So, uh, this is a long overdue update! My half birthday (if it's a real thing) occurred on March 21st. Since I didn't really get any gifts for my birthday, I felt obligated to get some presents for myself.

Well, let me first say a few days ago I let my personal assistant "go". I don't know what else to call it, but, Dawn was/is very nice, but frankly I wasn't getting much value from having her as a PA. Many of the things I wanted done simply did not get done, and I didn't really have enough other tasks (essentially errands/chores that I don't mind doing) to warrant paying her. (Especially as cooking/cleaning stuff are things I wanted, and she did neither) Two of the tasks she had quite a lot of time to do were: Return my coffee pot (it broke, it was sorta a cheap one, but I do like having a coffee machine!) and figure out my Danny Granger jersey situation. (That I ordered/paid for 6 weeks ago!) You see, NBA.com ****ed up and sent the jersey to the wrong address, some random dude signed for it, and it was up to Dawn to figure it out. She couldn't do it, I can't deal w/ the reps, so that's a wasted 120$ or whatever.

This actually leads into the 1st paragraph, which is presents! My back has been hurting me (I need to call up my friend Gene, who is a chiropractor, since maybe he would be able to fix me!) so the 1st "gift" if you can even call it that was a heating pad. I am truly balling now! Frankly, the heating pad has not done much, as I'm unclear when I'm supposed to apply heat and when I'm supposed to ice it. Further, icing is very difficult on my back since it's hard to keep it on the right spot! The 2nd gift is the Granger jersey that I ordered 6 weeks ago. **** it, I'm just going to suck it up and get a new one. I hate when things like this happen (technically this is why I hired a PA in the first place! Mega sigh!) but this time there will not be a delivery mix-up. The 3rd gift is to replace the coffee pot. Since I care about coffee (and genuinely enjoy it) I'm going to actually get a "nice" one. (note that I haven't actually ordered one yet, but intend on doing it shortly) I'm tired of the cheap ones that break/don't make great coffee. Lastly, the 4th gift, I suppose, are the other seasons of "Alway's Sunny in Philadelphia". I have the 1st and 2nd seasons, and I thought they were funny. Not GREAT, but worth watching for sure. So, tacking those on.

I made a strategy minute for the 2p2 pokercast about PSR. (Pot stack ratio) It's really quick, but I think it will be useful to everyone. Hopefully it explains what PSR actually is. Along the trend of strategy/poker/videos, my 3rd part SHOULD be coming out within days. As noted in the "suggestions" thread, there were audio issues, but it's been in inventory, and since we don't want 1k videos to "clump" (because then people complain about releasing 6 NL100 videos in a row or whatever!) this had to get moved back. C'est la vie! My next video is a 10/20 video that was 1 table of full ring and 1 table of 6max. Yay!

The book editing has been slow. It's 100% on me. The editor (Jodi Fodor, www.jodifodor.com) has been sending me updates (I think she's 5/6 of the way done with it, which is right on pace, since I wanted the edits to be done in a month, giving her 1/6th the month to do 1/6th the book!) and essentially the way it works is she rips through things, tearing down some of my oddly put together sentences and questioning my general structure, and I'm supposed to rewrite the sections/sentences that need individual rewriting. (And answering some questions, like, "should we capitalize this throughout the book") I've done about 1/3rd (TOPS) of the answering I was supposed to do.

I fear as though this blog is just another really long entry with lots of text that makes people lose focus, but since it's been more than a week since my last one (and my last post didn't exactly have a lot of substance) I think that's mandatory. So ya'll just need to deal with my stream of consciousness. Unless you "Xed" out by now, which I can't really blame you if you did.

Please note I just fell asleep and woke up. There has been a 7 hour gap in this blog. Wow. The past week my sleep schedule has been PARTICULARLY bad, because I was relying on Nyquil and Tylenol PM (used in conjunction, obviously!) and still going to bed really late. Had not woken up earlier than 4pm all week. The main benefit has been my Halo game has gotten reallllllly strong. Woot. I've seen a couple movies the past week, notably Buffy the Vampire Slayer (had not seen the movie, I love the TV show, obviously, so I wanted to see what it was based upon). It was OK, but it's one of those things where if I had seen this movie first, I probably would've delayed watching the TV show. It very much pales in comparison. The other movie was A Clockwork Orange. Wow! I had never seen this before, it was very good. Actually fell short of my expectations (due to the Hollywood thread/it's reputation) but it was very high quality. I think I had the wrong idea about it, it's not a "scary" film, but actually fairly philosophical. I recommend it. As for the futures...

