Man, that was tiring.

For those of you who are unaware, the couple of weeks was taken up by RA Training and resident arrival here on campus. What that meant for me was basically very very little time for myself, and a lot of work. To top it all off, I signed up for duty for the first weekend, so once we were done with the arrival activities, I was still tethered to campus to respond to emergencies.

All of that is done now, though, and it’s time to settle into the swing of things for the semester. As much as I like to have all that extra free time and relaxed work hours during the summer, my job really isn’t very fun at all over the summer. It’s just a lot of meetings, which are boring. Now, my staff is here, the students are back, and I’m actually doing my job again. While there are plenty of drawbacks to having all 786 of my little freshmen loaded into the building, having them here is actually what makes my job fun.

In other news, the Shadow continues to be awesome. Due to the craziness of the last couple of weeks, I haven’t had time to ride a whole lot, but I’ve gotten a few longer cruises in. Each time out things go more smoothly than the last; my riding skills are coming back very quickly.

What’s next for the motorcycle? Why, customization of course. Who wants a purely stock bike? Not this guy. The first project will be moving the rear turn signals from where they currently live, to down towards the license plate like this. The problem is that the stock location of the turn signals do not allow me to put on my saddlebags that I have from my last bike.. or any bags of a reasonable size. Once that’s done, I’m thinking maybe some Crash Bars/Engine Guards and maybe a front light bar to increase visibility. There’s also a really neat conversion kit that will turn your rear signals into running / extra brake lights as well to allow following drivers to better see the bike.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Stick around to hear some tales of poker and my upcoming trip back to CT… post coming soon!

Somewhere around a few days ago, you may have started to ask yourself, “Where did Mike go?” While it may appear that I’ve disappeared–given that I’ve not been on IM, or posting, or showing up places, or calling people–I am, in fact, still here.

Sort of.

It’s RA training time! This past Sunday, the RAs moved into my gigantic Tower of Doom, and since that time, all of us here in ResLife have been diligently educating them to be the best damned facilitators of community that there ever were. Or something like that.

This has (and will continue) to involve long days of work and lots of crazy activities. For example, last night we went rollerskating. Yeah, that was a great idea. Lets strap these wheels of death to our feet and try to go in a circle! Some of you may remember the ice skating incidient of this past winter. If you do, you’ll undertstand that things like ‘rollerskating’ are a terrible idea when it comes to me.

At least I escaped injury this time.

Despite how all of this might sound, it’s actually pretty exciting. It’s good to have the staff back, even if it comes at the expense of my free time for the next couple of weeks. My job is mostly lame over the summer, but once the students get back.. well, that’s why I’m here. It gives my job a purpose again.

At any rate, until we’ve gotten through arrival (students start showing up on Saturday, but the big arrival day is Wednesday 8/23) and the first weekend of the semester (during which I will be on duty), do not expect to hear a whole lot from me.

I do have to say, though, there may be a big annoucement in the works. It involves something that is Very Neat. Should this go through, you, my dear readers, will be among the first to know. Until then, I will leave you in suspense.

So today was an up and down day in poker for me. Down in the cash realm, and nice and up in the Tourney realm. I started at the 1/2 limit tables, but really didn’t get too many good starting hands, and many of those good ones went sour on the flop. But being down by 16 big bets isn’t that horrible… it’s just poker.

I later played in the wwdn blogger tourney, with 48 entrants tonight. I went out in 42nd after my flopped set ran into an 8-high flush on the turn. I checked the turn, he min bet, and I raised him by 4. He called, and when the flush card came on the turn, I was dumb. I bet big, and then was basically committed to call his raise. I could have played it safe. I had redraws. One of my Tens was a diamond. Alas, none of them came. And I left. Because I didn’t know when to let go. Oh well. Live and learn. All that.

Afterwards I tried a $10+1 3 table SNG. I was up big early, but made a mistake with a misread, and ran my AQ into KK. That dropped me down, and I suffered a slow death to be out in 7th, 2 places out of the money.

