tilt!

the parallels of the last post with tilt are incredible!

for example, you think you have made some improvements with regards to not tilting like a special needs monkey only to find yourself playing at 4am, trying to dig yourself out of a hole, as your accounts become emptier than your soul.

It's only when things get tough, do you see how far you've come and so you always need to be on guard even when you think you're getting somewhere. It's a lot easier to tilt in poker than irl for me. The only parallel I found was with driving. Other drivers used to make my blood boil! I noticed a strong correlation between peace with the stupidity and homicidal nature of drivers and an increase in poker winnings. I should probably start driving around town on Sundays to see how i am doing with my equanimity.

equanimity

I just learnt this word. It's a cool word. It means having calmness and composure, especially in a difficult situation. Every day this week I will try to put myself in a difficult situation with the express intention of remaining calm and composed and clear of thought. I will let you know how I get on.

Tomorrow, I am going for a meeting where i will be showing someone how to set up some analytic tools. I don't remember how to do it. I will not panic, or show and panic, and help them set it up.

I need to find things to fill the rest of the week! I will make some phone calls to companies (almost cold calls) which I don't like to do. That will be a good test. I also want to start doing a martial art a couple of times a week so I am not so weedy. I will find a class. I am not great at meeting people in unfamiliar situations so this will be more practice.
If anyone can suggest more awkward situations for me to put myself in, I will be very grateful.

I just thought of another. A company that owes me money, and who knew they owed me money before I started working, didn't tell me when I started, nor when i invoiced them, nor when I told them their invoices were late. They waited a long time to tell me. I was deciding how angry to pretend to be when I next speak to them. Instead, I will remain calm and composed when I next speak to them to explain to them how terrible they are at business and how they will have to change their ways if they wish me to do any work for them in future. That can be saved for later in the week.

forgetful sticks

i have lost many memory sticks in my time. I need to start password protecting them all since i know have data on them that could be called sensitive. my current losses are 2 identical looking ones. they're a bit shiny. i moved from my cave to an actual flat and now i can't find them. one is empty and one is full. i need the full one quite urgently. i will spend another few rounds of combing every inch of my flat including all the "obviously it can't be in there places because i haven't even opened that cupboard since i moved in and have no idea what is actually in there, i hope it's not spiders" places. i will simultaneously concentrate on not thinking that it is in the laptop case i threw away which was falling apart.

in other news, i moved out of my cave into a flat. i forget if i mentioned this. i am forgetting lots these days. i surely mentioned the bricks that masquerade as "heaters"?

as a brit, when people ask me how i am, i respond reflexively with, "great thanks!" if i had to answer truthfully i would say i feel both truly brilliant and utterly terrible at the same time. it's quite odd. i also find it difficult (impossible) to tell other people about this. i don't feel sorry for myself, and don't want anyone else too either.
one feeling often wins from the other but they're both always there. i appreciate immensely how incredibly lucky i am. i am well aware of this and it often permeates my many thoughts. it is a great source of relief and happiness and motivation to do well. at the same time, and sometimes winning are overwhelming feelings of depression and despair. i sometimes think about just moving away from everyone and living in an actual cave somewhere. i wouldn't even like to tell anyone. just go, for 6 months, and then come back to see how i feel. i often think no one would even notice. sometimes, i even like the thought that no one would notice. but like the occasional suicidal thoughts i know i don't have the gumption to go through with it. gumption. what a lovely word.

(i don't think i even have actual suicidal thoughts, just those where i don't really care if i accidentally or on purpose ceased to exist.)

five bellies

i hope five bellies isn't initiated by eating too many desserts. I have a worrying suspicion that that is exactly how it begins. And if that is indeed the case, then I must surely cut down. firstly, i am in love with twirl bites. horrifically, they are equivalent to 4 twirl two finger bars, yet i have no qualms about devouring the entire pack in one sitting. something i would never do to 4 twirls. jelly bellies are also a massive weakness. lemon tarts are another phenomenal dessert which I could just eat continuously. I am in some ways lucky that I don't know how to make them.
yesterday, i went out for food and had an awesome cake for dessert. mousse, with biscuit, a bit chewy, a bit soft and a whole lot of delicious. I was still hungry so we went to get a tea and belgian waffles covered in cream and ice cream from another shop. I felt like telling the waitress we were there for bang bang, louis ck style.



though of course i didn't. the waitress was so hot I think i might even go back.

logic

is all logic based on either circular or axiomatic logic?

for example, "stop" is defined as
(of an event, action, or process) come to an end; cease to happen.

"cease" is defined as
come or bring to an end.

