And so it goes…

I took the plunge yesterday and moved Sarah’s and my blogs over to the TypePad service.  Frankly, I was just tired of doing the maintenance on the MovableType system myself, and concluded it was sucking my "joy of life".  So while we were traveling back from the South by Southwest festival, I bought a day pass from tmobile for wireless access in the airport and moved our sites.

It was an excellent lesson that I often teach when speaking on technology, but don’t always obey myself: "pay someone to run it, it’s cheaper than doing it yourself".

Of course, I was in a jovial mood anyway; Mindshare had just won a SXSW award for our work for UNICEF.

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On a poker note, Sarah pointed out that I missed my monthly total.  No, I didn’t lose a bunch of money in February and avoided the totals because of shame.  I’m staying pretty much even these days, my poker skills have been improving because of all the time I’ve put in with my poker coach.  I’ve done a fascinating little experiment where I’ve been playing $5 Sit n Go tournaments for the last weeks and have had excellent results.  I’ve played 30 of them since February, placing in the money 60% of the time, and earning a return of 63.61% on my investment.  That’s a total profit of $124 on $179.50 of investment.

I’ve been tracking them religiously with PokerTracker, and have found some weak spots in my skills.  When I come across weaknesses, such as my always improving one-on-one game, I configure up a practice tool called Poker Academy and practice (for free) against AI players to improve my game.  I really do love Poker Academy, the AIs learn from your weaknesses and attempt to exploit them, which is an excellent thing for finding and eliminating your soft spots.

I’ve used Poker Academy for a while now.  In fact if you look in the list of product testers, my name’s there since I helped them find the bugs and improve their latest release.

I’m going to probably move up to $10 tournaments this month sometime after I get the latest round of interviews for my poker article under my belt.

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I’ve been working on an article about the poker underground in Northern Virginia for quite a while now, patiently developing my sources and shaping a story.  I’m close, and anticipate being finished with a full draft in a few weeks.  No word yet on the venue, but you’ll be the first to know.  Unlike most bloggers I’ve spent most of my time on research and sourcing, and I can tell you more about records requests at a courthouse than you’ll ever want to know.  But that’s what you’ve got to do if you want an interesting story, so I don’t mind it.