Last night, William and I were watching a TV show together - Dragon. In the episode we were watching, Dragon was trying to teach his cat some tricks. At one point he started trying to teach his cat subtraction (using pickles dipped in catsup as props) and William answered Dragon’s questions before Dragon did. I paused the show - unsure what to make of it. It was possible that he was just using his memory to dredge up the answers, but since we don’t usually watch Dragon (I honestly don’t remember the last time we watched it) I didn’t think it was likely. I asked him some more questions, and he got them right. He’s able to subtract numbers 5 and under, and add two numbers 5 or less (using his fingers) I don’t know where he picked it up, but it struck me as pretty amazing that he spontaneously picked it up on his own.

About the only math I’ve actively taught him is the concept of zero, and that was just out of his own curiosity. He needs the visual clue of holding up fingers to get the job done, but when that condition is met, he’s accurate all the time.

I suppose it’s just normal that kids pick stuff up like this, but I always find it amazing when William comes up with a new thing like this seemingly out of thin air.

One other trick he does is that he knows how to spell his name. He doesn’t write any letters yet, but he can type his name - sometimes he misses the second ‘i’ or sticks a ‘p’ in there for some reason, but he’s got it down pretty solid. I think that’s more out of necessity than anything else - his password on the computer is ‘william’ and when he wants to play the computer and hasn’t been told he can’t, he logs himself in. Meanwhile at 3, I know for a fact that I hadn’t even heard of computers - I remember not even really knowing what they looked like at 6 or 7. Kids today. Sheesh.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “*gasp* It’s the four elephants of the apocalypse!” - Ned Flanders

The Huskies’ football season opener is this weekend, so William and I are going to try to go to the game together. I’m looking forward to seeing the new seating and facilities in action. William remembered the game I took him to last year, and is looking forward to it as well (his highlight was the little bags of chips that we got from the PotashCorp tent, so hopefully he won’t be too disappointed when we don’t get to do that again :)

Summer Part 2 is here, with the temperature at 31 already and rising. Yesterday it was nice to be on an air-conditioned bus. With the new bus routes, I catch a bus that goes through the university - not ideal. The bus I would catch if it ran at better times (it goes by the nearest stop to my work at 4:30 - two blocks away, and then not again until 5:00) broke down part way home - I know this because the bus I was on picked up all the passengers from that one part way through the route. They’d been standing out in the sun for ~15 minutes, so I’m sure they appreciated the A/C on the bus as well.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Come see Bottomless Pete, nature’s cruelest mistake.” - Captain McAllister

I was reminded today of one of the many hilarious things I’ve seen on local TV. Back in the day, there was a big brouhaha (for want of a better word) over alcohol in strip clubs in Saskatoon. I don’t remember which stage of the controversy we were in, but I was watching CBC news one night - the 6:00 edition - and they ran a story on it. During the story, they had the typical community reaction and random footage of a strip club. This time however, they didn’t bother to censor the strip club footage, so they basically showed a stripper doing her thing on the 6:00 news.

I don’t remember if they apologized during the 6:00 news, or waited until 11:00, but by 11:00 they’d dusted off the old black bars to cover up the naughty bits

Somehow Costa Maragos is still employed, but I suspect that someone was in trouble over the incident.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Do you mind? You’re killing the romance in here.” - Mayor Quimby

Tournament night was a success once again last night. I won the first tournament, and was the first one out of the second tournament. Sure I got very lucky once to win the first one, but when it got to heads up, I had a 6:1 chip lead, so I must have been doing something right. The first hand, I was dealt a pair of queens, and two or three hands later I was dealt a pair of kings, both with friendly boards, so I was sitting in good position most of the night. I got very lucky on a hand where I raised with QQ, was reraised by the biggest stack at the table, moved all in, he called and flipped up AK. The flop brought and ace, but also two clubs (which he had none, and I had the Q) Turn and river were both clubs, and I doubled up. After that, it was pretty basic big stack pushing people around time all the way to the end. I didn’t have to show down too many hands, and I never called an all-in without the best hand, so I was playing pretty good.

The second tournament, we played omaha, and I was out in the third hand, when I misread the guy I was playing against - I thought he had the discipline to lay down a poor hand on a relatively scary board when I missed my draw, but he called me with bottom set, and my pair of Queens (with lots of missed straight draws) was no good. I mismanaged the pot size on that hand - 4 players seeing the flop and then calling a pot sized raise makes the thing get out of hand in a hurry.

