Sunday, January 29, 2006

COBRA Sucks

In 1986 Congress passed a wonderful bill known as the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. They must have been very pleased with themselves having managed to produce such a meaningless acronym that spells the cool sounding COBRA!

In the industrialized world there are only two countries that don't bother to provide basic healthcare for their citizens. One is South Africa and the other is America. Here in the States this has allowed a multi billion dollar industry of greedy insurance companies holding an escalating battle with medical facilities to see who can rape the American public the most. Both sides appear to be winning at this time. In fact this ugly little battle has pushed the cost of health care in America to over $5,000 per capita, more than double most European countries. Sadly all this extra money does not equate to better coverage or health care. In fact America usually ends up trailing in cases such as infant mortality, patient satisfaction, immunization rates, mortality rate, and percentage of people with access to health care.

But I digress. For those who are not part of the 35,000,000 people America now has as an under-class it is of little consequence. Professional people usually have health insurance which generally keeps costs at a manageable level for most families. As long as people live in ideal family units where either the husband or wife has health insurance though their job everything seems okay. That is until someone decides to change jobs.

When someone leaves a job this remarkable COBRA deal is supposed to offer stopgap insurance to protect people while they wait 90 days to be offered insurance through their new company. Unfortunately COBRA is a complete pile of shit invented by out of touch politicians who have no idea what it is like to be just an average person with an average income.

You see the fundamental flaw with COBRA is that people who have just left their job cannot afford it. My wife and I are in very good health and are both under 35. But to continue insurance through COBRA until her new insurance kicks in from her new job would cost us $1,200. That's $150 per week plus deductibles and co-pay just to keep our insurance.

I've spoken to a lot of Americans on the subject and it seems that very few of them elect to take COBRA because of the outrageous cost. So every day thousands of Americans join the ranks of the 45,000,000 Americans who have no insurance. For those lucky enough to be in an above average job this amounts to a minor inconvenience and a loss of coverage for just 60 or 90 days. Unfortunately for some Americans they may never get insurance because their job is not good enough, or they are unfortunate enough to be poor or unemployed.

America is the richest country in the world, yet the rich poor divide is growing year on year. It really is a sad state of affairs when America is in the company of a country like South Africa when it comes to health care. What's even sadder, is that this problem does not need to be fixed with a massive tax increase or other sacrifice. We are already spending more than enough to have a world class all-inclusive health care system for every American. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way that money is being funneled out of health care and into the pockets of greedy bastards who don't give a shit about anyone but themselves.

I decided to decline my COBRA coverage. If I get sick before our new insurance starts on April 1st I'll spend less money on a flight to England, where I can get my health care for free.

Sunday, January 22, 2006

God Bless America

I must be a real blogger now, because when I saw this shop the first thing I thought was how I needed to take out my new digital camera and photograph it for my blog.

As you can see from the picture this business, located here in Tennessee, decided that their shop was going to sell two things: Guns and vacuum cleaners.

The store sits on a busy main road just outside of Johnson City next to the unassuming Apostolic Church, a church cunningly disguised as a warehouse.

I just cannot fathom what prompted such a weird combination of products. I've seen gun shops that sell knives, hunting equipment, and similar. But I have never in my entire life seen a store dedicated to such an odd combination of products.

I have to say, this is a weird part of the world to live in. God, guns and vacuum cleaners. All you can eat baby!

Friday, January 20, 2006

You Wait For One Bus, Then Three Come Along

When I was a professional web designer I did a small handful of larger contracts, but one of the hardest things to do was to find new clients as well as being a full time designer. What's odd is that now that I don't make web sites any more I have been approached so many times it's not even funny. Last night the owner of a debt collection agency asked me to make him a web site. I just got commissioned to write this web site and maintain it for the newly formed Tennessee Poker Tour.

Okay so that's not the most exciting post in the world, but I just thought it was rather weird that the less hard I look for web projects the more seem to come my way. In the past year I've had five contracts and I have not officially made sites since 2003. Ah well.

Saturday, January 14, 2006

Evil AOL

I've always disliked AOL. When I lived in England I recall they decided to enter the ISP business and charge people by the minute to be online, which is a bit much given that at the time the phone call itself was about 2c-5c per minute. Still that was a little less arrogant than Compuserve that decided to price their plans in dollars and expected the Brits to simply pay whatever the exchange rate dictated for that month.

