I spent an hour and a half last night playing extremely good poker and working my chip stack up to a good solid level. Then, on one hand, I lost 2/3 of it. I was in the big blind and everyone folded around to the small blind, who called. I looked at my cards and saw AA. My instinct was to raise, but I decided for some unexplicable reason, to be tricky and check. The flop was J89, two of which were diamonds. My opponent made a pot sized bet. I thought he might have had a 10 and maybe a couple of diamonds down, so I decided to make a big raise. Unfortunately, he immediately went all-in and I knew I was beat. But the pot odds demanded a call, so I did. Naturally, he turned over Q10 and I was basically drawing dead. After that I played like shit and lost quickly. That just goes to show how disciplined you need to be to do well. Live and learn.
Today, I'm spending my time waiting on hold for an MVD customer service agent to explain what the hell I'm supposed to do about my car insurance. The problem is that my car is registered in AZ, but my insurance is with my Dad in CA and there might be some sort of problem with that. If there is a legitimate issue, it means that my registration and plates have already been suspended and I'll have to pay a $50 fee to reinstate them. Ugh.
After talking with a friend of mine who's been shooting guns since he was five years old (!!), I have learned that National Forest land is basically any federally owned land that isn't anything else (like a park, or building, or whatever). And apparently, that's THE place to go to shoot your guns off at bottles and the like. However, supposedly you're supposed to drive a fair distance off the road so you don't bother people like me. But it's pretty clear that in the place Tiff and I visited last weekend people didn't observe that rule. You're also allowed to use any kind of motorized vehicle (such as ATV or motorcycle) on National Forest land. So I think the bottom line is, if you're looking for a nice peaceful place to spend a weekend morning or afternoon, stay the hell away from National Forest land.
Try folkalley.com. I started listening last night and was really impressed by the broad range of folk songs they played. I was also especially impressed by the lack of ads. I hate ads with a passion previously unbeknownst to mankind, so I found that aspect of the station particularly fantastic.
Tiffany is in town this weekend, checking out the law school here since she is going to be transferring here next fall (long distance relationship no longer long distance will be a wonderful thing!). We decided to go for a bike ride on a mountain trail east of Tucson. At first, it seemed like a real nice area to ride, but then as we were driving along the dirt road, I noticed a guy with ear mufflers standing next to a car on the side of the road, and I thought to myself, now what could those be for? After another second of driving, I saw that he, along with a few of his friends, were shooting rifles at bottles and other junk. I pointed it out to Tiff and wondered if we were witnessing outlaws practicing their aim. Around the next turn in the road, we saw another group of people, this time with handguns. The handguns were even scarier than the rifles, and the "sportsmen" stared at us as we drove past. It was really freaky. But then the worst thing was the next group of people with guns that we passed. We saw a boy holding a rifle bigger than he was himself! I couldn't believe it. The whole family came out to shoot off their guns. Apparently, this business is completely legal, because we later saw several law enforcement vehicles driving along the same road as us. It boggled our minds that people would be allowed to do this sort of thing out in the open legally, but that's Arizona for you.
As I said at the beginning, we went with the aim of mountain biking, but we were so perturbed by the gunshots all around us that we didn't feel safe just picking a random trail and biking along it. Additionally, there were people with ATVs and motorcycles along most of the trails kicking up dust and making lots of noise--generally making the place inordinately unpleasant. However, we saw an information post that indicated a place where you could park your car and then bike along a trail where motorized vehicles were prohibited. This sounded like the ideal place, so we drove in the direction indicated on the map. Sadly, this didn't work out; the road was very poorly labelled and we couldn't figure out where the right turnoff was. We ended up driving for half an hour in privately owned land (with plenty of bullet hole-ridden signs saying "no shooting") before turning around. We also spent some time driving on one of the offshoots of the main road. It seems like the area we were in east of Tucson has all sorts of these types of offshoots in the mountains. You could spend a huge amount of time simply driving around and looking. The scenery is beautiful too. But of course, the gunshots constantly going off in the distance make it far less pleasant. And after people are done shooting their cans of bud light they certainly don't go and clean up after themselves. If the shooting isn't illegal, the littering as a direct result of it should be. We also ended up on a road meant for 4x4 vehicles only, but fortunately Tiff is a good driver and managed to get us out of it.
So, in the end, we managed to bike for about five minutes total. The trail we finally chose was super rocky and steep and had big jeeps and such driving along it fairly frequently. Tiff rode and I walked (it was too tough for me to bike) along the trail for a few minutes before we sat down, just out of view of the parking lot, and ate lunch. Then we went back to the car and drove back to civilization. It was an interesting experience, but I wish we could've gotten in more mountain biking than we did.
I was having a great time listening to my music on my headphones at work when someone got my attention and asked me if I was aware that my music was blasting out of the speakers on my desktop. Er, no, I wasn't aware :P It was actually pretty funny. I use a splitter for the audio signal and forgot that I had the speakers on, so I was happily listening away and had no idea that I was responsible for such a racket.
Yes, I have been neglecting my blog. Oh well. Let's see, on Friday, I flew back to the bay area to visit Tiffany. From the Oakland airport, we drove directly to Lake Tahoe, where we spent the night and went snowboarding the next day. The snow was pretty icy and strong winds shut down access to most of the mountain, so we stopped around 2pm, which is pretty early for us. But it turned out to be a good thing, since we went to bed essentially when we got home from Tahoe, which ended up being around 8. The next morning, we woke up 10 minutes before 6 to drive to SF for a half-marathon Tiff ran in. I did the 5k in 26 minutes, but I spent the first mile or so weaving through groups of people. I also stopped around mile 2 to tie both of my shoelaces.
We watched the superbowl at Tiff's friend's house in sunnyvale, then left around halftime to go eat dinner at my parent's house. We hung around for a couple more hours and ate some fantastic cheesecake my Mom made, then drove back to Berkeley to get some sleep before Tiff's monday morning class. I helped the cable guy install cable in Tiff's apartment, then in the afternoon Tiff and I saw Brokeback Mountain, which was a good movie. Pretty sad though. Tuesday morning I flew back to Tucson.
Last night I played in a competitive practice for ultimate frisbee and did pretty well. I have been entertaining notions of playing on the college team, but I still think it's just too much of a time commitment.
Time for class.
Well, the GSRP application is done. The website claims they still haven't received the letter of recommendation from my advisor, but Fedex tells me otherwise. I'll trust Fedex on this one.
Meanwhile, I'm attempting to reinstall linux at home on my laptop. So far, setting up wireless and ATI graphics drivers was a hassle but is done. I'm still working on installing a better window manager (FVWM), the cd-drive, my external hard drive, IDL, LaTeX, and sound. Getting linux operational is not user-friendly, whatever some linux guru might try to tell you.