Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everyone! I've put some snapshots up on my Flickr gallery from this morning:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/englishw

16 Days 'til Christmas

We got our tree Friday night and put it up yesterday. The girls had a lot of fun helping decorate. Lily (and Sweetie too) was fascinated by the red decorative beads. She ran all over the dragging them behind her with Sweetie just a few steps behind batting at the beads. For some reason Lily thought that all the ornaments should be candy, but I think she's figured out that they don't taste good now.

I posted a few more shots of the girls decorating on my Flickr page.

In Memory of a Poker Great

"When it comes to respect, Chip was number one" - Barry Greenstein

“The True King of Poker” - Daniel Negreanu

Chip Reese was one of my favorite poker players. He died in his sleep this week after having symptoms of pneumonia. Chip won the 2006 WSOP HORSE event, a $50,000 buy-in tournament of 5 different poker games. He was considered by many to be the greatest cash game player of all time. He also had a very pleasant persona. He was always calm, composed, and very professional. He never raised his voice at the table or got mad at a turn of a card.

The poker world had a great loss this week. We'll miss you, Chip.

Fox News Story

CardPlayer.com Story (much better than the AP one linked above)

Black Friday

Well, for me, Black Friday is over now. It was over at 6:11 AM. It was a very short shopping-spree for me this year. Usually, I head over to Fry's Electronics at 3-something in the morning to stand in line for killer deals. This year, for the second year in a row, the Fry's deals have been rather lame. Target was the spot to be for us this year. We got to Target at about 5:45 and took our place in line. There were about 150 people or so in front of us, but we still got everything on our list. Almost exclusively gifts for Mikayla and Lily. I did pick up The Goonies for me since it was $3.99. Who could pass that up?

Anyway, rather uneventful this year. I didn't get to push anyone (very hard) or even break a sweat running. I only made one phone call during shopping this year too...

Krista and her parents are doing more shopping today, but her parents weren't even awake when Krista and I left the house. They have much to learn about Black Friday shopping :)

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! Gobble gobble!

Folk Comedy

I'm a big fan of the folk-comedy genre. Just last week I discovered a musician that I have greatly enjoyed. Jonathan Coulton used to be a software developer, but is now a poor musician and sexy Second Life avatar. A few of my favorite songs are Code Monkey, RE: Your Brains, Skullcrusher Mountain, Ikea, and I Feel Fantastic.

He gives a lot of his music away free and what he does sell he releases under a creative commons license, so people can do things like this with it.

Enjoy.

'Small' Dell perk

I've spent a lot of money on Dell equipment here at work and I got my first ever 'small' perk from them. A little mini optical usb travel mouse. I'm using it right now and my hand is cramping up, so I'll probably not use it much :) Kinda funny-odd...

BOO!

What?

Another in the series of wide shots. I'm saving a special one for tomorrow, it being Halloween and all ;) Check back here tomorrow for it :)

Wide-eyed

Recently, my dad got a Canon 40D and the Canon 10-22mm lens. We have really been enjoying it. Thanks JD! There will be more wide shots in future posts :)

Arcade Update: 2 sides & a base

Flickr gallery UPDATED!!!! NEW PHOTOS!!!!


Well, Saturday we worked on the cabinet more. We have both sides of one cab cut out and sanded as well as the base constructed. The next step will be to attach the sides, back, and front to the base :D We are getting so close. About another hour or two of work and this thing will stand on it's own :)

Arcade Update!

Yes! We're still building them! Zach went back to school, Krista's sister moved in with us (a lot of cleaning and prep had to be done), and the busy/crazy season at work started...but we worked on it a little this last Saturday!

We now have one side of one cabinet cut out. A few finishing touches and we'll be ready to trace out and cut 3 more! Woohoo!

Flickr Gallery UPDATED!

A sad day for Salem

Lefty's is closing it's doors....here is the official letter:

Dear Friends of Leftys,

It is with a mixture of sadness and relief that we are announcing that we will be shutting the doors of Leftys forever after tonights show with Johnny Sketch and the Dirty Notes. If you are free tonight, we'd love the chance to say goodbye in person. If you can't make it just know that we appreciated your support in the past.

It isn't without a lot of forethought and reluctance that we came to this decision. Leftys has been a labour of love; a love of music, culture, people, and a desire to bring something fresh and fun to Salem. We have had many "magical" musical moments at Leftys that will never be forgotten!

To our patrons and loyal music fans, we most gratefully want to tell you how much your love of Leftys and appreciation of the music gave us constant encouragement to keep it going. Your seats will forever have your names on it .

Finally, tonight is meant to be more of a wake than a funeral. Come ready to have one last celebration.

