Long Time, No Blog

I guess it's been awhile since I've posted. I've been a little busy. Most of my "free" time has been spent working on a new design for my photography website, www.ouralbumonline.com. Here is what it looks like now:

I have most of the Senior Portraits pages done, including 3 sample galleries. All other sections are still desperately in need of work. The site also needs a major overhaul. It is 95% images in tables right now. I'd like to convert it to CSS and use less images. But hey, it's up and it looks alot better than the Postnuke site that was their before.


Saturday I had the opportunity to photograph my friends JD & Erica. I took them to Deepwood Estates and Willamette's campus to shoot their engagement portraits. I had a lot of fun. My dad came down to help - thanks again, dad! Here is one of the shots from the shoot:

I really enjoy shooting at Deepwood Estates. There are so many locations at one location. The only downside to shooting there is the competition. There were at least 3 other photographers there at the same time as we were there. We rotated spots and it was big enough that we didn't get in each other's way.

Well, that's the update. I won't wait so long to blog again...at least not until Thanksgiving ;o)

Blinking Dots

Okay, so here’s how it works. Click the above image so you can get the animated version. If you look at it looks like green dots appear after the purple ones dissapear.

If you look at the center all the dots disappear.

Very weird.

Whatever

 

Blogging From Lefty's

Today I posting from Lefty's in Salem while I wait to play their free no-limit Texas Hold'em tournament. They have wi-fi available for customers, so I brought my laptop with to keep me occupied while I wait. T minus 55 minutes.

A couple nights ago we watched "Catagory 7: The End of the World", a made-for-tv movie about a catagory 7 hurricane that hits Washington DC. To say it was dumb would be an outragious understatement. I knew it would be, but I guess I still had too high of expectations. I will relate one scene that I found particularly funny in a really dumb way:

At the FEMA-want-to-be's HQ all of the computers suddenly shut off, including the guy's laptop. All of the other appliances and lights stay on. He yells, "The T-1 went out!" At that point I fell on the floor laughing. He then went up to the attic of the building and had to reach around pipes to pull out two network cables that apparently were connected at one time. His huge task to bring power back to the computers by reconnecting the T-1 was plugging a male ethernet cable into a female jack at the end of another cable behind those pipes in the attic. Of course, his arm got stuck and the girl he had a crush on had to save him...the cable got plugged back in and magically the computers all turned back on and instantly had all the programs that were running before running again.

There were a lot of other terrible parts to the movie (I won't even start with the special effects), but that was the most memorable. Again, I don't expect much from made-for-tv movies, but I do expect more than that.

Well, it's now 6:20, my pizza is here at my table, and poker starts at 7. I must eat.

34os Wins By Taking Out 3 Players!

Last night I played a small (5 players) game of poker. I tried a couple of new things, one of which really worked for me. The idea is this, raise pre-flop with terrible cards, say 72os, 34os, etc. giving the impression that you have a strong hand. Then, see what kind of a flop you get and what other players are doing. If the flop comes AKJ, you can probably bluff very successfully. That is, unless someone really does have great cards. If the flop comes 723 or something low, you could hit your cards and no one would think you did because they are all low and you raised pre-flop. They wouldn't believe you and call your bets thinking you were bluffing you had an over-pair. That is, unless someone really does have an over-pair. Anyway, that's a play that I thought I'd try a few times last night and it really worked out for me:

Bill: raised just over double the big blind pre-flop with 34os.

Everyone calls the bet.

Flop comes 3-4-something with two hearts.

Eugene bets, JD raises all-in, I call, Christie goes all-in, and Eugene goes all-in. We see top pair, Ace-high flush draw, and my two-pair. My hand holds up through the turn and the river and somehow I took out 3 players and ended the game with 34os. I can't promise that play will work every time, but I used it 2 or 3 times last night and it worked well for me.

34os might be my new favorite hand ;o)

A Background & My Ideas

I was playing around with a design idea for my upcoming webpage (billenglish.net), and I ended up scratching the idea, but I came away with a cool background. I have sized it in a few different sizes and thought I'd put it up for download:

800x600 1024x768 1600x1200

If you would like a custom size, just e-mail me and I'll do it. For some reason I just liked the way this turned out.

