guttervomit

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Poker Update, July 24-29

29 Jul 2006

I’ve played a total of 17 ten-player tables in the past 5 days over at PokerStars and have a total record of one 1st place finish, one 2nd place, and one third place. The buy-in per game is $3 (+ $0.40 to the "dealer"), so I’ve invested a total of $57.80, and won $30 ($15, $9 and $6 for each of my top 3 finishes). Due to the buy-in/reward ratio, I need to win at least 1 out of every 5 games I play in, in order to actually turn a profit. My current success rate is about 1 in 8.5, which is admittedly still pretty far out.

I’m finally beginning to understand what it takes to win these things, owing to some no-limit hold ‘em strategy videos I saw over at ThePokerBay. The overall technique is based around patience, and a folding rate of around 90%. Yes, that means that in a game of 40-50 hands, you will generally play only 5, folding everything else. This explains why professional online players can manage 6 games simultaneously, because more often than not, all they need to do is click the "FOLD" button and move on to the next table.

I doubt I can hit the magic 1:5 win rate without putting a whole lot more time and effort into this, but it certainly is nice to try.

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We’re Back, Thank God

28 Jul 2006

This week marked the longest period that Highfiber.org or Guttervomit.com have ever been offline, a total of more than 48 hours. We experienced a catastrophic hard drive failure, and have had to wait on on-site tech support to replace the burned-out drive, install the OS and other software, then copy over as much of the old data as was salvageable. Thankfully, none of the web data was hit, as far as I can tell (although it’s kinda hard to do a thorough inspection of over 15gb of files, nearly half of which is user-generated).

A lot of things happened this week:

I had my ass chewed out by a client (which I deserved, so I’m not bitching about it)
I was in several meetings with investors, one of which is set to write a very healthy check with our names on it next week (fingers firmly crossed on this one)
I helped hammer out a hopefully profitable partnership with a big local game publisher
I drove home drunk thrice
I actually won a little money on online poker (then lost it again in subsequent tables)
I saw Sideways, finally (capsule review: interesting and complex, but not as good as I was expecting)
I wrote up the concept for my next personal web project, which is going to be a dating site of all things :)
I read a good 80% of and have started to finally gain an understanding of how inflation and free markets work. I doubt I’ll ever become a real economist, but it sure is nice to at least get the fundamentals.

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1

Anatomy of an Online Poker Tournament

24 Jul 2006

I’m currently 15 minutes away from participating in my very first online poker tournament at PokerStars, which is something I’ve been planning for the past month. Being a cheapskate, I looked for the cheapest tournament I could enter (a No-limit Texas Hold ‘Em event with a measley $3.30 buy-in). I must say I’m pretty excited. So far, 500 other players have registered, and my modest goal is to at least make it past the top 60 cut-off point. I don’t really expect to win big, but I’d like to think that I have what it takes to at least finish with a bit more money than it cost me to play.

The champion of an event of this size gets 21.75% of the total prize pool, which would be around US$330. Not that I’m saying that would be me, of course, but it sure is nice to dream.

I haven’t participated in any kind of live competition since my Magic: The Gathering days, a game which I was only marginally good at (I did make it to the finals of 3 tournaments, and took home some small prizes though). Will update this entry as play progresses.

UPDATE #1

Ok, we’re at our first 5-minute break, and about half of the field of 794 players has already been eliminated. I was a bit overwhelmed during the first few hands and proceeded to lose 1/3 of my chips to bad calls. Thankfully, I made one big all-in that allowed me to bounce back. I’m nowhere in the top 100 at this point, but I’m still playing, so that’s something I guess.

I got moved to a different table after the first 20 minutes, and am currently the short stack, after mistaking a check-raise for weakness. The limits have gone up twice already (currently at 50/100) and I’ve only got about 1,600 to my name. I don’t know if I’ll be able to hit my goal with this tourney, but it’s been incredibly exciting so far :)

UPDATE #2

Well, I’ve been eliminated at 187th place, still quite a ways away from the 127th-place bubble. It turns out that the winner of the tournament takes home a hefty US$500, which is pretty decent all things considered. I’m going to try again just as soon as I have a chance, as this was some of the most fun I’ve had online since Starcraft :)

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Lady in the Water

20 Jul 2006

I’ve always enjoyed M. Night Shyamalan’s revisionist-style movies; the intricate ghost horror Sixth Sense is one of my favorite horror films of all time, and I felt Signs was a wonderfully intimate drama. Lady in the Water isn’t on the same level as either of those two, but it does have a fairly interesting premise. (And no, it’s not the M. Night Shyamalan revision of the Splash genre.)