Cheers,

Karen and John Graham

I just ate there Thursday for lunch. I guess that's the last Lefty's pizza I'll eat :( I'm going to miss the Tuesday night poker nights too.

Good bye Lefty's... *sniff*

PokerStars Blogger Freeroll

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 8280136

Strong coffee

Had an afternoon coffee break and took a sip...nearly spit coffee across the room it was so strong/burnt...had to go back and get a picture of the filter.

Are you sure?

When you are in the computer business, you come across a lot of fun errors and just plain funny messages. This is one I had to post. This is after a pop-up that reads, "Are you sure you want to recreate the shared and workstation databases?"

Arcade Update

Flickr Gallery Updated!!!

Zach and I both have our control panel boxes at a "completed" state. At this point we need to decide if we are going to start with the Lexan and drilling holes or if we are going to start on the cabinet. We are leaning toward to cabinet, but that means more planning since we don't have things nailed down yet.

Also, we will be slowing down a bit due to getting the house ready for Krista's sister, Sarah, to move in.

Anyway, 29 new photos added to the gallery! Click here to see them!

Arcade Cabinet: Cutting Corners

Flickr gallery updated!!!

Well, we now have 2 control panel boxes nearly complete. This just shows how much time is spent planning and how much is actually cutting/screwing/etc. When we ended the day Saturday we had nearly double the amount of wood cut/screwed as the entire week before hand combined. Not alot more to say other than it is a LOT of work...more work than either one of us thought.

Arcade Love

Flickr Gallery Updated!

Well, it's late and I'm tired. New photos. Best part of the night - we cut our polycarbonate thermoplastic! Oh, and Zach's quote:

"Dude! We built a cat coffin!"

Next chance to work on it will be Saturday...check back Sunday for another update.

Arcade: Slowly but surely

Flickr Gallery Updated!!

Well, it might seem like slow going, but we are actually doing quite well. We have a rough design on paper, but all of the details are being taken care of as we go. We have no plans that we are working from or anything for this project. Just our own rough plan and then working out details as they come up.

As it stands now, we have the first control panel "box" more than half way done. One more good night should complete the box and get us to drilling out the control panel top. That's where I hope to be when I post tomorrow night after another afternoon/evening.

We ran into a couple bumps along the way today and thought of a few things that will speed up the 2nd control panel box - remember, we each are building one, so we have to build two of everything :)

As always, the fast food dinner was excellent. The pepsi consumption was on the high end of average. Check out the flickr gallery for more.

Arcade: First wood cut!

Flickr update!!

Well, after work today I made my way up to Sherwood for some more arcade building action. We finalized our plans, made exact measurements, laid out all our pieces to scale on paper, and then started cutting! We have all the pieces cut out for one control panel box. I think tomorrow night we are going to drill the holes for all our buttons :)

This is so exciting to finally be cutting wood! It was also exciting drinking pepsi and eating big burgers...

Arcade: First Saturday a Success!

Okay, to start off with, a lot of people have been asking for photo updates. So, I have created a flickr photo set that I will be adding photos to. Here it is!

I got to my parents house at about 9:30 Saturday morning and Zach and I started working. We learned very quickly that we had very different approaches to the project, but it ended up working out. We spend the entire day planning, talking about things, what part should be what size, drawing, looking at other cabs online, etc. We decided about noon that we needed to go out and do a little research on a few cab related things. So, we tried to find arcade cabinets and pizza. We ended up 2 for 2 :) Regal Cinemas didn't have any arcade machines with joysticks, but Bullwinkle's did. We got our measurements and moved on to pizza. I haven't had pizza hut pan crust meat lover's pizza and cheesy break sticks for a LONG time...it was great!

Oh, k, back to the cabinet, sorry ;) After all the research and planning all day we finally knew what we needed to buy, so we headed off to Home Depot. We got all of our wood for the project and our polycarbonate thermoplastic. It was loads of fun. The lady at the checkout couldn't believe what we were building. Her response was, "What, are you guys tripp'n?!"

So now we have a garage filled with wood, all our plans for building it, and a lot of excitement and motivation :) Hopefully I will be blogging another update soon :)

Arcade Cab Update

Zach: "Four plus three quarters is . . ."
Bill: "Four and three quarters."

Arcade Cabinet Project Update

Well, after a lengthy hiatus, my arcade cabinet project is being resurrected. Zach expressed interest in building one also and I thought it would be a lot of fun to build them together, so I decided to wait and build mine with Zach. Well, my parents moved to an apartment for a couple months while they looked for a house….yada yada yada….project delayed until now. My parents have moved into their new place, Zach and I both have all our parts needed, and we are ready! Tomorrow morning we begin construction! I’ll post pics and give updates more frequently now that it’s in progress again :D

My girls

Here are the latest pictures of my cute little girls:

A couple of files

I found the following directory on our network at work. The entire contents is no longer needed. There is no reason the data will ever be needed again. Just a couple files in there taking up a little space... /sigh

Free space: 5,249,558,134,784 bytes

I just finished setting up a storage server at work. It might not be large for some people, but it's the biggest RAID 5 array I've ever administered...I'm a little giddy.