But back to AOL. I never liked their attitude. I didn't like how they would compress images on the web to a lower quality to save bandwidth. I didn't like how hard it was to uninstall AOL software and how it always seemed to mess up some internet related Windows settings when you removed it. But that is a long time ago, I've not used AOL since 1997.

But I always rather liked AIM. It was clean and reasonable as IM software goes. But as per usual corporate greed has made the software become more intrusive. My current version starts playing audio and visual commercials when I open it, which is just lovely when I am listening to music. It also chooses to open a browser window to their crap web site even though I switched off that option.

My wife installed the latest version of AIM which has even more crapware built into it. That one practically wants to take over the computer and make it an AIM station as opposed to a Windows PC. Frankly I would rather pay for the damn software than deal with all this shit.

The one thing that really annoys me about software companies is when they feel that just because you install a piece of software on your machine you give them full permission to mess with anything on your machine as they see fit. What ever happened to the good old days when you just ran a program and it did what it was supposed to do until you closed it? Stop taking over my damn machine with your crap!

Busy

Well this has been a busy week. I've written two web sites including thewall.pokerxl.com which is my version of the milliondollarhomepage.com. There's been a lot of interest and even a sale or two. Let's hope I sell all my bricks. I've really been too busy to post on my blog so I guess this is my way of saying hello, and I'm still alive.

Sunday, January 08, 2006

I'm A Millionaire At Last!

Well they say the hardest thing is to make your first million, the rest is far easier...

Today to make up for my bad beat at the poker tournament I decided to complete my goal of getting my play money at PokerStars.com up to a million dollars. I've been playing in some $50,000 sit and go tournaments recently but have been staying around $850,000. Finally today had some wins and hit my target.

As of now I have a grand total of $1,025,217 in my play money account. Not bad considering I started with $1,000. Now if I could just figure out how to do the same with real money!

Maybe I need to find one of those suckers that actually pay real money for play money. I've never quite figured out why people do that, but oh well. On to my second million I guess.

Another Bad Beat Story


I was planning on avoiding the temptation to relay bad beat stories on my blog since they bore the crap out of me when someone tells me about them. With that semi-warning in place, read on...

I was playing in a freeroll invitational in a local poker league and had a horrible table. During the first 45 minutes 5 of the 10 players knocked out went from my table. This old guy got a boat, a bunch of trips, three flushes, it was unreal. I got pocket jacks cracked twice. But it was the way I was finally knocked out that annoyed me.

I raised five times the big blind before the flop with pocket nines, having played very tight up to that point. My raise was called. The flop was Q-7-5. I sensed weakness from my opponent and didn't put him on a Q. So I moved all in which was enough to put us both all in at that point. He paused for a while and then called with pocket sixes.

Now at that point there were two over cards on the board, no flush for anyone, and I had raised five times the big blind before the flop followed by an all in bet after the flop. I cannot fathom what he thought I might have had, or what hand he felt he could beat, other than a bluff with high cards. Of course I am clearly giving him too much credit, because none of those things entered his fish-like mind.

So anyway he catches runner runner to make a straight and knock me out of the tournament. Ah well that's poker. Just wanted to vent about the fish that played like a donkey.

If none of this post means anything to you might I suggest a look at my poker site...

M30402457 (Mersenne form)

230402457-1

"It's the largest ever prime number bitch."

- Professors Curtis Cooper & Steven Boone (Central Missouri State University) after discovering the largest known prime number.

Stupid Politician Alert!

You know how annoying it is when a drunk driver slams into a pedestrian or another motorist and kills them? Invariably the drunk bastard who did it escapes unharmed and some innocent family is devastated. Well thankfully that is all about to change.

Genius and Republican Representative Bill Alter decided to brain storm this problem of drink driving and after speaking with a fifth grader came up with a brilliant idea: Ban all stores from selling beer at any temperature below 60F.

