John Turner

This winter, my main indoor project has been to build out my home studio. I can’t go hog wild crazy with making it for recording and music only, as it also doubles as my primary work space (shhh…don’t tell the IRS Just kidding. No, seriously….) Anyway, I’ve been reading as much as I can about studio design, acoustic room treatment, etc. I don’t really get all the math, but I don’t really have to, as there’s lots of people out there that can do the heavy lifting and distill it down to plain language for the rest of us. [Read more →]

I tried setting up WP’s “blogging by mail” feature, where WP reads an email account via POP3 and converts the email messages into blog posts. Doesn’t work, and I’ve tried it with both GMail and an email account hosted on a regular domain.

The GMail way doesn’t work, apparently, because GMail is not POP3, it is POPS or POP3S or whatever it is called. Basically “secure POP3″, which means it runs on port 995, not port 110 like plain old friendly insecure POP3. But the other, non-free-email account way should work. This needs more investigation…I’d love to be able to blog by sending email from my crackberry.

I added all of my older HOWTOs into WP’s pages format. Check them out: HOWTOs

Engadget is propagating rumors from one of the sites that specializes in Apple rumors. The prediction is that Apple will release a 15.4-inch MacBook in 2Q. I’ve been Mac-only at home for almost a year (hallelujah!) and have been thinking lately about getting one of the current MacBooks. I’m not vain enough to pay $400 extra for black instead of white, but I’m visually-challenged enough to pay $400-$500 or so extra for a bigger screen. If I could get a 15.4-inch MacBook with Leopard for somewhere south of $1500, I’d buy it.

Happy Birthday to me!

Engadget has a post about the recent vulnerability in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks. I didn’t get into all the details, but apparently all it took was someone watching the memory registers on their computer for changes…eventually one of the keys was shown in the clear, and that’s all she wrote. Big media companies will never get it…DRM will ALWAYS fail as long as it involves having to distribute keys to customers. As one commenter notes, you can’t have encryption if you need to distribute the keys for decryption. That’s a recipe for a crack. Instead of spending money on increasing value and making content better, big media companies are wasting millions, perhaps billions, fighting a battle they can never win. They’d be better off (as Steve Jobs also suggests) simply releasing their content in a way that encourages customer loyalty, instead of presuming all of their customers are thieving pirates.

Almost made it to the first break. I was bleeding, licking my wounds in the small blind with only 900 left. Got dealt QJ off. Blinds were 30/60, guy in front of me on the button raised to 250. I went all-in, and what-do-ya-know, he’s got AA. Oh well…at least it only cost me $6 and not $322 like a lot of people spent. On to the next one…

I was doing really well, was up about 1500 over what I started with. I was in mid-late position, and got AQ off suit. Flop came out Ad7s9s. I didn’t have any spades. We were three-handed. A guy went all-in, I called him for something like 2,000 with my pair of aces. He had As5s, so any spade and I was cooked. And guess what? He got his spade. Ouch. I just noticed Phil Gordon is playing in this tournament, too. Yikes! Right now, a little over 500 people have gone out and interestingly enough, NONE of the pros are in the top 100. Very very interesting…..

The tournament just started…I’m doing OK. 2,755 people started, I’m ranked about 1000th right now. I was short stack for a couple minutes because I got too aggressive, but I settled down and took down a decent pot with a spade flush, Ace high. That got me up over what I started with, so its all good. Just having fun….

I’m in my first big tournament today, in about an hour. I play at Full Tilt because they’re the only site with a full-fledged client for OS X, as far as I know. Today’s tournament is part of their FTOPS series that they have every year. I’m pretty excited…the buy-in is $322, and the prize pool is a guaranteed $750K. I got in by winning a $6 six-seat SnG, which in turn got me into a $26 satellite. I won that tournament, too, which got me into the $300 big boy today. $6 to get $322…not too bad. I think first prize is something like $200,000. I’m going to play my game and see how it goes…some pros are playing, too, like Erick Lindgren, Allen Cunningham, Andy Bloch, Eric Froehlich and Toto Leonidas. It will be fun if I get to play against one of them…hopefully they don’t knock me out too early!!