Frustration

I haven't been able to play many games in the last 10 days or so, my internet connection has been brutal.

The last month or so my connection has been extremely laggy, to say the least. I'll click an action and it'll take 5-50 seconds to go through. I managed to get in about 8k vpps worth of games in the first 12 days of the month, but since then it's just been too bad to play.

Comcast (my ISP) has been out here 4-5x now, they sent their head tech the other day. He climbed up on the pole and saw that squirrels had chewed through the line, so he replaced that. He also replaced our TV box (that had been laggy as well) and all signs pointed towards the problems being fixed. That was Thursday.

I played a game Thursday and the connection wasn't the best, but I only lagged briefly 3-4x and hadn't disconnected at all from any messanger programs nor had I experienced slow browser page loads.

Yesterday, I tried playing a few games and the bad lag was back. I made it through about 5 games between the regular speed regulars and I fighting for games, but that was about it.

Today I was hoping the connection would've improved somewhat, but it's worse as ever. I'm being disconnected from trillian (basically AIM) a few times an hour on average, web pages are loading very slowly and most importantly the Pokerstars connection is being lost every couple of minutes.

I previously had a Sprint Broadband card that broke a few months ago, I forgot about it but got a free month of service and a free replacement card from Sprint, so I went to load it up yesterday on my girlfriend's laptop and it wasn't connecting. Today, I tried to install and load it on my PC and for some reason it won't install the drivers nor will it update automatically. So that is my second internet option and it is also not working. I'm going to have to bring it into the Sprint store on Monday.

My other option of internet I ordered Monday, DSL from ATT. It arrived Wednesday, though they told me it wouldn't arrive until the following Monday. It cannot be activated until Monday, however, so that is another option down the drain.

Another option is a friend of mine that lives nearby. He has DSL, but he is out of town at the moment.

Needless to say, I am beyond frustrated at this point. I've been mirred in a downswing for the last few hundred games, and it's really upsetting me that I can't get some games in to work my way out of it. It also sucks to not really be making any money (besides a little staking and coaching income, I'm not really bringing money in at the moment, husng.com isn't up yet and my business is done until the spring). Luckily I have some money in the bank and on a few poker sites, so I'm not starving or anything, but gaps in play/profit always hurt even if the impact isn't immediately felt.

One other thing that has bothered me lately was that I received a ticket last week on my work truck, which I park on the street in front of our house. I have kind of a makeshift bumper (it's a work truck obviously) so I put my front license plate in the window of my truck. I got a 50 dollar parking ticket for no displayed license plate last week! I've lived here since August 1st and had the truck parked here a majority of the time since then, and not a warning, citation or ticket up until now. I didn't even realize it was illegal, I've been pulled over twice (just random, no tickets or anything) in the few years I've owned this truck and not once has the officer said a damn thing about this. Needless to say, I don't see much I can do about the ticket except pay it. I'm thinking about filing a complaint to the town's police department, but what does that accomplish besides pissing off a bunch of cops? Next thing I know I'll be fined for having a piece of litter on my lawn or something even more silly. If I were wealthier I would probably hire a lawyer for a few hundred dollars just to piss off the police and get out of the ticket, but I can't afford to be a jerk and it's almost certainly the better life choice to not do that, but in all honesty I can see myself doing that.

So, besides all of that bull, life has been ok. Our first 3 beers seem to have come out great (the last two beers aren't finished but I am highly confident that they will turn out good at the very least) and there's a noticable forward progression in them from the prior beers we made. We were both a little worried that we might take a step back from the 3+ month layoff of brewing, but it seems we've continued to progress. I've also been reading more about some smaller breweries run by former homebrewers like myself, in which they use very small batch sizes when brewing beer (very similar to the sizes we use). This is a very good sign to me, because if we end up able to make award winning beer (homebrew competition) I would be very confident that I could start and operate a profitable brewpub. I'm getting a little ahead of myself in that regard, but it's in the back of my mind as we continue to brew. Up next on the brewing list is a holiday beer, an oatmeal cookie beer. We're using a Southern English Brown ale base and adding some oats and spices to create what hopes to be an oatmeal cookie type taste and aroma in the beer. I've read up on this one a little bit, but it doesn't seem to have been done too extensively. I'll be eagerly awaiting this one. We are also going to brew a big barleywine with our other two buddies that brew, a collaberation brew if you will. We will be doing our first 10 gallon batch on the new system for this one, and splitting up the batch 5 gallons each, fermenting and serving the beer at our respective places. We may even use 2 different kinds of yeasts and hops for dryhopping, to give each beer a unique taste.