Paul Giamatti is perfectly cast here as the dour, stuttering super at The Cove apartments, who finds a magical creature swimming in the public pool. Here is a film that is essentially a far-fetched bedtime story enacted in urban Philadelphia, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. There are moments when you feel that Shyamalan was making the story up as he went along, because honestly, the rules that are set out for our principal characters are confusing, and end up being switched around at critical moments.

One of the things I’ve always liked about Shyamalan’s films is the tightness of the vision, which is often the case when a single person is writing, producing and directing. Sometimes though, this same level of control can result in a purely self-indulgent kind of production; Lady in the Water, in my opinion, is a bedtime story that didn’t really need to be told.

Review Lady in the Water at FilmCrowd.com!

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TeamFocus

20 Jul 2006

Pandora Squared launched a demo of its newest brand yesterday, a corporate intranet solution called TeamFocus. Our aim with this product was to improve on the idea of a corporate intranet, i.e., by improving information storage and retrieval, improving employee relationships and improving employee retention. The current demo - which you can try now by registering for free here - incorporates the various stalwarts of our Genesis Engine, i.e., blogs, discussions and private messaging, and adds on project management, to-do lists, a file repository, and our brand spanking new Team Status module. As its name suggests, the Team Status module gives you a quick overview of the various members on your team, what they are currently up to, and provides various methods to get in touch with them.

Team Status Module

Our plan is to eventually offer TeamFocus as a hosted, subscription-based solution, although certainly a private, installed version would be easy to put together. Time to stencil ye olde logo on that 1U server eh?

Private TeamFocus Server? Right On!

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The Number-Coding Scheme

16 Jul 2006

I really hate the local number-coding scheme, which bans cars with certain license plate numbers from being on the road on a specific day of the week. I hate it because I dislike commuting and none of the places I need to go to are within walking distance. I hate the fact that various cities have their own version of the scheme, such that I am often unsure whether or not it is legal for me to drive to a meeting in a given city on a given day. Most of all, I hate it because I don’t think it’s actually doing its job.

I’ve been recently reading the very excellent , which mentions a similar scheme attempted in Mexico back in the early 90s. The driving force behind the scheme was to reduce vehicle emissions around Mexico City (which is one of the most polluted cities in the world). On paper, the idea sounded great. Vehicles with plates ending in a given number(s) could not be used on a given day, thus reducing the volume of traffic by as much as 20%. However, it turns out the idea had an opposite effect in the long run.

Sayeth author Charles Wheelan:

As would be expected, many people did not like the inconvenience of having their driving days limited. They reacted in a way that analysts may have predicted but did not. Families who could afford to buy a second car bought one, or simply kept their old car when buying a new one, so that they would always have one car that could be driven on any given day. This proved to be worse for emissions than no policy at all, since the proportion of old cars on the road went up, and old cars are dirtier than new cars. The net effect of the policy change was to put more polluting cars on the road, not fewer. A 1995 study found that overall gas consumption had increased. The policy was later dropped in favor of a mandatory emissions test.

This is the same behaviour exhibited by many middle-class families here in the Philippines. Instead of buying a new car to replace an old one, we keep the old car around as a backup. One of my close friend’s family has more cars than they have driver’s licenses, because nobody wants to be stuck without transportation at a crucial time.

The difference though is that emissions reduction was only one of the reasons for the policy. The Philippine government implemented it in an effort to reduce the physical number of cars on the road as well. After reading the Mexico experience though, I’m wondering if that is really what happened. I started driving a few years after the policy was implemented in this country so my personal experience is limited at best, but I don’t believe that the traffic situation has markedly improved (at least, not since I started driving back in 2000).

One of the things Naked Economics has been teaching me is that the best way to get people to do what you (the prevailing authority) want is to incentivize them in some fashion. With that in mind, I think the best way to reduce the number of vehicles on the road is to increase the cost of parking. Why parking fees, and not gasoline? Because you want to discourage private cars while encouraging public transportation. Increasing the cost of parking makes people think twice about taking their cars to work or taking several cars instead of jamming themselves into a single vehicle.

What I don’t really know is exactly how much the cost should be. On the average, it costs about PhP80 to park for a whole day in any of the business districts, and I think increasing it to say, PhP100 would have a very powerful effect on the average driver. The current coding scheme is flawed because it doesn’t really lessen the number of drivers; it just heightens the need to buy more cars.

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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

13 Jul 2006

Pirates of the Caribbean From my FilmCrowd review:

Interesting, if not slightly diminutive, sequel to "The Curse of the Black Pearl."

