but after reading a lot and watching a spirited debate between 2 intelligent stakeholders on tv (alex whatshisname from reddit and some corporate bigwig from NBC, look it up on youtube), i’m sure this is a really bad idea. in addition to the basic concerns about censorship (when has that EVER worked out well for us?) and first amendment issues, and the obvious technical problems, there are some other less well-known issues:

• a lot of people care about this bill, but most of them can’t even agree on what it actually says, in the literal sense. that can’t be a sign of good draftsmanship. the NBC guy kept saying “it only applies to foreign websites whose primary purpose is piracy” and the reddit guy kept saying “no it doesn’t”. yes it does. no it doesn’t. and like that.
• it puts the burden of copyright protection on the middle men. this tactic is born from frustration that we can’t control the providers if they’re outside our jurisdiction, and the consumers are small fish who are hard to catch and not politically expedient to prosecute. so who’s left? the middle men.
• like most legislation regarding technology, it’s hopelessly naive, and doomed to immediate obsolescence. what, DNS blocking is hard, and breaks DNSSEC? and it won’t work anyway? oops.
• the provisions regarding circumvention technology are very broad, and  the restrictions on content describing this tehcnology apply to domestic as well as foreign sites. circumvention technology could be taken to include all kinds of proxies, encryption, VPNs — things that have other legitimate and important uses.
• the limitation of liability for those who voluntarily block suspected wrongdoers is really insidious. the MPAA (or other copyright holder) can publish a blacklist of sites they consider to be pirates without any due process or judicial oversight.  if i’m a service provider and i don’t “voluntarily” block the sites on the blacklist, i open myself up to later charges that i didn’t take adequate measures if they turn out to be actual bad guys. so although officially getting a foreign site blocked requires a court order, unofficially the service providers can only protect themselves by taking the copyright-holders’ word for who’s a bad guy. the EFF calls this the “vigilante provision“.

scary.

• i made quads 3 times. unbelievable. and won important pots all 3 times. on one of those occasions i flopped quad fours and got paid by top pair, and on another one i flopped top set and got it all in behind a flopped flush, made quads on the turn to bust him. later made quad 4s again against a short stack all in, although he was already drawing dead against my set.
• flopped the nuts with a straight flush redraw — T8dd on 9d7d6c flop — and a guy 3-bet me all in on the flop for a lot of chips with a pair of black queens
• at the final table i reshoved tens into chipleader justin’s JJ and got saved on the turn
• also at final table i called tractor-hat don’s all-in with AK vs his A4 for most of my chips. flop T74 but no problem. turn Q, river J.

in addition to having way more than my fair share of luck, i played really well all day. i stole a tremendous number of pots without having to show hands. by the dinner break, i was the chip leader with about 150k chips and and 28 players left. but then came an seemingly endless draught of cards. i didn’t win a real pot for  2 hours and couldn’t find any opportunities to throw the weight of my big stack around. but i weathered the storm. by the time we were in the money i was an average stack but still in ok shape, and when we got to the final table i was one of the shorter stacks with 60k. justin the chip leader had a really big stack, probably like 350k of the 1,070,000 chips in play. the blinds at that point were probably 1500/3000. but after doubling up with TT vs JJ as mentioned above, and then busting a couple of the other shorter stacks, i was definitely back in contention.

when we got to 3 handed it was justin and me and a guy from canada. he played solidly but i could tell didn’t have much short-handed experience. justin was playing really well, but his stack wasn’t as imposing as it had been.

after playing a while 3-handed we stopped the clock to discuss a deal. the canadian guy had taken a couple big pots from the justin and they both had close to 400k, and i had 280k. we were probably at the 3000/6000  level at that point, so there was a lot of play left. an even chop would have got us over $9k each, and a chip-count deal looked like 10k for each of them and over 8k for me, which looked pretty good compared to the $5600 for 3rd. i would have probably taken it, but  justin wanted to play. fine with me… i had the canadian guy on my right, and as suspected he was not comfortable playing short handed at all. we leaned on him hard and dispatched him pretty quickly.

we played heads up for a little while and then stopped again to talk about a deal. at that point the score was 580k for justin and 490k for me, and i didn’t feel either of us had a skill edge. there was $6k real-money difference between 1st and 2nd. i proposed we make a “save” where we each take $10.5k or so and play for the couple grand left over. but the tournament director stepped in and said “you can’t make saves any more. the tournament coordinator says that once a deal is agreed on the tournament has to be over”. we both made a sour face at him, but decided to keep playing. we played for another 30 or 40 minutes  but we were still 50 bb deep (blinds at 5k/10k)  and neither one of us could make much headway. at this point we’d been playing about 15 hours. we got back to dead even, and justin said “ok, wanna chop it up?”. “sold.” but who gets the official “win”? we decided to high-card for it.  i drew a J and was looking good, but he pulled the A of hearts. that’s ok, i took home over $11k so i GUESS  i can live with a 2nd place finish

i get a nice looking email from godaddy. “time to renew one of your SSL certificates! renew early!” ok, that seems like a good idea, so i click the big green “Go To My Renewals” button.

