Landchark

So the wife and I went to las vegas last fall and i finally got around to writing up a bit of a poker trip report.

We saw a few shows (rat pack show again, of course), ate at some amazing restaurants, and I got in one awesome craps session where i was the only player at the table and i got on a very nice long roll and pocketed a nice pile of black and green chips.

anyways, this being a poker trip report, and not a overall vegas trip report, on to the poker…

i played all no limit, the poker hosts will always push you to limit.  i think they make more rake or something on limit.
but when i walked up to any room, the host always asked if i was looking for a seat at a 3/6 limit game.
i always said “no, i don’t play math, i like to drink.  put me on the no limit table” 

Bills Gambling Hall:

i had the most fun, and won the most, at bill’s gambling hall. they played a $1 no limit. only one blind of one dollar. plus they have cracked AA or KK jackpots during the day.

when you play there, make sure you bet on the pig races.  (they have, or at least did have, a slot machine next to the poker table that had a big screen with pig race bonus round that all the poker players would pick a pig and bet on).

 table was right next to the front door and only a $20 min buyin, so people would walk in, buy in for $20 or $40 and then play stupid, hopefully give it to me, then leave.  NEXT! 

drink service was very good there. most of the people were either kids who watched too much WSOP and thought they were awesome or beginners that thought they should try it out with that low of a buy in and only one $1 blind, with a couple of drunk locals thrown in. dealers were good too.

Golden Nugget:

played a lot at golden nugget – very nice, played 1/2 there. game didn’t play that cheap, tho. half the table bought in for $200-$300, and the other half the table had stacks of over $1000, one lady had at least $4k-$5k and the $300 buy-in stack next to me and i were figuring this dude at the other end of the table had at least $10k in front of him.  those people had big watches, too. i’m talking watches the size of connecticut. they were talking about playing in bellagio’s $10/$20 game so i don’t know exactly why they wanted to play a 1/2 game, but maybe they just were slumming or something.

limping and then a raise to $9+ with at least 2 or 3 callers was standard preflop. did 4-5 hour sessions starting at about 11pm for a few nights. got a breakfast comp for me and the wife after each one. i held my own against the regulars and decent players, but at least once per night i had some random schmuck utter what came to be my most hated phrase: “what the hell, it’s only money” and then proceed to call my huge bet and flip over a worse hand and then proceed to suck out. oh well, that’s poker. 

i must have looked like i played really tight at the nugget, cuz once i was one off the button and everyone limped for the $2 so i bumped it up to $25 hoping to steal or at least thin it out and steal with a c-bet on the flop. everyone folded around to one of the huge $1k+ stacks, a guy with a watch the size of connecticut, and he reraises me to $75 or something like that.  i think for a few seconds, and then say i fold, and the guy gets all big headed and flips a KQ and says to me “you can’t wait around for AA all day, buddy!” like he’s the king of bluffing or something. i look back and say “yeah, i know, i should play more hands” and i flip over a J4offsuit.  the look on his face was classic. 

oh, and golden nugget thinks that Hennessey is a normal brandy comp drink, so that was nice.

other places i played:

planet hollywood:

very nice poker room.  played 1/2 while waiting for the tourney and doubled my $200 buy-in after watching this guy buy 2 pots and then calling his all-in bluff.  most everyone there thought they were a lot better than they were. then i did the 1am tourney there, busted out in the middle. was pretty schnookered by that point.

fitz:

played one tourney, busted just before bubble. wasn’t too impressed with that joint.

binion’s:

played one tourney, busted in middle. was a cool 5 way allin with 4 people busting out, tho, so that was interesting.  i was shortstacked on the small blind and i had 4 people go all-in in front of me.  i had to call with my Jd 10d. heck i would have called with a 2 and a kleenex.  when the hands got flipped, there was a KK, AK, AA, and 99.  obviously, the 99 hit a 9 on the flop and won.  just like on the internet! a couple of diamonds came on the flop so i had a really good shot at quadding up and then making the money, but that third one just never came. oh, well. 

