Jammy shitheads

Whilst I was waiting for a virus scan to finish, I thought I'd fire up Party Poker for a quick game. I saw a $6 buy-in single table and figured that would do nicely ($2000 starting value in chips). The first dozen or so hands are all played pretty tight and I'm a few dollars up when I get dealt pocket nines. I raise three times big blind to 120 pre flop and get a couple of callers. I then flop a house of nines full of aces so I'm thinking this is in the bag. I bet 200 and get one caller which I though was odd. Next card is a Jack of spades and I'm thinking, right I want this so I'm all in for 1850 and the other guy calls. He shows Ace Seven, making him tripp aces. Jammy fucking cock pairs up a seven on the river to give him a house of aces full of sevens. He didn't deserve the win and played the hand badly from the outset by calling a pre flop raise with unsuited and unconnectable cards. Fucking shit head. I expect that on the play money tables but on real money tables, wankers like that should just fuck off.

I apologise for the swearing but I'm livid. The smug twat is probably now thinking they're some sort of poker god when the reality is that they made a very bad call and got luckier than they can possibly imagine. Makes me furious.

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Bog trolls

You must have seen 'em somewhere - the bloke (or woman) who stands by the sinks in the kind of bars and clubs that think they're a bit special when the truth is that they're just overpriced and have a higher-than-average tosser quotient. Now, I'm sure that some people get off on the thrill of having a flunkey to pump soap on their pudgy hands and then pass them some sort of paper product to dry themselves on, but frankly, I find it irritating.

Now don't misunderstand me: I'm no raging leftist who has a problem with the idea of servants or whatever, but this is a piss take. I do not need someone to put soap on my hands because I am not four years old. Equally, I am more than capable of grabbing a paper towel or using a dryer without any help whatsoever as I'm a big boy now. But it's worse than that. Whilst you are washing your hands they often try to force some nasty smelling aftershave on you as well. I don't know about you, but I'm guessing that like me you probably put on aftershave (or perfume for the ladies) before you go out of an evening and don't want to be accosted by some git wielding a vial of Hai Karate or possibly even Sex Panther (watch The Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy if you don't get that reference) because then you'll smell like the inside of a tart's handbag. While all this is going on there is quite often bad singing or 'motivational' conversation along the lines of "You the man, man, yeah you can do it, you can achieve your goals". No, I'm not kidding.

Finally, they'll exhort you to have a lollipop or something as well and expect you to pay them money for this molestation. On what planet of the strange fucking strange is it all right to demand cash for a service I neither requested nor wanted? I know we all have to make a living but this is a piss take and I got quite annoyed with the bog troll I encountered on Friday night. I asked him not to pump foul smelling soap onto my hands as the ordinary soap on the wall didn't smell of much at all which I prefer and he was handing out bog roll to dry your hands with. Bog roll. To dry your hands. Have you ever tried to dry your hands with just 4 or 5 sheets of bog roll? You can't. Anyway, there was a perfectly good hand dryer on the wall next to the sinks, which he was conveniently, or inconveniently from my point of view, blocking. I asked him to move and got a mouthful about how I was ruining his job.

By this time I just wanted to get finished and out of the gents so I could get back to my pint and conversation with my friends and I was rapidly losing my cool (those who know me know that when it finally does go it does tend to go quite fast and I will quite happily get nasty) so I told this gentlemen to "fuck right off" because "I didn't want [him] to slop soap on my hands" or indeed "hand me a fucking useless piece of bum wad" before leaving him in a stunned silence.

Yes, I know: it's not big or clever, but honestly. When a bloke goes to the dunny, he wants to do whatever he needs to as swiftly as possible, perform the necessary actions and sod off back to his mates, not be accosted by some pugnacious little twat demanding money for a service you don't want.

Obviously I'd never be so crass as to name-and-shame Henry J Beans in Bristol.

Ahh, crap.

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Curry

We all know of the comedy morning after effect curries can have but last night I had one which whilst rather spicy also had hard boiled eggs in it. Really tasty but christ does it reek today!

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Poker

I'm a bit of a poker player. OK, I'm a lot of a poker player. I play Texas hold 'em mostly but also 7 card stud and 7 card Hi-Lo. We have a hold 'em school at work and we play more or less every lunchtime (a good break from the desk). Now I consider my self to be a reasonable player and I have won money in tournaments, but I have days where, because this lunchtime game is for fun and a league where only honour is at stake, I have occasional runs where I play very loose indeed.

Recently, I have been playing tight and aggressive (only playing good hands and betting them heavily to win) and it's paying off as I'm having a good run, but at the same time I have struggled to make pocket pairs pay out. I should explain that a pocket pair is a pair dealt to you in your 'hole' cards (the ones only you can see and use). But today, I think I may have broken the curse.First off, the chances of getting dealt a pocket pair are 220/1 (interestingly I had at least 4 pocket pairs today in an hours play). The chances of making a set (three of a kind or 'tripps') on the flop (the first three community cards dealt, i.e. cards that all players can see and use) is under 12 percent which makes the overall chance quite small already.

