors story which means Thief of Time.

Here it is

Obligatory grinchy Christmas day post. Ya, so I don't celebrate this holiday anymore. If I ever have kids or such then I guess I will have to but right now it's just another day to me. Humbug!

Not that I care if other people are decadent swine today. Enjoy, eat, drink, consume! Whatever floats your boat.

Anyway, I decided to export from champloo and re-import into the new databases. Did it the dumb way, through pokertracker, instead of trying to do it directly with pg_dumpall & stuff. Why? Because even though it is grossly inefficient to use PT for the processing, it is almost guaranteed to work correctly. That's more than can be said for me hacking the pg_dump to try and fit observed hands into one database and played hands into another. Plus I would have to try and strip the HH from the observed hands...Meh, just let PT do it. The only problem is I have no idea of it's progress...data dir is now 911MB and the size of the old one was 5GB+. However, stripping the HH from observed hands should greatly reduce the size but...I have no idea how much. Once completed, I don't think I will re-cluster it if it's over 2GB.

I've abandoned screen casting for now. Pretty much abandoned gstreamer as well. Fuck it, if I can't get any help on pipeline construction #gstreamer can FOAD. Yea, okay, Dec 23/24 might not be the best time. I will ask again after boxing day but I doubt I'll get any help. I'm really not looking for someone to say: "$PIPELINE should work. YW." Even a simple Read The Fucking x would do...

So, I'm going to be using x11vnc for coaching and xvidcap for videoing. I may try ffmpeg2theora on the mpeg-1 stream but I might just go with xvid. I'm not sure if the benefits of theora/vorbis outweigh the added difficultly for people watching them. I know it's not hard but some people really are clueless.

But I intend to start playing poker again tomorrow provided the PT import is done. Make a video after a bit of warm up. Hell, I can't run much worse than GP/AW. Seriously, they rarely have a good session. I was watching GP 34 or something where he's 1-tabling 5/10 on FT (lol?), manages to get the donk to push pf when he has aces (such skill), and then drops a buyin with a Ten-high flush after flopping TP+FD. Now, the flush hand was semi-interesting because in position he bet the flop, obviously, bet the turn when he made his flush, and bet folded the river when it was a blank. Say what? Pot is ~$600 on the river, GP bets ~$400, other guy moves in for ~$800, and GP folds. That is pretty mind-boggling voodoo shit right there. If I bet that river, I'm calling a minraise. If I can't call a minraise, I'm not betting the river. Simple as. Might be totally wrong since I'm losing so much (?) value against two-pair+ but I just can't comprehend bet/folding for that price. IDK, maybe he saved $400.

Zelda! I'm at the Temple of Time on my second run. I have 14 hearts (+4 pieces of heart), 599 rupees, 27 poes, 18 golden bugs, & the magic armor. I have more rupees then I know what to do with/hold. I can see already that tracking down the rest of the poes is going to be a real bitch.

Why must everything be so fucking hard?

Missed coaching session. I managed to confuse the coach on the times. Go me.

Got Wii component cable. YPbPr transcoder doesn't support 576i or whatever so OF COURSE I have to enable 480p blind by using menu sounds. I actually got it first time after writing down the directions. Fucking Daredevil, right here.

Then I made the mistake of looking into streaming screen capture. Came across Istanbul which sounds ideal. Only, it doesn't work.

Which is great. gstreamer piping to icecast is the theory behind Istanbul but...IT DOESN'T work. I'm not sure if the gstreamer plugin or icecast is the culprit. However, I will tell you that I have 3 different versions of gstreamer installed. Quite a mess for Debian. And Istanbul bundles it's own version of the ximagesrc plugin for whatever reason. I have posted on the icecast forum but I'm not hopeful. Searching for gstreamer/shout2send got no hits. I also asked in the gstreamer irc channel but so far no one has responded.

Restarted Zelda in 480p. It looks 100% better. Even the Weather channel looks awesome now. However...I AM AT THE FUCKING FISH BIT AGAIN. ARGGGGGGGGGGG. I got one "FISH ON!" when I was dropping the controller to google something. And that's the only one so far. Don't forget, I need to catch two fish here.

