Rant

Note to Obama: Go Fix This Please

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ABC.com: Federal Officials Order Banks to Freeze Millions in Online Poker Winnings

Be it Obama – or even the other big O in the country (Oprah) – can you go fix this moronic policy? If we’re in a recession and people are actually making extra money doing something that enables it, why are we stopping it? Especially for online gambling. Considering that is only illegal if it’s done online… Can’t you simply tax the winnings and call it good?

How is it even lawful – never mind rational – that Lotto, scratch tickets, pull tabs, and full blown casinos are legal if they are brick and mortar based, but online poker playing is suddenly a illegal, actionable, sinful and a felony [in some states] to boot?

You wanted the top seat and promoted change to get there…

Change this.


Rant

List of Shame – Capitol Hill Brunch Edition

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Over the last year or so, Jolene and I have been to a number of places for breakfast on the west and east side of Lake Washington. Call it a tick from my childhood but I dig on brunch… I’ve been known to eat a burger at 8am for exactly this reason, but what’s also good is a varied amount of different foods be it a random menu or a buffet thingy.

The Eastside has a finite number of places that cater to breakfast… Brownbag, Hector’s, George’s, and Original Pancake House in Kirkland, Ruby’s and Pomegranate in Redmond, with the random Denny’s or IHOP all over the place. The Westside, as it includes the sprawling landmass of Seattle, has a much larger number of places… with that much distance to cover, we’ve been returning to an area that’s well known to one of us and sorta known to the other: Capitol Hill.

And so begins the List of Shame…
Continue reading List of Shame – Capitol Hill Brunch Edition →

digital pity

OH HAI! ROYALTEEZ PLZ?

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Microsoft.com: Bing – Microsoft today introduced Bing, a new search experience and consumer brand, outlining a new approach to helping customers use search to make better decisions. This “Decision Engine” approach focuses initially on four key user tasks and related areas: making a purchase, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.

Seeing as this was named after my rabbit, I’m expecting a royalty check at any moment.

Rant

ZuneHD

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Zune.net: ZuneHD

Huh. Not all that often that you can be surprised by your own company. The HD radio is interesting. So is it the big 3.3″ screen, especially for movie viewing; screen size is how the Zune 80 made it’s way into my life – for video viewing, I need the room both for the screen and storage… the iPod classic didn’t have a comparable screen and the PSP had almost nothing for video storage. I expect Zune’s to have wireless for sync’ing, but I don’t much need a web browser – even the touchscreen doesn’t matter much to me.

Given the profile, I’m almost afraid to ask what the storage is here – I’m assuming flash which would be a shame for video usages…

Wants more specs, plz!

Rant

Bad Beat FTW!

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Ahhhh! A poker post! It has been a while but this was what was likely to be a once in a lifetime this… after all, I don’t play in non-tournaments games in casinos very often and you need to play in cash games to qualify for the jackpots…

This was easily the most exciting event to happen to me in a casino (and that includes the night we had the Las Vegas police department show up at the hotel door, responding to a complaint.)
Continue reading Bad Beat FTW! →

Rant

Whoville Makes The News!

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FOX Sports: The 11-0 victory was Fico’s 43rd no-hitter, fourth consecutive perfect game, and seventh this season. She has a career ERA of .006. Fico (90-2 career) pitched another no-hitter on Thursday as Masuk won 10-0, but her streak of perfect games ended when she walked a batter. Through 11 games this year, she has given up just two hits and two walks.

Now that’s impressive.

Especially since the last time Monroe made the national news it was because they were giving out pot to customers from the McDonald’s Drive Thru window…

Rant

Swine Flu

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Sorry to do this, but I have to pull the trigger on the “I Told You This Was A Problem Waiting To Happen” gun: how wide spread would the zOMG-we-can-stop-it coming Swine Flu pandemic if we didn’t have so many freaking illegal aliens running around from the country that virus came from? Would we still have a full pandemic? Odds are, yes – Mexico is a popular travel location and a number of people from the wintery parts of North America, but would it be a full blown panic that takes up the first 15 minutes of every news broadcast if there wasn’t for the unmentioned threat that is exasperated by the millions of people now in the country that skipped the INS process and don’t have access to medical coverage?

Looks like the non-hippie government officials that were opposed to relaxing immigration or – better yet – enforce the existing law against unregulated immigration missed the target but hit the tree… not quite the problem the expected but it is a problem.

Yeah, they may have missed the target but they blew the tree clear outta the ground.

GeekStuff

Xbox LIVE Update: The New Digs

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I remember going to the Microsoft Millennium campus for first the first time, three years ago. At the time, I was working as an SDET for MSDN and they were just coming off a ship cycle for some online work as well as Visual Studio 2005… I was interviewing at a couple of different places at the time. One was the team that did the Sidebar and Calendar for Vista. Another was going to do some other incubation work within the company. I also interviewed with an internal shared technology for Microsoft Game Studios called Tools and Technologies. When I got to their building in Millennium, I remember walking into the “old Bungie space” – they had just moved to Kirkland that year – and stopped dead in my tracks at what I was seeing: they were in cubes.

