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Well, i’ve built a table, so now it’s time to roll them dice.

But, you say “chadd, i’ve never played craps! i don’t want to look like a complete tool and get yelled at by the dealers and shunned by the rest of the people at the table and have my girlfriend leave me and my dog get run over by a train and my house burn down and my momma not get paroled!”

Fear not!

First of all, you are not living the perfect country & western song (see minute 3:05).

Second, I’m going to give you the basics of how to play casino craps right here, in 20 easy to follow steps.

1. Walk up to the table and find an empty spot.
2. Set your drink on the bottom drink rail. All casino craps tables, and most home tables should have them. you never set your drink on the top chip rail. that’s for chips. pretty simple, the names give the purpose of the rails away.
3. Look for the big “puck” on the table. it looks like this:
4. if the puck is white and says “on”, just wait. if it is black and says “off”, put your money down on the table. never hand your money to the dealer, they can’t take it from your hand. just put it on the table, in the marked up part, and they will cash it into chips for you.
5. take your chips and put them in the top chip rail. not to be confused with the lower drink rail, see step 2.
6. put down your bet in front of you, on the pass line area.
7. if it is your turn to roll the dice, they will give you a bunch of them to choose from (probably 5 or so). pick two. they’ll take the rest back and then when you are ready, toss them down to the other end of the table.
8. some points about handling and throwing the dice:
   • never bring the dice back over the railing, you’ll get yelled at by the dealers
   • always use only one hand to hold the dice
   • blowing on dice is fine, having your hottie girlfriend blow on them is even better
   • always make sure you hit the wall of the table opposite you. you don’t want to look like a wimp or something
   • keep the dice on the table. don’t whip them off into the stratosphere, you’ll look like a dork.
   • don’t roll them into a bunch of piles of chips that are on the table
   • don’t throw them so hard they bounce from the back wall to the the front and back again.
   • optimum throw: lob them about chin high so they land just short of the back wall and then bounce against the back wall and come back at you a couple bounces and stop.
   • show some control with your dice throw, you’ll impress your hottie girlfriend
9. ok, you threw the dice like a pro, and in the process you didn’t spill a drop of the martini that you are holding in your other hand. very smooth.
10. if you rolled a 2, 3, or a 12, you lose your ‘pass line’ bet, and the whole thing starts over, but you don’t have to pass the dice, you get to roll again
11. if you rolled a 7 or 11, you automatically win your ‘pass line’ bet and the dealer will put your winnings down by your original bet, then you can scoop up your winnings, and you’ll get to put another bet on the pass line and roll again
12. if you roll anything else, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, or 10, then that becomes the “point” and the dealer will take the puck and move it to that number and flip it so the puck is white and says “on” to mark what the point is.
13. now’s when you can play your ‘odds’ bet. this is an extra bet that you put behind your original pass bet. this is the best bet in the casino since it is paid off at the actual odds of rolling the number, with no casino cut.
14. how much can you bet on your odds bet? it is posted on a little sign on the wall of the inside of the table next to the minimum bet amount, and usually says 4x or 5x or 10x or something. that means you can bet that much times your original pass line bet. so if you bet $5 on the pass line and it says ‘5x odds’, then you can bet $25 on your odds bet. i’m not going to get into all the odds of what point pays what payout, just know that this is the best bet in the casino, and you want to bet as much on your odds bet as your bankroll can afford or you are allowed at this table.
15. now, let’s recap where we are: you have a bet on the pass line, an odds bet backing it up, a martini in one hand, and a girl on your side, and you just rolled a ‘point number’.
16. now you roll again. it boils down to this: if you hit your ‘point number’ before you hit a 7, you win your pass line bet and the odds bet behind it. if you hit a 7 first, you lose both your bets. no other numbers matter, if you roll anything but your point number or a 7, you just keep getting the dice back and you continue to roll.
17. if you hit the point number, everyone will cheer, you’ll stand back, finish your martini and flag down the cocktail waitress while the dealer pays you out by stacking chips next to your bets.
18. scoop up your bets and order your next martini (remember to tip).
19. no matter if you hit your point or not, the dealers will then flip the puck back to the black off position and move it to the side. then, if you hit your point, you’ll get to keep the dice, otherwise, the dealers will pass them to the next guy.
20. start over at step 6.