Well, today I was dealt pocket 3's, not a spectacular hand but more or less as good as any pocket pair until the flop considering you don't know what anyone else has, and so I raised the bets pre-flop. I got callers. The flop came down 9-9-3. I had made a full house on the flop, a 0.98 chance from my position. The beauty was that it was such an unlikely hand to have no one saw it and I was on the button (translation: I was the dealer), so I was last to act.

The first person to act bet 100 which is an appreciable amount considering we start with 380 chips each. The next player folded after some umm-ing and ahh-ing. The next player folded immediately and the action was on me, so I milked it for all it was worth. I looked like it was a tough decision, and with a lesser hand it would be as the only sensible move at that point is to go over the top, re-raising the bet to 200 (minimum raise is the last bet) and if you have to go in for 200, you probably want to go all-in (bet all your chips), or fold. I made noises about my opponent having two pairs or tripps and eventually went all-in having made it look like I was probably a bit weak and an underdog. My opponent had no hesitation in calling me and we showed down - his A-Q of spades (basically, two overcards with Ace being the top possible kicker) to my full house. The only thing to save him would have been either two more aces, two more queens or a 9 and an ace or queen, all of which were very long odds, and indeed he didn't get it giving me a rather handsome stack of chips in winnings.

But it gets better. Of late, I have also had appalling luck with another hand: A-Q, suited or not, has punished me so many times either losing with it or to it (on one occasion I had suited big slick, i.e. A-K of the same suit and lost to an off suit A-Q) but now it seems I have made the pocket pair pay and I have beaten the suited A-Q. Hurrah!!

It's a funny old game, poker. Sometimes it can repeatedly kick you in the nuts in the nastiest ways possible but you still come back for more because you know that eventually, the poker gods will reward you with that one sweet hand that no-one sees and you get to take someone to the cleaners.


Footnote:

Gambling should be enjoyed responsibly. I don't play for money very often and only ever for a fiver or tenner at the most. It can be addictive and if you let it, it can become a real problem. If you think you might have a problem, find help at Gamblers Anonymous.

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Internet dating sites

Yes, I know - it's sad. But look at it from my point of view. I'm not naturally a very gregarious person with people I don't know, a bit shy and these days I can't stand bars and clubs because the music is too loud and I don't like it. All of which makes me sound like my Dad, but as I get older I appreciate the opportunity to have a pint in peace, not surrounded by teenagers on drugs who want to start fights. And anyway, whenever you're in such a place, you are generally rat arsed and half deaf which is not necessarily the best combination of factors for finding someone you might perhaps grow to love.

So with this in mind, where does your average 30 year old like me, who has a large but settled circle of friends (mostly in relationships of one level or another from committed partners up to married with kids) meet women? Or men, if you are of the lady persuasion.

Well, there's work, the old standby. Except that this can be a bit tricky. If you split up, you still have to work together (I used to work in a department where two people had gotten married and then divorced after he had an affair but they still had to work together. Ouch. Eventually, she got a posting for two years to America which is a bit drastic but whatever it takes I suppose). There is a saying that, if I may paraphrase, says "Don't shit on your own doorstep". And anyway, if you work in IT (as I do), there generally aren't many women about or those in other areas of the business will automatically assume you are a socially retarded geek. Which might be true, to be fair, but generally you aren't even given the chance.

So, where does that leave us? The television might have you believe that the supermarket is the meeting place du jour, but this is complete and utter bollocks. The supermarkets I use, because they are on the way home from work, are full of 15 year olds and their kids, obese women in velour leisurewear (often with the puzzlingly inaccurate slogan "Active" stretched across their corpulent arses) and people who would struggle to sit on the toilet the right way round, so that counts out the local ready meal emporium. I would shop at M&S (full of mumsy types but cracking food) or Waitrose (great food, frightening prices but usually well stocked with good looking women most of whom, I am sure, are happily ensconced in large penthouse apartments of with over-privileged tossers called Tarquin or something), but there aren't any anywhere near me.

So, bars and clubs are out, work is out and supermarkets are out. What's left? I have no idea, so I tried internet dating on a number of sites and my experiences can be summarised thus:

They are populated with nutters, denizens of the Kingdom of the Ugly People, and liars. Of all the pictures of people who you think are good looking, probably only one or two are genuine and you can bet they get inundated with messages so you have no chance. Either that or no one bothers to answer any messages at all, or, in the unusual event that a girl sends you a message or responds to one of yours, everything seems to go well and then it falls apart faster than a French car. One girl was so enthusiastic, she wanted to talk by phone and asked for my number, so I gave I to her and that was the last I heard of her (she contacted me first as well).

I've given up now. I no longer care. I've made it this far in life on my own, I'll make it further yet. It seems that unless you have a massive bank balance or you're some kind of narcissistic Adonis or a total bastard, women just aren't interested in you. I'm a regular sort of guy: nothing special to look at, granted, but I'm intelligent, have a good sense of humour, have a good job and so on, but apparently that just makes me an also ran and it would seem that nothing I try changes that. Internet dating is rubbish and all a big lie, so here's a tip for you. Don't bother. Save your money and spend it on a night out with your friends. You'll get a lot more out of it.

