Brent Stace’s Weblog

For some time now, Jenn and I have been hosting the occasional poker night at our house. On my new phone I discovered some demo games, and one of them happened to be Poker (Texas Hold ‘em). By playing on that phone I know I’ve gotten better, and I can’t wait for the next poker night. Either the demo is somehow easy or I’m really good at poker, but I started out with 1,500, and now I’m around 45,000. I’m sure real poker will be different because the phone will NEVER bet above 120 (even when the computer has a ROYAL FLUSH), and I can not raise the bet amount past what it tells me I can raise to. So, of course, adding the human element to the game will only make things more confusing/difficult. Anyhow, I’m going to buy Apple’s version of the game for my iPod and see if that is much different and freeing.

Some hands I have not yet achieved:
- Royal Flush
- Straight Flush
- Four of a Kind

I have however achieved the non-existant hands of:
- Royal Straight
- Bastardized Straight (using at least a king, ace, and 2…so it’s essentially a high card ace).

I’m thinking of proposing a variant of Texas Hold ‘em at our next gaming night. I think I’ll call it Virginia Hold ‘em where the Bastardized Straight hand is allowed and counts as a straight where ace is still high and the highest number of high cards wins. I mean, seriously, why can’t the straight hand loop around like that?

So, Jenn and I got new cell phones On Jan 12th. I was set on getting a Nokia because I have about 3 spare chargers from the prior Nokia phones I had. I got the Nokia 6085. I didn’t realize until I took it out of the box that it uses a different charger connector. Doh! I had to do some customizations to it to behave to my liking, but once I discovered where the calendar was and that I could bluetooth connect this to my Mac, the phone became 200X more better than I thought. I had to customize an iSync file to get iSync to recognize it, but it works just like it’s supposed to. I based my plist file changes from: http://www.james-lloyd.com/scripts/nokia-series-40-isync-plugin/.

In other news, there is one thing in Feb. I’m looking forward to in Apple land. That is the shipping of Time Capsule. Hopefully when it ships Apple will release the firmware fix for the other base stations (AEBS) that will stop corrupting the drives connected to it via NAS whenever files are written to the disk. This will enable time machine for the rest of us. We’ll see when it happens. Rumors are abound that Mac OS 10.5.2 may be released any day. Maybe when they do that update they will supply the firmware update also as well as add default Time Machine backups using the NAS from AEBS’s.