Shabbir's Diary

And it was good.

So very soon I get a new, hopefully permanent office.

I currently work either at home, where I have poor output because I refuse to be dismissive of my son when he comes into my office, or at Starbucks where you can't hear me on the phone because of their music, or downtown in an office suite where there's a different desk for me every day.  I don't want a perm. office downtown since I'd have to be $2k for a crappy little room that I'd have to fight commuters daily for.

So instead I've just been waiting....and waiting....and waiting.  Finally something opened up in my neighborhood, 4.5 blocks from my house and right past my favorite little diner.  My dream life involves me going to breakfast at a diner super early reading the newspaper, then going to work, all of it walking, no car or metro involved.  I was happy to walk as far as 20 or more blocks to work, but finding something just down the street pretty much made it nirvana for me.  It's also pretty cheap as far as offices go.

Weirdly enough I just saw "American Gangster" on the plane the other night coming back from DC.  In it Denzel Washington's character has this pattern of going to breakfast at a little diner in Harlem and then starting work.  I thought it was was funny we had the same idea of perfect.

Funniest thing I heard all day

Some of you know that I take my poker game very seriously.  I've been working for four years on my game, through books, occasional coaches, analysis, and tons of practice.  I recently picked up a new poker coach and he said something that I found hysterical.

"If you enter the pot and your opponents aren't afraid of you, then you shouldn't enter the pot."

He didn't mean that my opponents should be afraid of my big cards.  He meant that they needed to have no idea what I might be playing and be unable to deduce my hand, and therefore not know how to play their own cards.

He advocates a play style that I recognize from watching from Sam Farha on High Stakes Poker, where he can just as easily be betting absolutely nothing as much as the stone cold nuts.  He analyzed about 5,000 hands and told me I'm not bluffing enough (if ever) and that I should really be mixing up my game.  The problem being that when I enter a pot and people know I'm strong, they know to fold.  Playing with me for an hour or two and being slightly observant will tell you this.

So his point was that I'm predictable.  Being predictable makes it easy to play around me. 

And he gave me homework.  I don't mind.

Crushing the $3/$6 tables

It being his birthday, I'm going to give my buddy Chris Hannigan an unusual present.  I'm going to freely admit now that in the past, when I said, "You can't make money at $3/$6 limit poker", I was full of crap.  Chris always disagreed with me. 

I dropped down to the $3/$6 tables the other night when I couldn't get a seat at the $6/$12 tables and ran into a hot deck of cards that I knew how to play well.  I really have, for years, said that $3/$6 couldn't beat the rake, but that's really code for "it's hard for good hands to live until the river".  Which is entirely true.  You may have a set on the flop, but someone with a gutshot straight draw will call you all the way down with their four outs.

So I made a lot of money that session, but I have no illusions that betting a made hand hard to the river with two, three, or four callers is mentally healthy.  Lots of hands will get cracked over time, I just happened to get lucky that night.  What I really appreciated was that the mistakes at that level stand out so well, that I really enjoyed cataloging them and was able to keep multiple player profiles in my head.

(As an aside, I think I saw someone take chips off the table again, but I didn't catch him in the act, so I kept my mouth shut)

Some of the mistakes I saw at this level included:

1. Drawing without sufficient pot odds
2. Playing a made hand without being able to read the board and realize there are lots of other better potential made hands out there
3. Never releasing big pairs
4. Not seeing three cards of the same suit on the board (flush) and betting anyway
5. Not taking into account another player's tightness/looseness

I have to say, it's much more enjoyable studying my opponents when I'm winning money than when I'm losing it. And yet after about 3 hours I found myself getting tired and playing my cards mechanically, so I left.

I think I'll stay down here a while.

My first 90 days of an iPhone

I traded my Cingular 8125 (an HTC product based around Windows Mobile) for an Apple iPhone.  Despite the fact that the 8125 perfectly integrates with my Microsoft Exchange server and my iPhone does not, I'm thrilled with the switch.  Here's a quick summary of my behavior changes and what I like about the new phone.

Podcasts
Despite owning several iPods I've never really gotten into the habit of storing up and listening to podcasts, despite being deeply appreciative of radio.  I switched to the iPhone and set it to take podcasts on a daily basis and I'm entirely hooked.  When I'm commuting for any trip longer than 10 minutes I've got the headphones in my ear and I'm listening to one of these podcasts.  Note that I'm partial to long form radio stories, not breaking news.  I tried listening to the "news of the hour" but scanning the page of Google news (on my iPhone's browser) is always more efficient than listening to a podcast.  However the long form of things like "This American Life" work perfectly for the medium on a lot of levels.

My current favorite podcasts from most to least favorite are:

• This American Life
• Fresh Air (NPR)
• 60 Minutes (direct audio recording of the show)
• The Moth Podcast (true life standup comedy pieces of 10 minutes or so)
• Two Plus Two poker podcast
• Radiolab
• PRI's Studio 360
• American Public Media's Marketplace
• Newsweek On Air

Websurfing
I surf like a fiend now.  All the issues that exist with a small screen go away with Safari's ability to "stretch" a screen with your fingertips.  Websites not designed for the iPhone are effectively surfed with the browser, and websites designed for the iPhone look beautiful.

E-mail and scheduling
Though my old phone could schedule from the device and perfectly send and receive e-mail, it turns out that the function of "accepting a meeting" was not something that I really needed to do immediately when someone invited me to something.  I just save those for when I can get to a computer and so far the world hasn't ended.  I've also been running my e-mail through Gmail and syncing it to the iPhone and it's been working fine.

Weirdly, my schedule is updated whenever I dock the phone with my laptop, and you might think that's insufficient, but I've found it works just fine for me.

SMS
The iPhone lets you maintain multiple simultaneous conversations over SMS.  It makes SMS a pleasure to use, and maintains the context of the conversation over time.  Beautiful.

Google Maps
Are you insane?  This is great.  It triangulates your location with celltowers.  I've ridden down Market Street in San Francisco in a cab, watching it update my location accurately over and over again.  I used it to locate casinos on the strip for upcoming trips.

And on top of all that, the interface is pleasurable to use, even for the simplest tasks.  It's a million times more reliable than my Windows Mobile device.  I won't ever go back.

Nap + Kidtime + Dogs + Wife = good

Last Saturday was one of those litmus days for what kind of person you are.

I woke up with Moishe and took him to the Chinese bakery for dim sum for breakfast and some gear from the hardware store for some home improvement projects.  Then we came home and Sarah woke up, cobbled together something to eat and we munched, hung out, and I took the dogs for their walk.   We then all took a nap in our big bed.  We rolled out of bed around 4 or 4:30pm and went down to Mountain View for a friend's birthday party with lots of other toddlers.  Low key, and we rolled out of there after 3 or 4 hours, came back home and Sarah and I put Moishe to bed and watched a little tv while knitting.  I think I played poker online and then we went to bed.

Every day can't be like that or I'd go crazy from lack of accomplishment, but a few days later when I looked back on it, it was darn good.  I caught one of my favorite cartoonists saying you should live each day as if it was your last, and I was reminded of the famous Japanese film, Afterlife that Sarah rented it a few years ago.   "Afterlife" suggested that when people die they have to re-enact their favorite moment of life, film it, and that's the only memory they take with them to eternity. 

I thought that day would have made a pretty good Afterlife film.