Personal Dork Assistant

All In

It's a lot easier to make money as a real poker pro now that there's so many wanna-bes out there thanks to the Moneymaker Effect. But fighting through the fish do make it hard to win any given tournament. Nevertheless, the old pros do have the best skillz, not to mention the best one-liners.

Now, what we're doing to counter that is, we're picking places to take stands, sure enough, but we're still picking them, picking them, picking them...

It's like the difference between bacon and eggs for breakfast. The chicken gives his young by giving you the eggs, but the pig is committed.

—Doyle Brunson

Mmm... bacon...

The Rest Of My Life Is So Hard

It's a street in a strange world
I would like to inform my loyal readers (plural optional) that it is very hot and humid in the summer in Taiwan. Perhaps if I had spent more time in Florida I may not mind so much, but there's a reason we moved to California and put up with its idiosyncrasies. One never really has a chance to get acclimated here since all the shops and offices have the AC going full blast. But if you let yourself soak in the natural scheme you just become soaked in sweat within 60 seconds. It's a dilemma.

Maybe it's the Third World
Not that the weather was much better in Shenzhen. Left my computer bag sitting in the corner for three weeks and when it was time to pack up and leave I found that the bag was covered in spots of mold. I don't know how the fungi managed to make nourishment out of ballistic nylon but they seemed happy enough, at least until I washed the crap out of the bag to scrape off the icky stuff. Had to stuff the still-wet bag and the computer into the suitcase for the trip home. Then washed the crap out of the bag again once I got home. Thankfully it all managed to fit in the carry-on. And thankfully the bag's tough enough to stand up to the rough treatment without being worse for the wear.

I want a shot at redemption
After the Hello Kitty magnet/pin giveaways have run their course, the local 7-11 turned to that other famous Japanese cartoon-cat Doraemon for their next promotion. Like the previous promos, you get a random magnet out of the collection of 30 or so varieties whenever you spend more than 77NTD, which just happens to be a bit more than what you might typically spend for lunch. So I've been spending an extra few bucks on the larger drink or the fancy bento to reach the limit. On a hot day, the cold noodles seemed to be the way to go. Had to get an extra tea-egg to hit that 77-dollar limit exactly. Hit the register and found out that the cold noodles were on sale that week so I ended up a few bucks short of a magnet. Could've grabbed a pack of gum or something, I guess, but I wasn't in the mood to buy more random crap.

Spinning in infinity
First typhoon of the season just hit. Unfortunately the light typhoon, despite bringing lots of rain, wasn't quite windy enough to qualify for a typhoon-holiday in Taipei. Sucks.
Amen and Hallelujah!

Lovers In A Canoe

Budweiser is the exclusive beer sponsor of the World Cup, to the chagrin of the fans forced to drink the stuff inside the stadia. Of more interest for the rest of us watching on TV is the KoB's stadium advertising boards alongside the pitch. Anheuser-Busch put the Chinese name "百威" to the signboard in equal prominence to the "Budweiser" name in classic script. An interesting choice of advertising tactic, especially considering the games are being played at 11pm and 3am out here in East Asia. Although the broadcasters do rerun the games multiple times during the day. You think A-B is interested in the China market a little bit? And it's no coincidence that Stanley Roach's been making regular visits, too. You know Morgan Stanley wouldn't be sending out the big guns unless there's big money to be made. Or it's the signal that the fad's just gone over-the-hill.

Spent three weeks at the factory, but thankfully CCTV was broadcasting all the games live, although the coverage was awful. They had live commentators on-site, but with only one non-football person calling the game, there wasn't a color guy to add... color to the play-by-play. So the commentary consisted of barely comprehensible Chinese transliterations of the player names punctuated by an occasional "Ai-Ya!" or "Piao Liang!". The Taiwan coverage was actually significantly better, good enough so that I wasn't tempted to hit the sports bar every night at 3am. They had the color guy who almost seemed to have a clue, plus I had more luck understanding the Taiwan-accent Chinese compared to the governtment-issue Beijing accent of the CCTV guys. Next step would be carrying the English feed on SAP like ESPN does for Champions League games, but I won't be holding my breath for that.