Why do people Blog?

in

An interesting question came up the other day when some friends and I sat down for coffee. "Why do people blog?". Its an interesting question, and one that I can't quite be sure of the answer right away. The purpose of my blog is to have a kind of journal that I will actually keep an interest in maintaining. One of the problems I've had whenever I try to start a personal diary or journal is I tend to write stuff that I don't find useful later - its just embarassing. A blog though, is much more public than a personal diary, and thus even as I write it I need to evaluate whether I want other people to read it or not. This keeps my posts much less filled with future embarassment, and as a result, I find I can actually go back and read some of the stuff I've posted awhile ago and say "cool, I did on ".

Aside from that, I use my blog as kind of a personal soapbox. It doesn't matter that I don't have many (or any) readers. What matters is that I have an area where I can vent my frustrations or give an outlet to my daily cynicism at the world at large. In the days of geocities and tripod, I started a webpage called "The Domain of the Herald". It has long since died away, and the only remnants of it are on a recordable cd I have somewhere in my house. However, this was my first foray into online editorial writing, and I found it was pretty fun to have this personal soapbox. Since then, I've always enjoyed a chance to rant about the latest media outrage for instance.

So that's the big reason why I blog. Primarily, it is a place for me that just so happens to have public access for those who are oddly interested in my life, thoughts and feelings.

There's a lot of reasons that other people blog that don't really fit why I do, but are common as well.

  • Anonymous. The internet seems to give people this layer of anonymity that allows people to say whatever they want. As a result, more people tend to be willing to jump out and say things *because* they don't have to worry about someone knowing who they are.
  • News. Some bloggers take it upon themselves to help relay the news as they see it. A lot of these bloggers have inside connections to various places and are able to get news out faster or in a better way than your standard news sources.
  • Commentaries. There are a lot of blogs out there that strive for readership. They consistently put out interesting articles and stories that bring back people to their site over and over. A good example is Daring Fireball, a site that has often brought up some very interesting things about the latest developments by Apple. Its blogs like this that really shine in this area.
  • Other. Man, there are a lot of blogs out there, and a lot of them don't fit into the standard things I refer to. Many blogs are a blend of these types. Some are very personal, some are totally not personal. Some are factual, some rely on conspiracy theories.

I guess one of the biggest things about blogs is they are a nice way of presenting a history of things. If you can formulate what you're trying to say into this structure, than a blog will do wonders for you. Its simple, its easy, and there's a lot of nice software out there to deal with your blog's history for you so all you have to do is write. Its really quite wonderful.

Heraldk

PSO hits 25,000 members!

in

For those who read my blog regularly (which is almost nobody), they know I mention PSO pretty regularly. Well guess what? The best online affiliate hit 25,000 poker forum members recently. The sheer success of this site is an impressive feat. It takes a lot of patience and good customer support (read: more patience) to deal with the vast majority of people looking for a free lunch. To Mike and all the rest of the staff at PSO, I salute you.

For those who are too lazy to look back in my blog to see what I've said about them in the past, here's a quick synopsis of what they offer:

  1. Instant Bankroll: This program gives players who want to play online poker, but don't want to risk their own money, a chance to play for real money. Players just have to meet some simple preconditions, and follow a set of easy to follow instructions, and they get $75 at Party poker (or $50 at Titan Poker) plus a $25 bonus if they play enough hands.
  2. Promotions: These are the meat of the PSO site (for me anyways). They offer several promotions with different poker rooms where you can get free stuff for completing the requirements. I have literally got hundreds of dollars of free stuff from this.
  3. Frequent Flopper Program: For players who play a lot of online poker, PSO offers rakeback at select sites. This gives you a percentage of your rake back in either cash or PSO points (which are as good as cash).

Add to this a very active poker forum, poker league, and the tendency to give away awesome free stuff all the time (sometimes almost randomly) ... PSO is essential for the online poker player.

Oh, did I mention that I got a $500 buyin to one of the CPT events last January? Yeah, that's right ... PSO just gave that to me. I won't claim everyone will get such great things, but ... you never know!

Heraldk

Poker League

in

Well yesterday was an interesting poker day. I played some 2/4 limit at Ultimate Bet for a very short time, losing far more than I really liked (some $150). I just couldn't have my good hands stand up or when I had a good hand someone had a better one. Bleh. So I quit and played xbox for awhile. I started playing Jade Empire this weekend, and I'm really enjoying it so far!

