Iphone, meet cement floor of the Lucky Chances parking garage.



On the upside, I did win enough money this week to pay for a new one. Also, interestingly, one of the other people in the game bought it from me after I replace it. He gave me $100, and I agreed to give him the phone next week. I think he's going to refurb it and export it, but frankly I'm happy to get anything at all for it.

This is Sam, for those of you who know him. I also made the following two bets with him: I bet $100, even odds, on the Phillies to win the NLCS, and bet $150 to win $100 on the Yankees to win the ALCS. Looking at the odds online, the first bet is bad and the second bet is good. I don't actually know how to back out the house edge, though, so I don't see an easy way to calculate the EV on these bets assuming the Vegas lines are right. This is why I'm not a sports bettor generally.

So according to WSEX, the Yankees are -196 and the Angels are +156, so Sam is getting nearly the deal he could get with them, but I'm getting a much better deal on the Yankees. Similarly, the Dodgers are -122, but the Phillies are even, so I'm getting the same deal as online but he's getting the better one there. Anyone want to tell me who got the better end of this trade by how much? I think it's me but I'm not really sure.

This is posted using my shiny new 3g iPhone. The keyboard is either super annoying or just takes some getting used to. It seems weird to me that there are no period or comma keys on the main keyboard -- they seem common enough to want to avoid needing two keypresses. I need to learn when to trust the typo correction and keep going, and when to stop and fix it.

I'm now finally getting around to ripping my cd collection, which everyone else did 5+ years ago, but this is my first mp3 player. I guess the next step is to make some playlists -- my first attempt at listening to my partially ripped collection involved a lot of fast forwarding.

The other thing I finally got around to today was seeing the dark knight. Wow. That was easily the best comic book movie, and maybe the best genre movie I have ever seen. Actually, it would probably make my top n list of movies generally had I such a thing. Really excellent -- the characters and arcs in this movie were more ambitiously imagined and then even more impressively realized than any comparable movie I can think of. Even with my raised expectations of Heath Ledger's performance, he surpassed them.

Somewhat strangely I think the title character was maybe the third most central to the story. The most important character arc was that of Harvey Dent, as a symbol of and a contrast to both Batman and Gotham itself. The Joker as a character was as fiendish a character as I've seen on film, but he wasn't just eeevil: he was a sort of guide, both successfully with two face, and with somewhat more complicated results with Batman. One thing that I loved is that the Joker's insane monologues were generally the most insightful lines of the movie. It's so rare that the villain in an action movie is complicated and actually coherent and makes sense. And in this case scary and creepy as hell.

I do wonder what they'll do for the next one. Most Batman villains are frankly kind of doofy, like the penguin or mr. Freeze or poison ivy. Catwoman is fun but not main bad guy material. And to follow up the dark knight you really need something... dark.