brantheory

No Vegas Trip for me :(

bran — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:27:12 +0000

I just played in the Win a Weekend with Daniel Final and unfortunately, didn’t quite work out as planned. After playing for almost 3 hours, with about 5000 other players, I busted out around 900 place. It’s kind of painful after playing for so long to be eliminated fairly close to “in the money”. It’s pretty much a crap shoot with various types of players from total fish to season veterans. There were 2 hands that were probably the “TSN turning points”. One was getting my 2 Aces cracked by a pair of nines when a nine sucked out on the river. That would have put me close to 20000 chips. The 2nd hand I simply misread the player and it cost me.

One thing I learned from this is that it’s tough not to be get bored. It’s a slow tournament and I found myself watching TV, checking email, surfing, etc. Oh well, lesson learned and on to the next tournament!

Qualified for the Final Round for the trip to Vegas

bran — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:30:51 +0000

Even though I am fighting a bit of the flu, I just managed to qualify for the final round for the trip to Vegas with Daniel Negreanu. I posted that the 1st round was fairly easy and I only played maybe 2 hands the whole time. This time, there was over 6000 other players and the first 1000 players qualify to the Final round next Sunday, July 27. I actually had to play some poker this time eash of us starting at 2000 chips. Although there were a lot of dead stacks around (people who registered but didn’t show up so they automatically fold every single hand), there were still enough players around to make it interesting.

I basically played fairly tight for the early rounds and then started to open things up and play more aggressive and bully people around, raising and reraising. It’s easy to spot the donks who play any hand and give away chips. You just have to pick your spots and I quickly doubled up and then made my way to around 13000 chips or so. At this point, I basically shut it down and folded just about all hands until I qualified.

It still amazes me the people who take unusual risks and play stupid. But then again, those are the people who I love to play against! Next week will be interesting as I now have to change gears and play to win rather than play to survive. The winner gets the $15000 valued prize and the 2nd place - 600 place still get cash money. Not bad for a free tournament

On to the 2nd Round poker tournament for a trip to Las Vegas

bran — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:20:22 +0000

Poker Pro and fellow Canadian Daniel Negreanu is offering a Weekend With Daniel competition in Las Vegas:

The weekend includes a trip to Las Vegas, where you’ll get to stay at the Venetian Hotel and party with the man himself in true VIP style. Daniel will also invite you to his Vegas home, to teach you the skills you need to make it as a poker champion. The prize package is worth $17,000 in total!

Basically you have to first qualify in a daily WWD Round 1 freeroll. Players that finish in the top 1,000 will go through to our WWD Round 2 tournament.

I just played the WWD Round 1 this evening with a total of 1458 players in the poker tournament. I literally played 2 hands and folded everything else. Believe it or not, I qualified by doing nothing. I don’t know what the 458 idiots were doing but somehow they busted out. How hard can it be to make the top 1000??

So it’s on to Round 2 and I’ll let you know how that goes. I imagine that I may actually have to play poker to get to the final round.

AVG 8.0 - free antivirus edition

bran — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:02:23 +0000

AVG has recently upgraded their anti virus software to version 8.0. I have personally been using the free AVG personal edition on all my computers for at least 5+ years and have recommended to anyone who asks. The previous version was extremely light and unobtrusive and I have never had any issues with it. I was a little hesitant to install the most recent version as I have heard of some users’ complain that it slowed down their computer. It would appear that AVG has followed in the path of McAfee and Norton in adding in the kitchen sink of unneeded extras. Bloated software is probably my biggest pet peeve.

After some research, I decided to give it a try and so far it has been running fairly well. Yes it is more bloated than previous versions however, I haven’t noticed any obvious slowdown to my computer. A few things to note is that I did not do the default installation and purposely disabled some features that have been known to cause some issues:

Download from the AVG site and not Download.com

From sitepoint.com forum post: I found something a little odd with AVG 8 (at least this was the case last weekend). If you download from AVG directly (rather than using Download.com) then during installation you are able to deselect the ‘feature’ of Search Shield which checks each website for malware after searching on Google/Yahoo/Live/etc. This slows down your browsing experience and is annoying.

How to install AVG without LinkScannerIf you wish to install AVG 8.0 Free Edition without the LinkScanner component, or uninstall this component from your program, please proceed as follows:

Download the AVG 8.0 Free Edition installation package from our website.
* Run the installation with the parameters /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch. One way to achieve this is to:

save the AVG Free installation file directly to disk C:\

open menu Start -> Run

type c:\avg_free_stf_*.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch

* The installation will be started, and AVG will be installed without the LinkScanner component.

Rogers iPhone Plan = Customer Dissatisfaction

bran — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:27:35 +0000

There is no doubt that the iPhone being released in Canada on July 11th will be huge. Regardless of price or plan, lots of fanboys, tech nerds and kids with rich (or dumb?) parents will get there hands on it.