"end" is defined as
a final part of something, especially a period of time, an activity, or a story.

"final is defined as"
coming at the end of a series.

so it seems that you can't use dictionaries to understand words without knowing some words to start with.

maths is axiomatic and just uses some axioms which seem obvious (e.g. a+b = b+a) to construct the maths. but really, they aren't defined anywhere.

i don't know where i'm going with this. I guess I don't really know anything or know how anyone knows anything.

bubbles

i think everyone likes the bubbles that float out of the washing up liquid bottle.

bubbles, which no one likes, are poker bubbles. luckily i avoid them by going out just before the bubble.

i played again last week and went out just as the final table was forming. it was quite uneventful and mostly standard. i made one mistake where i chickened out on my plan when it came to shoving the turn after i raised the flop against someone who just bets incessantly and folds to pressure without big hands.
what was most interesting was the guy who rocked up late to the table. wearing sunglasses. lol, it was night time outside. and not that bright inside. nor were the lights in his head too bright. he was big boned (not fat, just quite big framed) and was obviously accustomed to being all alpha male. at one point i needed some change so help up a chip to him and said "have you got any change?". he replies "yes" and clearly purposefully looks away and pauses before looking back and saying "What's your next question?"
i replied "thanks" and threw him the chip.
he repeats "what's the next question?" and i just stared at him till he gave me the change. i think he takes himself a little bit too seriously. anyone playing in this tournament is not good at poker. including me, it would seem, as i can't beat these mouth breathers.

i play the euromillions when the jackpot becomes large. however, it's still -ev.
the odds of winning are about 1 in 116,531,800. it must be noted that it costs £2 to play. So only when the jackpot is £233,063,600 should you start to play. this of course assumes you are the only winner.
i think what makes it all worthwhile is that i never remember to check the results, but i do get an email from them when i win. so you awake to find a teasing "you've won something check your account" message, to which your mind dreams for a few minutes. then you check your account to find £2.80 in there. after you spent £10.

that was really two blogs in one, so i need a break. back on the weekend.

a tale of murder

google tells me i haven't blogged about storage heaters. i find this hard to believe.

i used to live in a flat with them. during this time, they were the bane of my existence. they call themselves heaters. they are not. they masquerade as technology. they are not.

they are a caveman antiquity.
step 1: make fire
step 2: get brick
step 3: hold brick over fire
step 4: wrap brick in newspaper/bearskin
step 5: sleep with brick
step 6: die of hypothermia

storage heaters replace the fire in step 1 with an electric element. and they replace the bearskin in step 4 with a metal case.
they are stupid for innumerable reasons. mostly that they heat up overnight, give off their heat during the day and are back to being ambient bricks in the evening. most people sleep at night (under a duvet) and are out during the day. thus rendering the storage heater invisible. other than on your electricity bill.

after one winter where it was colder inside than outside and showering in the morning was such a tortuous experience i used to go to the gym and do some sweating solely in order to shower there instead, i left the flat.

i have recently found out that a few years before i moved in, a criminal who was owed hundreds of thousands of british pounds lived there. he was also murdered there. the man who owed him the money gone done did it. i wonder why the estate agency and landlords forgot to mention this? luckily it wasn't haunted. i think he had more important things to worry about than haunt me, such as his death.

multiple events

i start posting regularly, and now a myriad of occurrences occurs (as occurrences tend to do) so a story of murder will have to wait till tomorrow.

today, i want to discuss more mundane things of road users.
they're mostly dickheads. car drivers, cyclists, pedestrians. i would say about 65% of people are just not pleasant. this increase to about 145% when they get into vehicles.

today, i was riding a bike and turning right at a round about (traffic circle to americans. not sure about other languages, sorry) and a car decided that attempted homicide was a more preferential option than waiting. so i had to brake and renounce my right of way as i preferred to be alive. i had indicated for about 5 seconds before the turn and during the turn. while braking one handed and straightening the wheel so he didn't hit me, my right hand almost subconsciously, changed from the pointing to the open palm. i was, in sign language, asking why? why not wait about 3 seconds, before accelerating with ease to tailgate the slow moving car right in front of you whom you will catch up to in about 5 seconds with the effort it takes to move you foot through about 10 degrees. if that. i think this message made it through to this man driver who decided to respond by giving me the finger.

i laughed, but on the inside i feel sorry for someone so angry. it must be terrible to be him.

in other news, i wore a watch the other day for the first time in years. it was weird. i had to stop wearing watches when they all stopped working. it would have been ok if they stopped, but instead the went at a time of their choosing, choosing to be anything but the real time. of course they chose times that weren't completely unrealistic. i could not handle this. telling the wrong time is much worse than just stopping.