Then, at 7:00, PSO had their 2nd league event. Unfortunately, I had to miss the first one. Last night I got extremely lucky at some pretty key moments. Early in the tournament, I busted a guy when I flopped a set of Jacks to his pocket kings. I'm a little surprised he called my all-in bet on the flop, but I was happy! After that, I started to bleed chips for a long time. With about 70 people left out of the 130 that entered, I was in the bottom 20 people or so, and just trying to survive. Then I went on a tear - stealing the blinds with decent hands like AJ and KQ. These hands pushed me up to 3rd in chips at one point.

I collapsed later on - I can't quite remember what the hands were, but I lost a bunch of chips and then I mistakenly called a guy's bet when I meant to fold. Oops! That's a lot of chips to lose on a misclick. I was once again near the bottom of the totem pole, this time with 30 people or so left. I pushed with 53s in the BB (since I had no chips left), and hit two pair on the river. *whew*. Another double up and almost double up from there and I was golden to make the final table.

Once there, the table was real tight. Understandably since the top 3 get much larger prizes (since PSO was topping up the prizes of the top 3 finishers with PSO points). I stole some blinds to stick around my 6th largest stack (out of 9). Then, a guy raises in early position with KQ and I hold tens. I thought about it, and pushed. The guy calls (I think this is a terrible call), and hits a king on the river. :( I'm out in 8th for an $18.08 payout. Yippee.

Still, its not a bad spot to be in. The idea for the league is to count your best 6 finishes in up to 10 tournaments. Your average place then becomes your score and the person with the best overall score (lowest) wins a $1500 prize package to play an event at the WSOP. That would be sweet.

So ... 8th is a pretty good spot. If I can do similarly in 5 more league events, I'll be golden to finish in the top 3 for sure (if not first). Wish me luck!

Heraldk

Team Canada

in

Honestly, I can't stand the media. First, what's with the debacle of accusing Gretzky of being involved in the gambling scandal? This man does more for the game of hockey than anyone ever before. He has always been an amazing role model for the kids everywhere and what does he get as thanks? Seriously, if he says he wasn't involved, why don't you believe him unless some reason not to comes up? Jeepers.

And now, with the crazy expectations everyone seemed to have for the Canadian olympic hockey team. I don't really quite understand how Canada is such an overwhelming favourite. If you take a closer look at all the teams, there are very few weak teams out there. In fact, teams like Finland, Sweden, Russia, and the Czechs are all very strong teams with a lot of depth. Sure, I wanted to see Canada win. But just because they didn't shouldn't make us shameful. We have a lot of talented players, but that doesn't mean we'll necessarily win.

Its a very tough transition. These star players on our team are used to being the go-to guy on their team. At the olympics though, they play half as much as they would with their NHL team ... and it can't be easy to get out there and give it your all when you're used to being warmer and getting more chances with your home team.

Bleh. So now we have the media asking questions like "What happened?". I'll tell you what happened. Team Canada lost to some very good teams. Those teams got prepared for the olympics as a team and not as a group of solo star players. Those teams played better than Canada, and so they deserved to move on.

There's always 2010.

Heraldk

Paper weekend

in

Well, I was supposed to be skiing this weekend. Supposed to be. The 24th Parkallen scouts have their annual ski trip on the family day long weekend every year. It was a blast last year and I was quite looking forward to going out this year. Unfortunately for skiing, I had to stay in town this weekend because ... I'm working on a research paper! Five of us from the poker group are preparing a paper for one of the top-notch AI conferences, AAAI. If it should be accepted, I'll have my fourth publication with a likely fifth coming later in the year.

So while I'm upset that I can't go skiing, I can't really be too upset. This paper means a lot more to my resume and career than one skiing trip will. Still, I wish I was out in Jasper with my sweety! Instead, I get to slave away collecting results and writing parts of the results section. Fun!

Heraldk Oh yeah, and I celebrated my 23rd birthday yesterday. w00t.

Devon Winter Challenge Camp

in ,

Got back last night from the big camp our rovers do - the Devon Winter Challenge Camp. For those who don't know, the event consists of a number of challenge activities that the scout troops go through. They are marked on these events and at the end of the camp, they top score gets a prize. The DWC camp is one of two big challenge camps put on in the winter each year in our region (the other being Mad Trappers). These camps are a great time for all involved. We ran an event called Landmines, which was basically like frisbee golf with orienteering. The idea was each scout troop got a list of bearings, and used them to find each hole. They then had to throw the frisbee through a bicycle tire tied to a tree. They then went on to the next hole taking the next bearing from the location of the tire they just found. I thought the event would work really well, but apparently scouts aren't being taught how to use a compass anymore, and that's a little worrying. There were a couple of notable exceptions, but a lot of troops had trouble finding all the holes.

We also ran campfire for the second year in a row. As usual, we had an array of fun run-on type skits to keep the kids entertained throughout. It went pretty well, I would have to say.

I got back last night and was pretty tired, so I managed to get to bed a whole lot earlier than normal. Trouble was, because I had slept outdoors for the past two nights, I found my condo waaaay tooo warm and had trouble sleeping. So today I'm really pretty tired. Oh well, I'll have to recover my sleep before the upcoming ski trip!

Heraldk

Politics

in

Lets take a moment shall we and discuss politics? Normally I wouldn't do this, but the latest outbreak on the federal politics stage has *me* fuming ... and I don't even live in the riding in question!

I'm sure you've all heard by now about Mr Emerson crossing the floor from liberal to conservative to accept a cabinet position. He did this before the parliment even sat ONCE!

Frankly, I don't agree with the idea of MPs changing parties. If you're an elected official in the Canadian government, then you were elected because the constiuents in your riding decided that they like you and the party platform you were representing. When someone crosses the floor, they are dropping the platform they were voted in on and picking up a different platform that is likely very different!

Now, under extenuating circumstances, there may be a case where the MP thinks that his constituents no longer fall into the same platform as the party they belong to. But Emerson hadn't even sat down in the house of commons yet to see anything like this! He was purely drawn for the cabinet position being offered.

He's arguing that he gives his riding more of a voice by taking this position. The trouble is - what sort of voice is that? Is he going to push liberal platform choices on the cabinet? Or has he adopted the conservative platform? Because I'm sure his constituents are going to be really happy about that!

Brutal.

But what really gets me is not just that he had the audacity to make this move. He also claims that he's surprised that people are outraged at it! Come on now, what did you really expect? Cheers from the masses? Riiiight.

It makes me shake my head.

Heraldk

Amazing night in poker

in

Goodness me. Last night was the best night for poker I've ever had. To set up the scenario, I had lost a lot of money on the weekend playing 2/4 limit. Apparently the cards just weren't with me and I played a little too aggressive in spots which cost me more than I probably should have lost. All told, I lost about $160 or so on Sunday which is the single worst day of poker I've ever had. Ewww. I quit, examined my game for awhile and thought about it a bit. I had some terrible luck, but I knew that I lost more than I should have. Monday night I played for an hour or two and won back $40 which was kind of nice.

Then last night happened. After I finally stopped playing around midnight, I was up $207 that night - my best night of poker yet. It pushed me solidly into the profit column again!

The hilight hand of the night was a $79 pot I won when a guy decided he wanted my big blind.

The table folds around to the button holding AJo who raises (as I would do). The small blind calls and I reraise with QQ. Button caps and both the small blind and I call. Flop comes QJ5, 2 diamonds. Small blind checks, I bet, button re-raises and small blind calls. I re-raise and everyone calls. Turn is an A (no diamond). Once again the pot is three-bet. River is a blank. Small blind gets out of the way at this point (probably had a flush draw), and I win the hand with trip queens. Sweet.

So with last night's winnings, I'm not up not only my $180 in bonus money I've cleared so far, but also up about another $100 on top of that. Yay!

Heraldk

Edmonton Sonata Arctica Show Review

in ,

Well last night was the Sonata Arctica concert that I've been looking forward to for quite awhile. For those who don't know, Sonata Arctica is a Finnish melodic metal band that took the scene by storm when they released their first full length album. When I first heard some of their music, they almost immediately became part of my musical library. This was the 2nd of two shows that I thought I'd never ever see in Edmonton. The first was Stratovarius in October of 2004. Both of these bands have huge followings over in Europe, but North America hasn't seemed to have discovered how good this genre can be. Oh well, I suppose the radio would probably ruin it anyways. Damn radio.

Anyways. I was pretty pumped for the show. The opening band, going by the name of "Helden" got going around 9:30 or so. This was a band I had not heard of, and probably with reason. They were a pretty new band and while their guitarists showed a lot of promise, I was totally turned away from them because the vocalist did nothing more than scream into the mic. I'm sorry, that's just not appealing to me.

Finally, SA took over the stage, and the wait was totally worth it. Tony, the band's lead vocalist has an absolutely amazing voice ... more so than I thought from the records. I was very impressed with how he was able to sing in a very clear high melodic voice and then switch over to a growly kind of tone that still kept the essence of the melody. Such talent!

The keyboardist was sensational. He had a keytar, which was a very cool way for him to show off how damn fast he could move his fingers! Its just not fair ... some people can play way too darn well. The keyboardist was featured many times on the albums playing dueling solos with the guitarist, and the show was an incredible example of why this should be done way more often. If the keyboardist hands went blazingly fast, the guitarist's fingers had to have gone at least as fast!

Incredible on many levels. The band played one encore of three songs. The first "song" being a medley of a whole lot of big songs that they didn't play during the show. They then went on to play two more crazy fast songs including Don't Say a Word, and then delayed the final chord of the last song as long as was possible.

The best part was how much the band looked like they were enjoying themselves. Particularly Tony who added little fun quirks into some portions of the music. I forgot to mention that Tony was dressed in some crazy plaid pants. Yeah, that's right, plaid pants. Taken aback at first, I couldn't help but think ... cool!

All in all, I was very happy with the show. Tony promised the crowd that they'd be back to Edmonton sometime after their next album. I think I will have to be there!

Heraldk

Jasper in January

in ,

Well, department ski trip weekend is now over, and I'm in a pleasant but kind of guilty stage of tired non-workness. I didn't get a lot of sleep this weekened, but I think I may have got a heck of a lot more than I might've got had I stayed up for all the parties that went on. Diane and I left Edmonton around 4:00 or so, and made our way into Jasper around 9:00 with a stop in Edson for dinner. It was a nice calm drive, and we didn't see any reason to get there in a big hurry. When we did arrive we checked into the hotel and packed our gear into the hotel. Mike and company were so anxiously awaiting the arrival of guitar hero that they had already left a message for us that we were given when we arrived at the hotel.

We got our stuff into our room and brought guitar hero up to Mike's room where it got hooked up to Nolan's projector and the party started! It went until about 12:30-1:00 when hotel security came by and told use we were too loud. Darn. Oh well, we needed the sleep anyways. Jeff S and Jess were our roommates, so we trundled down to our room and settled in. Slept until 8:00 when Diane and I got up and went to Marmot to spend the day skiing.

We didn't actually get out there until after 11:00 since we stopped in town to rent skis. As fate would have it, a guy needed to sell some extra lift tickets, so we saved the GST on those (they're $40 + GST normally in January). So we got to the hill with our tickets in hand and went skiing for a few hours. My knees weren't incredibly happy with me - does anyone know if there are any ski tips out there to reduce stress on your knees?

After the hill we returned back to the hotel to shower and clean up for the dinner at L&W with almost everyone in the department. It was fun, the food wasn't bad and we enjoyed. Afterwards, the party was in a big room that we booked for the department. It was really fun. Guitar hero was set up against one of the walls, and games were played by all. Much fun to be had.

There was an after party which Diane and I joined for a bit. It was loud and lots of drinking happened. I was tired so both Diane and I left the party early. Didn't get a ton of sleep as we had to get up to go on the Maligne canyon hike the next day.

As part of the tradition, the department goes to Maligne canyon and does a hike down in the canyon every year. It was a lot of fun last year ... and it was similar this year. Check my photo gallery (gallery.heraldk.ca) for some pictures.

After the hike, we stopped in Hinton's BPs for lunch/dinner and then we returned to Edmonton tired but happy with a good weekend. Its pretty incredible to spend a weekend with Diane ... she's pretty special, and I really can't describe how wonderful it is to spend so much time with her :)

Heraldk

Alberta Poker Championship Tournament

in ,

I mentioned a little while ago that I had won a satellite some friends and I put on to enter into one of the Alberta poker championship tournaments. It was a $200+20 affair, and it was last night. The summary is ... well, I did well, but didn't make the money. There was ~133 people in the tournament with the top 15 places paying out. It didn't take me too long to get comfortable. The play was not amazingly good, and I picked up a lot of pots with my tight aggressive play. People respected my raises, and I continued to pick up a decent hand once in a while. I doubled up about halfway through with pocket kings. First guy min-raises and I come over the top for all my chips. He calls (I think he thought I had a smaller pair and didn't want a call) and flips over pocket Jacks.

I took out a guy with 92o in the BB when I caught two pair and put the short stack all in. A few rounds later, I took another short stack out with 73o when he went all in and gave me 5:1 pot odds to take him out (I made a flush on the river with my 3 of spades).

Then I ran into a very dry run of cards. At that point in the tournament I had an above average stack, though not a huge amount above average. Probably around 24,000-25,000. Now I know that I played a little too tight, but its a little hard to make a big raise with Ace-rag from early position (I never got an ace in late position) ... and that was about as good as the hands were. I saw 75o several times, and worse hands than that ... and all the while the blinds and antes rose at a phenomenal rate. Over those rounds, my chip stack dropped to 16,500, and I just couldn't find a hand to play. Then comes the hand that I kinda wish I had played differently.

I have 16,500 in chips. Blinds are 700/1500, with 200 antes. UTG raises to 3000, and then UTG+1 re-raises to 8000. I'm in the big blind and look down at TT. What do I do? I'm scared of the raise-reraise thing. The player UTG could well have a monster with his minraise. A re-raiser has got to have something, and its likely AK or AQ at a minimum (if not JJ, QQ, KK or AA). Both players have similar chip stacks to me. I think one of them outchips me by a couple thousand and the other has a couple thousand less than me. If I call, I'm pot committing myself ... and the initial raiser still can act after me. I decided to fold, but I really wasn't too sure if I should have called or not.

Turns out I should have. UTG had AJo, and UTG+1 had AKs. Board doesn't pair anybody and my tens would've stood up and I would've almost tripled up. *sigh*.

Oh well, now I'm hoping that the cards turn out better for me. They don't. A couple rounds later, I pick up KTs (the best hand I'd seen with no action in front of me). Guy to my right folds but didn't seem happy to be folding, and I push. A guy on the other end of the table yells "NICE", and flips over AA. What can I do? No bad beat for him, and I'm knocked out in 26th-ish place. Top 15 get paid. *double sigh*.

It was fun though. Until I had that bad string of cards I really felt I had an edge on a lot of the players. I felt comfortable, and seemed to have this respect from a lot of players that I'm not certain is entirely deserved. But then again, I wasn't in a lot of pots. Just enough to pick up some blinds and antes and stay alive. I can't wait until the next chance I get in one of these big tournaments. I think I've got a good shot at the money on each try :)

Heraldk

Voting Day

in ,

Ugh. I hate politics. Everytime it happens it feels like I've got to decide between a bunch of idiots who make a mitt-ful of promises that there is no way on earth they will keep, or if they do keep them all then they'll screw over an aspect of the country they didn't stress in their political platform. Blah. I'm scared of the conservatives. I'm not entirely sure why, but it seems oddly creepy that Stephen Harper seems like such a good candidate when last time around, he scared the crap out of most anyone I talked to. Paul Martin is running a terrible campaign from where I'm sitting - he is running a fear based campaign which I heartily disagree with. While I might agree that I don't want to see Mr Harper in charge of our country, I want to hear why YOU Mr Martin, will do any better! All your campaign has done is made me want to vote for someone other than the liberals. Since I can't quite bring myself to support the conservatives, I have to move onto the other options.

I ended up picking the green party. Why? Because I empathize with their position. I hate how they are a party with candidates in all the ridings in Canada and they had enough of the vote to get federal money to support this year's election ... but their leader is not invited to the leadership debate. A debate where the bloc-quebecois leader is assumed to be in attendance even though they are a Quebec-only party. I just don't understand.

Frankly, it won't matter who I voted for. My riding is so overwhelmingly conservative that there is no way I can stop that. But, I have to place a vote, and so I'm going to put it where it'll do the most good.

Heraldk

Guitar Hero

in ,

My roommate ordered the PS2 game guitar hero last week and it arrived last night. Excited, he went home to his parent's place (where it was delivered) and returned to our place and we promptly set it up and started playing. For those who haven't heard of it, its a game where you have these guitar shaped controllers and you basically play DDR, but with a guitar instead of hitting arrows on a dance pad. There are five buttons for frets on the guitar, and you have to hold the button down while strumming on the switch where you'd normally strum on a guitar. You also get a whammy bar for more fun.

Not convinced this would be fun? Well neither was I until we started playing last night. It was really surprisingly fun. Not only that, its *hard* when you get into the late "normal" difficulty levels and even harder when you start the "hard" difficulty levels!

There's so much fun stuff to do! I haven't played poker online in about a week, which is a little odd for me. Oh well, I'm sure I'll get back to completing my full tilt deposit bonus any day :)

Heraldk

New TV!

in

Its been a little while since my last post, so this will be a post that catches you up with what I've been up to for the last little while. First, the big news: I bought a new TV! I ended up choosing option 2 from my list of options in TV Shopping. I figure that choosing that option is the best price/performance that I can get for my money. While LCD screens are really starting to go mainstream, I decided to hold out on that and rely on a more proven technology. I decided on the Toshiba 30HF85C. Its a 30" CRT HDTV, and a pretty massive one at 111lbs. From my eye, the TV has excellent picture quality, and has enough inputs to handle my xbox, dvd player, vcr and my roommate's PS2.

I picked up the TV yesterday. It cost me $690 for the TV and then I bought some cables and I actually went for Vision's extended warranty for 3 years. I usually go against buying extended warranties, but two major things swayed my decision here. First, if you don't use the warranty, you get the same amount in store credit (so in 3 years, if I don't use it, I can buy something new and fancy - perhaps a HD-DVD system). Second, if I ever have problems, instead of dealing with Toshiba and having to send the TV to them, I get to have people from visions come and fix it at my house. With the TV being an 111lb behemoth, I figure that's a good bargain. I guess thirdly, the warranty was $75, which I didn't think was unreasonable.

Alright. What else have I been up to? On the weekend, I played a bunch of poker and won about $100 over the three days. I spent some time hanging out with Diane which was wonderful as always :) On Sunday night, my mom, Diane and I went to a church seminar where they played a taped presentation by Lee Strobel called "A Case for a Creator". It was pretty interesting ... but I think I'll save my comments on that for another post.

Yesterday was TV buying day. My mom was free and was thankfully willing to drive around to Ikea and then to the south side visions so I could by a TV stand and then the TV. We got back to my place and I set everything up and then cleaned up my living room which was torn apart the night before to make room for the new television.

So that's been my busy week, and the next week looks like it'll just get busier! Such is life ... Heraldk

TV Shopping

in

Well I've started to go into the full swing of Television shopping. There seems to be a dazzling array of options out there, and its tough because I'm not really sure how much I should spend. So I figure if I post my options, one of a couple things might happen.

  1. By typing out the options that I have, I can more easily weight the pros and cons of my potential decision.
  2. If someone is actually reading this and has an opinion they can post a comment saying what they think.

So here are the options I can choose from.

  1. Basic CRT Tube Television, No HD capabilities
  2. CRT Tube Television with HD capabilities
  3. Small LCD Television (26-27")
  4. Larger LCD Television (30-32")

Option 1 The cheapest option and one which makes the best fiscal sense is the simplest, and cheapest option. Unfortunately, this option also lacks the features of future television viewing. HD capability is all the rage at the moment - and while I don't have an HD source just yet I don't doubt that I'll get one in the near future.

An option like this will cost up to $500 for a TV up to 32" in size. The TV would be a behemoth as any CRT TV greater than 27" in size is way more than a single person can lift and move.

Option 2 The next option is to get one of the few HDTV enabled CRT TVs. While more expensive than the non-HDTV CRTs, these TVs give the most future video viewing pleasure for the buck. While not as sleek and sexy as the LCD options, this is significantly easier on the pocket book. There is also a hidden advantage to the CRT HDTV in that LCDs still cannot display true black colour very well. But CRT TVs do not suffer from the same problem.

This option will cost roughly $1000 for a 30-32" TV. Less is possible with a 27" model from Toshiba. There aren't a lot of options in this category, but they tend to be cheaper than their LCD cousins.

Option 3 Option 3 is where we get to the fancy stuff - the sleek, sexy LCD monitor. As an aside, I don't really want to consider plasma screens as they are mostly offered in screensizes larger than my living room really justifies, and to my knowledge they are largely affected by image burn-in. So that leaves LCD technology which is really starting to take over it seems. I'm really really tempted to get one. The price on these beauties are really starting to come down which means I can possibly afford to pick one up. This is category one - the smaller LCD TV ranging up to the 26-27" range of television. My major concern is that some of the cheaper LCDs may not have the picture quality to justify purchasing them even at their cheaper price. The more expensive brands seem to be a lot better, but they're also rather expensive.