There are some good set pieces throughout the film and some nicely-played action sequences (both of them involve rolling through the jungle inside a large round object), but this film overstays its welcome just a bit too much to be consistently exciting. Davy Jones and his barnacle-encrusted crew were a definite high point, as was Johnny Depp’s manic performance as Capt. Jack Sparrow.

I personally found it annoying how sea-travel seems to take no time at all in this movie (regardless of the vessel the characters happen to be in); expeditions that should normally take months occurred in cross-fades. Perhaps if the plot had been tightened up more, they wouldn’t have had to bounce around quite as much.

As the entire two and a half hours of this movie was essentially a teaser for the third installment next year, I’ll have to reserve judgement on the whole Pirates trilogy until then. For now though, all this movie will really do is make you say "arrggh."

More Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest reviews at FilmCrowd.com.

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Digital Music in the Philippines

11 Jul 2006

digital music

A meeting yesterday got me thinking about the feasibility of an iTunes for the Philippines (or, for that matter, the third-world). I already wrote about the Mozcom effort Fliptunes (which generally sucked) a couple weeks ago, so I thought I’d take some time to write down some ideas for a local digital music initiative.

The big challenge here is that you are marketing to an audience that has thoroughly embraced piracy, and are effectively asking them to pay for something that they could otherwise be getting for free. That may sound like an impossibly skewed view, but I believe there is a way to make your service more appealing, such that it becomes a viable alternative for a large enough portion of the market. Because you are essentially trying to convert freeloaders, it becomes important to realize that virtually any amount is going to be "too much," unless your services offers something that piracy doesn’t.

My dream service would function as a kind of digital locker for the songs I purchased. It would retain these songs for as long as I was a member of the site, and would allow me to download them at any point in the future. For something like this, I’d say the average person would be willing to spend no more than PhP18/song. The reason why I pick the 18-peso price point is because you can represent that in your mind as three 5-peso coins and three 1-peso coins, i.e., a trivial amount. PhP20 per song, on the other hand, would be represented by an actual paper bill, which crosses over the line from being a "trivial amount" to being an "actual expense."

I would also be willing to pay a small amount per month to keep these songs in a digital locker. For a service like this, I would be willing to pay in the region of PhP1,000 per year (or roughly PhP100 per month). The digital locker concept is what makes this service profitable, because "keeping" the songs requires no actual action on the part of the music provider. All they have to do is keep a list of the songs that a particular user has purchased, and make these available to him whenever he logs on. What the user is buying is the convenience of having a place online where he knows his songs are safe (and could possibly even listen to via a browser-based radio).

The digital locker also has the added benefit of being a point of stickiness for your service, as you could further extend the idea to make each user’s digital locker publicly-viewable. You could conceivably open the whole thing up and build a social network ala last.fm or mog.com, except that the songs and artists mentioned are all purchase-able instantly. The idea really is to stop focusing on making a profit from selling songs, but to make your money on peripherals like the locker service (which can be priced in tiers of "storage"), or selling targeted merchandise.

Going forward, you could allow young bands to upload their songs as well and charge their own prices on top of a base price of say, PhP10, which is the minimum amount the service can charge (ala CafePress). Now suddenly you’ve got a network that grows organically over time and reflects whatever is popular in the local scene. But it all starts with locating that perfect price point at which you can start converting the piracy-powered masses.

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4

The Handshake

6 Jul 2006

I’ve been reading a bit of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink recently, where he talks about the phenomenon of, among other things, thin-slicing. Thin-slicing is essentially just a fancy word for that notion that you can glean a significant amount of information from minutiae, often unconsciously. I was reminded of this recently while musing about the miracle of the handshake.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve gone to nearly 2 dozen meetings, and shaken over 3 dozen unique hands. Many of these hands belonged to CEOs or VCs or people who would just as soon shake my hand as spit in it (and not in a good way either). One of these hands belonged to a guy with a billion-dollar collection of Salvador Dali originals in his house in Makati. Another belonged to the manager of Little Richard back in the day. And another belonged to the CEO of a multi-million-dollar Australian tech company. The rich, successful types usually shake hands in very similar ways, because they’ve done it so many times that it’s become reflex.

The general process is to grasp, pump, squeeze and release, but the timing of the release and the amount of squeeze you exert is crucial. Why is it crucial? Because people thin-slice you on the basis of your handshake.

Because there is a very specific way to properly shake someone’s hand, there are myriad erroneous ways as well. My personal peeve is what I like to call the faggot-shake, which is where the guy just slips his hand into yours and lets you do all the work. No pump, no squeeze. Just the barest hint of a grasp, a pause, then release. This is how women in polite society shake hands. When a guy shakes your hand like this, it basically means that he wants to be treated like a lady.