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/hollinger/playoffodds

OKC is a near-lock. They're 20-51 and project to finish 23-59. For them to somehow go 7-4 over their final 11 games would be unbelievable. So this is good
Atlanta is already a loss. I still like the bet but simply got the team wrong. It happens.
The other 2, though, are somewhat interesting sweats: Utah is 44-27 and project to finish 51-31. So I need them to win a game they're supposed to lose! The Knicks are 28-43 and project to finish 32-50. I need them to lose a game they're supposed to win! If I win 1 of those I think I'll finish slightly hot, but I'll still finish with a small profit on Vegas.

With random 2p2ers:

Lakers are 56-14. Project to finish 65-17. So this is really, really close; I need them to lose 1 game they're supposed to win. The Spurs are a lock to finish 3.5 games ahead of the Jazz, so I need to get slightly lucky vs rakes. I still very much like my 2:1 on that though!

This one isn't looking too good. Hollinger nets them a 7.1% chance of squeaking in, so I'm a huge long shot against. It's still possible though!

I won this a while ago, and he paid up.

The other really fun sweat. They're 43-28, project to finish 49-33. So... Please don't run hot Dallas! All in all, if I count OKC (+2k) and Wiz (+250) as wins and ATL (-575) Spurs/Utah (-50) Pacers (-1k) as losses, that's +625. So I will either win (running hot and scooping all the close ones) 2325 or (running cold and losing all the close ones) lose 1100.

Apparently my sister started a blog. (Or has had it for a little while, not sure) Anyway, http://marteenies.blogspot.com/ that's the link. Figured I'd throw it up here if anyone was curious. I've linked to my friend Teddy's blogged before, so going to continue those random links. Along this line, http://www.donohonjoisathief.com/ wanted to throw that site out there. My good friend Alex (Gary Stevenson) was scammed a while ago, actually wasn't even a scam; a friend of his welshed on a big debt, and has no plans of paying it back. Some of that information was taken down from 2p2, so I wanted to throw up a link.

Yesterday the new season of intramural began. I am no longer apart of Alex's team since they decided they couldn't participate; the team was full of a bunch of track guys, so since they have that to do, no time for intramural basketball. Rather, a different Alex friend of mine ("The Hammer") invited me on his team, which I gladly accepted. (I played a bunch of games last season for them as well) Unfortunately there is "construction" in the main court (it's closed off, but doesn't look like anything is being done ) which is a shame since I really got used to that court. We had to play on the green courts, which is a pity since those courts are dirty, I don't think the baskets are EXACTLY appropriately sized, and there is less space. Fairly frustrating we had to play 4v4 half court (lol no joke, for intramural!). Somewhat funny, a friend of mine named Eddie who I hadn't seen for a while called me while I was driving to the gym and invited me to play on his team. I told him I already was on the Hammer's team - as it turns out, we were playing Eddie's team! I thought we had more talent then the other team, but they kept it pretty close. We were doing 1s and 2s (probably should've done 2s and 3s, but w/e) and ended up winning 30-25. (It was actually a 2pt game, but we used "4 corners offense" when informed there were just 2 minutes left, dribbled around a bit... Got cheap baskets!) I had a decent game, I hit a few 3s and had a few nice running layups, but I also took some really stupid shots. I HATE stupid shots. A stupid shot is: A low % look. This could be a midrange shot, a rushed 3, or a heavily contested close range layup. With no shot clock, there is absolutely no incentive to take suboptimal shots. I normally am fairly low-turnover, but I was basically our point, so I also had a few costly TOs. (And some pretty nice feeds for layups tho)

I hung around the gym, since after our game, the next game (which was played full court) was Xorbie's team (Joel and Dana are my friends on that team) vs the defending champs. (My friends Brendan and Pete are on that team) I played on Brendan and Pete's team, and it was just a good all around game. We were down 3 with 2 minutes left, but blew several 3s, and the opposing team ran up the victory margin slightly. I had 1 pretty big block down the stretch on Dana which felt good, but I didn't have a great offensive game. (In my defense, I was pretty tired)

I intended on making a bigger push about group coaching stuff, but I still need to gather and recover all the audio files from the first 2 groups. Vitas is going to help compile all of them, so that the initial groups can get all that information, as well as allow me to resell the clump packages. Look for this to happen soon. I still have not pursued the people from last year in Vegas that owed me money. Essentially because I ate the entire security deposit, I went back and found out how much per person that would be, turned out almost exactly 100 per 2 weeks. Actually was a little more, but I rounded down to that to make things easy. There are actually a bunch of people that owe me money, but collecting is never easy. Sigh. Other than that, I'm sure there are minor (non) stories I'm omitting, but this has gotten long. Oh, tomorrow I'm going to a semi-formal