roadtorobusto

Since I twitter a lot more than I blog, I figured I’d add this to keep up some relatively fresh, albeit short, content. Look on the right and you can see my lovely stream of 140 character updates.

Just got back from a nice weekend in Vegas — two days of playing in an ultimate frisbee tournament followed by chilling on the strip with friends. I’m heading down again in a few weeks for a group dinner w/a bunch of friends and to see a show with Kate (we’ll probably catch La Reve), but this trip was very, very chill.

On the DC front Joe Tall is up working on some site improvements with me and the devteam this week, so it’ll be a fairly busy week, but

Pokerwise, I’m starting to play some low stakes PLO, working on the fundamentals and just trying to tune up my instincts on how/what people tend to play. I’ve got some ideas that I’m floating for cool SSPLO content in the future, but step 1 is for me to get a little more familiar with how the games play. My play is going to be pretty sporadic but I’m looking back/reviewing play in a lot of the sessions after the fact, using ProPokerTools when I hit situations where I’m a bit confused about equities vs ranges. Here’s the most recent postworthy hand (posted here).

I’m getting really really excited about SXSWi coming up in a few months. There are a ton of panels that look like they’ll be great to see and interact with. Ok, enough for now — back to work.

Have been all day today since just after the inaugural performance, which was quite good. Right now I’m listening to Songs of Joy and Peace. On the way home I think I’ll pick up a copy of Bach: The Cello Suites.

In other news, I finished my water challenge yesterday. Overall I think it was a great experience even though I got pretty tired of it near the end, it’s nice to have a reminder of what the charity really means to you on a personal level. Today I had coffee but only a little bit — an Americano in the morning. To try to keep sleeping well I’m going to stick to no coffee after noon and tons of water throughout the day.

On the DC end, I’ve been doing a lot of research today into desktop sharing/streaming programs. Most people I know use Teamviewer or Mikogo, but there are of tons of competitors to those platforms out there and more each day, it seems; I’m trying to find ones that would work well for individual and maybe group coaching lessons in the future that don’t require a ton of overhead. It’s tough to find screen sharing software that does well with video as well as static pages. Most are designed for sharing things like powerpoint presentations or office documents. I’ve given about half a dozen a try now and will give some more a try later this week. Might try to do a wrapup post about my thoughts on most of them once I’ve tested them in a bunch of circumstances.

Time to run — training for my marathon starts up pretty soon.

Day 8 of the water challenge and I’m finally back to normal.  I still miss the taste, the aroma, the ritual of it but the caffeine headaches are gone and I’m sleeping well.  You’d think that after all this work to rid myself of dependency on a chemical I wouldn’t rush back to it with loving arms, but I probably will — though I’m going to stick to Americanos.

Anyway.

The past week has been a little less insane than the week before, but now we’re moving on to providing some much-requested features (black background FTW!) and using the momentum from the DC upgrade to move into more uncharted territory.  The feedback has been great on our season lineup so far, and I’m excited to see what everyone thinks about the two debuts this Friday, as well as some continued updates we’re prepping the site for over the upcoming weeks (and months).  We (me/Chris/Joe/Chuck/Jay/Aaron) just booked our tickets to South By Southwest interactive in March, which I’m insanely pumped for — one of the greatest things for me about the way that DC runs is that we try to keep on the edge of interactive communities and technology as much as possible, and SXSWi is pretty much the premiere event for us to attend, check out some keynote speeches and panels, and meet people in other businesses doing similar things.  If it isn’t obvious all the time, I’m pretty insanely proud of what DeucesCracked has become and am really looking forward to seeing other people in the same field as us.  If any of you are in Austin around that time, hit us up and maybe we can grab a beer.

I’ve written a bit about this before, but I decided to start my water challenge Sunday.  Yesterday my head hurt too much to try to write about it (no coffee, and I’m an addict), but I’m feeling better today.  The challenge is pretty simple — for the next two weeks I’m going to drink nothing but tap water and I will donate the money I would have spent on coffee, tea, beer, wine, or scotch to The Water Project, a group dedicated to creating access to clean drinking water to Africa.  A little money goes quite a long way when it comes to these donations:

• $10   = 1 persons’s access to water
• $50   = 1 family’s water needs
• $500 = Repair a Well
• $3,500  = Dig a New Well

You can see past projects that they’ve worked like the Cameroon Biosand Filter and see the impact they’ve had on their communities.  Right now I’m in my caffeine detox phase but once the headaches are gone, it should be pretty easy.  I spend way too much on coffee as is, so I’m hoping to do my part to help dig wells across Africa and give back a little bit.  All of us live pretty charmed lives and it’s good to remember that, and offer whatever help we can give to others.