After getting some things done around the apartment, I decided to go for one more $10+1 3 table. This time, I was focused. I had my plan. I played cautiously, but not scared. As we got down to the final 9, I was in 7th place with about 15 big blinds left. I managed to work it up and found myself in the final 3. When we got there, there was one huge stack, and 2nd place was only a couple of BB ahead of me. He went up and down a bit, but eventually ran his silly All in to a much better hand from the big dude.

When I find myself heads-up, I’m in trouble. I’ve got about 6K to his 34.5K, with blinds at 400/800. There were really only 2 key hands in heads up play… and they both involved The Jimmy (The Jimmy, as you may recall is 24o, named after what happened in this particular instance).

I’ll post them below, for your reading pleasure, with my opponent’s name changed for etiquette reasons. All I can say is this:

Live by The Jimmy, die by The Jimmy.

PokerStars Game #5850510153: Tournament #29616611, $10+$1 Hold’em No Limit – Level X (400/800) – 2006/08/09 – 00:36:47 (ET)
Table ‘29616611 3′ 9-max Seat #4 is the button
Seat 2: ISS Spock (4930 in chips)
Seat 4: OTHER DUDE (35570 in chips)
ISS Spock: posts the ante 50
OTHER DUDE: posts the ante 50
OTHER DUDE: posts small blind 400
ISS Spock: posts big blind 800
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to ISS Spock [2h 4c]
ISS Spock said, “man”
OTHER DUDE: calls 400
ISS Spock said, “glad I didn’t try at that”
ISS Spock: checks
*** FLOP *** [7h 4d 2c]
ISS Spock: checks
OTHER DUDE: bets 1600
ISS Spock: raises 1600 to 3200
OTHER DUDE: raises 31520 to 34720 and is all-in
ISS Spock: calls 880 and is all-in
*** TURN *** [7h 4d 2c] [4h]
OTHER DUDE said, “nh”
*** RIVER *** [7h 4d 2c 4h] [Qs]
ISS Spock said, “thanks”
*** SHOW DOWN ***
ISS Spock: shows [2h 4c] (a full house, Fours full of Deuces)
OTHER DUDE: shows [7c 6s] (two pair, Sevens and Fours)
ISS Spock collected 9860 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 9860 | Rake 0
Board [7h 4d 2c 4h Qs]
Seat 2: ISS Spock (big blind) showed [2h 4c] and won (9860) with a full house, Fours full of Deuces
Seat 4: OTHER DUDE (button) (small blind) showed [7c 6s] and lost with two pair, Sevens and Fours

PokerStars Game #5850534594: Tournament #29616611, $10+$1 Hold’em No Limit – Level XI (600/1200) – 2006/08/09 – 00:38:57 (ET)
Table ‘29616611 3’ 9-max Seat #2 is the button
Seat 2: ISS Spock (1610 in chips)
Seat 4: OTHER DUDE (38890 in chips)
ISS Spock: posts the ante 75
OTHER DUDE: posts the ante 75
ISS Spock: posts small blind 600
OTHER DUDE: posts big blind 1200
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to ISS Spock [As 8c]
ISS Spock said, “can’t do anything with these”
OTHER DUDE said, “tuff one .. no cards eh”
ISS Spock: raises 335 to 1535 and is all-in
OTHER DUDE: calls 335
*** FLOP *** [4d 3d 4h]
OTHER DUDE said, “whoops”
ISS Spock said, “nh”
*** TURN *** [4d 3d 4h] [7c]
OTHER DUDE said, “gg”
*** RIVER *** [4d 3d 4h 7c] [6c]
ISS Spock said, “indeed”
*** SHOW DOWN ***
OTHER DUDE: shows [2d 4s] (three of a kind, Fours)
ISS Spock: shows [As 8c] (a pair of Fours)
OTHER DUDE collected 3220 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 3220 | Rake 0
Board [4d 3d 4h 7c 6c]
Seat 2: ISS Spock (button) (small blind) showed [As 8c] and lost with a pair of Fours
Seat 4: OTHER DUDE (big blind) showed [2d 4s] and won (3220) with three of a kind, Fours

I have to say that this has been a pretty good weekend. Angela is away in Florida, which sucks, but that gives me more free time for a little game called poker.