I am trying to make billenglish.net be a portal to my blog, my business page, Krista's blog, and Mikayla's neglected podcast. I want it to be unique, but not hard to use. I want it to be eye catching, but still easy to read. I know what I want, I just can't come up with a design that I like that follows everything I want. Here is a peak into my scratchpad for my current idea I am mulling over:


Something like that with the lines as a page bg and then a floating white rounded corner text area in the middle and then some sort of navigation...yeah, it's very much in progress, but I AM working on it. I am also working on redoing ouralbumonline.com. I think it's cheesy the way it is. I want a much better gallery and overall design for starters.

I have tomorrow off work so maybe something will happen with some of these projects. Or, maybe I'll find people that want to play poker and I won't get anything done ;o)

Warning: Infected

Martin Sargent (language warning on that link) is at it again. He was the host of such shows as Unscrewed on the old techTV. I know he is a technology guy and I was not a fan of Unscrewed, but I thought I would check out his new podcast Infected. Well, I feel infected now. It was SO BAD! Probably the worst 36 minutes of audio-only content I have ever witnessed, without exaggeration. From the crude humor and very foul language to the fake (and very dumb) Olive Garden commercials to the story about a guy doing something I won't even mention.

I am a paying subscriber to Revision3, an IPTV startup company that Kevin Rose basically founded. I like theBroken, diggnation, Systm, etc., but this...this was bad. I think it was supposed to be funny, but I couldn't find an ounce of humor in the whole show. It is very dissapointing to me that this kind of content came from Rev3. As a subscriber, I was able to download the show early. It will be available to all later this week. Save yourself the time and from feeling like you need to take a shower and skip this one.

There, that's my rant/review of a podcast.

Liquid Sculptures

Major kudos to Martin Waugh over at LiquidSculpture.com for some AMAZING photographs of water (and other liquids) dropping at high speed. He has tons of images on his site. I couldn't stop looking at them until there weren't any left to look at. If you haven't seen his site, go check it out!

Well, last night I played poker at Lefty's for the first time in a couple months. The night started off with 50-something and I got 14th (I think - a few of us went out at once). Not bad. I beat about 40 players, made it to the top 25%. It was fun, but the blinds just went up SO FAST! We started with 5,000 chips and when I left (2.5 hours into it) the blinds were at 4,000 - 8,000. Yeah, that's what I thought too. I was in the big blind and got an A9os. I went all-in for 11,000 more than the 8,000 big blind I'd already put in. THREE people called me! I was taken down by a KJos that hit a K on the flop. I had a lot of fun, but the blinds were amazing. I guess that's what it takes to take almost 60 people and get one winner within 3-3.5 hours. 60 people times 5,000 chips means that there is about 300,000 chips in play. That means average when I went out would be about 21,500. I had 19,000 when I was basically forced all-in by a big blind. I don't think that's right. With average at 21,500, blinds should be at 1,000-2,000, no higher. 1/10 of your chip stack is enough to put in for the big blind.

One other thing that annoyed me last night was the shuffling of people. It seemed like every hand we were being shuffled around from table to table. People leaving, coming, me going, etc. We spend almost as much time shuffling and chipping up as we did playing the last 45 minutes I was there. I understand needing to keep tables even and such, but holy cow! There was one guy that got moved to our table, played one hand, and then was moved to another table. I thought that was kind of dumb. But hey, it's poker and it was just for fun. I greatly enjoyed myself and I plan on trying to make it back sooner than 2 months from now. Especially since it's no-limit now and they have gone away from limit poker. But that's enough blog entry by itself: Limit vs. No-Limit.

I think that's all I've got for ya today. Oh, two quick things. 1.) Eugene posted on his blog!! Go check it out! 2.) Another shameless plug for my refferal link with FreePSPs.com - Go register to get a free Sony PSP! ;o) Ok, I won't do it again, I promise! And thanks Larry, whoever you are, for signing up through me.