Recently, I’ve noticed the faggot-shake employed more and more by blowhards, which is surprising because you’d expect these types of people to have very forceful handshakes. Instead, they place their clammy hands in yours and wait for you to shake, then proceed to bore you to death with their own personal illusions of grandeur. Thankfully, I know that the best way to handle a blowhard is to pretend you’re impressed. (It makes for amusing stories to your friends afterwards.)

On the other side of the spectrum is the samson-shake, which is often used by people who feel they have a lot to prove, and thus try too hard to show (irrelevant) physical strength. These guys squeeze hard and try to see if you’ll wince. I’ve seen this mostly from guys with crappy jobs. They usually have a big shit-eating grin on their face when they do it too.

Another variation is the eternal-shake, i.e., the guys that won’t let go. This is due to inexperience more than anything else, and I’ve learned that you shouldn’t really read too much into this one. (On the other hand, the very fact that the guy you’re shaking hands with is inexperienced might be enough to get a good idea of whether he’s lying to you or not.)

The trick about reading these hand-shakes is to keep it in context. For example, the aussie CEO had a samson-esque handshake, which confused me until I realized that it was probably because he was twice my weight. He looked right at me when he gave the squeeze too, and you could tell that it was a very subtle test. The only thing to do at that point is squeeze back, otherwise, I’d be marked as a lightweight.

Why do I put so much thought into these hand-shakes? Well, I’m obsessive about details, by nature. But the bigger reason is that a person’s actions don’t lie quite as well as his words do, and I need every bit of help I can get figuring these people out.

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5

Fun With Superman

1 Jul 2006

Cinematical has a really fun post that talks about all the various plotholes and inconsistencies in the recent Superman Returns. Some of the stuff they mention could be easily explained away by a bit of comic-geekery, but there are a few that bug the living crap out of me, namely:

Bullets bounce right off Superman. We all know that. But they also
bounce off of his costume. It never tears and we see that on the roof
sequence. However, Lex is able to stab right through it?

[ ... ] why was it so easy for the doctors in the hospital to rip of supermans costume?

I really have no answer to this. I’m assuming that Superman’s costume is actually an alien symbiote that leeches off the Kryptonian’s strength to make itself invulnerable … but that’s just me.

And some more:

Superconception: If the Superhump that went down in Superman 2
is the one that created the new kid, then the kid shouldn’t have any
powers at all — since Supes and Lois did the horizontal fortress-dance
while our hero was completely without powers. And anyway, since
Superman ended up deleting Lane’s memory of the Supertryst, she’d have
no way of knowing that the kid belongs to Superstud in the first place.

My personal thoughts on the super-hump: Superman lost his powers briefly in Superman 2, and promptly had his way with lady Lois. His body is actually "recreated" here, making him completely human. Now I’m of the opinion that this was the one and only time that Lois and Supes got together, because human and kryptonian DNA could never combine to have offspring … even in a badly explained comic-based movie. So the one time that Superman gets some, he doesn’t remember to wear a rubber and ends up getting Lois pregnant.

Here’s the flaw in the theory though: if he was completely human at the point of insemination, how could super-kid have those latent super-abilities? Guess the transformation wasn’t as complete as the movie made it sound, huh?

And some existentialist thoughts on the whole Superman/Clark Kent dichotomy:

My big beef with the Clark Kent thing is that it even exists. How many
people DIE every day because Superman is writing bylines and gutter
copy??

Isn’t it high time they killed "Clark"?

Hear, hear. Clark Kent has been in Metropolis for God knows how long, and he still doesn’t have any friends (at least, none that bother to look at him long enough to realize that he’s the spitting image of a certain well-known superhero). There was this interesting writeup some years ago about the difference between Superman and the other alter-ego-type superheroes (Batman, Spidey, etc). Whereas Batman and Spidey hide their true identities to protect the people that are close to them, Superman’s true identity is … well, Superman. It’s "Clark Kent" that is the facade, not the other way around, and while it was stylistically fun to have a mild-mannered journalist transform into an all-powerful demi-god back in the 50’s, the Kent identity doesn’t really serve much of a purpose anymore these days. (They did away with Clark Kent in the comics already I believe; whether or not the movie version will catch up remains to be seen though.)

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quick links to the good stuff

elsewhere online

Poker Update, July 24-29

We’re Back, Thank God

Anatomy of an Online Poker Tournament

Lady in the Water

TeamFocus

The Number-Coding Scheme

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

Digital Music in the Philippines

The Handshake

Fun With Superman

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