Oh, I forgot to mention that my fucking vidcard nearly died. I was getting an error after X crashed that there was no power going to my card. Uh oh. Powered off, unplugged it, plugged it back in. No goot. Crap. Powered off, unplugged it, took out an extension and plugged it back in. Works. WTF? I don't see how that extension got fucked but whatever I'm just glad my vidcard ain't dead.

I still haven't had a shower nor eaten yet and it's 2am.

By jove

I think I've cracked PokerTracker and postgres setup. Perhaps. Only...the last few months of datamining are for nought since I have had to create a new database from scratch. Bugger.

Setup now: link for played hands and full history and twilight for observed hands and no history. MMMkay.

Oh, and I hate being poor. 'Christmas bonus' makes my wage cheque...almost as much as last months. How much time off have I had? Half a day, IIRC. ~130 work, 46 holiday, 21 bonus. Well, isn't that a whole bunch of bullshit.

I have less than £5 in my current account...and I borrowed £300 from my BR. So, after rent and paying that £300 back, I only have £400 to live on until February. And I am supposed to be paying for poker coaching at £50 a pop. Um, in theory I should have some money in my current account since I'm waiting on a refund for those hard drives. All I can say is I'm going to be eating a lot of cheap food next month. Probably not going to be able to afford gas.

It sucks that my online statement lags so badly because according to that I have close to £200 (of the £300 I borrowed from BR) but it only shows £3 credit. So now I'm wondering where the fuck that money has gone. "Bills" obviously but what? £100 for the hard drives that 'should' return tomorrow. Ahah! Ebuyer debit just popped up, so I'm only missing £67. £19 on Wii cable. Missing £45. Um? Pipex?

Bad news is I need a new computer stuff. Hard drive minimum looks like. Good news is I can resell the composite VGA transcoder. Not much money there but worth recouping some money.

Mr. Brighside once again says: "Good. You're earning next to nothing at work which means it will be easy for you to grind that meager sum via poker. Once you learn not to suck. Also, you've had an expensive month with Wii + paraphernalia but you have it now and games are 1) relatively inexpensive + 2) not very numerous. Come on, you only really want Metroid and maybe Mario. Face it, you pretty much only bought it for Zelda...Also, you deposited £500 (less neteller's BASTARD tax) into FT while moving £300 out of BR. You haven't taken anything from your bankroll. Oh, and while you were down monies on FT, RB topped you up to almost breakeven (*groan*). Don't panic, you're not going busto just yet."

Anyhow, I need to get to bed. I will mention today's cardrunner's video. I watched it but lost audio 26mins in...and then my attention sort of wavered. However...I saw him getting stacked left and right. PLO he...bluffed off his stack, IIRC, no audio but I think he missed his draw and the other guy made his. Also, flush over flush. Although that guy practically donated with A4 v. TT on 664T. The villain ended up calling all-in Muddy's push didn't he? I mean, wtf, that is a stupidly scary board. You only beat a semi-bluff and most semi-bluffs are going to have lots of outs against you. Jesus, just fold BOTTOM PAIR on a 3 flush, paired board to huge aggression. Anyway, it's relieving to see pros run and play like shit. From reading 2p2 you'd think every regular poster crushes their current stakes for 8BB or better.

What grinds my gears

Ya know what really grinds my gears? When I make a mistake and the whole world seems to mock me for it. So what moronic mistake did I make? Oh, I thought Splinter Cell was going to be released on the release date. It wasn't. Meh, who cares that game sucks ass. I then made another one: I thought that the Wii component cable was released in the UK. It isn't released before Christmas. Which, again, is pretty mind boggling, but yeah, I made a mistake.

MEA FUCKING CULPA.

I seem to have made lots of entries today. Great.

And now paypal is not working for me when I'm trying to order wii component cables off of ebay. I also need to paypal for my coaching soon. I don't think my current account is compeletely busto. Desperately need my paycheck, though, had to borrow from my bankroll. I hate life so much right now.

