Livejournal just fired its technical staff (confirmed at cnet with different numbers).

So. The first thing to do is to back up everything, which I'd been planning to do at some point anyway. The first thing I tried was the sourceforge package ljbackup, which I liked because it was short and in perl, so I could see what it was doing. I fixed a bug and ran it, but it seems to be missing some entries, I'm not sure why. Too much work to figure it out.

So then I downloaded this tool for windows. I changed my password, ran it on all entries and comments, exported to html, and changed my password back. I think it got everything this time -- all my spot checks passed. So that seems good.

I'll have to do that on a more regular basis now.

588 entries, 2324 comments, 3.5 years. Not much compared to some of you, but I'd be sad if it all went away. I wonder what the easiest alternablogging solution would be.

I'm in a 2-3-5 game at lc, waiting for the big game. Up 600 after two hours so at least it's productive waiting.

Anyway the dealer just said to me: hey, you're the guy with the blog, right? Uh, what do you mean?

Evidently one of the floormen found it and was recounting hands. The dealer in question dealt the hand where I flopped a boat against Eldon's trips and recognized the hand.

Perhaps I need to start locking posts or using pseudonyms or something.

Oops, only up 350 now. Stupid KK, folded it on a QQ43 board.

As a man, you quickly learn not to walk up to a urinal too quickly. You want to glance at the floor beneath it for sticky patches or puddles, since apparently a depressingly large number of men are incapable or can't be bothered to pee into the convenient basin rather than dribble onto the floor.

Of course, it depends on the situation. At a ballpark or a concert, people are sloppy. When we went to meetings with the architects, their bathrooms were spotless. Either that is because of the context or because of the end users.

At work, the floor beneath the urinals is pretty clean. I didn't feel like I needed to be careful to avoid stepping in a sticky mess. Or, rather, it was pretty clean. Some time in the last few weeks, we reached a sort of dripping point where now there is commonly a small puddle stickily drying under the urinals.

I originally thought that it couldn't be because of just one new bad user -- a new hire who wasn't careful, or similar -- because it is there too often. Pretty much every time I go in, now, no matter what time. Note that the bathrooms are cleaned daily.

But actually, I think it could be one person, in a sense. It's not that he's peeing on the floor all the time, but that once there's already a sticky spot, other people are less careful. Plus it's less convenient to get close to the urinal, since you have to take a bit of a wide stance, as it were, to avoid stepping in the puddle. Which encourages dripping. So one sloppy person can have a widespread impact, where everyone else is sloppier as a result.

We have a blind man on our floor, who, based on previous cleanliness observations, must do a good job of getting the pee where it belongs. I wonder if he too is affected by the new environment, or if he still pees with accuracy because he doesn't have the visual input of the sticky spot that the rest of us has.

Anyway, how do we fix this? Posting a sign on the wall is too absurd and probably wouldn't work. If it really is an environment cues issue, then an extra cleaning in the morning might help. But I'm not doing it, for sure. There have been studies that show that the feeling of being watched can change cheating behavior (see this freakonomics blog entry about that): so maybe a poster of someone watching? Except that's super creepy above a urinal. Any other ideas?

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This brings up another topic. What do I tag posts like this with? I have a previous post (perhaps my most popular) that talks about urinals and behavior around them. How many urinal-related posts do I need to have before I need a tag for them? Would something more generic, like bathrooms, be better? I can imagine future bathroom-related posts that didn't touch on urinals, though I don't anticipate this being a common topic regardless.

This comment just got posted to an old entry in my LJ.

(Anonymous): Thank You for site

Thank you for your site. I have found here much useful information.
Good site ! ;)

It's obviously spam. But why on earth would a spammer post something with no link, no advertising, no content? Is there some filtering process that cut out the spam link or something?

I went to the lovely and perfumed Garden City the other night to try out the new 40/80 game. I got there and immediately sat in to a 20/40. As I'm sitting down, someone says, "Speak of the devil!" I look up, and it's Kojo! It's only his second time playing 20/40, but he seems to be holding his own at what looks like a nice and soft table.

The only other player who I think is any good is sitting to my immediate right. I can't decide if she's a pro, or just a good hobbyist like me. Anyway, Kojo starts talking to her, and it turns out that they used to work together in the mid 90's.

The pro and I started talking about 2+2 and online message boards, I name-dropped Tommy Angelo, and we talked about other players we knew. Then she asked if I knew patrissimo, and it turns out that she knew choiceful and recently moved near to the whole commune thing they've got going on.

So, obviously, LJ: she is elphie (hi!). This is the second time I've met someone I recognize only from LJ at a cardroom. Everyone I know is a degenerate gambler, or something.

