Random Bits & Bobs

So with Thanksgiving upon us, I guess I’m supposed to list things I’m thankful for.

I’m thankful to be employed. And most days in a job I like. I’d be thankful for a little more freelance work, because that would take a little financial pressure off, but I have limited time to chase that in, so I think I’m good with status quo and a few baloney sandwiches for the time being.

I’m thankful that the reception to our podcast has so far been excellent. With just two episodes released (next one drops Sunday 12/6!) we’re knocking on the door of 1,000 downloads, which is very cool to me. I went into this with no expectations other than to hang with Special K and have a good time, but I think we’re putting a good product out there and providing enjoyment to other folks as well. All that’s thanks to Special K, who does all the editing and the vast majority of the research for our episodes. I’m the funny fat guy on the show, and am perfectly happy to be the dumb one. So far I’ve been amazed at how intelligent he makes me sound, and the bumper at the beginning and end that Tragedy did for us is fantastic.

I’m thankful that my folks are still around, even though it’s less and less so every year. My mom has Alzheimer’s (or dementia, we’re not really sure and I don’t think I care enough to pay attention to the difference) so every year might be the last one that she’s really with us. Who am I kidding? She hasn’t been really with us for several years, but we still get flashes of the woman she used to be now and then, and as long as those flashes keep coming we’ll keep hanging on to them. She’s 76 and my dad is 80, so they’re pretty frickin’ old to have a 36-year-old son, but that’s what happens when you shoot out your last pup at age 40. I think every year that it might be the last one I have with them, so when I get another holiday with them, I’m pretty friggin’ thankful.

I’m thankful that I got Returning the Favor published and the reception has been good from the folks that have purchased it. If you want a copy and will be in Vegas, let me know. I can throw some copies into my carry-on and I will accept casino chips for book sales. A year ago I wouldn’t have considered publishing a book off my old blog posts and poetry, and now I have a copy in my backpack. That’s pretty amazing to me, and something I’m pretty proud of.

I’m thankful that in a couple of weeks I’ll be drinking with some of my best friends in Vegas. I can’t wait!

Go Bag – Part 2

Yeah, that whole post again tomorrow bit wasn’t working out, was it? Anyway, the front pocket of my backpack is pretty packed, but it gets a lot roomier moving backwards.

The second pocket is where I carry stuff that I don’t need that often, more for emergencies. I keep a USB-Car adaptor in there in case I’m in a rental car and forgot my car charger for the iPhone (happens more often than I care to admit). I also keep a small LED flashlight and a glow stick in there. Yeah, one of those snap it and shake it glow sticks. It’s kind of a just in case thing, but when the power’s out, you need a light source, and for less than a dollar, it’s worth keeping one on hand. I also keep one in the glove box of each car and a few stashed around the house for storms. They don’t give off much light, but enough to move around by, and they don’t run out of lamp oil or have their batteries die with no use.

My portable hard drive rides in this pocket when it’s not on the desk I’m working at. I carry a 500GB external HD pretty much everywhere, because it has a super-small form factor and holds all my music, all my family photos and pretty much everything I’ve ever written. And a bunch of porn, to boot! I picked it up for less than a hundred bucks, and it lets me keep my old MacBook plugging along without jamming up the hard drive.

I also carry a point n shoot digital camera with a 1GB SD card. It’s a Kodak that I picked up at Wal-Mart a couple years ago when I couldn’t find my Canon on the way to the airport. It’s worked out fine and takes decent pictures, and I typically am not carrying my SLR camera. I use it less and less since I got the iPhone, but it does take way better photos than the phone.

I turned an Altoids tin into an office emergency kit, with a few paperclips, binder clips and safety pins in there, along with a 512MB memory stick. I took a few rubber bands and wrapped them around the outside to keep the tin closed, and used them to hold an emergency sewing kit to the outside. There’s been more than one time when it’s been VERY important to have a needle and thread on hand, and a couple of spare buttons and safety pins are worth their weight in gold.

The last thing in the front pocket is a Do Not Disturb sign I swiped from a Marriott somewhere. The worst thing in the world is getting to a hotel very late at night and realizing that this is the ONE room in the building that doesn’t have a DND sign for door. So I grabbed one from a hotel and stuck it in my bag. It’s better than writing “Bugger OFF” on a notepad and jamming it into the keycard slot, which I’ve also done in a pinch.