Agenda

It seems my spelling has gone completely to pot now. So be it.

Plans & stuff

1. Replay Zelda in 480p collecting all items, Poe's, Bugs, & pieces of heart. Not majorly exciting but worth doing, especially since the improved graphics will make the game a pleasure to behold. It's fun!
2. Write a full review of Zelda. Kind of a whatever thing but maybe someone out there in Nintendo is interested in my thoughts on Twilight Princess. I'll tell you now the score is 9/10 but I think there is quite a lot of room for improvement. Specifically the controls. E.g. When firing the bow how about nooking the arrow by bringing the nunchuck and remote together while holding B, draw the remote back away from the nunchuck, and release B to fire. I understand that this might not be possible using the tech in the controller but it would work a lot better than the crappy pointer. The only item that it really suits is the clawshot. In all honesty, the remote is essentially worthless in Zelda. You might as well use a regular controller. (I know you can disable the pointer and use the analog stick to aim.) In fact, it would have probably been better to do so. Sword fighting by waving the remote and pressing A/B doesn't remain fun for long. It just fucks up your wrist and the same result could have been achieved by tapping a button. However, if the remote was actually wielded as a proper sword (i.e. you're holding the handle and the 'invisible' blade matches your swings and thrusts) it would never get old. Again, I don't think in it's current incarnation that the Wii remote is capable of such feats but what about the Xii? Or the Yii? (Those are probably profanities in Japanese, eh.) I mean, I'm excited about the future but I think the present could have been better too. Egads, that was kind of a long & rambling bullet point.
3. RAID, etc.. Let's think about this: I only really need RAID-1, 50GB maximum. I definitely need to scrap that Seagate drive. The WDC seems okay. Let's face it, I need a new desktop and retire this system to some less critical and taxing role. Maybe offloading some of the daemons from stone to here. Which reminds me, stone is almost out of space on /home, filled with my postgresql database. I'm clustering it right now but as soon as that's complete, it needs to move. Also, I need to reconfigure the database. Observed hands do not need HH and they do not need to go into the same database as played hands. Moving postgres to a system with faster drives will help too. RAID-10 would be good as well if I can swing it.
4. Work, work, work, and that's just the maintenance. I also need to work on poker. Looks like I'm going to be dropping $800 a month on coaching (2 sessions per week). That's quite a lot really if I am a losing/breakeven player. The plan, though, obviously is to become a strong enough winner to play full-time. That means 4BB and above. Period. Below that and it is just not profitable. Playing part-time I should be netting $1.6k p.m. at 100NL, and then $3.2k p.m. at 200NL, excluding RB. Which is not a lot at all, especially minus the coaching fee. However, it is significantly better than $0 or losing. Full-time, I only intend to play 40-50k hands per month so I'm only looking at double that. Those figures are for 4BB, and while I hope to achieve better than that it would suffice.

Money for nothing

God. Transferred money out of neteller to FT since FT are claiming there will be no reload promotions in the immediate future. Lost $20 for the privilege of using fucking neteller. And I wouldn't have used neteller if I weren't for AJ claiming there would be another $1k 50% reload. Fucking bullshit.

That's a whole raise, cbet missed flop, and minraise experience I'm missing out on to processing fees.

Bad call

Came home early sick. And I was feeling nauseas. Now I'm feeling somewhat better but meh.

Well, um, did manage to cancel the order but...sdb is once again looking pretty busto right now so I am wishing that I had not. Typical, first pass it finds one badblock, about halfway through the second pass I ring and cancel. Now up to 38 within the next 10m blocks.

The worst thing is I thought that there was nothing of any consequence on there. Porn and some old media stuff. Uh, only it turns out the vmware image on sda points to sdb. Frak.

Seagate

Another manufacturer that I will be avoiding in future. Ran badblocks this afternoon and found 2400+ on sdb! Seriously, wtf? I also found ~200 on sda which is a Western Digital Caviar and my most important drive :( Fraksake.