My PokerStars bankroll had gotten a little low, and I didn’t want to transfer in any more cash, really, as last week was Bill Paying week. So I decided to try a few cheap tournaments to see what I could do. The plan was to risk small amounts of the bankroll and see what I could get back from the investment.
On Friday evening, I entered one of the $1 + 0.40 5 table SnG tourneys on the site. By playing solidly, and waiting for the right times to move, I took that tourament down and got first place. It was a pretty quick moving tourney, and by the time we got down to 3, there were two other very solid players left. We were at 3 people for about 35 minutes, until finally one of the other two busted out. I went down to heads up play I was at a considerable disadvantage. Heads up play, though, is something I’d like to think I’m pretty good at. (I have a number of 3rd place tourney finishes, and a number of 1st place finishes. I almost never go out in 2nd). I ended up taking it down, and raking in the massive first place prize of…. $14. Which means that I only really earned 4 bucks and hour, but hey… it’s practice, right?

After the tourney, I hosted our usual Friday Shadyhouse game, which has pretty much moved to my apartment for the summer due to the central air conditioning here. It was a fun night, with one of my new coworkers and her partner joining us for the first time. I ended up slightly up on the night. Furthermore, Jimmy didn’t have any cash, so I spotted him both of his buyins, and he transfered an equivalent amount from his PokerStars account and into mine.

On Saturday, I played another 45 player $1.40 tourney, and ended up taking 3rd, giving me another $7 to play with. Later, I went back to the $.50/$1 limit holdem tables. That ended up with me down just a tad. No big deal though. I had a friend come in and stay over for the Pittsburgh Triathlon. After she crashed so that she could get up at 4:00 AM, I headed over to The Drinkingest Party hosted by Brian and Jen, and was able to see a bunch of folks that I haven’t gotten to talk to in much too long.

Earlier today, I was browsing around the PokerStars lobby and found the 180 player $4 + $0.40 buy in SnG. It looked interesting, and the blinds were set to advance on 15 minute intervals, rather than 10, so I figured I’d give it a go. Let me tell you the play at that thing was TERRIBLE until we got down to about 70 people. At that point, most of the players remaining had at least some acumen. When we were down to 54 players, I was back in 52nd place with just about 8 BB left. I was UTG+2, and opened all-in with 88. I was getting down to desperation mode. I was called by two players. The first reraised all in, and the second called all-in for a stack larger than mine. The reraiser had TT. Man, I was hosed. The other dude who called had.. get this… Q9o. Amazing. Anyway, I got very lucky and hit my set on the turn and tripled up. The TT guy just came out a little behind by taking the side pot.

On the next hand I had JJ. A loose player in front of me raised about 4xBB, and I pushed all-in in hopes to isolate things, or just pick up the pot there. To my horror, a dude calls all-in behind me, and the original raiser called all-in too. This time I was against TT (the first caller) and, A7s… from the original UTG raiser. My hand held, and I ended up doubling up again. That was the ammo I needed to go deep. I didn’t see many good hands for a while after that, but I was able to coast into the final two tables being 4th in chips. We went from 18 to 9 pretty quickly, and I found myself in the final 9 with the 5th largest stack.

Things were going well for me, and we were down to 4 handed play. I was basically tied with another player for 3rd in chips, and found myself holding KK. I raised UTG, and 4th place stack reraised me from the BB. I pushed all in and he called. I had run my KK straight into AA. The Aces held, and I found myself all-in from the BB with less than a full blind in front of me, with a monster hand of 74o. There was action behind me and I figured I was done, however by the river, I hit a flush with my 7 and tripled up. The next hand I had rags and had to fold from the SB. After that though, I found myself with AJo on the button, folded around to me, so I pushed the chips in. My raise though, was less than 1 full BB. I was called by the BB who had T2o, who proceeded to hit 2 pair by the river, and sent me packing.