Other things I always have with me are a book, a couple of copies of my book (because I have no idea when someone will develop a desperate need for poetry), a CAT5 cable (preferably 10′) and a notepad. If it’s a trip of any length I also have my noise-cancelling headphones, which I paid way too much for in the Atlanta airport one trip, but have proven themselves to be more than worth the cost every time I put them on. I also keep a couple of small caribiners clipped to the outside of the bag, just in case. Just in case of what I’m never really sure, but a couple of caribiners are usually pretty handy, and they’re lightweight enough not to bother me carrying them around everywhere.

Keeping this bag packed this way lets me grab it and go without having to think about packing, which means that there is less opportunity for me to forget shit when I’m on the way out the door. Having just gotten on blood pressure medication recently, the policy of keeping a few days’ worth of drugs in my bag is more important, as I recently found out what a flaming pain in the ass it is to get a prescription moved to another state in a hurry. So now I just drop in my laptop, portable HD and phone and I’m good to go. Now that cooler weather is here, I’ve moved back into my favorite jacket in the world, which has more pockets than I can keep track of, so I’ll be moving a few things back and forth from the backpack to the jacket, and adding a few trip-specific things like digital voice recorder, business cards, etc.

Notes from the road – what’s in your go bag?

Reading Pauly’s travel advice recently led me to think “Hey, you travel a lot, too, but kinda in a different fashion. Why not put together a few tips for frequent (or infrequent) business travellers?” So here they come – John’s tips on travelling light but travelling complete.

Most folks who travel often keep a “go bag,” that bag of stuff that is either ready to go at a moment’s notice, or just goes everywhere with them. In some cases, this is a suitcase with two pairs of socks and underwear, a dop kit and a change of clothes. In my case, my daily briefcase is my “go bag,” more for technology and other things that I find myself needing on a regular basis than a change of clothes. I’m not in a line of work where I don’t have any advance notice of my travel, so I can always swing home and pack before I roll out somewhere, and after spending the equivalent of 1/4 of this year away from home (and I’m not in what is typically a “travel” job) I’ve gotten my packing procedure down pretty well.

But back to my backpack. I replaced my briefcase with a backpack when I realized that two straps is just better than one, and I was swapping between bags when I flew anyway, so why not just settle on the backpack as a day-to-day bag? So I did. It’s a Jansport backpack, black, with a handle at the top that has a piece of neon green gaffer’s tape wrapped around the handle. The handle’s intact, but in a field where black is the color of choice, having something to distinguish your bag from every other black bag is important.

The bag that I carry has a laptop compartment where my Macbook lives, and there are plenty of pockets scattered throughout for all my stuff. Here’s a list of the pockets and the things that I won’t leave home without.

Front pocket – This is where I stash the things that I need to access quickly and frequently. Up front lives a Microsoft Arc wireless mouse.I picked this mouse because of the small form factor, and folding it turns it off, which is nice. Up front I also carry a power adaptor for my MacBook. I have three of these – one lives at home, one lives in my Charlotte office, and one lives in my backpack. It was worth the extra cash for me to not have to deal with wires in the two offices where I most frequently hook up the computer.

There’s also a couple of pens, at least one Sharpie, and a Leatherman in the front pockets. Obviously the Leatherman stays behind when I fly, but it’s an invaluable tool in so many ways. I carry the Leatherman Pulse, which is a newer model that includes scissors along with the traditional file, needle-nose pliers, wire cutters, knife and multiple screwdrivers. It also has a ruler along the back edge and a bottle/can opener.

Also up front live the headphones for my iPhone, which are more backup headphones than anything, along with a USB cable for the iPhone and the wall charger for my BlueTooth headset. I have the Jawbone Prime headset, which I like quite a bit. The headset itself livesin my car, but I keep the charger in my bag for two reasons – so I remember to take it out of the car when I need to charge the headset, and because the adaptor is a USB cable that plugs into a wall outlet, so I can unplug the Jawbone charger and plug in my iPhone USB cable and charge my phone or headset off the same device. I also typically carry my prescriptions in the front pocket, and when I’m travelling I transfer enough pills to get me through the anticipated length of the trip plus one day and leave most of the pills at home. That way I’ve got my drugs with me, but if I’m stupid enough to leave them in the hotel, I haven’t screwed myself when I get home.

Wow, that’s a bunch of shit and I’ve only gone through one pocket! I’ll be back later with inventory of the rest of the bag, which has a second front pocket, main compartment and then a rear compartment with some storage in addition to the laptop compartment.

On Comment Spammers, Atlanta and Poetry Contests

Does anyone have a good plugin or app to keep comment spammers off your WordPress blog? I’m by no means an expert on the format and I get tons of spam comments each day. So I’d love your help if there’s a solution out there that I just don’t know about.

