Thursday May 26, 2005
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Ramblings from the Mountains Michael Hunter's Weblog |
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Thursday May 26, 2005 one goal down, another to go I lost another 5lbs over the last two weeks for a total loss of 25.2lbs. I was a bit worried as I was not organized about my meals before spending 5 days in Menlo Park during the middle of this period. I was careful, but its hard to eat well at restaurants day in and day out. In any case it all worked out. I made my 10% (initial goal). Now I have to figure out what my real weight goal is. I started working out this morning on the treadmill and immediately realized that I wouldn't mind running again. I ran throughout high school and college but soon after developed some pretty bad shin splints. I suspected at the time that had to do with my weight. So I'm a little afraid of starting to run to heavy. That makes me want to revise my final weight goal downwards. We will see. I have a ways to go both in weight loss and physical conditioning before I should worry about this too much. ( May 26 2005, 09:35:56 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Saturday May 14, 2005
Thursday May 12, 2005 A recent article in the May 12, 2005 Tahoe Daily Tribune made me fear the worse about the long term fate of anything other then slot machines in casinos. The title of the article is "Nevada casinos win record $1 billion in March".
The article didn't appear on their website when I looked and contains some claims that are not consistent with the above quote.
Looking at a little more credible source, the Las Vegas Review Journal, we find the equivalent article.
Still a pretty sick number. Its pretty hard for me to imagine how its worth 11.3 billion to sit in front of a machine and pull a handle with the hope you get a good random number the next time1. Some part of the 11.3 billion includes video poker play which I can vaguely understand. I use to wonder why casinos spent so little money promoting new pit games. With the poker craze going on wouldn't it be interesting to hook some more of that money by the house? Well, the answer is probably that the cost of gaining that extra income doesn't make it viable. 1 Not to be harsh, but that takes less thought then it took when the editor managed not to notice that the numbers in the article didn't make sense. ( May 12 2005, 01:55:02 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0] Another weight watchers weigh in and another 2.4lbs for a total of 20.2lbs lost. This is about the rate I've been able to hold down to 220lbs in the past. Weight watchers claims for my sex/age/height I should be able to make it down well under 200lbs. I havn't been there since college! My body is long for my height causing me to be heavy for my height (I've tended to beat the carny weight guessers since I was a youth). OTOH I wouldn't mind losing as much as I can. I'm think that once I get down under my initial goal (weight watchers sets a 10% weight loss as your first goal) of 25lbs I'll probably aim to get under 215lbs and see how things go. Summer is coming which is an easier time for me to lose weight as I hike a lot more then I do in the winter. We had a nice post meeting meal at a new Mexican restaurant named Mazatlan. My wife is in New Orleans this week with her friend so I hung out with the girls. My wife and I had been there once before and had split opinions. My meal was fine but my wife thought her carnitas was marginal. This time nobody had any complaints. ( May 12 2005, 08:05:49 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Tuesday May 10, 2005 hands reads are not that precise At the bottom of Page 16 in the print copy of Card Player Vol 18, No 9 there is a sidebar about a hand from day 2 of the 25K WPT championship. Its an interesgting hand that Chri Bigler appears to have played wrong. The blinds are 600-1200 with a 200 ante (3600) when he opens in late position for 4k with AsKs (a raise of 2800 into a 4800 pot). The blinds call. Post flop he is against middle and bottom set on a Kh Jh 7c flop. The blinds check to him, he fires and is raised and reraised. He then goes all in and is called. The interesting part of the analysis is made by whomever wrote the sidebar (authorship is not clear).
I don't believe this is true assuming standard player tendencies. He was in late position and so didn't have to have a strong hand to open-raise with and his opponents didn't have to have strong hands to call. The flop is an action flop so he shouldn't "expect" to pick up the pot by betting a set on the flop. In fact I think with a late position open, that flop, and two opponents he should expect action on that flop. Firing top set on that flop both gets him action and information while not revealing a lot about his hand. There just isn't enough information from the blinds prespectives to think that a bet on the flop couldn't be from top set. No, the reason for the small blind to be happy getting all his money in is that the distribution of hands that Chris could have is wide. Thinking the big blind has probably over setted him made the proportion of that distribution that he could beat even larger. The real hand read here should have been made by Chris. He bet a scary flop and had two players came back at him. Top pair top kicker isn't any good and is a weak hand to draw to. ( May 10 2005, 08:37:08 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0] I just finished Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas. Coming days after the broadcast decision dispels some of the gloom of the final chapters of The Future of Ideas. But one of the fundamental concepts of the book is that the old will resist the new and often the old has more political power then the new. With more neocons (but not conservatives) headed for the courts the books repeated message should be heeded by all who think the freedom to innovate is important to our economy and way of life. So thats all nice and activist in tenor. But what about the book. I think many of the concepts in the book are excellent. The explanation of the end to end concept and how it applies to the Internet and contrasting it with the phone network is very clear. Pushing forward and building a 3 layer model (physical, code, and content) of the 'net gives a model for talking about how data flows in our current world which is probably comprehensible by the non-techie. I strongly suggest the book to anybody interested in the control of IP in all of its various flavors. Many of the ideas, cases, and ad hoc examples provide fodder for continued battle with the "old" content community and with our