All in all, I was pleased by the result. I took 4th place, for $57.60, which is not bad at all for a $4.40 initial investment. I will probably try the same format tourney again another afternoon when I have 3-4 free hours.
Later in the night, I headed to the South Side Works to see The Descent, a thoroughly freaky movie.

It’s time to get ready for bed though. This is the last week before the RAs arrive, and I have a mega-ass-load to get done this week to have the building ready for them. When I go to bed, I’ll be really, really glad I’m not in a creepy-ass cave in the Appalachian Mountains.

I also need to get a working spell checker for WordPress.

I played in the wwdn blogger tourney this evening. Contrary to what the title of this post might lead you to believe, I did not win the tourney. I finished in 12th place out of 22. [I’d like to note that I got my chips in when I was ahead on the last hand 🙂 ]. Not a horrible finish, but no cash either.

At any rate, I checked back in on the tourney when it was down to the final few folks. After watching for a few minutes, I asked if anyone wanted to make a prop bet on the winner. I got a bite, from PokerStars player meanhappyguy, coincidentally the sir who sent me packing in the tourney. He suggested the stakes of paint image, that would glorify the winner of the bet and the person they chose to win the tourney. He was kind enough to give me 1st and 3rd pick, while taking 2nd and 4th for himself.
Well, wouldn’t ya know it, when it got down to heads up action, the persons left in the tourney were the two I picked to win. MHG’s picks went out in 4th and 5th. As such, I won the bet. And here I post the spoils of my victory. As an aside, to help this make sense to you, my PokerStars handle is”ISS Spock”, and my icon is an image of Evil Spock from the TOS epsisode Mirror, Mirror.

Behold, my winnings:

Thank you to Meanhappyguy for holding up your end of the bargain. Maybe next week we can try the same sort of bet.

Recently my desktop keyboard had an unfortunate encouter with…. well, the wall. After that incident I had been using an older keyboard that I had laying around. This old keyboard sucked. The ‘B’ key wasn’t always responsive, sometimes requiring a truely unreasonable level of force in order to activiate. The other main (and maybe even larger) problem was that it was a beige keyboard. I hate beige computer equiment. It’s ugly.

Clearly I couldn’t allow myself to continue in such a sorry state, so I did the only reasonable thing. I bought a new toy. Behold my new keyboard and mouse, the Logitech S 510 Cordless Desktop:

So far, the set up is working out quite well. There were a couple bumps in the road at the begining though. The software packaged with the package didn’t support Firefox as a web browser, so none of the hot key features worked to launch things in Firefox. Also, I couldn’t configure the tilt wheel to perform the ‘forward’ and ‘back’ browsing features in the browser, either. The Logitech website, however, had an update to the software, and now everything works fine with everyone’s favorite memory-hogging browser.

The range on the keyboard is pretty good. I can use it to control iTunes’ behavior from across the room. The photo viewing hot keys are pretty useless. Why does someone need a dedicated “rotate photo” button that only works in the windows photo browser window? If I can get the zoom and rotate buttons to work in The GIMP, though, then they might be more useful. My only other complaint so far is the scrollwheel mouse button. In order to activate it as the middle mouse button, it needs a little bit too much force to be comfortable. Trying to click it also frequently ends up in triggering one of the tilt wheel buttons. This will probably get better as I get more used to the feel of the mouse.

In other news, I’m starting the process of redesigning this site and making it not so….. black and green. I’m probably going to use Jeremy‘s Cereal Port theme as a starting point, as I want the content area to resize. This is something that most WordPress themes, such as my current one, fail to do.

The plan for the night? Well, I’m about to have some dinner, and then there’s a little gathering for my former fellow RD / newly promoted supervisor. As of today, she’s officially ABD.

Ok, food time.