Small world, I guess. Results: Kojo ended up a few hundred, I ended up $50, and elphie had a big stack in front of her when I left, but I don't know how much she started with. Anyway, the team did well.

In case any of you have missed it, terrencechan has had a fascinating and unfortunate set of experiences at a recent charity poker tournament, chronicled starting here, and continuing here and here, then taking a bizarre twist, followed by a plea for sanity.

Basically, an unfortunate situation occurred at the end of a charity poker tournament, where the organizers made a snap decision to end the tournament (it was running over and they were being kicked out of the space, and didn't realize in time that they were out of time). They picked a really terrible method of ending it, which was that they declared that the tournament would end in four hands, and the first prize would go to the person in first place by chip count, second to the next person, and so on. Of course, this totally distorts the game.

Anyway, that was unfortunate, but chalk it up to inexperience about what to do in tournaments when you have no time and the prizes aren't money that you can just distribute in some fair-ish way.

The big problem came when the guy in second place didn't realize that he shouldn't play any of the last three hands (he was drunk). Shannon Elizabeth, in first place, and Annie Duke, spectating, convinced the guy to fold, basically by yelling at him. That's collusion, and explicitly against the rules.

So, Terrence was grumpy, and posted the story to his blog, and then called the organizer (wsopjoy, Joy Miller) to ask for some sort of compensation for the suckiness of it. I thought at the time that his chances were pretty limited, especially since he ended up with the second place prize because the top two people decided to split first.

Amazingly, though, Joy called him back, and heaped tons of abuse on him. ("I think you are shit", and the quite remarkable, "I'm refunding your money because you didn't sign anything, there's no evidence that you won anything, and don't even try to claim your prizes because they've been donated to charity.") She apparently didn't like that he had posted the story to his LJ.

Then, super unbelievably amazingly, she replied to his post, confirmed what he said, and then posted all kinds of crap in response to other people:

I DARE YOU! I fucking dare YOU...we are a 510 c3 organization and if you want me to personally mail/email your ignorant ass who has benefited from the charity then i will. we had a WSOP TD running the tournament by CA and USTD rules and if you EVER EVER EVER again question the integrity of the tournament, I DARE you to call us...ummm..what did you say? wrong, illegal and unethical to my fucking face! AGAIN...the choices were MINE do NOT call in to question the charity or anyone else involved. My email and phone number are below..,have your FATHER the Auctioneer call me...ASK someone who you MIGHT actually know in poker who i am...or maybe you should just get on Match.com and find a boyfriend instead of kissing Terrence's ass to get a date

Or the lovely threat:

My point is. I DID say all of the above quotes. Except "I am here with the people at CardPlayer, at PokerPages, at [other media outlets I can't remember] so good luck with your career." In actuality I said "Good Luck making a career when I HAVE ANY SAY" was the ending. I'm not very important, but when you attack the morality of people involved in my charity....you incur my wrath...however insignificant it is...you've won the opportunity to go heads up against MY wrath! no one else. The END.

It continually amazes me that people who are public-facing (this was a fundraiser for something called the Urban Health Institute, Joy is apparently a PR person) could possibly think it's a good idea to post profanity-laden comments to someone's blog, completely with threats and admitting to illegally taking away his rightful prize from the tournament. If terrencechan were willing to sue, he'd win in a heartbeat, though probably only the second place prize package.

The first thing they should tell you when you are in public relations is to avoid the kind of behavior she showed (in public, on record!). The second thing is that you should be nice to donors who had a bad experience at a recent event, even if they aren't very famous. She should be fired for this.

So I'm playing in the 20 at Bay, and this guy with a scifi tshirt sits down next to me. We chat a little, when he says, "This is kind of a weird question, but do you have a livejournal?"

Me: Yeesssss...
Him: Is your username "dmorr"?
Me: Do I know you?

It turns out that I was dorkily still wearing my Yahoo! badge, and he saw my name (somehow) and noticed its similarity to someone who posts in patri's blog, and figured it out. Yikes. Anyway, it was ejwu. It was fun to play with him until he got called for the 40-80 game. He reminded me of evwhore -- some similar mannerisms, both good players who like to gamb00l.

Another amusing moment occurred when the designated table fish actually apologized for folding too much preflop to the table. Pretty clear he knew what his role was.

And finally, here's a hand:

I raise from the button with A5o (which I think prock now thinks is a bad idea). The sb defends. Flop is Tc8c2s. Check-check. Turn is the 5h, and he bets. I now raise. River is a Q, we check, he doesn't want to show his hand but eventually turns over Jc7c for a meaty 18 outs against me on the turn. I'm still a favorite, though. He was some kind of disgusted when he saw what I raised him on the turn with.