I’m already logged into my godaddy account, and as advertised the button takes me to the My Renewals page. except… it says i don’t have any renewals pending. or any renewable products at all. i hit the refresh button a few times and navigate to the top and back to the My Renewals page, no luck.

ok so, that’s broken. which wouldn’t be too surprising, except it was broken last month too.

whatever. so i go to the SSL Certificates section under My Account, and i see this:

a list of all my certs, with a huge red exclamation point telling me i have products that will expire soon. “Renew now!”. where do you think that link goes? yep, to the My Renewals page that shows i have “no products renewing the next 90 days”. or ever, if i change the search filter to “all renewable products”.

well, that’s OK, cause i’ve got a link to “Manage Certificate”. so surely i can renew from there, right?

don’t be so naive. also, to show how gullible you are, you probably expected that link to take me to some info about that specific cert, right? ha! it really just takes me to different list of ALL my certs, with various options of what i can do to/with them. and renew isn’t one of the options.

well OK, but the cert names are clickable. so i guess i can probably click one of those and… WTF??? i get a read-only view of some cert details like serial number and key length, and the same options (site seal, rekey, revoke, etc.) as the previous screen. no renew.

ugh. i guess i must have missed something earlier. besides the “Manage Certificate” link that turned out to be a dead end, the My Account cert list had links on the cert names also.

you can also use checkboxes to select one or more cert, but your only option from here is “Cancel Account” (which i happen to know from past experience actually means “turn off autorenew”,  by the way)

so… where does that link go? hey check this out!

progress! the renew option appears in the right panel. and for some incomprehensible reason, the Cancel Account checkbox is now selected. ignore that, i guess. let’s select a renewal period.

here are the options.

sweet! i can get as many years as i want for $199.99

except, that turns out to be a lie (not surprisingly). 5 years costs exactly 5x as much as 1 year.

skipping ahead, i order 2 renewals and pay for them. note that at this point i haven’t actually received my renewal certificates, but at least i’ve paid for them.

i get a receipt email that has some more big green buttons:

well, that sounds promising. let’s Activate one of these suckers. i push the button, and it takes me to the same old My Account list of ALL  my certs, with no indication of what to do next.

i click on the cert name on the list (hey, it worked last time!), and now it shows this:

um, ok “renewal pending”. what does that mean? i don’t really believe it’s “pending” because i haven’t even provided the cert renewal technical details and it hasn’t started the verification process yet.

there’s only one clickable link there, so like a sucker i click it. it takes me to the list of all my certs with the rekey/revoke options that we saw before when we clicked the Manage Certificate link. There’s a link labeled “missing products? click here to update your list” but it doesn’t do anything. arrggghhhhhh!!!! at this point i’m swearing out loud at my monitor. i go home for the night with intention of having a drink or 3.

[skip ahead 13 hours and several drinks later]

i come back and click the Activate button again, same result. i click the cert name again and get the same Account details panel. but this time when i click the link on the cert name, something different happens: a list of “credits”, each of which has link labeled “request certificate”.

so at this point, we’ve seen:

1. the link in the 1st email didn’t work
2. the manage certificate link doesn’t help, and goes to a screen that’s not specific to the cert the link was next to.
3. there are 2 different lists of all my certs, with different branding and different options, but neither has a renew option
4. the only link that took me to a renew option was the unlabeled link on the cert name in one of the 2 cert lists (but not the other one)
5. the price list for renewals is misleading (or arguably just wrong)
6. the Activate link in the 2nd email doesn’t work
7. the unlabeled link in the Account detail panel eventual goes to a page with a list of the renewal credits i bought, but only after an unspecified period of time and several drinks have elapsed. in the interim it goes somewhere irrelevant instead.

and now hours, drinks, and about 1000 clicks later i’m at the point where i can “request certificate”, which is what i was trying to do when i started this process.

i manage a web application development shop for a living. this interface wouldn’t be considered acceptable for a pre-production prototype at my place, and we’d be embarrassed to show it to anyone. but somehow godaddy is able to live with it for months and years on end. i don’t get it.

why do i still use them?