I guess I haven't been doing a lot of system admin stuff recently and I'm paying the price now. Literally: £100 for 2x250GB (um, probably only 225GB) Caviars. I think sda might still be good but I'm not going to chance it. My desk is full of busted hard drives now. Must have at least 4 in there. Oh, and reiser4 doesn't support badblock mapping? Que?

So the major problem, as far as I can see, is that reiser4 on /usr had gathered some errors...and those errors were caused by the underlying badblocks on the drive. So even though I have found the badblocks and possibly forced their remap (unlikely since they were being written to often; yes, I should have done more than one pass but I need my computer) -- and fscked the filesystem -- it's nothing more than a band-aid. Fortunately I can swap in new drives on Tuesday.

I was just thinking: "Shit, that means dealing with grumpy ol' GRUB" but it actually doesn't. Phew! GRUB doesn't play nice with me. I've tried pretty hard but I still don't have anything more than an 8-bit menu. Not that it matters but it would be nice if after following the documentation it worked as expected.

Um, which leaves sdb. 2400+ badblocks? It must be pretty fucked. I'm running a second sweep with badblocks now that I'm booting off sda and not a live-cd. Oddly, it's nearly 1/15th through and encountered just 1 badblock. They can't all have been remapped...and I restarted badblocks once or twice on the live-cd and it was still finding loads early on. Should I cancel my order? I mean, I really need the money and I don't really need the extra space. I mean, I could RAID-1 it but then I'm actually losing space. Maybe if I don't see any in the morning I should cancel?

Hmm, I've never RAIDed before but so far my experience with cheap consumer hard drives has made me want to. There must be a level or configuration that would be suitable. Maybe if I just RAID-1'ed / & /usr.

Hmm, well, bollocks. I can't even cancel the order now. I don't think I could cancel it after it was placed either. I'll check badblocks tomorrow and if it's good (which will be unbelievable but a lie worth believing) I will try and cancel.

Fuck it, sent them an 'enote' to try and cancel. Hopefully they can manage to catch it before shipping. I feel bad but if I don't need them then it's a total waste of money. And if I can get them next working day...

Yeah, I'm bodging it but I'm poor so.

/usr error

Oh gods, no, not another fucking HD dying. /usr is a r4 partition on sda and it's choking hardcore. I'm hoping it's a FS error, although that would be bad too, obviously. Not sure how best to fix it. cp it off, fsck it, copy it back? Obviously I need to be booting off some live CD to do that.

Think I'll leave it for now...and hope it was due to me running out of space. I deleted Quake4 to free up 3GB. Haha, q4 sucks.

Um, vmware is fucked. nvidia is fucked. I was able to rebuild nv using the headers package but vmware wants the full source...which got deleted. So I'm rebuilding the kernel using the same config. Guess I should reinstall both headers & image since GCC has changed. Unless vmare likes the source dir once it's done...

Oh, and I tried 2.6.19-beyond1. It panicked. Great. Will try again...

Wiiii. Finally caught a bastard reekfish. The two bob fishing things I've had to do (for the cat in the village and this in Zora's Domain) have both been very annoying. I completed the Snowpeak Ruins temple. Took literally 3 hours or so and that included using the guide. Ball & chain is cool but a bit ridiculously large for Link. How the fuck is he supposed to be able to wield it?

Blahy! Time has flown once more and I must abed with my *nixy problems and dreams of twilit princesses.

Is the best policy

Um, not sure where I was going in my last rant. Something along the lines of: We want the .87EV, since in poker this means he has to call...and get his .13EV. I wish he [Mr. Generic Fish] would do that everytime. Gosh, gee, doesn't poker suck? Why can't I win all the time?

Which is valid but beside the point. The reason poker players make good money is because it is hard (to a degree; I am sure HSNLers would find MSNL & SSNL laughably easy) and it is very stressful due to the nature of the risk assumed. But risk is a function of reward so one must persevere. How very Anglo-Saxon of me.

