Some friends and I have been playing poker a couple of times a month for the last year or so. Our play is terrible, no one cares, and we usually spend more on beer than we win. It's a good time.

In November a few of us decided to head to the local card club and try our hands at play in the wild. We decided to enter a tournament. Tournaments are a great way to start out playing at a card club because you know going in exactly how much money you're going to loose from the start. Ninety or so people each pay a fixed entrance free, and only the top nine of them get any prize money at all. Tournaments all offer good initial chip parity -- everyone starts with exactly the same amount of money so you can't be pushed around by bigger stack from the start. Another added bonus is that for your initial buy-in of twenty or so dollars you get a few thousand "dollars" in tournament chips. They're not real money but they're the closest I'll ever come to saying, "I raise 2000," without having to append, "pennies."

Last November while sitting in the Atlanta airport with not much to do I saw a bank of six different trash cans. They were in a neat row, each was in a different color, and they were all good for only one thing. People would walk up with a piece of trash and then carefully place it into whichever bin it best fit. Is this bottle glass or plastic? The lid is aluminum does it need to come off? Is this a number two plastic or a number four plastic?

I live in a sleep deprived state. Not just because I have a lot to do and resent sleep as the short-term death it is, but also because I enjoy the swirling colors. Maintaining a sleep deprived state requires a good alarm clock. When your brain knows it needs 8 hours and you're giving it 4 it's gonna fight you, and given that it's in charge of your perceived reality, it doesn't have to fight fairly.

GPSDrive (http://www.gpsdrive.de/) is nifty software for Linux that turns a laptop and a cheap GPS receiver into a vehicle navigation system. It displays maps, records tracks, logs speed traps, and all the other little features you'd expect in a system trying to divert your eyes from the road.

It also sports a built-in system for networking with other GPSDrive enabled systems on the road to mutually plot one another's locations. The system, called friendsd, uses a simple UDP server to record and report the position, speed, and heading of other reporting systems on the same server. Of course, this reporting only works if the laptop has access to the Internet but with the various cellular and wi-fi systems available that's not so much a stretch.

For the last three years Cari, Bridget, Joe and I have co-hosted a Halloween party at Cari's and my place. Every year I man the bar because I enjoy doing so and like the chance to talk to everyone periodically over the course of the night. This year I decided to turn the role into my costume and dressed as Moe Szyslak, the bartender from The Simpsons.

In one particularly good third season episode, titled "Flaming Moe" (http://www.snpp.com/episodes/8F08.html), Moe finds great success serving a drink whose recipe was stolen from Homer. The drink, which Moe calls the Flaming Moe, includes as its secret ingredient Krusty Brand non-narkotik cough syrup and erupts into quickly retreating pillar of flame when lit. I figured if I was gonna do Moe I had to make that drink.

Three days ago I posted a rather lengthy entry wherein I decried the current state of open, collaborative calendaring. In it I listed six requirements for calendaring software and settled on the option available to me that met the most of them. Now I'm changing my mind.

At the time I needed a new calendaring solution fast and had checked out all the candidates before. The software package Remind had a nice interface, an expressive configuration language, web-visibility, local-storage, and was open source. It met four of the six requirements and would have served admirably for a few years. So why did I find myself laying awake worrying about my choice? (Seriously, I'm that big of a loser.)

I'm happy with my email client, text editor, compilers, IRC client, news reader, web browser, and just about every other tool I use in the process of my daily computing. The only consistent source of displeasure has been my calendaring (when the hell did that become a word?) application. I have a hideously over-scheduled life and need some sort of scheduling solution be it computerized or otherwise to keep things straight, but I've never found anything that really suits me needs.

Being a telecommuter, the closest thing I have to an office is an IRC channel. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is like a chat room minus the emoticons and pedophiles. While normally the office IRC channel is the very embodiment of maturity, there are two silly things about it that have always annoyed me. The first being that everyone gets to pick their own name, and the second being they can change their names at will.

There's a program on freshmeat called email2sms (http://freshmeat.net/projects/email2sms/) that runs emails through a series of filters until they're short enough to be sent to a cell phone as a SMS message -- which typically have a maximum length of 150 characters. The script is mostly just a wrapper around the nifty Lingua::EN::Squeeze Perl module.

Squeeze takes English text and shortens it aggressively using all manner of abbreviations. It leaves the text remarkably readable for being about half its original length.

I try to lead a very uncluttered life whether one's talking about hard drive layout, personal responsibilities, or physical clutter in my condo. Three years ago I got my first TV and DVD player. Each came with its own remote control. Not wanting to deal with two remotes on my coffee table (which at the time was a cardboard box) I went out and bought a nice $20 universal remote that was very programmable and easily handled the functions of both the TV and the DVD player.