• they’re cheap
• their cert approval process is sensible
• i keep thinking maybe they’ll fix their $##%#%# user interface eventually LOL

part of the reason for the good turnout is that turning stone “gave away” 100 seats (paid for by the jackpot drop). this is a pretty brilliant move by TS, and i hope they keep it up in the future.  a lot (most) of the giveaway seat recipients are dead money,  and the more dead money in a tournament the farther other people are willing to go out of their way to play it. and TS gets 150 juice on the 1650 free seat, so they’re getting a piece of their own jackpot drop. brilliant! this is a win/win/win for the lucky and grateful free seat recipients, for the good players who benefit from the dead money, and for the casino who gets a hefty fee for facilitating the transfer of wealth from the jackpot drop to the good tournament players.

about the structure: the structure was TOO good. 60 minute levels on day 1, with 75 minute levels after day 1, and a structure that started at 25/50 and included a 75/150 level, 2 150/300 levels (without and with 25 ante) and a 250/500 level.  the problem (if you can call it that!) was that despite this nice slow structure, we also started with 30,000 chips.  the published schedule said that they hoped to play down to 6 players on day 2. weeks ago i did some quick math based on a minimal 350 players (they needed 334 to meet the 500k guarantee) and a nominal final table average stack of 60 to 100bb, and calculated that they couldn’t possibly reach 6 players until several hours into day 3. i sent an email to a couple interested parties, warning them not to make any solid plans for early this week. sure enough, the tournament finished a full day behind schedule. c’mon guys, the math wasn’t that hard. if you want to keep it to 3 days, please consider reducing the starting stack and/ or eliminating  an early level or two, rather than reducing the length of the levels. 60 minute  levels rock!

as for my tournament, there’s not much to say. i kept my stack at a playable level through guile and deception for 11 hours, but it was a struggle. i never had any big pairs until late in the first day when i had QQ and had to fold on the turn, and KK when i reshoved my last 20bb preflop and got called by QQ. oops, there’s a Q on the flop. done. finis.

the most interesting hand of the day was one i lost. i called a raise on the button with 89. flop Q22 with 2 hearts and a spade, check check. turn 9 of spades, he checks, hmmm. i think i have the best hand, but it’s hard to get value out of it, because i feel like he  doesn’t have anything.  i check with intention of catching a river bluff  if a blank comes off.  river another 9, he leads out for 1000, about 2/3 of the pot.  i already decided on the turn he doesn’t have anything (would have bet a Q or any decent pair with 2 possible flush draws out) and this doesn’t change much, except now with my small boat i can beat something like TT. he might also have a 9 for a chop. i raise to 3000. the way i played the hand it doesn’t seem like i have anything either, so i’m hoping for a call from A high or maybe TT. to my surprise he makes it 6000. ugh. but i still like my read, he’s unlikely to have a Q. it’s either a weird bluff trying to get me to lay down an A, or a 9 for a chop. i ponder “i don’t see how i can be behind here”. i call. he shows QQ for flopped quads. “oh. well i guess you could have that” i say out loud. LOL

about the blog software: been messing with wordpress a bit for work, and it’s grown up a lot since my first iteration of the blog. widgets are cool, the visual editor is a lot better, media handling (i.e. image uploading and embedding) is a LOT better.

hand 1: i’m not much involved in this one, but it’s pretty crazy. 4 limpers for 5  (including me with 76) to Dao on the button, he makes it 40 to go. in this situation everyone’s pretty much aware he doesn’t have to have a hand, but he might. 1st limper calls, i fold, and 3rd limper makes it 160(!). Dao 4-bet shoves, guy calls for about 500. flop is Q high, all diamonds. guy turns up QQ for top set. Dao turns up 69 — both diamonds! board doesn’t pair, Dao doubles through. the guy jumps out of his seat and furiously punches some buttons on his cell phone and stalks away growling into his phone. 1-800-BAD-BEAT ???

BTW, i kinda like Dao’s play here. i probably wouldn’t do it, but it’s hard to put the 3rd limper on a hand that can call a shove. it really looks like a re-steal. that’s a seriously weird way to play queens.

hand 2: i raise to 20 UTG w/ AhKh. 4 callers including Dao. flop is Jh 8h 6c. a good flop for me, i might be able to take it down, and if not i’m probably a favorite over 1 caller. i lead out for 80. 2 callers; Dao and guy i don’t know but i think he’s probably an ABC player. i’m sure neither one has a set.