Anyway, I've decided to be brutally honest with Kyle, my coach, and blunt as well. He's playing 50NL. Why? It's not a problem for me per se. If he can't help me lick 1/2 on FT, then it is a problem. He can 12-table the playmoney games for all I care. I don't quite understand why he would be dicking around at such a low level if he could beat 1/2 for 5BB+ but we'll see.

Anyway, part of the honesty is I will tell him how much money I have online, how much I have in the bank, how much time I intend to play part-time, & how much I intend to play if I move to full-time. Working with him I will prosper. If he can't help me then I will find someone who will. However, I am pretty hopeful.

From glancing at his blog he seems to habitually pull down $4k+ p.m. This is not balling out of control money but it's better than I have ever done. Also, most days he seems to be making ~$500. Obviously there are losses to balance but he's still doing very well compared to me.

Honestly, I am very much looking forward to starting with this guy.

Wiiii. Calibration is the best policy. I cannot believe I spent 22 hours in Zelda with the pointer not properly calibrated. Also, I've actually started using it correctly, i.e. pointing it at the screen constantly instead of aiming it off to one side/below. Oh, and I beat the Star game lvl1 to get the bigger quiver (turned the pointer off). The teenie boppers were a nice touch. I'm not sure what I'm meant to do with the cute dog outside that loves to fetch.

Into the Arbiter's domain now. The Orc camp was very fun stuff. I killed the master Orc using the mortal draw and then busted out on the hog. All after tearing through the camp with my bow. HOW COOL IS THIS SHIT?

And then the 4 Poe's. I was reluctant to give up Illia's scent but I checked the guide (must stop doing that) and it said I had to. Tracking those bleeders down was fun. Saved it after I lit the 4 torches, only got to play an hour. Boo weekdays.

Of the four dungeons I've seen, ORDER BY fun DESC: Forest, Fire, Desert, Water. FWIW, I didn't hate the Water Temple as I remember doing in OoT. Think I hated it in LttP too. But yeah, I've been abusing the guide too much really. Still it took me a good 10-20 minutes to find the Big Door in the Water Temple. I kept diving into the actual water and sinking to the bottom. Oh, and targeting the eyeball after he switches to the fish was a major pain in the ass.

Loved the Find Zelda thing. Loved the Midas guy whom I'm collecting Poe's for. This game is so fucking awesome. I'm pretty sure after I'm done I will instantly start a new game and go through with the guide collecting everything. Every piece of heart, every bug, every Poe. Probably every chest. I seem to be opening loads now and putting the money back since my wallet is a fat 600 now.

Oh, and is Zelda dead? I doubt it. She's probably in the Twilight world or something. And I think I know who Zant is...

Not sure about the Wolf brother. If I have my chronology correct, he could be Link's ancestor...aka Link from OoT...LttP. That would mean Ganon could be Zant banished to Twilight and hence returned. Maybe.

Love, love Zelda!

Wii

ps3 v wii. HOT.

Wiiii will, wii will, rob you

Well, almost. Buying Wii off of ebay has turned out to be a major headache. Got an email on Friday saying that he had cancelled my order and refunded my paypal payment. Why? Because my shipping address is unconfirmed...which in a follow up email he says negates his seller protection.

Only...when I checked my paypal account at midnight, there was no sign of a refund. Queue angry email.

Woke up this morning, have email, have refund, need to pay by CC before Tuesday. Why is everything so hard?

Good news is it looks like I'm getting a Wii next Friday.

Watched Flushed Away. I didn't realise it has an Aardman(?) animation project. Pretty good.

BSG was excellent, as always.

Mozilla 'Iceweasel' is kind of horrible. Well, missing tabrowser extensions is a big downer. Apt-listbugs also seems broken. I've put off an apt-distupgrade because it retrieves a bunch of bugs. I check out some of the package QA pages and those bugs aren't there. I went through with the upgrade regardless, pinned a few things. Have yet to restart X. Did upgrade libc so I guess rebooting might be a good idea.