I wasn’t happy about all of that before, but I  only had a passing interest in Spore. But now I read that EA will use SecuROM in the upcoming Red Alert 3.

Oh noes!

I played RA2 more than I care to think about it. I played against my son and my wife like crazy. I’ve played all the RA2 expansions and Generals. The RA series was an awesom RTS series. Once I heard that RA3 was coming out I was all excited (and not just because Gemma Atkinson is in it, although that sure doesn’t hurt). Not so much anymore.

DRM does not work. When will the game companies realize this? What’s “funny” about this is that there were cracks available for Spore before it was released. Look at Stardock and in particular Sins of a Solar Empire. They have no copy protection or DRM and have sold remarkably well, especially considering the lower budgets compared to EA. Bioshock and other big games have had disatrous results due to oppressive DRM.

Stardock has, in fact, released a “Gamer’s Bill of Rights” that they will abide by as a developer and publisher. This is a very consumer friendly statement:

1. Gamers shall have the right to return games that don’t work with their computers for a full refund.
2. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
3. Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game’s release.
4. Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
5. Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer.
6. Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won’t install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent.
7. Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time.
8. Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
9. Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play.
10. Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.

I wish all games were like this.

Much Google love this week. I’m a Google fanboi, I admit it. I’m loving Chrome and would switch except for a couple of minor issues that I guess will be available in the near future. Well, maybe all but one. I’m totally dependent on Roboform and unless the extention API is similar to Firefox, I can’t see that being ported any time soon. I did find this page that describes a work around to sort of get it working, but it’s still not  integrated. They say it’s due to WebKit. Eh. Whatever, just get it working! Picasa 3 is also a nice upgrade if you use that.

I went to a friend’s 40th birthday party a couple of weeks ago. This is somebody I went to school with and not a friend from work or anything, so in some ways it hit me harder that I’m quickly approaching the big four-oh. Yikes.

Being a semi-retired Professional Poker Player(TM), I’ve been playing a bit of teh pokah lately. Just some SNGs, maybe a couple a night at good ‘ol Full Tilt. I’ve graduated back up to the $20s and after a couple of missteps while getting used to a bit different play there (there really is a difference between the $10 and $20, not a lot, but enough to notice it), I’m back on track and ahead again. Obviously small sample size. Oh, and I need to pay a bit more attention to the game and not TV while playing. When you check-call with the nuts you suddenly realize that “Modern Marvels” has more of your attention than the game. Even so, it’s still fun to play when it’s not a grind and I don’t feel like I have to play.

Of course, I have to play WoW…but that’s different…

This was from cnn.com on 2008-09-04:

And thanks to Easycure for another example of the Liberal media bias that “doesn’t exist”:

I’m not saying McCain is the be all end all, but I will say that Obama isn’t going to be all that different than any other politicain. Y’all can sit back and pat yourselves on the back while bringing home less pay, but at least you can “feel good” about it.

Meh.

That’s probably all the politics you’ll get out of me here. Despite the Repulican convention being held in my back yard, I couldn’t care less about it right now. 

This video (from quite possibly the best 2 minutes of video a week), sums it up nicely IMHO. Make sure you watch until the end.

Damn straight…I’m going to Arby’s. See ya later.

Enjoy!

It’s been beautiful around here the last few days. Well, “nice” if you mean in the 90s or so, but I can handle that despite the fact that I’m not what you’d call and outdoors person. Outdoors to me means sitting on the deck having a drink and ideally a cigar. Lawns are looking a little brown, but our new landscaping looks great (we had a new retaining wall put in earlier in the summer).

I did find a new cigar store that I think I’ll come to love. Previously I went to one that is close by and has a decent selection, but the staff knows absolutely nothing about cigars. It’s attached to a liquor store and is staffed by people from there instead of having dedicated cigar store people. It’s nice because it’s close, but other than that I was left wanting. I used the new fangled Internets and did what the kids these days call a “search” (I used “Teh Google”) and found one further from my house, but fairly close to my office that is really nice. It has a 400+ sq ft walk in humidor and couches and chairs to sit at and smoke in the store! They have a big screen TV and free WiFi. ZOMG! I went up there about 1pm today (Monday) and there were like 4 people sitting around chatting and smoking. The sales people were knowledgeable and helped me pick out something new. I’m now sitting on my deck trying it out and I have to say I like it. Locals, if you’re in the Maple Grove area it’s called Tobacco Grove, check it out.

