Shabbir's Diary

College Park illegal cardroom robbed

Here we go again.

A couple of years ago the Fairfax County Police got a hard on for raiding poker games that took a rake.  Then when they ran out of games to raid in their jurisdiction, some enterprising young fellows started robbing games throughout the area.  Then it got quiet for a while and all the local operators got paranoid.

We appear to have some entrepreneurs again, and the method is similar to the previous spate of robberies.

Late one night last weekend in a quiet College Park neighborhood, police answered a call about an armed robbery. Once there they found what looked like the center of a professional gambling ring. They also found 12 men, missing their cash, their cellphones -- and their pants.  See WP article

The discussion on the local forums says the pants tricks is just to save time.  Last time games were robbed the robbers didn't want to take the time to pat everyone down, so they just took their pants.  These aren't speculation, this is what the previously robbed home game players said happened to them.

Ironically enough I just found a new "Big Game" here in town and have planned a trip out with some buds for Thursday night.  I was comforted when the owner described the approach as having security cameras that monitor you up the stairs as you approach.  I've got plenty of poker going on now, so I'm not really in need of that level of risk in my life right now.

 

No title necessary

My stepmother and I were sitting over breakfast at the IHOP.  Moishe and I were eating my breakfast while my mom was eating her one good meal of the day.

Mom: "So I've purchased a cemetary plot.  Do you want to go see it?"
Me: "No, that's morbid."
Mom: "Well I think it's really pretty.  It's in a very nice secluded spot with no threat of development."
...
Me: "So when are we seeing Zareena [my sister] tonight?"

And thus it was that I discovered my stepmother has a better relationship with her own death than I do.  If you pray to something, pray to the gods of cancer treatment for me.  She's headed back to the Mayo clinic this month.

Yet another New Year's resolution, no more CDs or iTunes

I've got a handful of New Year's resolutions, most of which I'm not going to tell you about.  They're really not resolutions, as much as 2007 goals.  I do these at work too, and run them by my business parters and senior managers.  I figure if you don't want the  boss to go off on a tangent and make your life difficult, you can get your shot at least once year when he asks you what he should be working on this year.

So I made up some personal goals for the year which mostly consist of tracking our money in different ways and starting to do those computations about when we can retire.  We're not close to retirement today, and we sock away the maximum every year, but it's helpful to actually see the end target point 25 years before you get there, so you can do something about it if you don't like where you're going to end up.

The one goal I will tell you about has to do with stuff.  As in, I have too much of it.  Sarah went on a tear (which I approve of) this month and started trying to get rid of stuff we don't need in order to lighten us up.  One of the first candidates are books.  Typically I'd just as soon give the books to goodwill, but Sarah noticed that some of them are being sold for a decent amount of money on Amazon.  So she started listing them.

$1,400 net profit and 160 books later, I think I know what I want to do with my book collection.  Then I started eyeing our CD collection.  I thought, hey, that's just sitting in the attic.  Typically I buy a CD and rip it and put it in a box in the attic, keeping it on our server.  Or I buy it on iTunes.  And all this so I can put it on my iPod.   Seems like an expensive hobby, doesn't it?

A few months ago we were playing cards at Matt's house (where I totally cleaned him out of money, wine, and whiskey), and he showed me his Rhpasody music service.  The interface, compared to iTunes, really blows.  But as I looked at our books flying out the door, and our cash building up in our Amazon account, I thought, I wonder how good the Rhapsody collection is?  I started looking through our CDs to see what they had.  And the answer is, they have almost everything we're currently buying.  Suddenly $15 / month for a Rhapsody compatible device sounds pretty good. 

The crux moment came when we were watching the Ricky Gervais HBO show, "Extras" the other night.  The closing song is a short Cat Stevens tune.  I suddenly had a craving to listen to some Cat Stevens.  Well iTunes would happily sell me a greatest hits album, but now I own the freaking thing.  Why not just use the service to download all the Cat Stevens I want, and then next week, when I have a craving for a new or old band, do the same with them?  Why burden myself with all this stuff?  You don't own stuff, stuff owns you, says Tyler Durden.  I get less stuff, I get more freedom.

And that's my goal for 2007.  I'm going to buy less music, and sell back as many of my books as possible.

For my iPod replacement, I've tentatively settled on the Creative Zen V Plus.  This is particularly ironic, since I predicted a year ago that Creative was doomed in the mp3 player market.  And here I am buying it.  Little did I realize that someone was going to produce an all-you-can-eat music service with everything.

NYT: What $1.2 trillion can buy

There's not much that gets me mad anymore.  I'm just waiting for Bush to leave office so I can stop rolling my eyes.  But this story in the New York Times really puts the cost of the war in Iraq in perspective:

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

I just can't believe this waste.  It's not clear that we've made ourselves or the region any safer because of it.  We haven't secured an ongoing supply of petroleum, either.  It just seems like a waste of money.

How to reach Shabbir

Someone commented that they wanted to e-mail me but there was no entry on my blog about how to do that.  So here's some guidance in order of my preference:

1. Write me by e-mail: I much prefer to be approached by e-mail.  You can send e-mail to shabbir -at- safdar.net.  You will be prompted to answer a challenge-response code after which you will be authorized to send me e-mail.  If I don't answer the e-mail, I recommend that you...
2. Call me.  Yes, call me.  You can get a number through Jangl by following this link: http://callme.jangl.com/shabbir@safdar.net     It will give you a temporary phone number to use that masks my real phone number, but connect you to me.
3. If you're selling something, don't just call me to pitch me.  I don't want to talk to you for the first time over the phone.  You need to send me a piece of direct mail to my DC office that's clever enough to get by my screeners.  If that works, then it has to be attention grabbing enough keep me from tossing it when I get my packet of mail and weed out the junk.