Anyway, it was fun, and the same two people won the two tournaments as last time - Tim through cold calculating skill, and me through blind luck :)

Simpsons’ quote of the day: “It may be bleak, but this music is really getting to the crowd.” - Lisa

Last night I fired up a freeroll poker tournament, just for fun. It was an 1800 person tournament, with the top 9 places getting a seat in another 1800+ person tournament - the top 9(?) in that tournament get a seat in another tournament (less people this time - maybe 45?) and the top 7 people in that tournament get a trip to Australia to play in a big money tournament there. Overall, I knew it was a waste of time, but I felt like playing some tournament poker.

Anyway, about an hour and a half in, it was bedtime, so I decided to throw away my chips - I had a slightly below average stack of ~7500 (initial stacks were 1500) and I reraised a guy all in with QJc preflop. He called me with A4o. Pretty insane, but I was willing to give him my chips. The flop hit me pretty hard, QJx. So now I had the big stack at the table, and it would take some doing to lose the rest of my chips. I called a guy’s all in with the all powerful K9d, only to be raised by a guy with pocket 7s. Great, I thought I was done, because in the interim I’d lost some chips to make my stack more reasonable. The 7’s held up for him, and I was ready for bed. Unfortunately I still had 2K left. I doubled up the next hand with whatever crappy cards I was dealt, and again the next hand. It was pretty sick. Eventually I did get beaten when my 54s didn’t hold up :)

The funny thing is that I busted out in 321st place out of 1800, and until I decided to lose my chips, I only showed down my hand two or three times (once was KK all in preflop against 66, one other time I had a full house on a 4flush board and raked a nice pot.) I was pretty amazed at how quickly the thing went. I was also amazed by how poorly people played.

The reason for wanting to play some tournament poker, is because this poker night (tonight) is tournament night. I used to play fake money tournaments pretty exclusively, but I haven’t done it much in quite a while, so I needed a brushup. Not that the level of play at Rob’s is as bad as the online fake money tournaments…Still, the types of play required don’t differ that much.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Who shot who with the what now?” - Jasper

It should surprise nobody to know that I used to enjoy “Weird Al” Yankovic music back in the day. I spent an evening last week watching Weird Al videos on YouTube, and watched UHF last week as well. I don’t know what prompted it. Strangely enough, he’s got a new album coming out right away, and he’s giving away the first single - Don’t Download This Song on the web. I haven’t even heard it yet, and still, I’m spreading the link around. What does that say about me?

I’m slowly working on getting Erin set up to easily post pictures to the kids’ website. My goal is to fix up an automator action that I found on the web to allow her to pick out a picture and have it resized and transferred to the website automatically. The hangup right now is that it doesn’t want to resize over NFS, so I’ll have to work on something to resize it locally and then copy the resized picture to the NFS share. It’s pretty close, and once it’s there, expect to see a lot more pictures of the kids start showing up over there.

Simpson’s quote of the day:
Little Ditty about Homer and Marge.
Her heart was as big as his stomach was large.
Oh yeah, they say love goes on.
Long after the grilled cheese sandwich is gone. - “Weird Al” Yankovic

A little while back, I pulled the digital camera out of Erin’s purse to take some pictures of the kids. When I turned it on, I was greeted with an all white screen. I snapped a few photos anyway, on the off chance that it was working. The thing was clearly broken, but at least it should still have been under warranty. Erin took the camera in to be fixed last week, and it was ready to be picked up yesterday. The repair place is only open until 5:00, so Erin and the kids came and picked me up yesterday after work, and we headed there.

Getting there was no problem at all. We got the camera, and headed home. I thought about the various ways we could get home, and decided that taking the freeway was probably no worse than the alternatives. Clearly I forgot that they reduced it to one lane Southbound out of downtown. At one point, only 3 blocks from the entrance to the freeway, I told William that we’d probably be home in 15 minutes. Ten minutes later, I think we’d only moved 3-4 car lengths.

As soon as we got backed up, I had second thoughts about my choice of route, but I figured that we’d already waited too long to bother abandoning that route and going to another of the undoubtedly backed up bridges. I guess I should have rethought. We got home about an hour after we left the repair place. Not good. It never takes an hour to get anywhere in Saskatoon unless there is a big accident or something. The funny thing was that once we got past the 8th street exit from the freeway, traffic was suddenly so sparse that it was laughable. Next time I’m going to suck it up and take the college drive bridge - at least it would have had all it’s lanes open.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “We studied traffic patterns and found that drivers move the fastest through yellow lights, so now we just have the red and yellow lights, m-haiai.” - Professor Frink