the steakhouse on top of binion’s is really good, too.

plaza:

played 2 of the $40 one table tourney’s.  came in second on the first one and won the second. worst players i found in vegas were at that place in that tourney. i overheard more than once, “that’s not what would happen on my playstation game”.  funny story: you can chop the prize once it is down to 3 people, and in the second one i played, it ended up with 2 of us left and i could tell this was his first time ever playing in a casino. he had me about 4 to 1 in chips, like 100k to 25k or something like that. and i offer to chop the pot 50/50 with him right then.  he’s like “no way, i’m totally going to win!” and his friend (who looked like he knew a bit more what he was doing and had busted out in like 7th or something) says to him, “dude, take it, or this guy’s going to crush you”. so, the guy refused my chop offer, i just said, “okay, don’t say i didn’t offer” and about 3 hands later i had evened out the chip stacks and he then proceeds to ask me if i want to chop. i said, “sorry, you had your chance” and then about 3 hands after that i won the entire thing, and the guy’s like, “whoa, i should have taken that chop”.  heh heh. that was awesome.

imperial palace:

eh, not so great. crappy room, really. drink service was slooooow and it seemed to take them forever to get me on a table in a mostly empty room.

i did hit a 4 A’s on the video poker there while waiting for a table, so that was good, but i still probably wouldn’t go back there anytime soon.

excalibur:

i was going to play at the excalibur, since i’ve heard that was the softest game in town, but they had all computer poker there, so i didn’t play that.  can stay home to play poker online if i want to play on a computer.

luxor:

played a little cash game there, 1/2. but the tables were mostly all full. and the wait list was really long. but the people playing looked like a lot of fun. lots of jager flowing. which is the best place to play   i finally got in one night, but i got put at a table of fuddy duddy old men for the first hour, then got moved to a fun table and proceeded to get hammered on free shots. one dude at the other end was buying your choice of patron or jager for anyone in a hand with him. i think i about broke even there, kind of a blur, so not sure. 

well, that’s it.  ended down for the trip, but had a load of fun and learned a lot, so it was a good time.

maybe, someday soon, i’ll get my rear in gear and post a overall vegas trip report.

Tags: , booze, craps, Hennessey, poker, vegas // 2 Comments »

Preface: after hooking up the magicjack and subsequently cancelling charter phone and cable TV, we were only recieving OTA HDTV, which was fine with us, since we didn’t watch much of the cable TV anyways, and we have netflix so we can stream as much Law & Order as we like if we feel we need a fix.

anyways…

There was an old antenna in the attic, so I ran a coax to a boster splitter in the basement, one line to the HTPC, and one to the upstairs TV. 

we got all the local channels in with good signal strength, 90%+, but one channel, FOX seemed to want to bounce around the 55%-85% range.  this would cause some irritating dropouts during programs.

i figured it was the signal strength, so i added another booster up by the antenna. this helped a bit, but dropouts were still fairly common. 

so i happened upon a couple “how to build an antenna” posts on youtube and avsforum and figured i’d try to build my own.

we didn’t have any wire coat hangers, so i got 4 3 foot wire rods at home depot for $1.88 each, for a total cost of $7.52+tax. i had the washers, screws and a 2×4 laying around the garage, so that’s all i needed to spend.

here’s some photos of the final result:

 

and believe it or not, it actually works. now i’m getting all local channels at above 90% signal strength, CBS, PBS and ABC all at 97%. no more dropouts for us.

the wife thinks it looks like some sort of junk art, but it’s in the attic, so who cares what it looks like, as long as it works.

p.s: you can see the old antenna that was there when we moved into the house in the background of that middle photo.

another p.s.: I know that there’s no such thing as an “HDTV” antenna, or a “digital” antenna.  an antenna is an antenna. but it just sounds cooler to say i built an HDTV antenna

Tags: , antenna, diy, hdtv, home theater, htpc // 8 Comments »

in my hunt to reduce monthly bills i found magicJack and at that price i figured it was worth a try.
currently, we have the unlimited phone plan (along with the TV, internet bundle) from Charter.

