laziness, poker, work, trying out php...

was how my last week went off :(. Yeah no real achievements to boast off.

But here are a few things which happened:

ONE
Today I went to play in a friendly poker tournament with some people from my office. I didn't know anyone except for the guy from my team who invited me! and I was the only Indian there (shy smiley). So I was scared and I just didn't want to end up being the first one out and so being called a sucker. And I really want to elaborate on this because the whole thing went better than I thought it would :).

Yeah, I did end up loosing $10 of my buy-in but being able to spend almost 4 hours on a poker table (My personal record) was almost worth it.

Details

What I should have done - 1:
Don't play loose in the beginning or you will end up going out or being short-stack when the blinds go up.
What I did - 1:
I tried to play tight, but couldn't play aggressively the hands I raised into, and ended up folding to loose players who would just raise...and so I had maybe 1/2 of my stack after the 1st hour.

What I should have done - 2:
Should wait patiently for a nice hand, raise big (or All-In) and try to double up.
What I did - 2:
Raised on suited 2 and 10 (was I was BB?), went all-in and got lucky on the river to hit a flush against trips of 5 of the opponent :).

What I should have done - 3:
By then we all came down to 1 table from 2 and had 9 remaining players. I was the short-stack, I needed luck.
What I did - 3:
Got a pair of 5's, raised real big, everyone folded because the guy sitting next to me openly judged that I had 2 Aces (he was reading into my playing pattern, that I was raising only on big hands). So I collected the crucial blinds.

What I should have done - 4:
By this time, we were 6 people left on the table and surprisingly, I was not the shortest stack. So I should have waited and pushed out the short-stacks so I could end up in the money!
What I did - 4:
Got a pair of 9's. Went all in on flop and doubled up. Was in 5th position, but with much better chips now. Got a pair of K's and went all in again. The opponent who called, got a straight on river. The end.

Just a word of advice, don't read too much into my game, I did raise mostly on pairs, but that is just because that's the 90% of the good hands I got. :)

Thanks for the nice experience.

TWO

Last week I had been trying desperately to build up a program in PHP that can pull out all my bookmarks from delicious and upload them into my website's database. Then, I would like to publish the bookmarks on my site, the way I want it.

I really hit a snag, when I had to go through trying to build the N step process of using OAuth. It really sucks. First the process is too hard to understand and 2nd I couldn't find any set of instructions which actually work.

So I gave up on this after 3 days of effort, I will definitely try this again, this time the idea is to pull out the RSS feed XML and parse it using more familiar Java (or I will even try PHP again).

THREE

Since last month, I have been trying to figure out my expenses and savings in a better way. The idea is to try to maximize my savings and then invest them in the best possible way, so they can grow. Till now, I have only been able to work on identifying the various categories I generally spend each Month and then defining a limit to each category for every month. This I hope will help me to control my spending. But the bigger part, of putting your savings to the better use is still left to be figured out. And in fact, even bigger part, how to maximize my earnings, is yet to be acted upon! So loads of work to do here.

FOUR

I had setup 3 goals for the year at the beginning of January. Here is the status report after the first month:

Weight Loss: I have not worked on this goal at all. All I have to show for this goal is, that I went gym twice and that I am trying to control my eating habits. So lot of work to be done here as well :)

To read a fixed number of hours each week:Seriously I am not at all tracking this one, but I do make a conscious effort most of the days to spend time either reading or doing something constructive rather than just watching a movie or sleeping. So to show for this goal, I have already finished reading one book, Rich Dad Poor Dad (my review of the book below). And I am still reading my second book, The Millionaire next door. The target is to finish 2 books a month.

Third goal, I can't even remember. Which means, I need to look it up and add an update for it by this weekend.

So these were the ramblings for last one week... if you made it this far...you really have a lot of patience and we should be friends :) so contact me...bye.