Back in Atlanta this week, working (ish) ’til Wednesday afternoon. Got no plans tonight if you’re in the ATL and wanna get together, let me know. I’ve pretty much settled into a routine of staying at the Marriott Century Center, because it’s convenient to the interstate and thus my office in Midtown. It’s decent, and as of last night I’d locked up Marriott Platinum status until 2011, so I get the concierge level rooms. The nice bath mat and robe in the room is pretty spiffy, but I haven’t taken advantage of the concierge lounge yet. May check that out tonight.

Thanks for all the nice Facebook comments on my poetry contest win a couple weeks ago. It was pretty wacky to me to win the thing, since I’d never entered a poetry contest before. So I was shocked when I got the notification, and pleased because the way the poem came about was really neat. So I read the piece at the last meeting of the Writer’s Club, and it was very well-received. I kinda only started going to this club because my senior HS English teacher is on the board, so that gave it a measure of respectability in my mind. I gave her a copy of my book at the last meeting, and she was touched a little by the gesture.

Nothing really to report, since I had my crushing run at Omaha in West Virginia I’ve since given back $100 to the poker economy of Cherokee, NC on the electronic tables there, and dropped a gross $240 in my home game last week. I kept ending up second best, with draws that didn’t get there, or hands that wouldn’t hold up. I did manage to crack BadBlood’s aces with my kings in a hand that had we been playing deeper I could have gotten away from, but didn’t rake a significant pot for four hours after that.

In the AA v KK hand I had position on Blood, who was very early to act. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t UTG, but it was close. He raised preflop, his buddy Mike called and I three-bet. Now my preflop three-bet range is fairly narrow, and I need to work on expanding that, but I when I took his $3.25 raise to $8, I’d pretty closely defined my range as being a big pair or AK. Action folded around to Blood, who re-popped me to $31. Mike got out of the way and I thought to myself “He’s got Aces, but I don’t have any chips, I wish we each had a pile of money so I could get away from this hand.” But I had less than $40 in front of me, so I shipped it in. Blood called the five or six extra dollars, and I made a set on the turn to come from behind. I did have a bit of a sweat, as the Ks on the turn was the third spade, but I faded the flush and doubled up. It didn’t happen again all night, so I became the spewmaster. It wasn’t pretty.

Hopefully I can provide a better showing for myself in Vegas in a few weeks. I’m looking forward to seeing all of you there, and so is Suzy. We get in relatively early on Thursday and leave Monday, so we’ll be around to party and we’re both planning on playing the tournament. I bet I wouldn’t win a last longer with my wife.

A new episode of the Gambling Tales Podcast is coming up first of next week, with the inimitable Dr. Pauly as our special guest. We’ve got two more episodes in the can after this one, then we need to pick up more material for later shows. If you’ve got a great gambling story, drop us a line at gtpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks to everyone who’s downloaded and publicized the podcast, the response has been great and we’re having a blast doing it. I think starting in the new year we’re gonna try to do some promotional things, maybe with Cake Poker (bonus code GTpodcast!) in a shameless attempt to monetize the podcast and get more listeners.

The Russian and the Medallion

I had seen in him in the cardroom since I sat down, he was obviously a local and was in there a lot. You’ll have that when you’re in the only casino within a couple hours’ drive. I don’t remember his name, it was something obviously Russian or at least Eastern European. We’re gonna go with Andre, even though I know that’s not right, but it’s something in the same phonetic realm at least.

Andre was playing $1/2 No Limit when I sat down, and it took less than an orbit to figure out that he was one of the more dangerous players at the table. He could lay down a hand after he bet it, for one thing, which put him head and shoulders ahead of 70% of the room. He understood the strength of position, too, and had a talent for exploiting weakness in others. In short, he had most of the gears and knew when to use them. He was only at my table that first night for an hour or so before his name got called for a $2/5 seat and he moved on to play at higher stakes.

The next day, we ended up at the same table again, and this time it was for a longer period. I noticed he had on a different sweater, but the medallion was the same. It was a big medallion, and there wasn’t another good word for it. It was probably 3″ in diameter, with a young man’s picture taking up the whole face of it. It hung to the center of his chest on a thick gold rope chain, and it obviously had some significance, as he wore it everywhere. After we’d shared the table for several hours, and shipped a few pots back and forth between us, I finally asked him whose picture it was.

He got very quiet for a moment, and this 50-year-old man, who looked not unlike someone who you’d find drinking straight vodka in a fuzzy hat in a Cold War movie, got misty-eyed at the poker table. He looked down at the medallion and very quietly said “My son.” I let it go at that, not wanting to intrude too much on the real life of someone who I just happened to share the felt with for a little while, but by the mist in his eyes I could see the story of a man who died far too young and left a father behind who will never forget.