A collection of Scary

there was a recent study i read about regarding online dating. it described how the best way of matching people was using just a couple of simple questions, one of which was "do you like scary movies". apparently, matching answers here was the best correlation they found for successful matching. i find that odd. it's a binary choice.
also, i wouldn't know how to answer the question. i like good movies. the genre is less important to my liking of a movie than the goodness of the movie. i like good scary movies, i dislike bad scary movies.
i think that the point of the question is more about being scared. i don't really get scared by movies any more. some, like the butterfly effect, are truly harrowing, without being scary. also, the butterfly effect has complete nudity in it and yet is rated as a 15! that is scary.

yesterday i got very confused while driving. the man in front of me was driving frustratingly slowly down the road for about 500m before finally braking and pulling over into a bus stop without indicating. i fired one blast of a horn at him as he slowed without notice. as i drove away i heard a horn fired. i don't know whether the man was retaliating or someone else found his manner dangerous and required him to be blasted in the head with an warning sound.
i hope it was retaliatory. you can tell a lot about a person by the horning that they do. some people use it as a toy (e.g. eygpt, new york city), some people use it accidentally leading to awkward situations (me), some people never use it, some people blast it due to anger, and some people wait until you are far enough away before using it e.g. the man in my story.

i expect that this would be a much better way of finding out what people are like, instead of asking whether they like good movies.

it must be fate

one of my earliest jobs was the finance department of a small internet firm run by submentals. i'm sure i've written about them before in the past. it was like a terrible sitcom.
one of my roles as the finance department, was to chase people for money. it was horrible. calling people a year after they should have started paying was bad. calling people who had service problems no one told me about. i used to get a lot of bizarre abuse. the strangest was when i called a company in the same building asking them to pay. i got shouted at by this unbalanced women for about 10 minutes after which she hung up on me. a few minutes later, the ceo (a truly terrible human being) stormed into the office asking who had made them so angry, asking why they were being shouted at. reluctantly, i said it was me. i tried to then describe how in fact i had been shouted out, and not the other way round. before i could speak, he then starts to congratulate me for doing a sterling job.
how very odd.

these days, i have to chase people to pay me for work i have done for them. at least now, i don't have to be a dick about it, and due to this horrendous past, i don't feel at all bad about it since i do it in a timely fashion for work they know they need to pay for. I am just amazed how some companies have the gall to respond to your request for them to pay overdue bills, and then not do anything about it!

the golfing range

i went to one this morning and they seem to have replaced the plastic tees with automated plastic tees. this is an amazing example of trying to implement technology for no reason and failing miserable. you're supposed to load a bunch of balls into it so it can replenish automatically for you. i couldn't work out how to do it anything other than one at a time which makes it equivalent to a non automated tee.
except this was worse. when you do a practice shot, and just stroke the ground at the right level, the tee things you hit the ball and so tries to replenish the ball. this takes much longer than you want, and so you need to throw in another practice swing.
this could get you stuck in an infinite loop if you're not careful.

golf, as a game, is a curiously lonely one. made bizarre by the slave you employ to carry your clubs because walking for a few hours is tiring enough without the added strain of hitting a ball maybe 80 times.
to be fair, if i could afford it, i would have a butler do things for me that i could not be bothered to do.

homicidal drivers

i gone done did a bit of cycling recently. i quite enjoy it.
however, it can be very scary. i find driving scary enough. people don't seem to realise the kinetic energy possessed by a two tonne metal object travelling at 30 miles per hour, let alone at 70 miles per hour. while it's scary in a car, when you're on a bike, you know that you don't have much protection. instead of an engine built to take an impact, you have clothes. these don't work in quite the same way. many drivers seem rather persistent in their attempts to bring about an untimely demise for their fellow road user.
i thing i have noticed is that there are an equal proportion of terrible drivers to terrible cyclists. many cyclists are as suicidal as drivers are homicidal.

this all got me to thinking. drivers that don't indicate.
for years i thought they were just super selfish people who weren't really aware of the existence of others. but they must know that there are other people on the roads. and if that is the case, then i can only conclude they really don't care at all about themselves. it's like they've given up on life and are just letting it slide. to me that's pretty scary to share a road with.

what else is scary is my 1tb drive is almost full. what on earth do i have that takes up 1tb?!

sharing thoughts

i find it easier to share my thoughts online sometimes. in real life i'd usually keep them to myself.
i wonder why.
it's like it's easier to care about people you don't care about. there's nothing invested in them. when someone you care about annoys you, doing things you know annoy you, that's much more annoying than when people you don't care about annoy you in the same way. or maybe that's just me.