Oh, I finally learned how to blow smoke through my nose without passing out and choking to death. When done a few times during a smoke of a decent cigar, it does add a lot to the flavor.

The August heat does mean one thing in this area: The Minnesota State Fair. I know Drizz is already getting psyched for the beer drinking, kid chasing and people watching.  Personally, I’m of the mind that humanity basically sucks, so I tend to avoid things like the fair. Seriously, I get no enjoyment out of watching overweight people either squished into clothes that are too small, or hanging out of wife beaters while letting their 8 kids run all over the place. If I wanted entertainment like that, I’d just watch CMT or something. My guilty (geeky) fair pleasure is listening to the fair police on the scanner. It’s amazing the stupid things that stupid people do when they get looped up on Leinies in 100 degree heat. Hopefully they haven’t moved to digital yet (I forgot about it last year, so for all I know they already have). I do send the boy out with some money to bring me back a bucket of Sweet Martha’s cookies, but other than that I avoid it like the plague.

Looking at this blog I see I’ve basically done two posts in two years. Not exactly what you’d call prolific. There’s a couple of reasons for this. First off, this started out as a “poker blog” and I basically quit playing poker. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, but it became “work”, the proverbial and literal grind. Instead of that, I spent time with my wife in Second Life, and then in World of Warcraft. Despite the friends I had made playing poker, playing anything with my wife is more fun.

Another reason I took a break was that I was bored to tears with “poker blogs”. I came to the realization that reading about people’s games were, to be honest, very boring. I looked at a fair number of my posts and saw the “last night recap” of thing and went “meh”. The “poker blogs” I like to read (and there are very few right now) have poker as a background or secondary theme. Reading some of the blogs and such makes me realize that I don’t know many people in the current “poker blog” arena. Again, it’s interesting to me because the people that started this have basically moved on past blogging about poker and into more interesting things. Sorry if this offends you, but it’s true.

I do feel bad that I didn’t keep in touch with people better. What’s interesting to me is that a lot of us old timers have, through one way or another, stuck together. I signed up for Twitter to follow Wil or somebody, and next thing I knew I had a fair number of the old timers following me. (If you’re really that interested go to Twitter but don’t expect much) Ditto for Facebook, LinkedIn, Last.fm and others (I’m “chrisdhal” at most places, give it a try). There’s been a few IMs, but those have kind of dropped off and I miss the IRC (is that still around)?

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time playing World of Warcraft. For the past year or so I’ve been the leader (GM) of our guild of a couple hundred people. I won’t bore you with that, but suffice it to say that’s where I’m at most of the time. There’s a lot of drama at times and is actually pretty stressful. Lots of fun at others.

WoW has led me to appreciate the Manhattan.

My son has graduated high school and is into his second year of college. Oh Em Gee.

I have been playing a few SNGs on FTP lately. Usually one a night. I’m enjoying it again and who knows, maybe I’ll start to play more again. There’s a new card club that opened up that’s closer to me than Canterbury and I plan on visiting that soon.

Wow, twice in one year. See, there’s hope yet…

and the one and only professional poker player Chris Halverson. I thought I was seeing a ghost. A blast from the past.

It took long time friend and blogger Pauly to pull me out of retirement and play in a blogger tournament. As a world reknown Professional Poker Player(TM) I have been keeping a low profile as of late, where “late” equals “about 18 months”. When you reach the pinnacle of the poker world, the $200 NL on the late Party Poker, there’s really not much left you can look forward to. So I took a break. However, when I saw that Pauly was celebrating his 5th year of blogging with this tournament I decided I had to show my support, so I quietly signed up. It took about 45 minutes and then I was recognized.

Fear suddenly rippled through the tables.

About this time my friend Jason stopped by my house and sweated me and helped a bit, including chiding me for my trademarked weak tight play. Some plays were made and I stayed about average through the next break.

All in all it was a great time. In the end I saw this pop up:

Tao Poker Result

So I got in the money for $9 (woot!) and outlasted over 450 people in my first tourney back in a long time. Not too bad, and even more importantly, I had some fun.

