Hopefully I’ve restricted comments in a way that will suppress some of the more pathetic comments that find their way through the spam nuke net.

Just in case anyone were to find this site while looking for info on me - I’d probably rather they weren’t confronted by that sort of nonsense.

February 19th, 2008, posted by Administrator in General and Vague rants · No comments

You might not have realised this from reading the site, but over 12,000 comments have been submitted to this site since it went live. 12,000. I know!

How popular am I?

The answer is that I am staggeringly popular with spammers. Of those 12k comments submitted, 96% of them have been discarded as spam, leaving a mere 4% as genuine attempts to add something to the site. Put another way, 24 out of every 25 comments I get are no more than

January 12th, 2007, posted by Neil in General and Vague rants · No comments

9 years of email
ignored for just 30 days
oops - all deleted

November 23rd, 2006, posted by Neil in Vague rants · 3 Comments

As I was driving into work, my musical enjoyment was interrupted, as it occasionally is, by a completely irrelevant travel report. Now, as we all now, travel reports, when they bother with them, are either about a 20-mile jam on the motorway you’ve just joined, or a problem that has now cleared on a motorway 100 miles away from where you are at the time. Or both. But that’s by-the-by.

The real point of interest in this report was that it was apparently all for me. Apparently, my progress was going to be easier, because my slip road off the motorway had cleared. As you can imagine, this was a blessed relief to me, even though I wasn’t planning on using my slip road today, because, well, I don’t need to go into it, surely, do I? I mean there’s nothing worse than having your slip road and then seeing other people use it, is there. I mean really.

I don’t know where this deep personalisation of reporting has come from, or when the shift from telling me that “the slip road is now clear” to the reporter saying “your slip road is now clear” began, but I can’t be the only one who finds it at best irritating, and at worst confounding: train announcements now talk about “your next station stop”, as if it somehow belongs to all the passengers. Quite apart from the fact that as a passenger I only really care about stops at stations (I don’t recall ever hearing an announcement about my next “signal stop” or next “random unscheduled stop 100 yards outside the station”), in what sense is it mine? It only comes close to being correct when the station in question is where I will be leaving the train, in which case it’s still nonsense for all the passengers who will be left on the train as it departs. Unless “your next station stop is the final destination” of course, but let’s not get started on that one just yet, shall we?

I can vaguely remember not noticing this phenomenon until a few years ago, when I was watching QVC. There seemed to be then, and still is, a style guideline for that channel that tells presenters to always use the word “your” whenever possible. I imagine the theory behind it is to personalise the broadcast. If, as a presenter, you can reach out into someone’s home by referring to them directly, perhaps they’ll like you more, and vicariously like whatever tat you’re flogging at the time. And then perhaps they’ll buy more of it.

Perhaps it’s just as well that I don’t watch a lot of QVC these days (not that I ever did, mind) because it really, really, really annoys me. “You’ve got your on/off switch here, your battery compartment here, and of course you’ve got your memory card in here”. No, no, no, I don’t have any of those things. I just don’t. On my camera, yes, I have those things, all of them, and I suppose they’re mine as a property they inherit from being a part of the camera, a larger object that I do own, but I don’t have the ones on the camera you’re holding, any more than you own the corresponding parts of my camera. They’re just not mine. They’re not even yours! “I’ve got my on/off switch here, my battery compartment here”… you wouldn’t dream of selling it like that. Or how about “my dog’s got his on/off switch here, his battery compartment here”… No. That just won’t do either.

On the other hand, if I do have my on/off switch there and so on, does that mean I can phone QVC sometime and ask for my camera back?

November 8th, 2006, posted by Neil in Vague rants · No comments

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 · 5 Comments

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.

Read more…

October 10th, 2006, posted by Neil in Vague rants · No comments