I love the entries where the title applies to both of the things I bore you about in the main entry.
This morning, I played golf with my Dad at San Jose Municipal Golf Course. I shot a 96, which was better than I expected to do given how infrequently I get out to play. The last time I played was in Tucson over the summer, and all I remember about that particular outing was that I did not come close to breaking 100. There once was a time when I was a bogey golfer... Sigh. In any case, the subtitle for this portion of the entry should be: "Shane hits the links: Golf Noir".
In other news, I just watched Murder, My Sweet. What an awesome movie. My favorite part was when Marlowe lights his match stick using the ass of a baby-angel-statue in the garden of the fancy pants mansion. But there were a lot of other great parts too. It was suspenseful and kept me guessing right till the end. Philip Marlowe is my hero.
As I spend more and more time preparing for a workshop I'm going to in mid-January, I've realized that I have probably already learned more from this conference than I learned from an entire week of conferencing at PPV. That speaks to the weakness of gigantic conferences vs. smaller workshops in addition to my own interests in astronomy.
I'm looking forward to spending Chrismas Eve with my family and relatives tonight. Unfortunately, I'm sick. I had a cold sore a few days ago, then a sore throat, and now I'm sniffling non-stop. Fortunately, life goes on.
The cookies are baked, the presents are wrapped, and Santa Claus will be making his rounds tonight.
I checked my grades a second ago and discovered I got one A and two B's, meaning that I can get two C's and a B next semester and still maintain the 3.0 GPA that is required to take the prelim exams. So that's good news. It'll be pretty tough for me to get a C in every single class I take next semester. In fact, one of the classes I'm taking next semester is radio astronomy and is taught by my advisor, so in theory I should be familiar with the concepts taught in the course. And we'll have lab stuff that I ought to be good at too. So I'd say I'm in good shape as far as classes go.
I finished reading the Half Blood Prince at 2am this morning. It took me about 10 hours to carve it to pieces. I was on page 450 or so around midnight when I decided I was going to have to go the distance and there wasn't anything I could do about it. It was extremely intense. Trying not to give any spoilers, I'll just say that some part of me is not convinced that Dumbledore was wrong about a certain person. In any case, things have been left very much open for the seventh and final installment. I can't wait to read it.
I'm looking into getting Tiffany and myself a pair of webcams for Christmas. So far, all I've looked at is a $100 Logitech webcam. That might be a bit pricey, but I definitely don't want to get something that sucks.
I am back in San Jose with my family for the holidays. I spent the past couple of days with Tiffany in Berkeley, but now she is in Colorado visiting her family for Christmas. I finished almost all of my Christmas shopping, but the only things I need to get are stuff for Tiffany, and I know what I want to get her.
So far while home I've read the first third of The Half-Blood Prince. My first guess was that the title refers to Riddle the younger, but now I'm thinking that it might be Mrs. Potter. We'll see how it works out.
I've also been productive so far in wrapping up my journal entries for our road trip back in the summer. At some point, I'd like to do a map like I did for the 2004 summer road trip, but that will have to wait till later. For now, check out the 2005 summer road trip.
Thanks to going to bed before 11, I woke up at 7 this morning and still got about 8 hours of sleep. And I couldn't have gotten to sleep that early if I hadn't been playing ultimate all weekend long in Hoasis 2005 (5 games on Saturday, 2 on Sunday plus hanging around to watch the semifinals and finals of the tournament).
It was fun to play in the tournament and see what the upper echelons of ultimate frisbee are like. My team was more about having fun than winning the whole thing, so I had a good time no matter what our record was. As it turns out, we went 2-3 on Saturday to put us in the loser's bracket and 1-1 on Sunday. I got really lucky to be on the team I was on, since I showed up Saturday morning to try and pick up on any team that wanted me. My team was called Scout's Honor, and we all dressed up as boy or girl scouts. Like I said, we were more about having fun than winning, and have fun we did.
Today is my instrumentation final. I got one of the worst--if not the worst--grades on the midterm, so I need to do well. I've been studying pretty hard for it though (especially compared to some of my peers :P), so I think I'll be in decent shape. Then tomorrow we turn in our stellar atmospheres projects and talk about them for up to 24 minutes. Quite frankly, I don't know how we'll fill up more than 5 minutes for each project.
Here's a rundown of four hands that were fairly important for me in last night's tournament (in which I finished second).
1. Down to six or seven players. I have a decent-sized stack, about what I started with, giving me an M of just over 20 and placing me squarely in the green zone. It's folded around to me in middle position and I notice I have AQ offsuit. I put in a standard raise to 18, three times the big blind. The button, one of the shorter stacks with an M of 8 or so, calls. The blinds fold. The flop comes rags and I check. My opponent goes all-in for about 50. My first thought is he probably has me beat, but I take my time and calculate the pot odds. From the action before the flop, there were about 45 chips in the pot. Add in his 50 chip bet, and I'm basically getting 2:1 odds. So if I think I can win 1 in 3 times, it's worth it for me to call. Now, based on the pre-flop betting, I just don't think he has a pocket pair. He's smart enough to be aware that he's short-stacked and needs to make a move with any kind of hand, so I guess that if he'd had a pocket pair he would have raised me all-in pre-flop. He might have caught one of the rags, but Ax, where x is less than a queen, seems much more likely to me. And then of course there's always a 10% chance he's on a bluff. So I call, and he turns over A10. My queen kicker holds up and suddenly I'm up to about 300 chips.
