I’ve finally read Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code. It’s considered a bestseller, so you’ve probably read it or at least heard about it (and if not, feel free to follow the link I gave). What amazes me is how much stir it caused among certain religious organizations. For example the official czech web of opus dei (sorry, no link for ’em) has a news section where the last five messages are about The Da Vinci Code. Quite funny.

Having just read the book I have a few questions: Sure, there’s a pope… but… anyone ever seen a popess? :) Why are women so discriminated in religion (particularly in Christianity, as I don’t have much experience with other religions)?

You can as well skip the next paragraph…

On thursday the signal got significantly worse compared to average, my connection speed was reduced about ten times. This kinda annoyed me, but I couldn’t do anything so I thought that waiting would do the trick. The other guy connected to the same wifi said that he had problems too, so we contacted the owner of the access point who told us that no changes were made. I waited two days, and then – another jump, this time to no connection at all. I contacted the guy on the other end of the wi-fi (aka owner of the acces point) again, he told me that he’s made no changes (again) and that the other guy’s problems already dissappeared. Well, so I had to examine my end. With immense help of my father (hey, I’m no hardware guy at all) we couldn’t find any problem anywhere. I was rather depressed (how can I survive without internet connection?), but after 8 hours or so the signal suddenly skyrocketed back to normal and I had my 3mbit again. This has lasted till now (which is like a day or so) and I hope there won’t be further problems. But it’s really strange, you know?

Good night.

Hello from Dapper Drake!

I’ve been patiently waiting for the final release not to get myself into trouble (I never installed release candidate I think), well, the upgrade wasn’t as smooth as I expected, but still went kinda ok. Let me sum up the result:

Positives:

• Wine doesn’t take more and more memory when running Pokerstars (which means I will not have to restart it every while).
• New ubuntu “human” theme rocks! (unlike the previous ones)
• Firefox 1.5, and generally updated versions of apps.

Now for negatives:

• The upgrade was an ordeal (as usually), I was up till 3am to get it at least a bit working.
• Gentium font has a very weird ‘u’ that is much taller than it should be (you’d say it is not that important but it’s totally annoying). Had to switch to verdana (any better tips for a font to use in apps ?).
• Nvidia drivers (for 3d graphics) got deinstalled and I will have to install them again.
• A lot of problems with Java (no java plugin in firefox (I know it only takes one link, but I can’t remember anymore where it was), CGoban won’t run (java.awt.AWTError: Cannot load AWT toolkit: gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk.GtkToolkit))
• Wavemon doesn’t run (fatal error: could not get range information), also my wifi connection is very crappy for no apparent reason, maybe it has something to do with it…

And I always think “this time thay have to get the upgrade right”. No. Never.

Hello from Dapper Drake…

This was probably the most enjoyable poker session I experienced so far (well, there weren’t many of them yet). We started five handed, no-limit cash game (the one I hate the most but we always play it live, well, whatever…). While we were starting Joe played both real small stakes nl at our table and was finishing an online sit&go tournament, he managed to get third place and cashed cool $400. For apparent reasons he was kinda excited about it. :)

I was involved in two interesting hands (the one when I flopped monster fullhouse wasn’t that interesting really ;-)):

In the first one I got A7 of clubs. Nothing interesting before the flop that I remember. We saw flop – me and an agressive opponent (but not maniac, rather reasonable agressive) – containing two clubs, there was a K and something I don’t remember anymore (some not very threatening straight possibility). He bet out and I quickly put him on Kx, and although I thought that my counting of the money in the pot made it rather obvious that I was drawing and counting pot odds, but luckily my opponent didn’t notice. We saw a turn like 9 or something, no clubs. He bet out and again the pot odds were okay for me to call (however I realised that now my flop+turn bets together do not justify the call, but well, it was too late…). River came K again. Well, now he has trip Kings and I am lost with an Ace high. He checked. Uh, does he want to check-raise me on the river? Isn’t it kind of obvious that I missed my draw? Well, I check too and show my missed Ace high draw. And it was good…

The second hand was even better – I got KQ, raised, got reraised and called (but not much money yet, just messing around). Flop came QJ4 rainbow… neat, I have top pair with good kicker, I am gonna check-raise him. So I check and he bets around the size of a pot. Now I stop down to think – he is an extremely tight player and not particularly agressive either, it could be just a bluff to punish my checking. After some more thinking I decide he has it – either QJ or AQ. I show my top pair king kicker and he, surprise, surprise… shows AQ. I would be drawing to three outs, hopeless… Needless to say, I was (and still am) very happy about my laydown.

Chile is a country in South America and England is in Europe, but the problem is that except of it being very far there is an ocean between (in case you don’t know), so it’s probably quite a problem to get from Chile to England on foot.