For the last 26 months, I’ve lived life shackled. Wherever I went, whatever I was doing, I was chained. Whether I was in the office or on vacation, I was never without a constant reminder of my indentured status. Yesterday, however, I was able to cast off the cruel instrument of my oppression. The dreaded pager:

The department finally decided that it wasn’t worth their while to continue to pay for our two way text pager service. It’s a smart call on their part, too, since they were mostly used to set up where and when the RDs would gather for lunch, to see if people wanted to grab a drink, and other such social uses.

They’ll be using our personal cell phones to contact us now. While this still puts us within constant reach usually, it’s much less oppressive. I can turn off my personal cell phone, or choose not to answer it as I see fit, and that’s ok. With the pagers, they had to be always on and with us.

Still, a part of me is sad to see the pager go. I suppose I became accustomed to having the little guy with me everywhere. It was neat to be able to get all the sports scores and uselessly vague news headlines of the hour. And while I never quite grew to love the pager, I certainly at least became a little fond of the damned thing.

Goodbye Mr. Pager, and good luck with your next victim.

So, the main event of the World Series of Poker is on. Day 1a was yesterday. Yes, Day 1a. There are 4 day 1’s. Yes, 4. Why? Well, because there’s something like over 8600 entries this year. Just 3 years ago, there were 839 entries in the 2003 WSOP Main Event–the $10,000 buy-in No Limit Texas Holdem tourneyment you’ve probably seen on TV. In 2004, that number more than tripled, thanks mostly to ESPN’s coverage of the previous year’s tourney, to 2,576. Last year, 5,619 folks dropped the 10-large to get into the action. This year’s top prize will be over $11 million.

Throughout the day, I was reading the stories on the PokerStars Blog as well as keeping up with the live hand updates on Poker Wire. Unfortunately, everyone’s favorite poker geek, Wil Wheaton, was eliminated in this hand. It looks like it may have been a bad beat, but it’s hard to say, as the information does not list when the chips got into the pot.

At any rate, the volume of reading material on the event yesterday was huge. Last year, I just waited until ESPN televised the event to see what happened. This year, I can’t keep away from the computer to find out what’s going on as it happens. Who knows, mabye next year, I’ll play a few satellites and see if I can win myself a seat in the thing.

I didn’t spend yesterday just reading about poker, however… I was able to play some too. Last night, I hosted our weekly Shadyhouse Poker event. As for our core crew, it was only myself, Alan and Charlie. We were joined by one of my new coworkers as well as another coworker who played with us for the first time on Sunday. Later in the evening, coworker Jamis joined the action. I ended up finishing the night with about 250% of my original buy-in.

After everyone went home, I caught up with my reading on the Main Event, and found myself quite awake. I decided to give a one table Sit and Go tournament on PokerStars. As I the tournament started I felt focused and determined. I was ready to sit and play my best game. The table was pretty loose, which is really no surprise for a small buy-in SnG tourney. I waited for cards and played them aggressively. I was up only a little bit above my original stack for quite a while. By the time we went down to 5 players, however, I was on the short stack. Things got better for me though, as I made it head-up, with about an even stack to my opponent. 18 hands later, the tourney was mine.

My play has been solidly improving over the last few months. To be sure, I still have quite a few leaks in my play, but I mostly know what they are. Knowing what you need to do and actually doing these things are not the same thing though.

A few weeks ago, after observing Mr. Jeremy in a few tournaments on Poker Stars, I switched from Party Poker to Poker Stars.

The rakes and tournement fees charged by Poker Stars are less than that of Party, it’s a more attractive interface (with several different available themes), and there seem to be just as many terrible poker players.

Jeremy already wrote about our entry into the Wil Wheaton dot Net blogger tourney, and his unwillingness to believe that I had A Better Hand Than Him. He eliminated me, but that was ok, since he went on to take second place, win a bunch of cash, and got me a really neat set of Kem Cards

Starting today, Poker Stars started a new freeroll satellite style tourney with over $2,500,000 in prizes and payouts. The way it works is like this:

Every Poker Stars player receives one free entry in to the first level of the tourneyment. Level one tourneys happen about 4 times a day, and the top 50 finishers of each one, advance to a weekly level 2 tourney. At the weekly level 2 tourney, the top 6 advance to a live game in the Carribean with a $1,000,000 top prize.