Over the years, the TnT group re-orged within the company, taking on new roles and tasks as we went, until we eventually became part of Xbox LIVE last year. This past weekend, my team moved from the Millennium campus to the newest and most contemporary campus within the Microsoft world: Studios West.

While I’m not back in a proper office – the Xbox LIVE team has opted for Open Offices which is still a cube – the new digs are just absolutely jaw dropping… keep reading for some pics from the Commons today.
Continue reading Xbox LIVE Update: The New Digs →

Rant

Teabagging 101

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MSNBC.com: Rachel Maddow Show

Watch it and then ask yourself: how can someone take on a name without doing one Internet search? I give props to Rachel for not breaking down (in the first six minutes). I cannot believe they got a woman named Ana Cox to speak as part of the report. The fact that she actually says – with a straight face, no less – “Who wouldn’t want to teabag John McCain?” made it feel more like something from the Onion than MSNBC. But alas: it’s a true story and I honestly think the Onion couldn’t make it funnier.

Can’t wait to see what the FCC makes of the term when they realize it’s a gaming [and slang] term for: “slapping ones testicles on another person’s face.”

Update: Even The Simpsons get it: Hulu clip

Rant

Snow-globed …in April?

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Went snowshoeing this weekend for the first time. Drove from 75 and sunny in the lowlands to 120″ snow base at the Summit in Snoqualmie. Was told by one group of people “you can’t shoe here – this is private property!” which got a ‘Uh, you own the whole mountain?’ in reply. The woman replied with “Actually, yes! We bought 80 acres a couple of years ago!” which sent me scurrying down a mound of snow. Equally as mind blowing was walking around on shoe-things that are about two feet long on a massive layer of snow while wearing a short-sleeve shirt, but it was hot up there… was fun tho – may do it again this or next week. Heard there was bare ground starting to show in some places already…

Nind numbing? That was doing a FacePlant into said layer of snow and need help to get up because I tried to walk forward with your left shoe pinning the right shoe down.

noOb.

Rant

Nine Point Fuckin’ Five

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Sales tax in King County Washington is now 9.5%. I don’t know if I’m more appalled by the actual number or the fact that there’s no public outrage by the rise in sales tax. Again.

Or still. I need to start going to Oregon to buy stuff. This new rate makes a 360 game $65.69. Makes a $3.75 cup of coffee become $4.11. New Nintendo DS? $186.14. A Samsung 52″ LCD on sale at Best Buy goes for $2099.99 (orig $2699.99) but in WA it’s out the door price is $2299.49, eating a third of the savings. I know it’s simple math, but it doesn’t take the sting out of it. And isn’t that just what you want to see as spending slows down? Higher tax rates? On top of that, Amazon is a WA based company: every order there gets ding with sales tax as well. Pretty damaging number.

On a personal note, my thanks to everyone that re-elected Gregoire. True, Rossi may have raised the rate as well (maybe even raised it higher!) but I can’t debate that because it’s an unknown. What I can state is a very simple fact: Christine has raised it from 8.8% to 9.5% within a span of four years. And where has the money gone? I know where it hasn’t gone: the Alaskan Way viaduct, a new 520 bridge, the light rail project for Bellevue, or the “new” monorail in Seattle. I know that we have new parks though. I’m sure we have a whole slew of anti-drug programs. Not to mention the anti-online gambling task force. Along with all sorts of other hippie feel-good programs that have been dreamed up in Olympia and given us nothing to show for it.

Well, I shouldn’t say we have nothing to show for it… obviously we all have to help pay the bill.

Rant

Take Fast!

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Not sure where 2009 is going but it’s obvious that it’s not being channelled into the blog… and I’m not even going to apologize for it. The simple truth is that there hasn’t been much going on that needs Ranting about. And what does need Ranting about is being passed through other channels be it work or personal related… after all, somethings are just simply not meant for public consumption. Hell, even my Facebook status goes for up to a week without an update…

That said, I’ve been holding out for Al-baby to do something stupid that would help me to rally, but he’s been remarkably quiet as of late. The only other coming head explosion will be that around our coming King Country (or WA) sales tax increase… the splash zone of brain matter will be directly impacted by the size of the increase… I’m expecting to be at 9.5% by summer and 10% by year end. This will mean a large head pop.

In other news, there’s a foster kitten in my upstairs bathroom in an experiment to see how my allergies [and allergy medication] hold up with critters in my house… so far so good, but time will tell.

Ever forward.

digital pity

Oof.

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MSNBC.com: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has chronicled the news of the city since logs slid down its steep streets to the harbor and miners caroused in its bars before heading north to Alaska’s gold fields, will print its final edition Tuesday.

Hearst Corp., which owns the 146-year-old P-I, said Monday that it failed to find a buyer for the newspaper, which it put up for a 60-day sale in January after years of losing money. Now the P-I will shift entirely to the Web.

“Tonight will be the final run, so let’s do it right,” publisher Roger Oglesby told the newsroom.

In a word, be it printed or blt’d: wow.

Hearst’s decision to abandon the print product in favor of an Internet-only version is the first for a large American newspaper

…but it won’t be the last, I’m sure.


Randy No Arms' ongoing commentary on life, gaming, and the rest of the world