Yet Karl Bushby decided to try it. He started in 1998 and now he’s somewhere in Russia, having crossed the dangerous Bering Strait. Karl plans on finishing his more than 50 000 km journey in 2009. It’s almost unbelievable that someone is willing to spend more than 10 years of his life just walking around the world…

You can find much more info (photos, journal, etc.) on official pages of the Goliath expedition.

While reading fullcontactpoker forums I stumbled upon a post named “What’s so bad with killing children?”. I suggest you to read at least the first page of the thread (later it turned into a series of useless personal attacks). Here is the relevant excerpt from the Bible:

2 Kings, 2:23-24.

23: And he (Elisha) went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.
24: And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

Pretty hardcore, huh? I’d rather suggest following ninth Satanic rule – “do not harm little children”.

I thought that Bible probably contains more inconsistencies and just plainly weird things, so I made a bit of a searching and found Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. It rocks. It contains full Bible thoroughly commented, you can also search by cathegories (such as contradictions (wouldn’t believe there are so many of them), absurdities, cruelty and violence).

Here an example of absurdity, God was angry because “the earth was filled with violence.” So he killed every living thing to make the world less violent:

Genesis 6:11-13

11: The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.

12: And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.

13: And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

But it isn’t really difficult to find many utterly ridiculous things there – actually it is difficult to find a page in Bible without contradictions with other parts. I seriously pity all the people who have chosen the Bible as something to lead them through their lives.

PS: Let the flaming begin, I am prepared to dodge bullets. :-P

Sometimes I write a post (or just intend to write it, like now) about a website that is completely in czech language. It makes no sense to write that in english, since any potential visitor has to know czech rather well to enjoy the site. On the other hand it wouldn’t make sense writing half blog posts in czech and half in english, or would it?

There are some words that are often misused. It drives me insane when I see native English speakers use “your” instead of “you’re” (I have no problems with “youre”, I can decipher that quite easily) and vice versa. Some people also use “their” instead of “they’re” or—even worse—instead of “there”. I can see no fucking connection between “there” and “their”, the words obviously have different root.

As my English education consists mainly of reading/writing, I absorbed at least these simple cases, and totally fail to understand how any native Englishman/American/Aussie with any basic education can make these mistakes (over and over again).

When trying to find out why people so often write “loose” when they mean “lose” (don’t ever do that or I’ll have to kill you) I found several interesting sites. One said that you can pronounce the word out loud to find out how to write it, that when you pronounce it “lu:s” then you write it as “loose” and when you pronounce it “lu:z” then you write it as “lose”. Actually I got just the reversed information from this one – that loose is not pronounced the same as lose. :-)

Then I found a very useful site about commonly confused words. The site explains the differencies very clearly and offers short tests to confirm that you understand it.

The words in which people make mistakes but I don’t care:
advice/advise, desert/dessert, clothes/cloths, later/latter, it’s/its (its basically the same, some people just dont like to write apostrophes), and probably many many more… but I don’t care…
The words in which people make mistakes and it annoys me:
accept/except, affect/effect, among/between, farther/further, hear/here, hole/whole, knew/new/knoew/no, loose/lose, peace/piece (and what about peas? I guess they forgot), than/then, their/the’re/there, threw/through, to/too/two, wear/where/were, your/you’re

The words in which I make mistakes and it annoys me:
can/may (depends whether I’m concentrated), fewer/less (I use less exclusively), lay/lie (I finally learned the difference today after all these years)

All the rest are the ones I consider unimportant so I just don’t bother. ;-)

Getting them too?

It’s usually someone whose whole family was brutally killed and left several millions (or milliards) dollars. The person is in danger and has to transfer money to a safe place, you are the one to help him – you just have to send some kind of small fee like $80, well, who cares when you are to recieve several millions soon? ;-)

I stumbled upon a story of a psychotherapist who fell for the nigerian scam. Well, simply put, he’s an idiot and I think he deserves what he got (now you might find this a bit harsh, but sending money to someone repeatedly without ever getting anything back seems pretty stupid to me).

There are actually quite a lot of people who enjoy pretending they are stupid and playing around with the scammers, some of them are pretty succesful in ridiculing the scammers and few even managed to get money from them (duh, some of the scammers must be real dumb if they let others scam ’em too). The 419 eater site collects the letters and various stuff, some of which is pretty funny (such as the guy who posed with a loaf of bread on his head and bottle of wine in his mouth (you can read the whole story too)).

Well, there is a lot of funny reading for long winter nights, scammers seem pretty active but so do scambaiters…

I came in first in yesterday’s empathy game (czech only, sorry). That’s quite a good result considering that my empathy level is pretty low and that I only spent a minute or so thinking about the words (but maybe it’s actually better this way).

Operanda made this empathy game inspired by littlegolem’s empathy game, with the only practical difference that this one is in czech.
Well, it’s a cheap link just for letting me win, isn’t it? ;-)