I guess that is all for now, I feel a little better after unloading my depressing start to the month, but I just need to be a little more confident and less lazy and I'm sure things will start to pickup around here.

Online Poker In Jeapordy

The Bush Administration appears to be attempting to pass new regulations for the UIGEA legislation as one of the "midnight" acts that most presidents do shortly before leaving office. This is troublesome, to say the least.

I've made a sticky on the 2p2 HU forum alerting users about the legislation and I urge all readers of my blog to at the very least call the #s in the following thread and/or email relevant parties.

Here is the link: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/57/poker-legislation/lets-all-call-fed-tell-them-hold-off-uigea-regs-340261/

Also, if you have a blog, please post about this and link to that post. We need all the support we can get.

Results

Election Prediction Results:

1) Obama wins by a pretty good margin

Obama won by 7% or so and won over 2-1 in the electoral college. This was a very safe bet though, as a lot of betting sites had Obama at 1:12 or even better prior to the election.

2) Obama wins Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, PA, New Hampshire and the rest of the NE states (WV is the only state north of VA and east of IN that McCain wins).

I was right on all of these predictions, but I left out NC (likely Obama) and Indiana (Obama won narrowly).

3) I think McCain will squeek out North Carolina.

I was wrong here, looks like Obama squeeked it out, 50-49, or by less than 14k votes out of more than 4.2 million votes in the state.

4) I want to say McCain will win Florida by a hair as well, but I'm going to predict Obama wins Florida by less than 2 points.

Obama won Florida by 2 pts. I thought the anti gay marriage initiative would give McCain more support than it did, or maybe the Gore/Clinton campaigning combined with the advertising advantage Obama had just really counteracted that and then some.

I recall Hillary Clinton making the claim that Obama had no chance in Florida if he would be the nominee vs McCain and most pundits agreed. Turns out about 99% of the arguments the Clinton campaign made in the primaries were bullshit. Obama crushed PA, OH, won FL by 2 and was very competitive in western states Hillary could not dream of competing in.

5) Obama loses Indiana by less than 3 pts, comes within 5 pts of taking Arizona, McCain's home state.

Obama actually wins Indiana by 26k votes, or less than 1% I believe. Mccain wins Arizona by 9 points. Very surpising to me that Obama takes Indiana and gets trounced in AZ, he was pushing ads in AZ up to the election day and the demographics of the state have improved mightily for Democrats in recent years. Yes, I realize Indiana is Obama's neighboring state, and the organization was crazy huge in the Gary/Northwest Indiana areas, and that McCain is from AZ, but the former I still didn't think would be enough for Obama and the latter I thought the ads and polls were a sure sign Obama was competitive (not to mention NV and NM went Obama pretty solidly).

6) Election is called after Obama wins Virginia and Pennslyvannia (I'm not sure on this one, some polls may close before others, like if Obama won Virginia, Florida and OH and PA wasn't announced yet, most people would likely call it for Obama).

I think it was after Virginia, though the networks could've called it after Ohio/PA were called earlier. I think I was right on this one, but I'm not positive.



Conclusion: I think I did a good job of predicting the results. I didn't nail them on the head and I don't give myself a ton of credit bc I think this was a very very predictive election according to the polls (I've been following the polls on many sites, especially fivethirtyeight.com, though also realclearpolitics and pollster.com).

I'm not going to get into my personal views on the election or anything, I'm sure a lot of people are tired of hearing how everyone feels about this, but I am happy Obama won. I definitely preferred him over Hillary and most other democratic challengers, and while I liked McCain more than any other GOP candidate and some democratic ones, campaigning has never been his forte, and neither has leading or working with large groups of people. He seems to be good at micromanaging one or two reform things at a time and getting shit done that way, I also respect him for his ability to stand up to the traditional right wing of his party throughout his career in the Senate.

Meh, I guess I did share some of my views.

Election and Pics

First off, since election day is tomorrow, I'd like to make a few predictions:

1) Obama wins by a pretty good margin

2) Obama wins Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, PA, New Hampshire and the rest of the NE states (WV is the only state north of VA and east of IN that McCain wins).

3) I think McCain will squeek out North Carolina.

4) I want to say McCain will win Florida by a hair as well, but I'm going to predict Obama wins Florida by less than 2 points.

5) Obama loses Indiana by less than 3 pts, comes within 5 pts of taking Arizona, McCain's home state.