i should preface this by saying that i’m not a company shill, have no affiliation to any voip service, yadda yaddda yadda. i did work for a bigger telecom company for a few years a few years ago, but that can’t be relevant apart from giving me some inside info on how the telecom industry works.

anyways…

ordering was easy on the magicJack site.
it did put on the pressure to get a multi-year contract upfront, but at this price, i can afford to waste that offer if i do want to renew after the first year.

got the unit in less than a week from ordering.

i tried it first with my main desktop just to see if it works, and yep, it did. plugged it in using the provided usb extension cord, pulled out the phone line (that goes to all the jacks in my house) from the charter phone modem thingy and plugged it into magicJack and instantly had a dial tone.

color me impressed.

made a few calls, got a few calls, everything seemed to run well for a couple days.

magicJack doesn’t offer a local area code for us so i took a nearby city, and then signed us up for a grandcentral account to forward to the magicJack number.

i also set up another gmail account for us to get grandcentral voicemails, i also send all magicJack voicemails there, so even if the mj vm is unstable, as i’ve read it can be, we should be covered by grandcentral.

then i tried to remote desktop into that computer from out of town and magicJack ground to a complete halt. couldn’t even get a dial tone.

i figured this was a bandwidth issue, because remote d is a huge hog. and since i have been looking for a reason to replace my current router, a netgear FM114P, because of wireless slowness, i used this as an excuse to go router shopping and make sure i get one with QoS so i could prioritize the  bandwidth.

upon recommendation from a network expert type person friend of mine, i got a DLink DIR-625.  works great once i got all the wireless settings configured. get just as fast of speeds on the laptops via wireless as i do on my wired desktop. very nice.

so the 625 has QoS built in and with some router magic can autoprioritize voip packets or something. i’m not going to pretend i know how it all works, all i know is that it does.  you can set your own QoS rules, if you want, that assign priority to machines (and ports) on your network but i haven’t had to do that yet as the built in auto-QoS seems to work just fine.

once i got that router installed, i could log into remote desktop and magic jack still ran fine. sweet. bandwidth problem solved. voice quality was about “cell phone in a moving car” quality.

i figured it was time to move magicJack to its permanent home, the jukebox we use to listen to mp3’s and watch divx/netflix movies on.
general specs: xp sp2 (up to date), athlon 2800+, 1gb ram.
the only bandwidth usage on that machine would be the streaming movies, which we’d have to pause anyways when we get a phone call, so it shouldn’t be an interference.
and getting the popup on the screen when a call comes in would actually be a nice feature so we don’t miss calls in case we are watching a movie at blast your eardrum volume.

so i ran a phone line to that computer and plugged in the magicJack.

everything worked fine, but call quality was “very choppy”.

so based upon some of the tips read on the dslreports.com magicJack forum, i ditched the provided usb extension cord, updated all usb drivers, and set the magicJack process in my task manager to be high priority.

when i called the test number, 909-390-0003, voice quality was very good (this was at about 5pm, in case that is relevant). so it would seem that those tips fixed the “very choppy” issue.

next thing i experienced: my voice to the external person is crystal clear. but, the external person sounds intermittently choppy to me.   that happened on both incoming and outgoing calls.  it wasn’t a constant choppy, just seems like randomly throughout a call, the incoming voice got a little bit of a stutter once in a while.

i’ve messed with the QoS on the router, enabling and playing with the QoS rule settings, for the source ip and port range (my computer) so i think that’s why my voice sounds great to external callers because those outgoing packets are prioritized.

after reading about how people set up QoS with tomato, i did some hunting through my server logs to see what IP was getting used when i was on the phone.  not an exact science and not really perfect but i found IP addresses in there for chicago and atlanta.

so i added those addresses to my destination QoS rules, and also added the minneapolis IP just to be safe.

