I dabbled in the $100 buy-in No Limit game at the Bike again last night.

I got off to a rough start — I lost my $100 buy-in pretty quickly. I was intimidated by two of the other players, one of whom is well-known in the online poker community and a very solid player, and so I wasn’t playing well. I was chasing flushes and straights, which is a pretty good way to lose your buy-in. If they hit, great, but they usually don’t, which is why chasing isn’t a great idea. Also, they say if you can’t spot the fish at the table, it’s probably you. I didn’t see any fish there.

Anyway. I busted out and went over to play in the 4/8 game for awhile. I was up/down/up/down and got bored with the game, so I checked back in at the No Limit board. They had two tables going, so I put my name on the list and told the guy “Don’t give me Table 12.” (The table I busted out of.) Shortly afterward I was called to Table 10.

I bought in for $100, played conservatively for a little while until I got a feel for the other players’ games, and then it was a repeat of last time I played: I ran that table and cashed out about an hour later for $420.

End result: +$220 for the night. Shweet.

I play a lot of Texas Hold’em poker at the Commerce and the Bike, but it’s all been Limit Hold’em — I’ve been a little intimidated by the No Limit game and too afraid to try it. I play a lot of No Limit online, but not for real money, it’s just for practice, and I’ve played in several live tournaments, but again it’s not for real money, it’s for tournament chips. In that No Limit game, you’re playing for real money and you can lose it all on one hand. Scary.

Tonight, I played No Limit Hold’em for the first time at the Bike. I bought in for $100. I cashed out with $475. I owned that table.

Shweet.

Many of the techs on The Company’s Help Desk haven’t really been socialized very well. Their people skills on the phone are so atrocious that I sometimes joke that we must keep them in a cave at night and only let them out when the phones ring. After reading the following email one of them sent out — a company-wide email — I think the cave crack might have been too generous:

I seem to have made way too much lemonade for our lunch……

Bob

How’s that for a tempting offer? In a word: Yuck. Also: Ew.

Stick a fork in it, it’s done. Santa Barbara is up and running on its own and I’m hitting the road for home.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Elvis tattoo has left the building!

There’s a measure of irony in the fact that John Ashcroft is in the hospital for what amounts to a back-up of bile.

I don’t wish him a speedy recovery.

My mom sent me the following email the other day:

I almost E-mailed you in the middle of the night. Woke up around
2:00 having had the sweetest dream of you. You were about kindergarten
age and so cute. Someone was trying to kidnap you and you managed to
escape. I can still see you running toward me.
Love, mom

Let me get this straight. Her “sweetest dream” was about me being abducted at age 4, and the vision that stayed with her is me fleeing in terror?

Nice. Love you too, Ma.

There’s a forum for Road Star riders (which is what I am) called, conveniently enough, Road Star Riders where people discuss anything and everything about their motorcycles, and sometimes the discussions range over into the political arena.

The political stance over there is very much right wing conservative, with an overload of posts about how fabulous Bush and Co. are and how pathetic liberals and their ilk are. Being of that ilk, I occasionally jumped into these discussions to provide a little balance, a little factual information rooted in reality, and a little of the wonderfulness that is me. My contributions were VERY much not appreciated. So much so that the guy running the forum (“Thor” – spare me the machismo) has banned me and deleted all my posts. What a sissy.

Now, “Thor” (bwahaha) obviously thinks he’s a rough, tough, bad-ass biker. I offer his signature picture (which appears at the bottom of each of his posts) as evidence of his inflated opinion of himself:

But you know, for a rough, tough, bad-ass biker type, he’s awfully thin-skinned. I mean, he was practically convulsing over my posts in support of gay marriage, and you’d think my saying that W is the worst president we’ve ever had was a slur against his mother. Oh my, was he upset! And the fit definitly hit the shan when I defended my remarks with logic and facts and helpfully pointed out all his misspellings and poor grammar and corrected the factual errors in his statements to me. I could almost hear him crying. And so he banned me and deleted all those upsetting posts of mine.

Wah.

At that point I realized his sig-pic didn’t accurately portray him, so I decided to modify it for him:

I sent him a copy, because you know I’m all about being helpful. I wonder if he’ll use it…