turn is the 6d. i think this is a blank. there’s about 340 in the pot and i’ve only got 310 left. i check. Dao bets 150, the other guy folds. wow, what kind of spot did i put myself in here? this is a lot more complicated than it seems. i think i’ve got 12 or 15 outs (although there’s a chance the other guy had 2 of my outs with small hearts) so i’m getting pot odds. there’s even a decent chance i’m ahead against a draw (T9?),  so folding doesn’t seem like a great plan, but the stack size is a problem. if i call here there will be 640 in the pot going into the river, and i’ll be tempted to call off my last 160 getting a 5:1  price with A high even if the river blanks off.

so, with my tiny bit of fold equity (against a 1-pair hand) and my tiny bit of value (against a straight or flush draw which will have to call), i grimace and push in for just 160 more. he tanks but calls, and the river is a brick. neither of us want to show our hands, but after i turn up my nut no-pair he tables KJ and takes it down.

i’m so rattled by getting felted with no pair that i’m too tilted to play any more,  and i pick up and leave.

so where did this hand go wrong? well, mostly it went south when i missed all my outs LOL. really, all of my options on the turn kinda sucked, but of 3 ways to go i think i probably chose the worst. option #2 was betting out (all in, or 150 with intention of calling a raise). option #3 was to check-call 150 and save the 160 for a rainy day (or a good river). as it happened, the river would have gone check check, so i would have saved a few bucks.

this hand would involve a lot less pain if i just check-raise the flop.  i might still get broke, but i’d sleep better. frankly, i’m not sure why i bet out on the flop into a crowd.

it looks like what happened is this squirrel came down the chimney into my wood burning stove, pushed the grate out and got into the house. but then he couldn’t get out and panicked. he ran around to all the windows, breaking a couple wine glasses on my kitchen counter in the process and then tracking squirrel blood all over my off-white sofa

there’s a door in my living room with a pretty large gap underneath and he could see daylight through the gap. he couldn’t quite fit underneath and got the bright idea of trying to make the gap bigger by chewing through it. he never did succeed in making the gap appreciably bigger, but he made quite a mess, and eventually managed to squeeze underneath. uh, bad news … there’s another door between squirrel and freedom. back into the living room. 

you can’t see it in that photo, but there are squirrel tracks up the side of my definitive tower speakers. suprisingly, he didn’t rip the fabric. next step: track the chewed up door  stuff all over the house. up the stairs, down the hall, there are chewed door parts in my bedroom and muddy squirrel prints on the bed.

i haven’t tried to get the bloody squirrel prints off the sofa yet. if not successful, might need to make an insurance claim: “uh, hello claims department? yeah, a squirrel broke into my house and made a mess on my sofa so maybe you could buy me a new one? hello? hello?”

we’re playing 2/5 NL and the game is temporarily short-handed and tight and boring. doug limps for 5 and the small blind folds. i’m the big blind w/ 74 offsuit and i can hardly contain my excitement at seeing a flop for free. the flop is random garbage,  K85 rainbow. i check and doug checks behind. the turn is a 6, and i’m somewhat surprised to realize that i’ve made a straight. there’s like $9 in the pot after the rake and jackpot drop, and nobody is interested in this pot, so i do the only sensible thing:

“make it $700 to go”, i say. doug’s only got $200 and change in front of him, but i’ve got a decent stack and $700 sounds better.”how much???, he says. “i said $700″. he starts thinking, giving me a bit of a jolt. “why would you do that?”, he asks. “well, i’ve got the nuts”, i say. actually i take another look and realize i only have the 2nd nuts, 97 beats me, but i guess he would have called by now if he had that. he thinks some more, and he’s not just kidding. he’s thinking of calling. i decide to help him out a little. “what do you have?”. he doesn’t answer. “a set of sixes?” i ask. “why, can you beat a set of sixes?”, he asks skeptically. ” yeah, but i’m just practicing my hand reading skills”, i tell him. eventually he calls and turns over K6 for 2 pair. no miracle 4-outer on the turn so he gets busted.

doug’s a good natured guy. he gives a sheepish grin before heading off to the ATM. “i figured i was beat, but i thought i could suck out on you”, he said. we both know he was 10:1 dog. “that woulda hurt”,  i conceded.

i’m pretty sure i’m not going to let him forget that pot for a while. maybe ever

so, inspired by christopher walken’s succinct yet lunatic efforts, i’m gonna try twitter for a while and see if i like it. if i do, maybe i’ll even tell someone i’m doing it …unlike this blog, which i’ve more or less kept a secret on the advice of my lawyer, my CPA, and my high school english teacher (hi miss mills! remember me?)

follow me, or don’t, at http://twitter.com/gmorten1

i’ll be back here when i feel the need to get something out that won’t fit in a twitter update