exact settings, for the DIR-625 QoS:
checked: QoS enabled, autoUplink
unchecked: dynamic frag, auto classification unchecked
Rules:
priority 1
source: magicJack machine IP, UDP protocol, source port 5060-5070
destination: proxy1.Chicago.talk4free.com – vms1.Chicago.talk4free.com (use the ip’s), all ports 0 – 65535
added a rule for every server i might be hitting with magicJack: chicago, atlanta, mnpls

once i rebooted the router, i tried another call and BLAMMO, calls were crystal clear, both voices incoming and outgoing are fine with no stutter. it was as good as our line with charter.  sweet.

i don’t know that i need to give those rules priority 1, because that may be overkill on the choking off of other bandwith to the house, but based on our usage while on the phone we haven’t noticed any slowdown of our other bandwidth so i’ll leave it for now. if it starts slowing things down, i can always lower the priority until i get to a sweet spot of bandwidth speed and call quality.

for a load test, while making a call, i had my wife stream live365, and on my desktop, i turned on a radio stream and loaded 12 youtube videos at once.  call quality stayed the same and the radio streams never buffered and i loaded all the videos. don’t know that was the most scientific test ever, but it was a good practical test and magicJack passed with flying colors.

in case anyone wondered, i ran a voip speed test and pasted the results below.

Speed test statistics
———————
Download speed: 10499000 bps
Upload speed: 983296 bps
Quality of service: 99 %
Download test type: socket
Upload test type: socket
Maximum download pause: 38 ms
Average download pause: 1 ms
Minimum round trip time to server: 18 ms
Average round trip time to server: 89 ms

VoIP test statistics
——————–
Jitter: you –> server: 2.3 ms
Jitter: server –> you: 3.6 ms
Packet loss: you –> server: 0.0 %
Packet loss: server –> you: 0.0 %
Packet discards: 0.0 %
Packets out of order: 0.0 %
Number of supported VoIP lines: 6
Estimated MOS score: 4.0

overall, i’m very pleased with how magicJack works. it installed and worked well directly out of the box, especially for the price.
to get it to work with the same call quality as our current phone line did take a bit of tinkering and research, but it wasn’t that bad, and again, for this price, i’m willing to put in some tinkering.

we’re going to give it a week and if things stay stable, we are going to drop charter phone service. worst case scenario is if the thing craps out on us, or if the company goes belly up or something, and we have to get a phone line from charter  again.  in the meantime, we’ll save about $50/month, so it seems worth it to me.

hope this helps out someone who may be considering getting magicJack or having choppy voice quality issues of their own.

Tags: , htpc, magicJack // 11 Comments »

Phil from Chicago Sign Systems came into town and installed the winning design.
He printed it out backwards on vinyl and applied it to the back of the frosted plexi.
the K2 and lounge are both black vinyl and the card suits are some kind of fancy semi transparent vinyl. I didn’t even know such a thing existed.  What an age we live in.

It looks fabulous, i’d say.
I still have to figure out some other sort of backlighting, but for now, I’m more than happy.

[ note: i'm not really the best photographer, so the orange backlight kind of glares in the photos. In person, they look like the bottom where you can see the card suits better ]

[ note 2: the walls are still orange, not pink ]

Again, thanks to Phil and his super awesome art talents.

Tags: , basement bar, chicago sign systems, jukebox, k2 lounge // 2 Comments »

Today I was working diligently at a task assigned to me by my supervisor. It was a true challenge, one that required me to be extremely focused. Sadly, my co-workers did not share my need for focus. They were babbling on and on about their “little buddies” and “coconuts” and “buxom movie stars”.

Finally, I could take no more.

“YOU GOTTA STOP TALKING ABOUT GILLIGAN’S ISLAND!” I blurted.

Their confused, blank stares were evidence that they had never witnessed such an urgent need for concentration before.

So, after several minutes of akward silence I exclaimed “and don’t think of drumming up a conversation about The Ropers either.”

That shut ‘em up.

Tags: , cubicle noise, Gilligan's Island, The Ropers // 1 Comment »