Despite this being a Friday with plans of leaving early today (Louisville shuts down on Derby weekend) I’m in a fairly foul mood today. Lots of things are bugging the shit out of me today and I can’t seem to get my mind past them:

• Spam: If people would stop clicking on links in spam emails, then spam would become completely ineffective and just go away.
• Scientology: Seriously? Do the people really believe in this or is it just an exclusive ‘boys club’ out to make money?
• Vaccines for children: Newsflash…. THEY DON’T CAUSE AUTISM. Are you seriously that fucking stupid? Why is it okay for people to just ignore so much scientific data from countless sources to continue with their completely anecdotal made-up beliefs.

I’m playing in a fantasy baseball league being run by this guy and our draft was Sunday. In a 9-team league, I got to draft last… lucky me. Oddly enough, Albert Pujols didn’t trickle down to me so I had to settle for Joe Mauer as my first pick.

Here’s my team:

Offense:
C – Joe Mauer
1B – Kevin Youkilis
2B – Robinson Cano
3B – Ryan Zimmerman
SS – Asdrubal Cabrera
IF – Yunel Escobar
OF – Shane Victorino
OF – Nate McLouth
OF – Alfonso Soriano
OF – Carlos Gonzalez
Util – Jorge Cantu
Bench:
Mark DeRosa
Yadier Molina
Carlos Quentin
Franklin Gutierrez

Starting Pitchers:
Tim Lincecum
Cliff Lee
Jon Lester
Josh Beckett
Hiroki Kuroda

Relief Pitchers:
Mariano Rivera
Kenshin Kawakami

Other Pitchers:
Leo Nunez

Bench:
Matt Thornton
Scott Kazmir

Scoring Stats:
Off: R, HR, RBI, SB, AVG, OPS
Pit: W, SV, K, ERA, WHIP, K/BB

I feel like I got a pretty damned good pitching staff and a mediocre offensive team. What are your thoughts? Comment or email me: koleslaw at gmaildotcom.

I don’t really like to interact with people and I especially don’t like to interact with strangers. The exception to this rule is playing poker because those strangers are trying to give me money. A service in which I get to randomly interact with strangers? It sounds like a personal hell for me. I think I can safely say that I will never ever ever try this thing.

Joe the Peacock hits the nail on the head: http://blog.joethepeacock.com/2010/02/i-dont-get-chatroulette.html

I’ve played a couple homegame small buy-in tournaments to no avail, so I’ll not talk about those. My online poker has been pretty good though.

A friend (who will remain nameless) ran $50 up to $500… sent me $25… then promptly lost his roll. I’ve really been making the most of that $25 though.

I’ve played several $2 nine-handed SnG and my cash rate is over 50%. I’ve played a few $1 and $2 heads up SnG and I’m not doing particularly well in those. Heads up is a lot harder when you haven’t been playing with a person over the course of a full table and don’t have a feel for their style. I’ve also played in a few small buy-in MTTs ($1 or $2 bucks) including the Daily Dollar which I’ve played in three times and cashed twice (for a whopping net of $2)

After sending my friend his $25 back, plus a little more, I’ve run my account up to $40. Not too shabby.

Last night before I went to bed, I made the final three in a $5 nine-hander with a 9k-2.5k-2k (approximately) lead and promptly outplayed myself to a third place finish. I was pretty upset with myself for that.

So, I have two New Years Resolutions this year: 1) Drink more water and less sodas. 2) Post more on my blog. I’ve done slightly better on #1 but until now I’m 0 for the year on #2.

I stayed from work today with what may or may not be the flu. Symptoms: fevery-feeling, sniffles, sore throat, coughing, achy, walking around the house makes me exhausted. So yeah, maybe it’s the flu.. or maybe it’s not. Devon can’t get it from me, she had both flu shots this year. I can’t get flu shots, I’m allergic to eggs. After lying on the couch all day, either sleeping, I decided to come into the back bedroom just so I can sit in a chair for a few minutes.

December was rough… probably one of the roughest months I’ve had in my entire life. I’m still a little shocked that I manged to make it through.

In other news, I’ve been playing a bit of poker. Nothing serious: some $2 SnGs online and a home tournament. I’ve really improved my game from the last time I played over a large stretch. My secret? Play tighter and more aggressive. That’s all it takes, really.

Let’s see if I can manage to keep up resolution #2.

After a brief hiatus due to some server issues, I’m back and ready for action! I’ll post more later when I’ve got time.

Just a quick side note… I hate twitter. If something is important enough for me to shout at the Internet, it’s probably going to take me more than 140 characters. Twitter is not new, I’ve been using IRC for at least 12 years.

If you come across some good anti-twitter reading, send me a link and I’ll post it up.

I’ve actually managed to get into a couple low-level raids in the new guild I’m in (Naxx 10, Naxx 25) as well as do a plethora of heroics so I’ve been able to get some pretty decent gear. I’m still rocking a green wand…

(sidebar at this point, does anyone use a WP plugin that lets you link Wowhead stuff or whatever on the fly?)

but it’s only a matter of time before another wand drops… wands aren’t nearly as rare as say, getting the fricken tier-0 headpiece to drop off of Gandling in Scholomance. So I’m wearing mostly level 200 epics with some 213s and a couple blues sprinkled in. I don’t normally show helmets on my mage, but I’m still wearing the Hat of Wintery Doom, which looks like a pimp hat, so of course I let that shit show.

I’ve been doing my PVE as full arcane. I’ll write about that later.

I’m back on the dark side… I started playing World of Warcraft again. I’ve got my Mage up to 76 so far, one more level until I get to use my flying mount in Northrend! Those last three levels will fly by after that. Unfortuantely, I’m having some technical issues playing the game. My Internet connection drops out periodically, sometimes every couple minutes, sometimes I get a bit longer before drops. Sometimes the cable modem goes offline completely and needs to be reset. On Blizzard’s site, they suggested changing some settings for the network card I have, which I tried to no avail. The connection always goes off whenever I’m in an instance and we engage a boss. That’s clearly unacceptable, especially when I hit 80 and start doing raids. If anyone has any ideas regarding this, I’d love to hear them.

In other news, Devon and I both sang karaoke for the first time ever on Monday at the Highland Tap Room. It was fun. Devon is a much better singer than me. I have a feeling she’s going to want to try it again real soon.

I’ve heard the new Harry Potter movie sucks. I’ll probably see it this weekend to confirm.

In other other news, we’re going to see Ralphie May at The Improv a week from Saturday. I’m very excited!

As I was leaving work for the day, I glanced at the switch on the wall and noticed two of the lights were blinking rapidly. This usually indicates that there was a feedback loop somewhere in the network and I decided to track it down before leaving. The patch panel read “8″ so I tracked down the wall play corresponding to #8 to being in the back room where our development servers are mounted in a rack. Apparently, the switch in the back was plugged into both the firewall and the master switch, effectively saying “hey look, these servers aren’t behind the firewall!”

I unplugged one of the cables and the lights stopped blinking. I checked to make sure the interwebs were still working (they were) and all was right in the world.