Yes, there’s a ton of other bets that you can make at a craps table, and you’ll see people throwing money all over the place. But this is the basics, and will get you into the fun. If you can follow those steps, you will look like you know what you are doing, and you will be playing the highest player advantage strategy.

Have fun and see you at the tables!

Tags: , casino fun, craps, dice, martini // 2 Comments »

Have you recently felt inadequate holding your Coors Light despite that it is marketed as the “Coldest tasting beer in the world?” (whatever the f*ck that means)? Do girls giggle (justifiably) when you order that rum and Diet Coke?

Fret not good sirs and BEHOLD: The 11 Manliest Cocktails In The World!

I must say, many of these I have not had and several seem as if they might require a welders mask and a nearby does of adrenaline ala Pulp Fiction.

The good news is that #1 is the favorite drink of this man:

Tags: , Drinking, fat tony, manhattan, martini // 2 Comments »

subtitled: Let the music play

sub-subtitled: home bar jukebox and media computer - part 3

After getting the HTPC mounted in it’s built-in sliding shelf (shoved into a hole in the wall) and getting the computer running the jukebox software and running the touchscreen, the last thing that needs to be done is to build and mount the touchscreen into some sort of enclosure on the wall.

I wanted to have something that would take up the corner above the HTPC, a wasted corner space, and something that could be lit/backlit and display some sort of signage with the ‘k2 lounge‘ name in it somehow.

The general idea we (my dad & I) came up with was to hang a plexiglass “door” in the corner, with the touchscreen mounted in the middle of the door.

now, on to the construction:

first, my dad made a frame for the touchscreen. It was basically a standard picture frame, but the inside of the frame has to have some fancy edges in order to accommodate the wires that make the touchscreen work. these are different for every touchscreen, so you can see the photos for an idea of how we did this.

Next step was to cut the hole in the plexiglass where the touchscreen will be mounted. I used a sheet of 24″x48″ plexiglass that is .220″ thick.

After cutting out the window, I used an orbital sander (80 grit) on both sides of the plexi to give it the frosted effect.

The outer frame is the easiest. Just cut a hole out of a sheet of leftover ply (from the middle of a poker table i built before) to make a one piece outer frame.

Next, we put it all together just to make sure it all fit.

Success! Time to move it to the basement and re-assemble.
The outer frame was hung with a few 3″ hinges.

I pre-assembled (not pictured) the touchscreen, screen bezel frame and plexiglass to make it easier to mount to the hung door as a one step process. Then took this and screwed it to the back of the door.

This hinged door gives me easy access to the back of the door and the monitor. The outlet that the monitor is plugged into is split, with the left 2 outlets constant hot and the right 2 outlets are switched. I’m using the right outlets for the HTPC power outlet, and the right 2 for the monitor and backlight power outlet. This gives me the ability to easily turn on and off the monitor and backlight via external switch.

The monitor VGA and USB cables go into the wall and down to the HTPC below.

Well, that’s about it. Next i turned it on and there it is.

I still have to get some type of decor to put on the plexi that says ‘k2 lounge’ and some type of backlighting for the jukebox, but as a temp fix, i mounted a blue fluorescent light behind the plexiglasss.

The ‘door’ itself is quite solid, with very little wiggle when you tap the touchscreen, but at some point I want to attach some sort of latch to hold the door solid to the wall.

Tags: , basement bar, htpc, jukebox // 2 Comments »

subtitled: home bar jukebox and media computer - part 2

when i last left off, i was going to build a jukebox by building an enclosure for my touchscreen.

well, I haven’t got that started yet, so i thought i’d take a detour into the story of how i got the jukebox running on my newly enclosed pc.

Jukebox Software

I began by doing some research at the jukebox forum at arcade controls. They have a fairly active board and lots of friendly nerdy types all too eager to offer an opinion.

I started to go through the list of PC jukebox software that they have compiled and i installed demo’s and did a lot of trial and error. I ended up going with AlbumPlayer.

The touch screen interface is awesome and works great with my 15″ ELO touchscreen purchased off eBay.

screenshot of albumplayer user interface in action:

Album player has a nice built in music database that allows you edit all the song/album data including all the basics: genre, artist, year, album cover, etc.

The extensive database collection editor allows you to create custom collections that you can use for grouping, browsing, playback, etc.

