I posted recently about how each new year brings with it fresh surprises and keeps you on your toes. Well with that in mind I decided for the first time to plough my blog archives and discovered that a year ago I was coming back from a blogging absence and trying to write a robot poker playing program that would make me a millionaire.
Hmm.
Well now that I’m back from a blogging absence let’s now talk about the poker assistance program I’m trying to write just now. I recently discovered that the online poker software I use keeps a handy archive of every game you ever play. What’s more, it’s in a nice format that can be mined by a computer program should you decide to write one.
My ultimate aim is for it to automatically detect betting patterns in opponents and flag them up as you play.
The reason I mention this is that whilst coding said program this lunchtime, it confirmed for me something that I posted about the other day - the futility of taking notes in low stakes poker.
The data has revealed that in the past four weeks of poker playing, I have been up against no less than five-hundred and sixty different opponents. There’s no way you could ever keep track of them all without computer assistance.
Enter ‘Holdem HUD’ - patent not pending. I’ll keep you posted.
July 22nd, 2005
It’s great having a back garden full of long grass. I don’t know why short grass is so popular. People just don’t seem to stop and think things like “Hey, why am I actually cutting this stuff?”. If they did, they’d be happier, and have much more free time to spend with their families, albeit probably not in the garden.
The best bit is that once you’ve learned to love long grass in your garden, it will annoy people who come to visit. And that’s how we ended up with my father-in-law coming round a couple of days ago to spend four hours cutting the back garden down so that the fence was higher than the lawn once more. Hurray!
While he was getting ready to leave though, a nice man came round from the council and said that he wanted to upgrade our bathroom with a new bath, toilet and sink for free. It was explained to him that the house owner wasn’t in, and that it was bought anyway and not a council house. The nice man insisted that it didn’t matter - all the houses on the street were getting it due to the newly allocated council budget for home bathroom upgrades.
He then took a few photos of my bathroom and left, promising to come back next Tuesay at 8am with a new bathroom and some workmen.
This seemed a little odd, so the missus decided to ask the neighbours about it, being the jaded cynic that she is. Next door claimed not to have been offered a bathroom, but had read about ‘bogus workmen’ in the local paper. I’m not sure what a bogus workman is, or what they had done to get themselves in the paper but it seemed to make things even more suspicious.
A quick phone call to the council yielded the pleasantly philosphical response, “You don’t get anything for free in this world.”
I took this to mean that as far as they’re concerned we ain’t getting a bathroom.
This leaves some unanswered questions.
Who is this man? Why did he take photographs of my toilet? Will he be coming back on Tuesday at 8am? Will he actually want to fit a bathroom, and if so will he end up trying to charge me?
I don’t think I’ll be letting him in anyway.
July 22nd, 2005