Are you immune to phishing?

http://www.siteadvisor.com/quizzes/phishing_0707/

That's a pretty good quiz to test your phishing detection skills. Being in the IT world for awhile and having worked in a financial institution for 2 years, I would have been devastated by anything less than a perfect score on this test :)

It's a good quiz though...I'd recommend everyone take it to brush up on phishing detection.

A Chip and a Virtual Chair

This past Friday night I played in a bounty tournament on UltimateBet.com. For those of you who don’t know, in a bounty tournament, part of your buy-in goes to the prize pool and part of it becomes a “bounty” on your head; whoever knocks you out gets your bounty. This particular tournament was a $25 buy-in ($20 to the prize pool and $5 bounty). I really like the idea of having a bounty because it means you don’t even have to make the money to earn your buy-in back. It also slightly alters the style of play. People are more likely to call your all-in, knowing that if they knock you out it’s money in their pocket.

Anyway, I started playing and I always play rather conservative in the first several rounds of a tournament because there are so many players that play a lot of hands simply because the blinds are cheap. If most of my table is playing loose, I tend to play tighter. So, I expected to not play many hands. I did not expect, however, to have such a long stretch of bad cards. I think in the first 2 hours I played 5 hands. It was horrible.

A couple times I had medium strength hands (AT, A9, QJs, 22, 33, etc.) that I would have liked to see a flop with, but every time I limped in or made a 2x the BB raise, I was raised or re-raised. It was the worst run of cards I have had in a long time. I eventually got down to only a single BB in chips left. I had the button, so I knew that one of the next 9 hands would be my all-in. I don’t remember what I played, but I tripled up. So, now I had to make another move very soon. Well, I did and it faired well for me. I was able to stay alive long enough to make the money. Out of 365 entries, 40 players made the money. When we hit 40 players I gave a big sigh of relief. I did it! I had the least amount of chips out of anyone in the tournament, but I was still here and I was walking away with at least something.

At this point in the tournament something changed. It was a combination of a couple things. First of all, I started to get a few hands now and then. I got TT, AK, AQ, 88, etc. I also loosened up my play quite a bit because the fear of being knocked out before the money was gone.

So, the end of the story is that when we got down to the final table I found myself in 2nd chip position and I was able to keep that position until we got down to heads-up play! I couldn’t believe it! It was after 11pm and I had been playing for over 4 hours so I was a bit tired and I didn’t play a very good heads-up game. I ended up getting 2nd place! It was my biggest cash in any tournament by far and probably my biggest accomplishment in poker. Not only did I get 2nd out of 365, but I did it coming back from just having a chip and a virtual chair :)

Ordering Pizza Online

The last time I tried order pizza online was in the summer of 2000. Krista and I were just married and we decided to try ordering pizza online. After an hour or so had passed after we placed our order and there was no pizza, I called them. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: Yeah, I ordered a pizza online over an hour ago and it isn't here yet.
Them: Online?
(pause)
Them: Oh yeah, online! Yeah...hang on...let me verify your order...
(pause)
Them: Ok, now, what did you order? And, what was your address?
(I give him my order)
Them: Yeah, I think that's just coming out of the oven...yeah, it's on its way!

And about 40 minutes later we got our pizza. Not the best ever, but hey, it was worth a try to order online.

Lately I've noticed all the pizza places in town advertising online ordering. It's been 7 years and now they are advertising it...I'll give it another shot. Just sent my order off for a couple P'zones from Pizza Hut. We'll see if we get it :)


UPDATE: We got our pizza! No problems! Wow! Pizza technology has come a long way in the last 7 years ;) Oh, and P'zones are great!

Transformers

I enjoyed watching the new Transformers movie this week, but this guy took it a little too far:

(originally posted by PunkJr on Flickr.com)

While we were up at Krista's parents for the 4th of July holiday, we snuck away to the theater and saw Transformers. I loved it! It brought back a lot of memories and made me check eBay for old 80's Transformers toys :) No, I didn't buy anything, but I'd like to :)

Home

I am now home and very happy to be so. I left the hotel in NY at 2:00AM PST, so I am very tired. Just a quick post to end my Rochester posting spree.

-Bill

Rochester, NY: Day 4

Today we had another full day of classes. It was great. We learned so many things. I got more hints and tips about upgrading to the next version of our Kodak software.

