Christopher Hamilton

Today was like Christmas all over again.

My new iPod arrived today a whole week and a half before I expected it. If that wasn’t enough to make my day the new Digital SLR camera I ordered at the end of September arrived too. I had been told to expect it at some point in January.

W00t!!!!!

On Christmas Eve my damn iPod decided it didn’t like me anymore.
I went to power it on with the intention of listening to music as I was falling asleep only to discover that instead of playing anything to hep me relax it was showing me a little folder with an exclamation point that basically says “I’m screwed! Get me fixed!”.

That was a nice Christmas kick in the junk.

So I got home from the parents last night and tried to fix it by going through all of the Apple DIY Support steps and managed to get nowhere. Then to make me really happy the hard drive started to sound like it had been dragged outside and thoroughly beaten.

I went through the Apple support site looking for the next step, which I assumed would be to send it back. First they wanted me to check if it was still under warranty. I thought it was, but I thought wrong! It expired 6 months ago. So it’s out of warranty….ok, it can’t be that much to put a new hard drive in it.

Wrong again jackass

£250+ to basically have it replaced with the same model, or £220 to get a new one with colour screen and video..hmmm tough call

So at some point over the next week or two, I will be the owner of a shiny new black video iPod.

I’m a little pissed off because I could really have done without the extra spending, but I’m looking forward to having a new toy to play with. I might try to buy a hard drive at some point in the future and fit it into my old iPod so I can use it as a backup, or then again I might not. I’ll just have to wait and see.

The worst thing though is I’m going to have a week or two without any music on the way too and from work.

That sucks!

I got home from work today and for some reason I was exceptionally tired. I haven’t been sleeping that well recently, but I hadn’t had a particularly busy day so there was no major reason for it. I crashed at 7pm and woke up about 45 minutes ago. The 5 hour “nap” was a stupid idea. I should have just tried to stay awake and gone to bed early. So now it’s about 1am and I’m wide awake.

I think I might play some poker and try to catch a few more hours sleep so I’m not a total zombie at work tomorrow.

With office Parties, OU Assignments, and building pc’s I’ve not had a great deal of things to write about. To be honest I still don’t but I thought I’d post anyway.

We had another poker night at our place on Saturday. It was a decent turnout with 8 people playing. That’s not too bad when there are times we can only get 5 people, (and 3 of us live there). Everyone seems to like the idea of playing short tournaments with blind increases every 20 minutes. So with our tournament structure set and everyone at the table with there beers our poker night began.

***

That afternoon I’d gone to our local pool/snooker hall with my Dad and little sisters boyfriend for a few beers and a lot of games of pool. My day started as I meant it to go on, with a Guinness for breakfast. We don’t go out to play pool often so it’s always a fun day of drinking, and verbally abusing each other for missing simple shots. After about 4 or 5 hours of Guinness and pool we had to call it a day. They were going to some birthday party that night and I had to go home to setup and play some poker.

***

After drinking all day I was at a slight disadvantage, Dave and Barry are pretty good players so I needed to have my top game to beat them. The first tournament was over fairly quickly with my bubbling out in 3rd place. The top 2; Barry and Dave.

When we setup the 2nd tournament I felt a lot better and really played some decent cards. We had a few notable hands in this tournament with Dave catching the only Quads of the evening to crush someone and dump them out of the tournament. After about an hour and a half of play it got down to the last 3 players. The short stack pushed, I called, and he was gone. I can’t remember what the cards were, but I’m sure I was behind when we flipped them over. (I should really have taken notes)

Dave and I heads were heads up. He knows I love heads up games and asks me for advice sometimes when he’s HU in Stars tournaments. I get very aggressive and could literaly be playing with anything. So with that in mind, hands he probably would have played normally he folded because I’d constantly raise. It’s a great way to steal pots if you can keep up the aggression.

We were pretty level in chips and in the end we were both all-in. I flipped over JT. Dave flips over KK

Oh crap…..

The flop brings 2 hearts. One more, I only need one more.

Turn….A

Yes!!

No more hearts!

River was a blank.

W00t! I’d won the second tournament of the evening.

We played another 4 tournaments finishing around 4.30am With me having doubled my tournament buy-ins. Not bad for home tournaments that was dropping in numbers as the evening progressed.

***

My good play/fortune continued into my only other game of poker this week which was a small 1 table SNG on PokerStars last night. I played very confidently and once I got in front never looked back and ended up winning it pretty quickly. My game is so much more improved than last month where I nearly crippled my bankroll. I’m playing down at the smaller limits to build my bankroll back up and hopefully I continue to win and make correct decisions to help me improve my game.

I’m contemplating either moving the site to Typepad so I don’t have to worry about hosting it myself, or rebuilding the server I’m using to one that I’m more comfortable with.

I’m not really sure what to do at the moment. The idea of hosting it offsite is very appealing since it means I won’t have to constantly run updates on the server, although having my own server gives me a lot of freedom to do what I want.

One way or another, there’s probably going to be some downtime between Christmas and New Year while I cary out one of the options.

I might even look around Six Apart’s Site to see if there are any hosts who have Movable Type simply because the software rawks.

…..

In fact, fuck it! I’m going to continue to use my own server. So at some point over the next few weeks the site will be down while I upgrade the server and reimport all the crap on this site.

Decision made….yeeehaaaa!!!