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Standards, or the lack thereof

There was a time when the BBC was a byword for excellence in reporting news. Diction would be precise, reportage would be factual, to the point, always in the third person and impartial. Written work would be grammatically correct. However, it seems that things have changed. And the culprit? The interwebnet.

Read this article on the Buncefield fuel depot fire which occurred in Hertfordshire (UK) last December. Notice something odd about it? That's right, the author feels the need to tell us that Hertfordshire Oil Storage Limited (the company that runs the depot) is a joint venture between Total and Texaco, not once, not twice but three times in the space of a few hundred words.
Either the person responsible for this article is stupid, or they were under the influence of some substance or other. But even then, why was it not checked by an editor? I noticed the mistake within seconds of starting to read the article, so why didn't they? This kind of sloppy, lax rubbish erodes a reputation already tarnished by a written style that is becoming more like a tabloid newspaper by the day. Why on earth do they feel the need to have a new paragraph every 3 lines? Is it some kind of corporate rule? It's a shame as it ruins the enjoyment, if that's the right word, I get from keeping up to date using the BBC as now I know it can no longer claim to be one of the best news casters in the world, and therefore, by extension, another little bit of the greatness in Great Britain dies.

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Mr Angry

In the last 24 hours or so, not one but two things have attracted a sufficient amount of my ire to leave me with bulging veins in the cranial region and frothing at the mouth like the rabid pet of a cheese-eating surrender monkey.

Recently, it came to my attention while building a commercial website for someone that I was no longer getting a good deal on my web hosting. 15 quid a month (plus VAT) for 50MB of space and a pitiful amount of bandwidth seems like rather a lot for script hosting when another company can offer me 3GB of space and 40GB/month bandwidth plus ASP.Net hosting for half that, so I decided to move hosts. I set up my new account and contacted my current supplier, who has been about as helpful as Pete the Feet, a legendary Moseley tramp who spends his entire life wasted on a potent combination of Kestrel, White Lightning and Meths and likes to shout random obscenities at trees and pigeons. Although I can understand the shouting at pigeons bit because they are evil vermin who should all be shot. When I finally got a response last night, I was told that they would charge me £20 (yes, twenty Great British Pounds) to change the IPSTAG. For those not in the know, the IPSTAG is a short string of letters and numbers in the registry of the domain which denotes who hosts the domain. It takes about, ooh, 3 seconds to change. How do I know? Because, spitting blood and bile, I told them in no uncertain terms that I thought they were a bunch of robbing shysters but seeing as I had no option, they had better go ahead and do it. 5 minutes later (this is at 9.30 at night) I get an email telling me it’s done and they are now referring me to the accounts dept to settle up and close the account.

Twenty quid. For that. You miserable, scum-sucking, thieving pikey bastards. I hope their servers all mysteriously overheat and die in a smoking heap of twisted drive platters, fried processors and burnt out buses.

After calming down and getting a relatively early night as I was knackered from playing a fairly high stakes poker game in the office after hours (!), I was happily sleeping when at 5.45 am (yes, that’s right: a quarter to six in the morning) I was awoken by my neighbours. They weren’t doing the normal things that people do when they wake up, like bumping into doors because they’re still in a zombified state or tripping over the cat which has cunningly positioned itself full-length on the third step down from the top of the stairs. Oh no. They were hammering a facking nail into the wall at 5.45 in the sodding morning. Who the arse thinks that it is socially acceptable to hammer a nail into a party wall at that time of day? What drugs must they have been taking to wake up at stupid o’clock and think “I know, I’ll bang a bastard great nail into the wall of the house adjoining us. They won’t mind being woken up by it”. To give you an idea of what kind of people we are dealing with here, they own a caravan. And they sit in it at the bottom of their garden, next to the garage, for days out. No, really. However, by the judicious application of some four star you could put paid to that and do everyone a favour because if they ever take it out of their garden and hitch it to their moron-mobile you can guarantee that the gormless tossers are the sort who will happily trundle along at 35 in a 60 zone which has no overtaking areas for miles on end without thinking to look see if they have caused a massive tailback and maybe pull over for a bit to let the normal people past, all because they’re too mean to spend a couple of quid on a B&B. Bastards.


AAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!



Right, that feels better.

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Hello

Hi there. Just what the web needs: another self-obsessed individual who is convinced the world really wants to know what goes in their head. I always resisted blogs for this very reason until I realised that I am a bit on the self-obsessed side so I then figured what the hell, I might as well do it.

I don't post all that often and when I do it tends to be a rant about more or less anything that I've been thinking about. The first tranche of posts are ones I have moved from a mySpace page mainly because I am fed up with the ropey nature of mySpace, it's liberal attitude towards advertising (i.e. there's a hell of a lot of it and they are mostly irritating smiley ads with sound you can't get rid of) and the fact that it doesn't look very good. Yes, I know that's a very shallow reason but frankly, I don't care that much.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the rubbish I post and in truth, I'm not as much of a miserable sod as my posts might make me out to be but I've always felt a good rant helps let off steam and keeps the stress levels down so ranters of the world, be proud!

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