After class we went to the George Eastman House here in Rochester. It is an amazing place. I'm posting photos below. It was built between 1902 and 1905 for $300,000. Then, a few years later, he spent $750,000 to have the house sawn in two and extended from the middle 9 feet - simply amazing. There is steel between all the walls also, so that in case of a fire it would be contained.

After the Eastman House, we went to a neat NY pizza place on the outskirts of Rochester. Excellent pizza (sorry Zach, no photos of the pizza).

Our flight leaves tomorrow morning at like 3:00AM PST or something crazy like that. I'm looking forward to coming home, but I'm not looking forward to getting up that early.





And this is as close to a group photo as we have :)





Wow! A wooden safe! Very cool.



And a camera that looks like a gun, who'da thunk?

I liked the ceilings...

Rochester, NY: Day 3

Today we were in classes most of the day. I learned a lot of helpful things. Things that will save me time and headaches when upgrading to the next version of the software as well as a lot of things to pass on to others at work. We also have a lot of ideas of how we can better use the software to meet our needs. We are only half way through classes and I already think it has been very worth while for us to come out here. There is one class I am going to take again tomorrow because there is so much to absorb that I know we can use. I'm excited! If tomorrow is half as good as today I'll be even more excited :)

I took a few shots around sunset time here. Nothing special, just something to post :)

Rochester, NY: Day 2

7:30 AM EST - Even though part of my body felt like it was 4:30 AM, I did feel well rested. We got up and got ready and then went to breakfast. I had a buffet of eggs, bacon, french toast, and strawberries.

After breakfast we headed out to see Niagara Falls. It was only about an hour and a half away. The drive was great due to the AC in the car and the 88 degree with 5000% humidity weather outside we were missing by being in the car.

I was absolutely amazed by the falls. Photos don't due it justice. I took some panaromas, but those will have to wait until I get home to stitch them together.

We weren't sure if we could go to the Canada side or not, so we tried anyway. We decided to walk from the falls into Canada. The guy in the little building you walk through said, "And you guys are all Americans, right?" and then let us through. No I.D. or anything. It was kinda weird.

We walked around a bit, but it was very hot and we were starting to get hungry. We found the Hard Rock Cafe and decided to eat there. It was excellent.

After that, we went down and took pictures from the Canada side of the falls. I am really glad we did because from that side you were able to really see all of the falls. Once we took our photos and browsed a gift shop, we headed back to the U.S. side.

To leave Canada, all you need is $0.50 to deposit in the little machine and then you walk through. On the U.S. side we did have to show our driver's license and they made a record of us. That was it.

We headed back to Rochester after that and were only slightly delayed by a huge thuderstorm, complete with trees fallen in the road and everything - it was great :)

We all met in one of the hotel rooms after that and went over all of the class options one more time and finalized our choices.

That reminds me, I forgot to mention why I am here for those of you who don't know :) Excel sent myself and three of my co-workers to a Kodak DP2 users conference here in Rochester. DP2 is our print production software and this is the big, once a year, set of classes and talks about its capabilities and how it can better do what we need it to do. I think it will be a great opportunity for us to enhance our workflow at work and hopefully we can fully utilize all the information we get here.

After choosing our classes we were hungry for dinner. A big favorite place a couple years ago (I wasn't with Excel at that point) was the Dinosaur BBQ. It is a bar and grill style blues place. I got BBQ chicken and ribs and it was incredible. Dad, Zach - you would love this place.

Well, it's late now and we have class at 9:00 tomorrow morning. I'd better be signing off and heading to bed. Here are a few shots from today:

From the Canada side of Niagara Falls:

Looking down from the observation deck on the U.S. side (the blue dots are people):

And, the best view from the U.S. side of the river:

Rochester, NY: Day 1

2:45 AM PST - My alarm went off. I got up, showered, got dressed, ate some breakfast, and then waited for my ride to the airport.

6:35 AM PST - Our flight left Portland on time. It was my first time flying since 9/11. A lot of things have changed, but we made it through without any incidences. The in-flight movie was Shooter, but I watched Ghost Rider on my PSP instead.

11 or 12 something central time or something - We got to Chicago alright and only had 15 minutes to get to our connecting flight to Rochester. We ran. I am out of shape.

3:30 PM EST or something - We finally arrive in Rochester, NY. We got our bags, found our rent-a-car, and then checked into our hotel. It is quite nice. We were all tired, so we decided to eat lunch/dinner/whatever at the resturant in the hotel. I had a very tasty meat lasagna and a ceaser salad.

It's now 9:30 PM EST, 6:30 PM PST, and it feels like it's 11:00 PST. Tomorrow we are going to go sight-seeing. Not sure where we are going, but I promise I'll have more exciting pictures that just from out hotel room :)

Out the window to the right:

Out the window to the left:

Our room:

Stay tuned for more!