Sharpie Mini Game

I just played a fun little flash game, the Sharpie Mini Game. It's your basic paddle game, but if you play through level 4 you get a Sharpie Mini. Since I use sharpie's exclusively when labeling burned CDs & DVDs, I thought a mini would be nice to leave on my desk. Here is the link to a free Sharpie Mini if you don't want to play the game:

http://www.sharpieminigame.com/winners/index2.htm

Here is a link if you do want to play the game:

http://www.sharpieminigame.com

Bet that was a big surprise ;o)

I only played it because of the weirdness about it when I first looked at it. I was inputting my information and realized that the example birthday was ONE DAY away from my actual birthday! Weird huh?
I thought it was VERY weird!! It got me to play and then got me thinking about the odds of that birthday coming up. At first I was thinking of all birthdays for those living and the odds were crazy (like 3.6 million to 1). But then I was thinking that they probably wouldn't give 1905 as a probable birthday and they probably wouldn't give 2004 as a probable birthday...they must have formed a demographic of their target audience and choose a birthday in the median. And that's me. 25.5 years old. Not as fun to think about with the odds...I was about to go register for a poker tournament and buy some lottery tickets! But, since I thought it through more, I realized it wasn't against all odds after all. Not as exciting to think about, but hey, it's a free Sharpie mini and it was a fun few minutes playing the game.

Free PSP

Hello all! Some of you may remember that a little over a year ago I did the freeipod.com deal and actually got an iPod. It was so cool! Now, the same company is doing free Sony PlayStation Portables.

Here is the deal:

1.) Sign-up with freepsps.com.
2.) Complete 1 offer (like apply for a credit card, try video professor, etc).
3.) Get 5 friends to do the same thing.
4.) Get a free PSP in the mail!

It really does work! That's how I got my iPod that I use daily. If you aren't interested, don't do it. But if you'd like to give it a shot, sign up through this link:

http://psps.freepay.com/?r=24729089

There, that's my plug. I didn't want to send out e-mails to everyone because that seemed tacky. I know this is too, but I think it's less tacky.

iTunes/iPod Problems: Take 2

One of the most frustrating things in the world happened last night. On my NEWLY reinstalled XP box - iTunes is not syncing with my iPod. I just had to share my frustration visually. I took the above shot of myself last night at the peak of my frustration. I spared you the red blotches forming on my face by making it B&W. I am seriously considering an alternative to iTunes for syncing with my iPod. The problem with that is - I LIKE ITUNES! Ok, aside from all the problems I have and how deathly slow it is on the PC...anyway, enough venting about that.

Last night we watched Prison Break's 9th episode. It was amazing - just like all the other episodes. I am really enjoying this series. Prison Break, Numb3rs, Mythbusters, and WSOP are the shows I try and keep up with. I think I'm about 8 episodes behind on the WSOP (World Series of Poker) though.

We also watched Lord of the Beans last night. LOL! It was great! If you haven't heard about it, it is a Veggie Tales episode that parodies...guess what? Lord of the Rings. It stars Junior as Froddo Baggypants. He must take his magical bean through the land of Muchsnowia to the land of Whoa. I really got a kick out of it. To make things even better, the Silly Song with Larry is him singing an Elvis style song as an Elf. They call him an elven impersonator - LOL! Ok, so I like Veggie Tales. Who wouldn't?

On tap for tomorrow night may be Star Wars Episode III or maybe special features from one of the two bonus disks it came with :o) I am very excited!

And I hate to leave with that image above. I am in a much better mood this morning, aside from being sick and wanting to stay in bed sick all day but I'm forcing myself to go to work. Anyway, here is another photo from last night. I made it my Windows user icon and my chat clients' icon.

Zestfully Clean

Well, first and foremost, I must point you all to Krista's blog with photos of last night's fun with Mikayla.

Now, about my computer. All the spyware is gone! No, I didn't clean it all out. I gave up and reinstalled Windows XP. But, I used a cool little program called nLite to customize my install CD. It integrated all the patches for XP, my device drivers (even my RAID), and let me have an unattended install. That means, it knows my product key, my name, my password, user account, preferred resolution, etc. It was amazing. I choose the partition to install to, walked out in the living room and watched TV for 20 minutes, came back and was browsing the web on my newly installed OS. Check out nLite and make your own custom Windows XP CD!

Here is another photo I took of Mikayla this past weekend using my 50mm and no flash: