Rob's Ramblings

With one week until decision time, here's what I have so far.

Hardware: Love it, best phone ever used. No surprise there, but adding the camera and microphone capabilities has been very useful.

AT&T Phone: So far I have only had one dropped call, and it was in the same place that my wife's company issued AT&T blackberry dropped as well, so it's clearly a dead spot. Good news is that I could reconnect after abut 100 yards of driving. Not a spot I stay at for long so not worried. Signal in office is good to great, sometimes as many as 5 bars. Reception in Toledo is most times full bars both inside and out. Around Temperance the closer to Toledo you are the better the signal, but outside of that one spot have not seen an outside dead zone. Recption in north Temperance inside is not good, but that was expected. I can use WiFi and Skype if I need to place calls at in-laws house, and forward incoming calls to landline while I am there so far has been no problem. Trips to other locales in area have been surprisingly good, even as close as the next town over (which is farther away from Toledo). I was told that this area is in a depression in places, that could explain some of it. Trips to Monroe (10 miles away) and Detroit had full bars everywhere.

Assessment: Not as good as Verizon (expected) but a lot better than I thought. At this point not a deterrent to keeping phone. When/if day comes that my office moves to teh basement, I will be getting that Microcell they are testing now to ensure coverage (initial reviews of that looking good).

AT&T Data: A much bigger disappointment, but not a detriment. Even though claims of 3G in all of south side of Temperance according to maps, I only get EDGE anywhere. While more of a nuisance (some things require 3G, some will work slowly on EDGE) it's not a killer. Plus I have WiFi in the places I am the majority of the time. Crossing into Toledo seems to be like a magic switch for 3G, I get it fine at the bowling center both inside and out.

One thing that has been a fairly major fail is the newly rolled out MMS service. All attempts to send to Verizon phones go out but are not received. Tests to another iPhone were received fine. I'm not willing to be too upset by this because I can send these via email attachment if needed until AT&T clears things up, and a quick Google shows that in many respects I am better off than a lot of iPhone owners.

Assessment: Disappointment, but not a deal breaker.

If I had to choose right now, I'd be keeping the phone. I still want to test indoor coverage at the Kroger in Lambertville, thats the one other place I can imagine needing the phone ("Homey, what was it I am supposed to buy?").

Bad beats and suckouts are not unique to online play. It can happen just as rough in live play.

For my birthday, my wife took me to the Greektown Casino in Detriot for a weeekend of fun away. Part of it was the opportunity for me to play in a live tourney, something I only had gotten to do once before. I thought it was going to be an $80+15 buy in, but it turns out that the last Saturday of the month they do a $300+40 deep stack (10,000 chips) tournament. That was pricier than I wanted to play, but after some quick checking it was the only game in town that didn't involve a jaunt over to Windsor, something I did not want to do this time. So I ended up playing in it.

At first I was nervous. I've played and won several small stakes tournaments online, and I know that the level of play online is usually better at a buyin level than it's comparative live tournament counterparts, so I probably have played against at least as good competition if not better. But I just don't have the experience playing live really. I decided to play it close to the vest, pretty much ABC poker for the most part. Small preflop bets regardless of the hand to disguise my hand, never limp in first to a hand, continuation bets only with a made hand or a semibluff at worst, that kind of thing. I think in the first hour I played maybe 5 hands, taking down both I stayed in past the flop.

A few hands stood out before the first break. First was my first double-up. I minraised with with pocket 5's, and got a call from a loose player in the small blind. A 5 falls on the flop. He bets, and I call. An Ace falls on the turn, and I loved to see that, I figured he had called with an ace. No flushes or straights are out there. He bets, and I raise. He almost instantly goes all in and I don't think twice about calling. He turns over A8 for a two pair and my set of 5's has him with 4 outs to suckout, none come on the river and I am at 14,000ish chips and he is crippled.

Next two hands worth mentioning are where my relatively untested reading skills came into play. The chip leader at the table is this Russian guy who is just a nonstop talker, both in hands and out. To be honest I was pretty much ignoring him as best I could, but I got into a hand with him where I had KQ in the cutoff and he and 3 others had limped in. Flop hit a Q as the high card, and I bet and only he called, still babbling up a storm. Turn card is a 9, and now a low straight is out there and suddenly he gets quiet for the first time I can recall all day. He checks, I bet the turn and he calls. My alarm bells are going off in my head as the river is a whiff and he checks again. I trust my gut that tells me he is trying to trap me and check behind. He turns over 78 for the made straight and I avoided a big hit. He can't believe I didn't bet the river to set up his chckraise, and I simply told him "thanks for telling me I was dead earlier in the hand". He fished for how I figured that out for a good 10 minutes, I didn't even answer him, happy in picking up on that (probably easily obvious) tell.

Next hand is one that I had pocket Kings preflop. An early raise is reraised by the next guy, who is new to the table. It was the first reraise preflop all day, so I only called, as did the guy behind me (named Doc). Flop is rags, and this guy bets only 1/3 of the pot. My instincts are screaming he's got Aces, and I fold the Kings. Doc folds behind me, and tells me he had Jacks but got the same bad vibe. I never found out what that guy had, but  Doc's played in a lot of live events, so having the same feeling that he did there was a comfort and a reminder to listen to my gut when it starts buzzing at me.

I made it through the first break, and after that the blinds started catching up to me and I went card dead. Twice I got down into the push/fold mode for extended periods, and both times I managed to survive, first with a triple-up with A10 of spades when two 10's fell on the flop, and another with KJ when I got called by J9 and it held up. Literally the next hand I got pocket Kings, and as I was stacking my chips I minraised (now finally having enough chips to get back to that play), and the same guy that earlier I thought had Aces thought about it, and wen't all in. I insta-called and he groaned. I knew I had caught him in a steal. My kings were up against K10 offsuit, I'm at least a 4-1 favorite I think.

Flop has an Ace and Jack. I've seen this one too many times online to know what's about to come and I brace for it. The dealer was kind, he at least turned over the Queen on the turn to make the straight for the other guy and spare the drama somewhat. I needed a 10 to get a matching straight but it did not come. When we counted the chips out we were exactly even so I was busted out in 16th place. Had I won that hand I was gong to be in good position to make a run at the final table.

Kinda puts a dent in people's incessant whining about "rigged" play online, I think.

As I left, Doc and a few others I played in (that all knew how inexperienced I was in live play) all said I played really good and hoped I'd be back. And I think I will a couple times a year hopefully, though maybe over at Windsor (which people say is really nice) or if at Greektown for the lower-cost tourneys until the budget says we can afford this one again.

All in all, I had a great time, felt like I belonged there, and had a great experience.

The theme of my workday so far has been one of frustrations. The core of my original workday was managing the release of two site updates to production in the early afternoon. Before any site is released, we have to jump through hoops of a process of paperwork submittal and approval by a change request board. Welcome to life in the government. Today, for the first time in my nearly 5 years working at this position, a request to release was denied. The reason being becasue the CIO decided to put a blackout on all releases for the next 10 days, which apparently nobody knew the scope of this blackout until the weekly approval meetings were held. And from what I can glean, this blackout is, as a co-worker stated, "like hitting a gnat with a sledgehammer."

Prior to that, I was asked to do some last minute estimations to one of our applications to really beef up the level of security both in data storage and in access. This was for a group that needed to use this application on October 5th. Now keep in mind that in our little world of CMMI, there is no such thing as a 5-minute fix, so the mere fact that they were willing to forego a lot of our QA processes to get this done in time spoke volumes about it's importance. My initial estimates put it at about 48 hours of just coding and unit testing, but we pared it down to 32 hours. In this timeframe however is my birthday (on Monday) and a weekend trip starting tomorrow that my wife has had planned for a while now (where to, I still have no idea), so when all was said and done, not only was I going to be scraping the bare minimum for time to get it done, I was looking at pulling a double-shift on my birthday in addition to working late the night we return for this trip (making the overall prospects for relaxation less). So we go through all of this, get our schedules seemingly lined up.... and then find out that the group requesting this never got permission from the Office of General Counsel to go ahead with it in the first place.

Ready.... FIRE!!!... Aim...