Posted on by mwhybark

Meet "Ben"

Online Poker: Hold ‘Em and Hide ‘Em [NYT]

Excerpts from the opening (Quoted bold italics mine):

“Ben” sleeps five hours a night; the rest of the time he sits at his desk in his “Brooklyn” apartment playing online poker. He won $5…

“Ben” quit his “teaching” job five months ago and now makes around $100 an hour. Five days a week, he clocks 10-hour shifts of Texas Hold ‘Em on his Dell laptop computer. With reggae in the background and coffee mug in hand, he studies his competitors who sit in London, Copenhagen, Los Angeles and elsewhere, while the dealer in Costa Rica tosses cards.

Sure, thing, “Ben“. We know where “Brooklyn” is too, and it’s in the garden state, with a majestic view of the Pulaski Skyway. Such a transparent pseudonym.

Posted on by mwhybark

Barbered

I told my barber “Three and a half – four inches on top, shorter on the sides.”

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He misheard that, somehow, as “Three-fourths of an inch on top, shorter on the sides.” I did not realize what had happened until he clapped clipper to pate, and by then, we were committed. Oh well. I hear the military is fashionable this season.

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Posted on by mwhybark

Danelope Week Part IV

danelope_site_avatar_head.jpgThe preceding post was also inspired by Mr. Lope’s generous entry commemmorating this year’s St. Patrick’s. I had no idea choral music was a favored listening habit.

Strangely, hoever, searching his site only yeilded fruitful results on the words sing and karaoke, a discipline for which Mr. Lope has previously expressed his fondness.

Thanks. This is hard.

Posted on by mwhybark

Bare Knuckle Boxers

The Bare Knuckle Boxers are my old Irish music rock band, in whch I played this electric mandolin. I also ran the old version of the website, which is worth rummaging through. Last night Greg (the other ex-mando slinger of BKB) and Karel (ex-guitarist) dropped in on the current version of the band at Mulleady’s in Magnolia. Mulleady’s was always a fun place to play and they sounded just fine.

The occasion was a CD release; the recording features the new lineup and while I have just finished ripping it to listen to it, I have not yet played it. As I was ripping the disc I dug into my archives to find material that the original lineup of the band recorded.

I hadn’t listened to the older stuff for a while; it sounds good! I’m looking forward to hearing the new stuff.

These three songs were recorded at Gravelvoice in May, 1999. The songs ‘All for Me Grog’ and ‘The Gallowglass’ were released on a split single (genuine vinyl!) by Seattle character Wally Hargrave of Estate Records. Haven’t run into him lately – wonder what’s doin’ at the Estate?

Posted on by mwhybark

Time for a refresher

Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes – How to Share Libraries is a hoary how-to covering a way to provide full-user-rights access to a single song collection.

I’m reviewing this to see if there’s a way to rip simultaneously to a networked storage area from two or more machines and have the new song data be simultaneously available to all the copies of iTunes running. Currently, System A and System B write file data to the Library files separately and locally.

The obvious solution is to go under the hood and set up symbolic links such that all the iTunes instances write to the same file. The question is, “Can iTunes manage record-locking, or does it rely on a file-locking approach? What if there is no locking protocol at all? Does that corrupt the database?”

Generally, I suppose the right way to work this out is to test it empirically, since it’s easy to rebuild the database if there’s a problem by smply dragging the files into the iTunes window.

One supposes that disabling iTunes’ “keep my music folder organized” option might be a bright idea before moving ahead wth the test.

Posted on by mwhybark

Find the bagman

Neighbor Search: interactive search interface with embedded links that allows you to search, by neighborhood, name, or proximity, to see the publicly-recorded presidential campaign donations in the area you’re looking at.

In the search results, clicking a name or a donor’s street address will result in a new set of results. Neat!

I doubt, however, that some of the donors would be happy to know that their primary residential address is available in this manner. I found, for example, the home addresses of some recognizable local business execs in my first set of search results.

The lesson? When you give money to a campaign, you should report a P. O. Box as your address.

[via Monkeyfilter]