Yes, and I'm not making this up, a 10 year old child came up with this idea and Bill Alter has drafted a bill to make it illegal for stores in his home state of Missouri to sell cold beer. So we now just have to keep our fingers crossed that drunk drivers never find out about bars, refrigerators, or drinks that don't need to be chilled such as Cointreau or red wine.

There seems to be some kind of bubble that develops around politicians, after they have held office for a little while they become utterly detached from reality and start living in a parallel universe where stupid ideas like this would actually work.

Clearly I am no politician and obviously cannot hope to compete with the astonishing acumen of this guy, but maybe he should consider a small tax on alcohol to help fund better public transportation and alcohol education and rehabilitation programs. Drinking and driving is a terrible thing but this law proposal will do nothing to help the situation. But if people could easily get low cost convenient transportation to bars and clubs, there would be far less need to drink and drive. But what the hell do I know, I don't even brainstorm my ideas with children.

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Swindon, Swindon, this is Swindon

There are three things I can tell you about Swindon, England. First is that it is the birth place of Melinder Messenger. She was a young hottie that got discovered after she posed for an advertising campaign for a window company.

Her ample 'assets' got her noticed and in fact the ad campaign was banned for being too sexually suggestive. This caught the attention of the Daily Star newspaper in 1997 who decided to pay her for some topless glamour shots known in England as page three, so called because a handful of tabloid newspapers in England publish topless photographs on page three of their paper to boost sales.

Melinder Messenger used this opportunity as a springboard for a career in the media and went on to appear in various TV shows as a presenter. In fact she even ended up with her own TV show in the UK.

The second thing I can tell you about Swindon is that it is also the birthplace of Billie Piper. She was the daughter of a British actor (Paul Piper) and decided she wanted to play the acting game herself. At the age of 15 she was spotted on a TV commercial and given a record deal. She became the youngest ever artist to debut at number one on the UK pop charts.

She later married media mogul, DJ and TV presenter Chris Evans which raised a few eyebrows since he was 16 years older than her. Their marriage fell apart after a little under four years, and she took a role on the resurrected cult British sci-fi series Doctor Who.


The third and final thing I know about Swindon is that it is home to one of the most bizarre road systems in the world. The jewel in the crown of this bizarre set up is a series of five mini roundabouts called The Magic Roundabout. Named after a crazy psychedelic kids TV show from the 60s.

But now I have learned a fourth thing about Swindon, which is really why I am writing this post. Alex Tew, a young man of 21 from Swindon, recently wowed the Internet world and proved that even today a little bit of original thinking can make you a fortune online. Just when you thought that all the good ideas had been done already he opened a website called MillionDollarHomepage.com and made a million dollars in less than six months.

He decided he didn't want to end up broke after college and so set about selling advertising space in a manner never done before. His unique story caught the attention of the media and he ended up getting world wide publicity for his wonderful idea. At the time of writing he is selling the last 1000 pixels of advertising space on eBay, which currently has a bid of over $150,000.

So now I know four things about Swindon and so do you. I am currently selling advertisements on my blog for $100,000 each. Any takers?

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Baptist Minister Arrested For Soliciting

Reverend Lonnie Latham, a senior Southern Baptist leader and pastor, was arrested for soliciting sex from a police officer posing as a male prostitute recently.

Now on the face of it it is rather amusing to see some guy that has previously spoken out against gay marriage and homosexuality getting caught in this manner. If there's one thing I can't stand it is hypocrisy of this kind. But I think that this story raises some deeper issues.

First of all, why are we paying police officers to pose as prostitutes? It's called entrapment, they are deliberately creating a situation of temptation, that might otherwise not have existed. Maybe Reverend Latham thought this cop was cute, perhaps no other male prostitute would have interested him that night. In other words were it not for the deliberate acts of this cop it is possible that no crime would have been committed.

Secondly, I was under the impression that people were innocent until proven guilty in this country. I was clearly mistaken. This man has been publicly identified by the media as soliciting a fake male prostitute for sex. It doesn't matter if he is later found not guilty at trial it is likely his life will be ruined. He will no doubt lose his job, his position on the board of the Southern Baptist Church, his family, his friends and possibly much more. In other words the trial is largely irrelevant at this point, this man's life has been ruined and he is technically at this point an innocent man.