when i think about it, it's really the wrong way round.

whatever it is i'm afraid of with people in the real world, i think it's bad for me to behave how i do. that will be something i will focus on for the rest of the days of my life. it's way outside my comfort zone but i'll give it a go. things like my hopes and dreams. i wonder what it's like to share them.

i never go for the big stuff, cos even the small stuff people disregard or laugh at me. like when i said i don't want a job. i want to work for myself, set up lots of streams of passive income. they call me unrealistic etc. i wanted a job for about 12 months for experience and money, and i know working for someone else is not what i want long term. maybe later down the road teaching is one of the few things i could see myself doing which involves working for someone else. but that's because teachers can actually make a difference.
i think i wrote this as a draft about two years ago.
since i had a job for the last couple of years before i was finally in a position to tell them to leave me alone and work for myself.
i tried the talking more openly to the people i think i'm closest too. that didn't work so well. i think i need a better approach. it turns out that people who say they want the best for you, often want you to do what is best for them, while they convince you it's best for you.

my head hurts.

as yakshi has been too lazy to finish his work out art (the final chapters of quincy), i have begun to reread the five part trilogy of the hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. i like books.

i did a poker!

i finally managed to rock up to a casino, the ol' vic on edgware road in london town for a game of the poker. not many people turned up for a 1 rebuy if you bust tournament. It started off well as the table was short handed so i won a bunch of pots against people stuck in 2004. an old man KEPT limp reraising monsters and no one else seemed to notice. one dude would only play AQ+. just before the final table, i was a couple of seats around from him so i just kept raising his big blind. 4 occasions i had the chance. 2 he shoved on me (over 25bb). i lolled and folded both times. both times he showed KK. i saw him get kk 5 times in the tournament and he played them just as badly every time he was given a chance.

i remembered how boring live poker was, and also how easy. of course i bubbled the first tournament i played in years. i lost AK vs 77 for the chip lead and then when i finally got a chance to shove 6bb i got k9 called by j7. i flop 2 pair and lost to a straight.
maybe i shouldn't have called with my ak earlier. the raiser was an average to bad player. he opened to 6bb, playing 12bb. i had about 25bb. i figured him for a pair because it's still 2004 and decided a race to become chip leader could gain me a great chance to win. he who dares, eh?

it's a bit of a turbo because live play is so super slow. i spent my time trying to guess everyones hand in every pot, but there aren't even that many showdowns. it's quite scary how loose some people play. they can play almost anything based, i think, primarily on how bored they are at the instant that they have to decide whether to call or fold (no raising allowed, it's 2004!). so guess the hand becomes quite the eye opener when you expect sets+ and see top pair no kicker win.

possibly worth going back. i just don't have the time for poker at the moment, so maybe ssnl online is the way forwards for now. i haven't logged in to pokerstars in so long i think they may have forgotten about me. i do miss making the money at poker. tax free and it was pretty steady for a few years. if i can just sort out my anger management issues, i think i'll be ok...

funnily enough, i think reading bringing down teh house (after all, it is 2004, isn't it?) made me excited to go to a casino and play a beatable game. amazingly, i found out about another card room, which charges a rake on it's tournaments of up to 40%. FORTY PER CENT. LOL @ anyone who plays there. seriously, it's a £25 + £10 tournament. i had to work out the % rake twelve times and then use a calculator because i could not believe that it was so high. it did make me realise that 100% rake just means the rake is the same as the entry. maybe rake should be calculated as a true percentage, eg 50+5 is 9% not 10% and 25+10 is 29% not 40%. either way, you have to be insane to play there. which makes playing there surely profitable if you're not insane? i think i've just discovered a catch 22 (it is 1961 isn't it?).

why i quit my job

diabetes charities.
helping people who couldn't help themselves to another piece of cake.

i mean that only as a joke. that's obviously wrong as type I is genetic.

what is not a joke, however, is the following tale. set in one of the largest UK companies who supported a diabetes charity for a year. within the company (i did a bit of work there) all the charity raising initiatives for years up till then had involved cake sales, and tuck shops, and more cake sales.
in fact, everything revolved around selling sugary items to people and taking the proceeds for charity. Thankfully, diabetes (the charity) came to town. I naively assumed that now, things would change and charity raising would involve other things, perhaps involving exercise.

i was wrong.