The highly anticipated price plans have been released on the Rogers website. Notice that there is no unlimited data transfer like our friends in the US get as well as the basic extras cost extra. (call display, evenings at 6pm rather than 9pm, etc). It looks like for a decent plan, you are looking at paying at least $100 a month, probably more. Don’t forget the extra charges as you are watching Youtube videos that push you past your cap!

Check out the tons of comments which are even more entertaining and basically comes down to everyone saying “F YOU Rogers”.

http://www.blogto.com/tech/2008/06/rogers_iphone_plans_revealed/

http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/27/rogers-announces-iphone-3g-plans-unlimited-data-isnt-one-of-th/

In fact, it has even spawned a brand new site http://www.fuckyourogers.com/

It would be interesting to see how the iPhone does in Canada. Unfortunately, it seems the Canada is far behind that of the United States in this regard as there is very little competition here.

Beware MSN Messenger SPAM

bran — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:55:16 +0000

I have been on MSN Messenger for a long time. Admittedly, it’s not the best IM client out there but the simple fact is that most of my friends use it. Apparently it’s the #1 of IM client in Canada while AIM is #1 in the United States (go figure?).

A potential problem that I have started to see is the IM Spam that I have been receiving. I would estimate, at least a few times a week I would suddenly receive an unsolicated IM message:

(9:39:03 PM) curtissmalzahnzmbx667@live.com: 2252128559Hey check out hxxp://cobatra.com/gdr43

It’s fairly obvious that this is some kind of malware website. I can only imagine how many people fall for it and click on the link mostly likely with the famously insecure browser, Internet Explorer 6.

As always, keep your system up to date with virus and firewall protection and of course, use the just released, Firefox 3 web browser.

**EDIT**

Just got this one:

(10:33:46 PM) vitiwovazig84@hotmail.com: heyy. how are you? I’m doing OK. lonely though … can you come watch me strip on my webcam??? pleaasee. i’ll love you forever.. go here http://2iN3ZBpcygOP6.blogspot.com see ya there! =) i am waiting!!

Yahoo is falling apart

bran — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:54:41 +0000

It’s kind of sad seeing what has become of Yahoo as of late. It has been in the news for some time as it negotiates on and off again with Microsoft that eventually led to nothing. This did not make too many shareholders happy as they saw perhaps billions (yes billions) of dollars fly away. This created more drama with major shareholders such as Carl Icahn’s attempt to dissolve the board of directors and the head of Yahoo Chief Executive and co-founder Jerry Yan on a stick.

Eventually Yahoo turned to Google as their white knight but that deal (partnership?) turned out to a be a lame ad sense deal . Yahoo might as well have just created a publisher account. Shareholders see this as a ~ $800 Million deal, which pales in comparison to the ~ $12 Billion. Maybe Yang uses a different algorithm?

What is perhaps most interesting is mass exodus of Yahoo execs. What will become of Yahoo?

Proposed Canadian Copyright Law presented today

bran — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:11:02 +0000

Possibly some scary news for Canadians who may soon face stiff copyright law where some critics are going so far saying that Copyright law could result in police state:

The federal government has introduced a controversial bill it says balances the rights of copyright holders and consumers — but it opens millions of Canadians to huge lawsuits, prompting critics to warn it will create a “police state.”

People caught downloading music or video files illegally could also be sued for a maximum of $500, but uploading a file to a peer-to-peer network or YouTube could result in lawsuits of $20,000 per file.

The Hype Machine is on

bran — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:18:41 +0000

Most people in the tech industry are keeping an eye on Apple WWDC Event today and the rumoured release of the iPhone 2.0. Let fanboys rejoice, the Apple Hype Machine is in full force.

Most, if not all the big bloggers are doing live, play by play of the event including what Steve Jobs is wearing, here’s a few to keep an eye on:

Will this be the iPhone that Rogers wireless is planning on releasing at most likely some exorbitant pricing plans?

I am actually more curious how twitter will be able to hold up to the onslaught of tweets for this event, which I can only imagine will be massive. They are supposedly prepared for it based on their blog post.

We’ve moved much of the load off our database by utilizing more memcache, employing more read-slave servers, and by fixing some bugs for improved efficiency.

In the event that our estimates and preparations fail, we have designed a way to keep Twitter updates moving quickly through the system to their respective recipients. We have isolated and created on/off switches for many Twitter features. Should it become necessary to shed incoming load quickly, we can turn off features such as stats, pagination, and several others to preserve the reliability and timeliness of your Twitter timeline.

The TTC’s beta site is now live

bran — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:01:53 +0000

Check it out the beta here: http://www.beta.ttc.ca. Supposedly it costs about $400k for the revamp, and will be fully functional by mid July. The RSS feed for service alerts is a great idea and looks fairly clean and simple. A definite improvement from their current site which looks like web 1.0 at it’s best or something that was done by some TTC employee who just learned how to use Dreamweaver.