I just don't understand why such time, money and effort is spent trying to stamp out prostitution. It's clear that it is never going to go away, and the fact that it is illegal only makes it more difficult on the vulnerable who are sucked into this profession.

This story is just sad for all concerned. I hate to see our tax dollars squandered in this manner to appease the radicals who want to legislate their brand of morality.

Thanks CBS

If there is one thing that I will forever fail to adjust to about America it is the way that the TV networks don't give a flying shit about their viewers and care only about numbers.

Like many people I started watching Threshold, largely because Brent Spiner was in it and I've always enjoyed his acting. The show was basically The X-Files but with a different spin and more reminiscent of the good old days of The X-Files before it started to get silly. Either way I started watching it, had the DVR recording it and saw all but one of the episodes.

Unfortunately the all important ratings were not amazing and so like so many shows before CBS decided to cancel the show and not air the final three episodes already shot.

Now this really pisses me off. Get me watching a show that has an ongoing plot line and then simply yank it off the air after messing with the schedule for the show in the last few episodes. I just fail to understand the logic in such a move. Back in the sixties the networks did the same thing to Star Trek, pulling it off the air due to poor ratings. Later on when people realized it was a good show they made more. Eventually Star Trek spawned countless spin-offs and movies making hundreds of millions of dollars. Now that the most recent rendition of Star Trek has finally come to an end they are working on a massive online RPG due to be released next year.

So with lessons like that as far back as forty years ago, why have these networks not learned anything? Why are they still making the same blunders and shitting all over their viewers?

I find it offensive that I invest my time to watch a show, only to find it being moved to different nights and different times, and then it vanishes for a couple of weeks, comes back then vanishes for good. I have to go searching the Internet just to figure out what happened.

So I guess Threshold is no more and I will never know what happened next. Thanks CBS, I appreciate you wasting my time. I will certainly remember this next time you are trying to shove some new show down my throat.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Rhode Island Legalizes Weed

In yet another baby step Rhode Island became the 11th state to legalize marijuana for medical reasons.

What I don't get is why this is such a big deal. Doctors have at their disposal a vast array of incredibly potent drugs many of which are highly addictive and have horrible side effects. So I don't get where the debate is on this weed issue. Either we trust doctors to prescribe medication to help us heal or feel better or we don't. This childish debate on medical marijuana needs to stop. If a doctor chooses to prescribe it with the belief it will help a patient then I don't see the danger. Right now across America kids that used to once in a while experiment with a bit of weed are now selling various pills to each other that have been prescribed by a doctor. The new generation of recreational drug users realize that popping a pill is actually easier to get away with than smoking a joint.

As a nation we have this weird obsession with marijuana and choose to squander billions of dollars of tax payers money on stamping it out despite the fact that this is clearly a futile exercise that will never yield any positive results for society.

So I am glad that we are gradually removing irrational arguments against the drug and allowing doctors to do their job without interference from bureaucrats and politicians. Maybe as a next step we could release all prisoners that got put in jail smoking a joint. Perhaps one day we could also stop punishing students who smoke joints by removing all their financial aid. Ah I'm just getting ahead of myself. Good job Rhode Island.

Monday, January 02, 2006

Harrington On Hold'em

Anyone who has undertaken the quest to learn No Limit Texas Hold'em will attest to the fact that it is a game of incredible complexity. Sure anyone can learn to play, but most people will never even achieve a level where they can consistently win money at the game.

I've read many books on the subject since I began learning in 2003. Some were reasonable, some were total shit, many were simply trying to cash in on the popularity of the game thanks to the WPT and Chris Moneymaker's unlikely WSOP win.

Of all the books I've ever read this one by Dan Harrington is certainly the best. The book presents some very advanced concepts but does so in a way that most players with some experience of the game will be able to comprehend. While this is not a book for a novice players at almost any level will gain something from this book.

There are in fact two books in this series and the second is literally a continuation of the first. The first is called Harrington On Hold'em Expert Strategy For No-Limit Tournaments - Volume 1: Strategic Play and the second is called Harrington On Hold'em Expert Strategy For No-Limit Tournaments - Volume 2: The Endgame. I can only assume that Harrington was paid for the length of the title.

In any case Happy New Year and if you want to improve your poker game, buy these books today!
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