I’ll update more shortly, I think I’m going to try to resurrect this blog a bit and see what happens.

Thanks Pauly for the 5 years of great posts and for the fun tourney.

Iggy: Are you ever going to post again?

AlCantHang: POST!

My friend Jason: Do you even blog anymore?

And the main way you know it’s been a while since you posted last: There’s been a couple of posts on Henry’s Cards Speak since I posted last.

Yes, it has been a while, and I apologize. I really have no good excuse other than not a lot has been happening. I haven’t been playing poker, which kind of defeats the purpose of a poker blog and will definitely mean that Felicia will have nothing to do with it.

So an update…

Been playing a lot of World of Warcraft. My Night Elf priest is level 56 and I have a level 15 human Warlock. We’re having some guild drama which caused my wife to leave and I’m probably not far behind. I think half the guild is younger than 21, and know for a fact that the more vocal ones are still in high school and they piss me off to no end. *sigh*

Wow, does that sound geeky.

I want to reiterate that I hate cars.

Work has been kicking my ass the last couple weeks due to a migration project relating to the sale of my company last year.

I understand there’s a big poker tourney going on in Vegas right now. I have a vague idea about who’s doing what.

My Bloglines category for “Poker” showed over 2000 unread articles on Monday. I started to read some individual ones and then accidently marked them all read. Ug. I did take the opportunity to prune down my subscriptions a bit though, and will continue to do so. I’m not so much interested in the poker as I am the people and such. As opposed to Felicia, to me, if it’s all poker all the time,
I’m just not that interested. I’m going to have to go back to individuals to read about the blogger get together in Vegas.

Thanks to those who have kept in touch, I admit I’m not the best at that. It’s nothing personal, I’m like that to everybody. I’m trying.

OK, this is like breaking the seal, let’s see if I can start posting a bit more often now.

Thanks for stopping by, sorry for the unexpected absence.

No, not WoW, although that’s been consuming about every waking hour that I’m not at work, but “wow” as in, “my new computer is freaking fast” wow.

I ordered a Dell refurb last Sunday and it showed up on Thursday. I left work early and got it setup and I’m very impressed. I got a Dell XPS 600 (P4 dual core, 2GB RAM, 500GB HD). It came with a Nvidia 6800 video (256MB) which seems to be working well. I still will probably upgrade to the 7900 to be current (and may splurge for the 512MB version).

I went the refurb route for a couple of reasons. My time is important to me. It may not seem like it since it’s now spent playing WoW, but I play it with my wife and friends, so it is a good social time. Researching which motherboard to get is tedious and not worth my time. There’s also the warranty. When you piece it together yourself and something goes wrong, you’re screwed. Now I just call Dell and they send somebody out. Again, time. I’m capable of doing things myself, I’ve done it before, but hardware problems are not things I like to screw around with.

One thing that suxors about buying from somebody like Dell is all the crap they put on there. A brand new machine should not take 5 minutes to log into. Even after you go through and get the stuff so it doesn’t ask you anymore, it is still slow as hell. This is a terrible user experience when getting a new computer. In some ways it’s worse then having an infected PC.

Thankfully my friend mentioned an app that will remove most of it automatically. If you are getting, or know somebody who’s getting, a Dell, run and get the Dell De-Crapifier. It kind of crapped out a couple of times, but I just re-ran it and it uninstalled everything. Awesome! Reboot a couple of times and things are flying without any of the junk on there.

Going into Second Life is a whole new experience. The graphics are so smooth now it’s not even funny. The particle effects are stunning. The avatars move smoothly (negating any network/server lag). Incredible. This is how it was made to be run.

World of Warcraft is much smoother too. I think that’s more due to the extra memory and CPU power than the video, but the video is sharper and faster. I am able to keep up running because the computer isn’t swapping all the time. Much better experience.

All in all I’m very, very happy. Things are so smooth and fast it’s unreal. I made an image of the disc after removing all the crap so I can quickly get back to a known state if need be and not have to spend hours doing the OS install (hopefully). Just need to install a few more things, copy my music over (and free up space on my laptop) and I’ll be good to go.

Oh, and this was paid for with poker winnings. Even though I suck, I was still able to pay for it all with poker winnings. So it’s like it was free.
Woo hoo!!!