"But Shabbir, you must almost never receive any good products this way!  What's the point?"

Exactly, that is the point.  I find products when they bubble up online and through the communities I follow, not because I get pitched.  If you have to pitch it to me and I haven't found you already, then by definition you're not ready to talk to me yet.

The end of an era..

Tonight I sold the BMW on Craigslist and have already placed the Harley with a friend to be sold for a fee.  I am out of the motorcycle life.

Many people have asked me if I regret it, and occasionally I think what fun it would be to ride, but at the same time, I can't help but think that it doesn't matter how fun or how careful I was, I could still get creamed in such a way as to really ruin my family's lives, even if I survive.

The proverbial camel straw was an article about a couple that wore full gear and drove carefully on their bike.  Inseparable since high school, they were out riding one day when a woman struck them.  Inseparable in life, they died within hours of each other at the hospital.  I realized that it didn't matter how careful I was, or how much gear I wore, I was just a walking percentage.  It didn't hurt that I was starting to approach the age where my reflexes and vision will deteriorate.

This is the cause of many middle aged bike accidents, because riders don't appreciate their slight perceptual deterioration.  So I'm done with the bikes.  I'll miss them, but I'm sure I'd miss my family more if I got plowed.

Too much spam made me do something extreme...

...I've today added a challenge-response to my personal e-mail.  I could never do this at work, but personally I get e-mail that's overwhelmingly spam. I've actually lost quite a bit of stuff in my mailbox because I couldn't find it through all the spam.

The system I chose is not new, it's called spamarrest, and was mentioned recently by John Battelle.  I investigated and found it did exactly what I needed.  I took my personal server and told it to sit on all incoming e-mail, instead of forwarding it to me.  Then I set up SpamArrest to login to my server, pickup my e-mail, and then put it in "e-mail jail" if I haven't approved the sender.

While in jail, the sender gets an e-mail back (that I customized) with a challenge that resembles those "wavy letters" you see all over the web when signing up for something new.  If you do fill it out correctly, your mail gets through and you get pre-authorized forever (or until I ban you).  If you don't, your e-mail stays in quarantine (in jail).  I can browse all the held e-mail in case I really need something as well.

It's a good system, but I'm dreading the problems it's going to cause my parents, who aren't going to be able to fill out the challenge-response.  What's funny is that for years science fiction writers have talked about how we'll all have agents screening our incoming communications for us. 

Well, this is it.  Now I just have to teach it to automatically RSVP for poker games for me...

World Series Of Poker schedule for 2007

The WSOP schedule is out, or it's been out for a while and I just noticed it.  Either way, it's pretty interesting.  Since I am not, as many of you might suspect, a wildly rich man, for me to play in a $1,500 event I have to save for a few months to get the buyin together.

This year there's several $1,500 NL no-rebuy events again, but I'm particularly entranced by a couple of non-traditional games.  One is the June 9th $2,500 HORSE event.  HORSE is a mix of games, played one per round.  It's pretty fun, and impossible to win unless you're a decent player or wildly lucky at 5 different games.

The other is a $1,000 SHOE event, on July 1.  It's an amazingly small buyin, but I think that's because they're worried about the turnout given the mix of non-Hold'em games.  SHOE is 7-Card Stud, Hold 'em, Omaha Hi/Lo, and Stud Hi/Lo played one game per round.  It doesn't say, but presumably that's a Limit tournament.  I think that would be a ton of fun to play and not too wildly expensive.

Thoughts on my home game question

Chris, one of the hosts of my regular Friday night poker game, had an interesting perspective on the home game dilemna I mentioned previously.  We discussed it in IM today, and he authorized me to post it here. 

I was contemplating the winner's dilemma in a game like ours.  Although I think the notion of a "high-water" mark is a myth, I agree that there is limited expected value in continuing to play against equally skilled opponents once one is up.

Except for one important benefit: practice.  In the case of our game, you have four, possibly five, players who are consistent winners at low- and middle-limit stakes in casinos.  When one considers how few players win in the long run, that is pretty impressive.  The opportunity to hone skills against them at $1/2, instead of $5/10 at the Taj, is indispensible.

Sage words, I think.

Poker results for the last 3 years

A little insomnia caused me to investigate my poker results from the last three years to see how I've stacked up.  I realized I never posted 2005, so I went back and dug it all up.

2005 was before I really started learning no limit, I lost a total of $462, comprising of $198 live and $264 online.  Of course back in 2004 I lost $1,825 live and $717 online, for a total of $2,542.  So let's table this baby up:

Year	Live	Online	TTL
2004	-$1,825 (360h)	-$717 (389h)	-$2,542 (749h)
2005	-$198 (95h)	-$264 (146h)	-$462 (241h)
2006	+$1,508 (217h)	-$1,564 (214h)	-$56 (431h)

I think the right way to interpret this is to say that I suck 45 times less than I did when I started playing poker.  There's also another factor: fun.  This really hit me at my usual Friday night game.  It's a low stakes game, $1/$2 with a full kill, limit hold'em.  After two hours I was up $60, which statistically is my high water mark.  (Katie thinks this is crap, by the way, she thinks I suck when I win an entire buyin.)

Anyway according to my statistical history I'm up as much as I'm likely to be, but the table is still full and my friends are all still here.  The question comes to this: do I leave?  I can't stay here and not play without being rude.  In fact, there's also nothing to do.  But if I leave I won't get to hang out with the guys, which is fun.  But there's no column in my end of year stats for fun, just dollar results.

An interesting quandary, in my opinion.  What would you do in that situation?  I know what Sklansky says, "Don't quit winners", but what if we're all pretty evenly matched?  Then I've just experienced the upswing, should I sit around and wait for the downswing?  What would you do?  Leave it in the comments.