I decided to give this free first level tourney a try today. Entries were capped at 10,000 players. With only 50 tickets to the level 2, that means only 0.5% of the players would advance. Not great odds, but I figured I’d give it a shot for free.

The carnage started early. In the very first hand at my table, UTG went all in, and recieved one caller. Needless to say, I folded my 27s from the big blind. UTG had.. get this 34s. His caller? The mighty A2 suited. Clearly, this tournament would be filled with brilliant play. At any rate, A2 won the hand when he paired his 2.
Two minutes into the tournament, 250 people were already eliminated. 5 minutes in, 1,000 people had met their end. 10% of the field gone. The way to survive this kind of craziness is to just sit back, play super-tightly, and stay out of the way of the crazies.

I managed to get a couple of big hands and at about 17 minutes in I had roughly doubled up my original stack… by which time 30% of the ‘players’ were gone. Things stayed pretty quiet for me for another 20 minutes or so. I had 2685 in chips, which put me at about 2136th place out of the remaining 5002 players (yes, 36 minutes in 50% of the field was gone).

I found myself with AKo in the big blind. We were on level 3 , which put the blinds at 25/50. UTG+3 limps, the small blind completes, and I raise to 150. Both players call. The flop came A56 with 2 spades. The SB bet 150, I raised him to 600, the thrid player folded, and SB reraised me. I reraised him all-in. He instantly called.

What’s going on? Am I hosed? Of course not. He flips up 3sTd. He has NOTHING to my top pair, best kicker. As luck would have it, the turn and river were running spades, and he caught his miracle flush. I had to admit, he trapped me with his genius play, silly me.

At any rate, since he had me covered, I was eliminated. 2 hours later, the strategy master who eliminated me is, surprisingly still in the tourney. He’s sitting in 239th place of the remaining 534, with about 2/3 of the average stack…. Actually, I just watched the guy cripple himself when he was the second guy to call someone’s all in. He’s now down to 483 of 513, and out it 444th place.

Watching the tournament unfold, it seems like solid play, and a little bit of luck could get you pretty deep in one of these. It will be interesting to see how the level 2 tournaments in this promotion work out. It looks like those will be 1,000 – 2,000 player tournaments.

theantidj.net, lonely and abandonned for so long. It sat here on the web with no purpose, save for collecting unreasonable numbers of comments from blog spammers trying to sell us on online poker and viagra subsitutes.

Why has the mighty theantidj.net been so neglected by its creator? The answer is simple. The AntiDJ is gone. I last stepped behind the decks 7 months ago at Flux, while back in CT for winter break. Prior to that, I did a guest spot at Ceremony in July of 2005.
As for my own DJ rig, I haven’t touched it in well over a year, except for moving it over to my new apartment.

When I first moved to Pittsburgh, one of the things that I worried about is that I would miss my weekly time in the DJ booth, whether at the club or on the radio. I did miss it at first. But after a while, after getting settled in Pittsburgh, working at the University, and finding some new interests, I found myself missing the DJ thing less and less. These days, I’m not even really interested in going out to the club too frequently anymore.

I guess what it comes down to, is that people’s interests change over time. From 1998 – 2004, I was playing some form of electronic, goth, or industrial people every week, at times, 2 – 3 times a week. DJing was my main recreational activity. Now, I really have no interest in such things.

The basic jist of this post: there is no more AntiDJ.

So what becomes of this site? Well, I keep it of course! I’m not going to throw away a perfectly good URL. I will start updating this again, just as a general blog. I’ll probably talk some about music. But I’ll probably talk more about my persepectives on my field of work, on other stuff, and of course, Poker.

So, stay tuned, dear readers. There’ll be some more content here soon.