6) Election is called after Obama wins Virginia and Pennslyvannia (I'm not sure on this one, some polls may close before others, like if Obama won Virginia, Florida and OH and PA wasn't announced yet, most people would likely call it for Obama).

7) Chicago will be nuts, I'm staying in.

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Now, to non election stuff.

Our brewing setup is functional. We've brewed 2 beers, one on each of the last 2 Wednesdays. The first was a hoppy red ale, or hoppy amber ale. This recipe was based on one I found from a very respected brewer known as Jamil. We used a similar grain bill (basically you can seperate a beer recipe into malt or grain, hops and yeast) to what he used, but changed the hop profile and yeast. It is going to be kegged Wednesday, and should be ready to taste in about a week. Initial partially fermented-non carbonated tastes have been very promising.

The other beer we did was a pumpkin beer. I know, Halloween was Friday and it won't be ready for a few weeks, but I've always wanted to brew one of these and so did my friend, so we did it.

I have some pics of this beer and the brewery below, but we basically took a light amber ale recipe, tuned it up into a stronger alcohol/sweeter beer and added 5 lbs of organic pumpkins doused in dark brown sugar and some spices (cinnomin, ginger root and nutmeg). It was really fun to brew and I think it will taste delicious.

Most importantly, we've hit all of our targets during the brewing process, meaning our brewing setup is very efficient. This was one of our major concerns when building it, that we would not be very efficient and would spend a lot of time and effort trying to calculate and offset recipes so that we could duplicate them or get the taste we want in our beers. Fortunately, it seems we will have very little adjusting to do.

We have also encountered no major problems with the setup. While we have figured out a few improvements that we would like to make, there is nothing pressing that is required.

Here are some pictures of the pumpkin beer and brewery.



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Above is a picture of the pumpkins being prepared. The night before we had to slice, skin and gut the pumpkins, douse them in dark brown sugar and put them in the oven for about two hours until they softened. We then refrigerated them overnight.



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Above is a pic of our setup. It's not a great picture, I realize I'm going to have to take more now, but on the top we just to the left of the fan you can see a pot sticking out (better viewed in the next picture). That is the water pot, where water is heated up to a certain temperature. It is then dropped into the converted keg-pot below the fan, called the mash ton. The water is added to the grain there. Some time later (for all your brew savvy people out there, I know I'm leaving a lot out) the result of this, the wort, is transferred into the boil pot (the yellow striped pot in the bottom back end of the picture). After we're done boiling and adding hops or whatever else we're going to add for a particular recipe, we'll transfer the wort into a 6 gallon plastic fermenter (picture a plastic bucket). All of this transferring is done via copper or stainless steel pipes, meaning we don't have to lift a damn thing during the brewing process. Not lifting 13 gallon pots with 5-10 gallons of 210 degree water in them is very +EV.



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The above is the side view of our brewery setup. You can see the water pot I referred to in the last post a bit better (the top pot), as well as the mash tun (the middle pot) and the boil pot (the bottom right pot with the blue stripe in this picture). You can also see the fire on the water pot, our setup is powered by propane and there is a burner under each pot.



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This is a picture of our removable sparge arm. Basically, after the water is added to the grain in the mash tun, it sits for about an hour, soaking up the sugars from the grain (this is called the mash). After this, you drain most of the water from the mash tun into the boil pot. But there are still sugars left in the grain, so you add some more water and drain it into the boil pot. This is called the sparge. You want a gentle flow of hot water going into the mash tun during the sparge, thus we took some copper, put a T on it and made small slits into it, giving the water a wide, yet soft flow into the mash tun.



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Above is a picture of one of us adding the chopped up pumpkin into the boil pot. The copper tube is connected to the mash tun, we put a stainless steel, flexible hose on the end of it so that the wort from the mash tun transfers into the boil pot with minimal oxidation (I think that's the correct term off the top of my head). Basically, you don't want the wort falling into the pot and splashing around, you want minimal contact with air.



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Above is a picture of the pumpkins in the boil.



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Our final picture is of the boil, after the hops are added. I'm sure most people think this looks disgusting. Normally the hops are put in a hop bag, so they aren't just floating around, mainly this makes for easier filtration from the boil pot to the fermenter, but our brewing supply store was out of hop bags, so we had to add them directly in the boil. It was a pain in the ass to filter them out afterwards, but it won't be a regular problem because we will have hop bags in the future.

I'll get some better pics up soon, but this should give you an idea of what I'm always talking about.

If anyone is in the Chicagoland area in 2-6 weeks, feel free to shoot me an email or message here if you'd like to try one of our brews.

Until then, have a good November.