lawmakers. The downside to the book is that it seems repetitive. Many of the cases and examples travel similar ground over and over. I suspect most who have been involved in the software trade during the last decade would feel that way. But thats the price for developing a book that can be given to somebody who doesn't have the same depth of knowledge and wants to understand why napster isn't all the evil they have heard it was or that P2P isn't some sort of new drug that is killing the nations youth. Additionally the legal slant which abstracts away much of the technical haze makes for a clearer look at how various technologies should effect our countries policies. ( May 10 2005, 07:13:12 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Thursday May 05, 2005 Personal log stardate... I've kept a dead tree journal for some time now. Its an on again, off again sort of thing. Recently I've really been itching to keep the same thing on my thumbdrive where I can store images, sounds, data, etc. along with my entries in a form factor I can carry with me anywhere. So as a first try I looked around for software that would allow me to keep a personal log in html. Most of the things I found didn't really fit or were for hand held platforms (low datarate entry devices). One thing I ran across is elog. From a shared lab log type of thing it sounds like a cool tool. But still didn't quite meet my needs. Just as I was about to hack something up with Ruby on Rails (I'd already decided whatever I did should be in Java/Ruby/something I could run on a variety of platforms) I ran across Pimki. Pimki is a wiki/weblog/todo list/RSS feed generator package written in Ruby. Its not really meant as a personal log but provided me most of what I wanted in one fairly simple package. There are a few things it lacks in the security area. I would like to be able to logout without shutting down the server and I would like to be able to keep the data encrypted. But all in all its a fairly reasonable package. I suspect my personal log will be electronic from now on. ( May 05 2005, 12:53:01 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0] In Getting Flat, Part 2 Doc Searls makes the comment Though I doubt I'll live to see it, I am sure some day we will look back on massive TV consumption the way we now look back on drunk driving and ubiquitous cigarette smoking: as an unhealthy practice that, for a few dumb decades, was the norm. The whole article (part 1 and part 2) makes some good points. But this one jumps out at me. My first reaction is "Yah"! Thats right! But hold on, I think maybe Doc is giving into blaming the media instead of the content. Much like most of radio programming today, which wouldn't have gotten my grandparents to wait expectantly for their favorite program, TV today lacks good programming. Maybe when the tools1 and bandwidth are available video podcasting will provide some real diverse content for TV. I have hope for reasonable use of broadcast video media. I have little hope that the companies involved today will make the transition without a lot of external prodding. 1 I'm not talking about production tools. They exist today and are getting better. For example my sister-in-law produced a workout video for my wife in an evening with her digital camera and some DVD authoring software. No, the barrier for both audio and video is search. Until its easy to search both won't be able to scale very well. ( May 05 2005, 12:35:25 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Wednesday May 04, 2005 I can't complain Another weight watchers meeting and down another 4.8lbs (down 17.8lbs total). On the plus side is the 4.8lbs and the fact I did it over a trip to the bay area which included several dinners out and an anniversary meal which was anything but light. On the negative side is the fact that it was over two weeks. 2lbs/week is a nice amount. I should be happy with it, but I'd hoped to get one more week well over 2lbs before settling down to the 2lbs/week grind. ( May 04 2005, 10:57:57 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Monday May 02, 2005
Its been 10 years and a few days since my wife and I were married. We had already set a date for a wedding party when the company my wife worked for shut down their local office leaving her without insurance. So 6 months minus a day before our planned wedding we ran off to Las Vegas and were married by Elvis with a few friends in attendence. Later, at the previously scheduled time, we gather together a bunch of friends for our wedding party. Fast forward 10 years. I'm pretty bad about remembering our April wedding date. Its our Octover date that seems real to me. But my wife remembers. So when she asked me to take Friday off for a surprise outing I thought it was just going to be a nice evening at a bed and breakfast or possible at her friends cabin on the west shore. It wasn't until she clued me in that I realized it had been 10 years since we had run off to vegas. As we were preparing to leave our house she had me put everything in a backpack and wear some hiking clothes. That didn't sound like a bed and breakfast or her friends cabin. I wondered if there were a private cabins somewhere adjacent to forest service land that were heading towards. As we pulled off the road into the spooner lake parking lot she told me we had come to stay in a cabin above spooner lake looking out over Lake Tahoe.
We first walked up to a closer cabin that her father had stayed in last summer and then cross countried over to the road up to the cabin we were destined for. Besides the cross country piece (which was of our own choosing) the trail was on a road which climbly fairly slowly until it came close to the cabin. The cabin sits on a point overlooking Lake Tahoe. Its roughly 1/3 of a mile away from the main trail giving you a nice feeling of isolation.
Its not a very large cabin. While the cabin closer to spooner lake could easily hold four people the Wild Cat cabin could hold four people cozily.
The people sleeping in the loft had better be comfortable climbing up and down a fairly simple ladder through a small hole. If any nightly needs arise the people sleeping below are also going to be awoken.
But for two its a perfect little place to retreat. The "galley" is great for making that perfect meal after a long day on the trail hiking, showshoeing, or cross country skiing. My wife fixed a wonderful meal of appetizers, curried lobster, and strawberries for dinner. That definitely doesn't fit the diet but made for a wonderful anniversary meal. ( May 02 2005, 01:48:07 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0] |
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