2. I don't remember the details of this one as well. It was in heads up play, and I was down to an M of 10 or so. My opponent had a little less than twice as many chips as me and had been betting aggressively and taking most of the pots. My strategy was to let him take more of the smaller pots and make a big stand when I finally hit something. Fortunately, I got very lucky on this hand. I had Q9 suited and just called on the button (I think I just called...). My opponent checked and we saw a flop. I was very happy to see J10x come and give me a very deceptive open-ended straight draw. My plan was to use a semi-bluff check-raise all-in move if he made any play at the pot on the flop. He didn't, so I got a free look at the turn, which brought the magical 8, giving me an extremely well-disguised straight. As I said, I don't remember the details very well, but I think I bet, then he raised to put me all-in and I called with joy. I think he had J3 or something, and at that point I had a big lead.
3. Again, I don't remember the details too well. Heads up, I think I had Q8 suited with the blinds at 20/40 and raised to 120. He then went all-in to bring it to 400 total. I figured I was beat, but I thought I might be getting the right odds to gamble. It took me awhile to think it through, but eventually I calculated 1.6:1 odds [(400+120)/280], which would be just fine if I had two overcards to his pair (a strong possibility), two live cards above/below his (e.g. A9), or a stone-cold bluff (always a possibilty). The worst situation would be an overpair, QQ, 88, or AK. I felt that each of these was a remote possibility, so I called. He turned over K10 and it held up. In retrospect, I think it was a fine call from a straightforward pot odds analysis, but it might have been better for me to let it go and maintain my big chip lead so I could make a stand another time.
4. This was the hand that broke me. I had been doing a lot of calling on the button with weak hands, so I thought my opponent might be ready to start raising in that situation with weaker hands than normal. So, my strategy was to call on the button when I had a big hand, and if he raised, then move all-in. Finally, I got pocket 5's on the button and decided that was big enough for me. I called, he raised to about 3x the big blind (about 120 by that time), and I went all-in without much hesitation. Unfortunately, he called without much hesitation and had me beat with JJ. Again, I don't feel this was a horrible play. It was a pretty aggressive move, but that's my style head's up. The only counter-arguments are that I had been playing pretty well to that point and the blinds were still small compared to my stack so that there was no need for a move. Thinking about it a bit more, I don't think it was a good move. I should have waited for a bigger hand to make that move, because he'd probably only call with hands that were way ahead (e.g. overpair) or were about a fifty-fifty split (e.g. two overcards). In fact, the only hands I'm making him fold are ones that I want to play with, like the lower pairs. On the other hand, a low pocket pair is the kind of hand I normally want to get in before the flop (when a bunch of higher cards are likely to show up) for either as little money as possible or as much money as possible and not somewhere in between.
Nothing like spending your Saturday afternoon on a beautiful day cooped up inside working on your stellar atmospheres project. Then again, I did waste my time this morning, so I suppose I deserve it. Or at least, I've already had my fun for the day. Finals will be over eventually.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a website describing what kinds of seafood should be avoided. It's a pretty interesting < href="http://www.mbayaq.org/cr/SeafoodWatch/web/sfw_regional.aspx">guide to check out, so I recommend it. The worst thing I read there is what some humans due to sharks: Shark finning is so lucrative that it is no longer confined to bycaught sharks. Many sharks are slain just for their fins, used in traditional delicacies like shark-fin soup; the fins are stripped off while the animal is still alive. In many countries, once the fins are cut off, the shark is thrown overboard to die. Can you imagine anything worse? That's the equivalent of cutting off someone's arms and legs and leaving them to die. Sometimes I am shocked at things we do.
My ultimate frisbee team had a great time before the first game of the playoffs Saturday morning, when we set up the 'human tunnel' and had the back of the tunnel run through to the front while cheering loudly. Later on, we lost the game and were eliminated from the tournament, but it was still a fun time.
That night, I dumped $15 into the weekly poker tournament (that's one buy-in plus two re-buys) and still managed to finish in 12th or 13th place. It was pretty ugly.
Last night I had to re-season my wok, because I burnt some food on it that wasn't going to come off without soap. I also went in to work yesterday morning, but didn't make any real progress. However, I'm hoping that the non-progress I made will help me ask more informed questions today. We'll see if that happens.
I was bored writing this post, so I imagine you'll be bored reading it.
In all the excitement of giving a journal club talk, I nearly forgot about today's deadline to register for the Z-Machines workshop that I'm extremely excited about going to! Fortunately, at lunch today it came up and I rushed back to my office and registered without any difficulties. I almost screwed myself over though. I would have been really upset if I had let that one slip away.
I haven't been reporting about my ultimate team for awhile, mostly out of laziness. Well, we finished the regular season 5-9, but I still enjoyed my team a lot. In fact, last night I had the most fun I have ever had playing ultimate. On the field opposite us, the two teams were playing "T-rex" ultimate, with their arms tucked inside their shirts so they could only use their hands to play. It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen! One guy tried to throw a hammer, but it basically went right into the ground. I couldn't stop laughing. Then after our game was over, we decided along with our opponents to have a full squad beer point. Everyone on each team got on the field at once and was required to play with a can of beer in one hand. Spilling beer is an automatic turnover and draws loud jeers from all players on both sides. It was really a lot of fun. Fortunately, I got to talk with Tiffany for awhile after it was over and I didn't drive under the influence. Thanks Tiff! =)