the cake sales, chocolate sales, fizzy drink sales continued unabated. the irony of selling diabetes inducing goods to people who sit around in an office all day was lost on them. i saw them merely giving money to a charity via the method of increasing the amount of work the charity will need to do in future. yes, it was as though the charity was on a recruitment drive, although of course they wouldn't have approved. in fact, for one day, the charity came to the office and gave away free fruit to people at lunchtime. sadly, they literally (as in the original meaning of literally, not the new definition of literally which is literally defined as figuratively) couldn't give it away. I took a few pieces, instead of buying them from the canteen that day. almost no one else went to take some. i told the people sat around me and none could be bothered to go for a walk to get a delicious free food.
the irony was further compounded when a fellow member of staff pointed out, that if someone had diabetes, they would not be able to contribute to the charity since it was all sugary goods that were being sold to raise money.

the worst part was that apart from about 5 people, no one could appreciate all this irony. and that is why i quit working there.

Picture 1

One of my favourite error messages. What boggles the mind is that someone programmed this in.
All I did was press the close button to exit Excel.

catharsis

from the moment i first laid eyes on her, something in my head and my heart clicked. the short hair, the unique clothes, the smile, i could go on but i don't know exactly what it was. i would describe her as the type to use black headphones with her iPhone. but of course, she didn't have an iPhone.
when it all turned to shit, i would be miserable for years afterwards. was it worth it? I have never allowed myself to ask that question of me before. deep down i must have known i was too close to it. right now, i would say yes. wholeheartedly worth it.

maybe that's why i find myself in a similar situation with someone else i can't ever have. hopefully the feeling of melancholy will pass. it always does, yet each time always feels different. getting absorbed by work is a terrible solution. it just avoids the issue instead of resolving it.

i don't think this post sounds like me. from tomorrow, i will begin again my 30 day photo challenge. i'm not even gonna lie, most of them will be old photos. but that's ok. they're still ones i took and they're not terribad.


"novelty is brilliant, because it exists as a concept"

bicycle. BICYCLE

i went to ride my bicycle.

I think the entire saddle industry needs a rethink. Either that or i don't know how to sit on one. I only went for about an hour and a half yesterday, and today i must have bruises the size of DVDs on the tops of my inside thighs. I can fortunately undertake all tasks that i would like to do. The only act that causes me great pain is the sitting down on the saddle.

While I'm at it, if anyone here cycles, how do you stop flies flying into your eyes, mouth and nose? I wear (sun)glasses but this doesn't even protect my eyes.

Finally, if the road makes could make roads (at least the edges of the roads) out of not gravel, that would be appreciated.

robots

If you live in england you will have no doubt suffered the mental abuse that is getting a phone call only to answer it and have a robot on the other end say something along the lines of "Have you been missold PPI..."
The worst thing about this is that they put this little pause in before they start the message, so you answer the phone, say hello, and then get abused.
It was like those people who used to make answerphone messages of themselves saying "hello (pause) how are you (pause) i'm not here, please leave a message (beeeeeeeeeeep)"

These tend to occur from unknown numbers. Sadly, I sometimes have to answer unknown numbers as some businesses want to hide who they are. (chickens). When i answer the phone from a number i don't recognise (or unknown/blocked) i now just wait a few seconds to see if it is a human.

yesterday i confused a lady who called me because of this silence. i realised yesterday i have been conditioned to annoy/confuse real people by answering the phone with silence, because i don't want to be tricked into saying hello to a robot. a robot who probably doesn't care.

The robots are winning.

work avoidance

I think i could probably write a book on this.
Ways to avoid work while remaining productive:
1)eating.
this is always acceptable. one needs to eat to live.
2)hot drinks.
as with 1, can also be consumed at a higher frequency than foods.

...

16)go and vote.
all politicians are self serving and detrimental to society. It gets worse the higher up the chain you go. however, due to the fact that some are worse than others, you have to vote for the horrible, egotistical, narcissistic and often mentally challenged folk, to ensure that the worse kind (BNP etc) get a smaller percentage of the votes.
I think it would be great if you could vote negatively. anyway, this is tending to non productive thoughts so they are for another day

...

24)buying computing equipment including wireless mice and keyboards because laptop keyboards and mousepads are built by people who are clearly submental. the keyboard should be as close to the user as possible idiots. not as far as possible.
the f keys should not require extra buttons for them to be pressed.
the mousepad should not be so intrusive that when you use the keyboard you keep accidentally selecting things with the mouse.

...

72) defrosting the freezer.
it has to be done. so why not take a break to do it?

...

141) write a blog post
it's been a while. people might be worried. others might be craving their next fix (MAYBE?). it's essentially important to society that you blog.