The price points for these TVs range quite a bit, but I've seen TVs reasonably cost in the $1000-$1200 range.

Option 4 Oh these are sweet. 30-32" of awesome screen space, but very thin and light in comparison to comparably sized CRT screens. The downside is the price. So the question is ... are these worth the high higher sticker price?

The lowest price I've seen these come is $1300 and they go up well over $2000. You're paying a lot for brand name and quality of the LCD screen I think. But its hard to say - I need to look at a lot more of these especially since if I pay for something here, I'm really looking for the screen to last me a looooong time.

Other Considerations My living room really isn't big enough to house a screen larger than 32" so that's what I'm looking at. A smaller screen might be a better option if it carries a nice lower price tag since then I can make it a secondary TV when I move to a place that can house a larger screen. I want something of quality that will last several years, wherever it is housed.

Thoughts? There's a lot more running through my mind with this issue, but that's kinda what I've got so far. The world of TVs is a vast and confusing place I'm finding. Ugh.

Heraldk

A weekend of Poker

in

I didn't really plan it this way, but this weekend was more poker filled than it ever was. On Friday, I left work with a couple friends and went for dinner at the Druid. Then afterwards I was able to go to a poker night at Ryan's place. I bubbled out at that tournament unfortunately. The game was pretty wild - everyone who played was crazy loose, and I didn't really get cards to help me take advantage of the loose players. *shrug* - no worries.

Then Saturday was my own poker party. We had a surprising number of people turn out for it - so we had to have 2 tables of 6 people to start it off. My Dad, Diane, Curtis B and I made the money ... and Diane took 2nd place! :) I finished first, though my dad claims he forfeited his stack so he could return home for dinner (which is actually true, so I don't doubt him). It was a pretty fun day and there was some pretty incredible food people put together, crowned by Mike's pork roast.

Today I played poker in the afternoon after cleaning the house and won $69 on Full Tilt playing 2/4. Then my mom picked me up and we went to get a set of shinpads so I can play indoor soccer for the CS intramural team.

Then I played in a freeroll tournament through PSO and took 31st for $10. The tournament was kinda odd though because only 120 people showed up ... and they had 2000+ registered. So they had the top 200 make the money, and so everybody cashed a little.

So yeah ... a very poker-filled weekend. Now I gotta get some work done! :)

Heraldk

Money!

in

What a pleasant surprise! I arrived home today and in my mailbox is a letter from the alberta government who as part of the Alberta Heritage Scholarship fund decided to award me a cool $2000 scholarship for my achievements in my first year of grad studies.

Sweet!

Since my finances are all well and good at the moment, I may well turn my new found wealth to my Television fund where I am looking to purchase a new fancy tv for my living room. Woohoo! I can actually afford a nice one now without dipping into my poker fund (which was my original plan). Crazy talk :)

Heraldk

An Anniversary

in

It has now officially been 2 years since Diane and I started Dating. Naturally, we had to get out to see each other and we spent a lovely evening together. It wasn't all that fancy, but you know, that's part of the reason that I love Diane so much. Its a pretty big day for us ... two years is definitely not an insignificant amount of time. But part of what makes what we have so special is that we both feel the important part of the anniversary is to just spend time together. So we did. We went out for dinner at East Side Mario's which is not all that fancy, but has some pretty good food. Then we just spent the rest of the evening with each other. It was a simple evening, we exchanged a couple of small gifts, and we really just enjoyed each other's company.

I'm really amazed at how lucky I am with Diane. She's all I could ever hope for and more ... and I really kinda stumbled into the relationship. On a day like this, I just shake my head in amazement and say ... yay!

I think that's all one can do.

Heraldk

Holidays go by too fast

in ,

I really should be working. But since I'm not, my holidays have been going by far too quickly.Still, its been a good holidays - lots of time with the family, and a couple friends are coming over tomorrow afternoon. Then there's new years and the two year anniversary for Diane and I coming up in short order! Amazingness!

Last night I watched Memoirs of a Geisha ... I don't know what rotten tomatoes has against it - I thought it really was a pretty good movie. Oh well. Maybe I'm just ignorant - I haven't read the book nor do I know anything about Japanese culture. *shrug* - from an ignorant standpoint, I thought it was good :)

Hope everyone is having a good holidays!

Heraldk