I just increasingly can’t shake off the feeling that I could be doing something more productive, both financially and mentally, with my time than trying to laugh off the bad beats of the low limit grind. I’ve just managed to donk off $470 while chasing a $500 bonus, which means for about 40 hours of toil I get a princely $30 added to my bankroll. Which sucks ever so slightly.
I have a seemingly continuous series of ideas floating through my head at one time or another, all to do with making money on the web, or at the very least learning some new technologies and applying them in some fashion: whether it’s profitable or not, I am starting to think it will be more useful than repeatedly flopping the nuts only to lose on the river.
In a way, I would miss playing, though. Partly because at the back of my head I just know I’m still a good player. I’ve become very lazy, though, and I’m possibly the only player left not making use of all the wonderful tools that allow even the most average of players find an edge somewhere, so maybe I have only myself to blame, but then again if it comes down to which toolset you use to get the biggest edge, then I’m just no longer interested. What I would miss most, perhaps, is the community at ITH, which I wouldn’t be nearly as involved in, and depending on which of my ideas I pluck out of my head first, I would have to offer to give up my moderating duties there too. I’d be like a normal poster again - can you imagine anything worse? 
I guess since I probably would then no longer talk about poker or music at all on this blog I’d have to find a new name for it. But maybe that’s no bad thing, really.
October 12th, 2006, posted by Neil in Poker and Vague rants ·
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Unforunately, no-one seems to have written a plugin that will allow me to list all songs played on a certain date, but I’ll put a list together of the whole day’s effort later on.
So far I’ve taken the wrapping off a Stephen Duffy collection after several months of not letting it get to the top of the “play me next” pile, which I’ve followed up with a Boo Hewerdine album I bought for a quid last year some time. Nothing particularly brave or experimental so far, then, but I’m hearing all these songs for the first time, and that’s my basic aim. I wonder if I can experience 100 new songs by the end of the day…
October 12th, 2006, posted by Neil in Music ·
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Today is the anniversary of John Peel’s last live broadcast, and BBC are marking the occasion, as they did last year, with a day of broadcasting dedicated to Peel. Which basically I hope means a day of not pissing about having inflatable ego fighting contests, and concentrating on playing decent music - things Peel managed with effortless ease all through his career, but something which, alas, apparently requires his death for the rest of Radio 1 to be able to manage once every 365 days.
In the spirit of the occasion, I will be unearthing lost gems from my music collection. I absolutely won’t listen to any albums that last.fm reckons I’ve played in the last 6 months, and hopefully I’ll be able to fill an entire day with songs I’ve bought or acquired somewhere along the way but have so far left languishing at the bottom of piles, never to be heard. I’ll remove any shrink-wrap I find. It’s going to be a great day.
You can see what I’m listening to all day over on the right of the page.
October 12th, 2006, posted by Neil in Music ·
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In the news this week, has been that Britain’s jails are full to bursting. In fact they’re so full that even the Lord Chief Justice can only get a room for a couple of nights at the most. Shocking, really.
We currently have just under 80,000 heinous felons locked up in England and Wales, of whom about one hundred are probably trying to escape at any one time, god knows how many are rioting, and let’s not even talk about the showers. I know, soft target, but I couldn’t help myself. Which is something you might hear in those showers, I suppose.
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October 10th, 2006, posted by Neil in Vague rants ·
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It’s a sad indictment of our modern post-post-ironic-post-MTV-post-dancehell1 and high-tea (high) society that poets find it so hard to make a living. Except the crap ones who write the special forms of poetry that don’t scan and force you to place the emPHAsis on the wrong WORDS and syllables and then just run on to the end in a soppy, sappy mess - I’d imagine there’s money in that old rope. Not sure how you get into that line of work, though. It was never offered as an option in my careers education, I remember that much.
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October 9th, 2006, posted by Neil in Vague rants ·
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Logged in this morning to see that my blog ranking at Technoranki has moved from a tantalising 8 to a highly improbable 9. Out of 9, if you don’t mind! (There aren’t any 10-rated blogs). I’m now a stone’s throw (distance and weight of stone not yet known) from the list of 50 top blogs. According to britblog. Which might not even be very popular itself, I suppose.
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October 9th, 2006, posted by Neil in General ·
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