Technolo-babble

I recently had an amazing thing happen: I was presented with a paycheck for which I had spending money after paying my bills!¹ And, thanks to my successes at local Saturday gatherings with friends (one of which plays on PokerStars), I decided to invest some of that in some online poker.

I looked into 3 online poker rooms: PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker. Unfortunately, due to some unjust legislation in the US, it is particularly difficult to transfer money to these online poker rooms from the United States. In fact, attempts to use my Credit or Debit cards on any of these 3 sites all got declined. Ultimately, PokerStars is the only one I could deposit to (using the Instant eCheck option, which has a $10 minimum deposit). Some bank wire options looked decent enough on the other two, but then their minimum deposits ranged from $50 to hundreds of dollars and, starting out, I wasn't looking to invest quite that much.

Anyways, I've been playing on PokerStars a fair amount over the past week. I've become pretty good I think (I wasn't bad off when I started, as noted to being why I started playing online poker), and am in the process of reading a couple of books by Harrington and Sklansky.

I was curious if anyone here plays online poker as well?

¹ Really, there are several other things that money ought to have gone to, but I like to invest in entertainment sometimes if I can.

Well I was just watching some nice, uneducational TV and saw a clip about this really smart girl who had the answers to all of California's problems. She should run for guv'ner!


If you want to watch about the same amount of content from her, but with some other people contributing their knowledge:


All this reminds me of a beautiful blond girl who outlined a plan for boosting education in Africa, the Iraq, and the Asian countries:


As for the former two: I still plan to move to California...but I think I just may steer clear of Santa Cruz.

Dropbox, which ranks well on maximumpc.com's list of "32 Totally Essential Apps," is actually a really nice service. Here's the idea:

Dropbox integrates with your computer shell to provide you a "fake" folder on your computer. It is "fake" because the folder is not actually on your computer---it seamlessly synchronizes what you put into the folder with what's being stored elsewhere (in your "dropbox"), and lets you grab it from your dropbox as well. The whole thing is intuitive---it looks and acts just like any other folder on your system!

There are several account types available, but I'll be sticking with the 2GB that comes with the free account. Also, you can earn up to 3GB more through referrals.

Aside from making a simple, free 2-5GB extension to your hard drive space, Dropbox also comes with some nice other features. First, you can access your files in the dropbox from anywhere. Just login to the web client (or download the local client) and you're set!

As well, you have a "public" folder that can be accessed by anyone. When you put files in there, you can right-click and get a public access link, and voila---free hosting! For an example (that I'll eventually delete), this file is in my public folder (it comes in there by default): http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1617350/Top%20Secret.txt

The other feature I'll mention is of particular interest to BYOND developers. You see, software developers oftentimes work in flocks. And a flock of developers needs some way of privately sharing the developments among one another. With Dropbox, you can create "shared" folders that are available to a list of users you choose. That means if you were putting your game's project files in the Dropbox, you could share that folder with the rest of your team, and you'd all have access to the same folder of files. Imagine the possibilities!

It's available on Mac, Windows, and Linux, so I suggest you check it out now! Oh, and if you're going to register, use my referral link---we both get the extra space! :]

I'm not sure exactly what I was doing, but somehow I stumbled upon a small, somewhat strange site called iNith. One of the videos there struck me as particularly inspirational. The strange thing is, this one actually gave me some inspiration (whereas most inspirational videos suck). Judge for yourself!

Live, if only for your dream