You can browse/search albums grouped pretty much however you can think of based upon album artist.The search functionality is complete and works really well, but it isn’t too pretty. This is supposed to be upgraded in the next version, so I figured I could live with that one con to the software.

My biggest selling point was that Album player is the only jukebox software I could find that was playlist based. I wanted to be able to load a pre-built playlist and then allow my guests or myself to add tracks to the ‘queue’ and then go back to the playlist.

I got albumplayer to do this really easy by creating a custom collection, then in the random play options, you can choose what custom collections are in the pool for randomization.

For example, I wanted rat pack music to play randomly and continuously when nobody is picking music. So i created a ‘rat pack’ custom collection and added all my rat pack albums to it. I chose this collection as the random play collection, and now it plays random songs from those albums continuously. Users can still browse through all the albums on the jukebox and choose anything they want, and it will be added to the cue as the next song. once all the user’s chosen music is done playing, it automatically picks a song out of the random pool (rat pack in this case).

The random play adds a song to the queue whenever it starts the last song in the queue.

You can choose multiple collections to be put into the random pool, as well.

Importing music into the jukebox was really simple. Just hit the “scan for new music” and it scans the chosen directory for anything that hasn’t been already added to the albumplayer database. Then you can import anything new. Albumplayer gets album/song information from whatever source you set, filename/directory structure or mp3 tags. The cover is automatically found and added from either amazon or whatever local location you set. You can always go back and edit any of the album info. There’s even a handy google images link to help look for album covers.

Here’s a screenshot of the album info edit interface from my install:

I’m not going to get into all the rest of the features here, read about them on the albumplayer site. Or, better yet, since the demo is free, you can install and play with it yourself. I’ll just say it does everything i can think of that i would want a jukebox to do.

I always choose to import my music based upon the mp3 tags since I spent a good amount of time going through all my mp3’s and making sure they all have the correct tags attached to all the songs/albums. The best tool I have found to do that is called Tag & Rename. It allows mass mp3 tag edits, adding tags automatically from directory names and file names, and mass renaming and reorganizing of files based upon tags.

So now i have monitor one as the touchscreen displaying the jukebox interface. but, i can’t just let monitor 2, which is actually hooked up to the projector, just sit idle, now can I?

luckily, there is a plugin for album player called CD Art Display which gets a feed from album player and displays the album cover along with other player info like song title, artist, album name, time remaining, etc. All the normal mp3 player display info.

There are a lot of pre-made skins that you can use with CD Art Display, but i’m a picky type and wanted to go along with the vegas theme in the k2 lounge.
I ended up with the following screenshot taken from my projector:

The album cover takes up a huge portion of the screen, and has that nifty reflection that is all the web 2.0 rage these days. The song title, artist, and album info all show up in the sands sign marquee to make it look like that is currently performing artist, which it is. pretty slick, eh?

well, it gets better.

CD Art Display has a play time progress bar that fills in as the song progresses, so I made the progress bar look like one of the neon tubes going along the bottom of the sign that gets filled in as the song progresses. the time remaining is displayed just below the marquee.

I can already hear the masses screaming “holy crap! how did you make that look so awesome? and can i have the skin you made?”

I didn’t actually make a skin, all i did was use the built-in skin editor on the default skin that came with the app.

Here’s a quick step-by-step:

1. Start with an awesome photo
   
2. work some photoshop magic to make it into a wallpaper size image
3. work even more photoshop magic to erase the names in the bottom marquee and move the frank sinatra, dean martin, etc names down to the bottom. then stretch out the top marquee so you can fit the mp3 info in there.
4. save that image and use it as your wallpaper
5. mess around with the built-in skin editor to move all the elements around till you have them where you want
6. change the colors/font in the editor so that the album info matches the sign marquee letters
7. change foreground/background colors of the progress bar to match one of the sign marquee’s neon tubes
8. bask in your high level of awesome

another fun little feature of albumplayer is that it has last.fm functionality built into it, so it automatically updates your profile as you play music. Fun way to keep track of what is being played on your jukebox. Check out what is hot on my jukebox at my last.fm k2 lounge profile.

Well, that’s how i have my jukebox set up.

Next up, the physical jukebox enclosure for the touchscreen…

Tags: , albumplayer, bar, basement bar, cd art display, htpc, jukebox // 2 Comments »