Texas Calculatem and Poker Office Blog

Another week has passed, and I'm down about $0.75 at Limit Poker. I've just been playing at Pacific and Jokerstars again, but it's hard staying focussed for long. I'm thinking of just depositing $500 and increasing the stakes, just to see if it help with my concentration.

In the blogging world, the two wars have died down. Neither party backed down in the latest skirmish, but just got bored and decided to do other things. SMT SMT. My aggregator tool is still up and running, and useful for keeping up to date on the latest happenings. In this last week, Kenny has been organising a charity tourney (click here for more info), and Miasdad has been fished yet again at Jokerstars.

Moving on to other random things that have been on my mind...

I'm still concerned by the chicken and eggs that I eat. Apparently the Waitrose Columbian Chicken eggs are made in the UK. Columbian refers to the breed, not the source. Rosie kindly pointed that out to me, so I'll be off to get some when I'm done with this post.

I met up with a few ex-colleagues from my IT monkey days on Wednesday and Friday.

On Wednesday it was a meeting with some of the guys who were on the grad scheme at a Swiss bank. We went for a curry at Mirch Masala and all had the shits the next day. Good times. Everyone seems to be doing well, though I'm not sure I could go back into the world of IT.

On Friday I met up with a dude who was an intern while I was running the bank's global copying and pasting function. He's having fun supporting complicating swaps trading systems, and had some gossip about my old boss. Apparently she'd finally been let go after six years of incompetance. I was very shocked by this news, as she had sex and race descrimination laws on her side. Anyway, it appears that just after I'd left, she'd told all the managers what a liability I'd been, while at the same time telling them how the team was struggling without me. It's nice to know that I was stabbed in the back while I wasn't there to defend myself, but I'm glad I left and have no intention of moving into a similar role ever again.

UK interest rates went up on Thursday, from 5.50% to 5.75%. It was the expected course of action, with the odds on betfair being around 1.10 prior to the announcement. However, the rise appears to have caused lots of anger on the forums at the BBC (click here to view the anger). The move had little affect on the markets, but in the near future, rate increases are more likely than falls.

All this is good news for my buddy in the local Taleban, who took it upon himself to retire at 27 last week. He was tired of being exploited at an engineering firm, threw a wobbly, and stormed out. He now plans to live off gambling, and learn skills such as cooking, martial arts and chatting up random chicks. He has been perusing pickupguide.com and testing out the skills in Wimbledon and Croydon.