fight is tomorrow night on PPV. Jon Jones is roughly a 2 to 1 favorite to win the fight. I think Shogun will crush him. I am betting $100 to win your $180 and vice versa. I'll only bet with someone whose name I recognize. I've done bets with Crispy and Probability twice. I'm up 2-0 on Matt for full disclosure of my betting awesomeness. Matt here's your chance to win some back

PM me if interested. FTP or Stars money only. No escrow. I'm trustworthy.

So usually once a year I go on a guy trip with one or two of my friends. We try to go somewhere different every year. Past vacations include, Canada for fishing, Costa Rica, Mexico, Vegas, Santiago, Chile

This year we're headed to Cartagena, Colombia. We're leaving three weeks from today and staying for four nights. We've already reserved a boat for two days, but have nothing else planned. Should be a good trip.

I watched the entire Breaking Bad series (3 seasons) in about ten days. This is one of the best shows I've seen. I think it's definitely up there w/ Sopranos, The Wire, Dexter, etc. The acting is just incredible

Here is Hobie's winter cooking guide

I hate it when it gets cold but I love making soups/chili/stews this time of year. Here's a few of my favorites that I've made recently

anything by Emeril on the show Emeril Green on Planet Green channel. Every single soup of his from this show has tasted great and is usually pretty healthy

anything by Barefoot Contessa from Food TV. Her stuff almost always tastes great.

All of these recipes are pretty easy to make. I'm not exactly the fucking Iron Chef and I made all of these fairly easily

http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/rec...ili86607.shtml This is the link to the recipe for Wendy's Chili. Very easy and pretty good

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/i...ipe/index.html. This is an easy soup w/ lots of veggies. Very good

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/i...ipe/index.html Great vegetable recipe. I didn't puree the veggies because I like them a little chunky.

I generally hate vegetables and pretty much anything green but you can roast any vegetable this way and it tastes really good. I've tried tomatoes cut in half w/ skins removed, squash, green beans, potatoes, carrots, and a few others and they all tasted really good

I'm old so I have to eat veggies

http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tv/...pes-soups.html This is a link to Emeril's soups recipes. I've made prob half of them and they were all good.

As a tip if anyone actually makes any of these, I usually cut all of the ingredients in half and go from there. If you didn't you would usually end up with ten servings which is just too much. Most of these recipes you can freeze them and they will still taste good. Potatoes are the exception in my experience. They generally taste weird after being frozen.

That's it. Later

I recently saw Restrepo and A Prophet and they were two of the best movies I've seen in years

Restrepo is a documentary on the Afghan War. The website is restrepomovie.com. It's in limited release right now and Nat Geo is showing it Nov 29th I think, but I would highly recommend seeing it on the big screen. One word sums up the entire movie. Haunting. This movie should scare the shit out of anyone thinking of joining the Army

A Prophet is a French prison movie. It's one of the best gangster movies I've ever seen. I've never been inside a prison but this is pretty much how I imagine it would be.

That's it. Later

Here are the steps I followed. Hope it helps someone

1. Join Leggo--I did it a long time ago
2. Randomly comment on blogs-- I have a lot of free time
3. Become friends with one of those bloggers who happens to be really good at poker
4. Eagerly accept when said friend invites you over to their house to play poker with him and his friends
5. Don't actually play poker when you visit him. Just sit about 2 feet behind him and watch him play
6. Repeat step 5 many times
7. Actually apply what he says into your game.
8. Profit



This is a mixture of HU and 6max at 50NL
Thanks Leggo and more importantly thanks Nick

I will gladly take Miguel Cotto at the current odds of 3 to 1 if anyone is interested. Just something small to make it interesting to watch. $50 or $100 on my end. PM me if interested.

I'm not exactly a boxing expert, but Cotto is going to make Manny his bitch tonight.

So I think I'm done playing for October. I have played almost exclusively 6 max. I think I played less than 200 hands of HU. For a while now, I've been determined to do better at 6-max and I feel like I've finally crossed a big hurdle

For the month of October I'm up 59 buy-ins plus about 20 buy-ins of rakeback. All total I played just under 60k hands which I'm sure is also a record for me. I've made a couple of changes in my game that made a big difference.

I had signed up for Shootaa group lessons but I had to bail at the last minute. Our nanny quit like the day after I signed up for it and it's been insane at my house ever since. My second daughter is going to be born on Monday Nov 2nd (c-section obv) so I'm pretty pumped about that. I doubt anyone cares but I'm going to post a picture anyways.

After having sworn off investing in real estate earlier this year, I have just put a house under contract. It was pretty easy to find as it's the house next to mine. The redneck builder that lived there went busto and the bank foreclosed on it about two months ago. The house is about 6000SF heated and Sean (the builder) told me it cost $700k to build it. ((If you are building a house yourself you can generally calculate that it will cost $100 per square foot to build plus the cost of the lot. If you are having someone build it for you then just add about 20% to that figure.)

Anyways, he owed the bank $475k at the time of foreclosure. The bank as always appraised it at foreclosure for $440,000. When it was new, the house appraised for ~$750k. I talked to the bank directly without any real estate agents involved and I offered $350,000 and provided they do the financing with zero down. They balked at first wanting me to put down $50k but in this market I thought it was a pretty solid offer. After about a week they agreed to it and are giving me a 3 year interest only loan for the $350k. That works out to about $1400 per month payment plus an additional $500 in property taxes and insurance.

I'm going to close on this in about ten days and hopefully get some renters in there to cover the payment.

I made a couple of really good meals this week too. One of my favorite meals out is the Penne Rustica at Romano's Macaroni Grill. I found the recipe online. Here's the link. It was really easy to make and tasted almost exactly like the original.

http://community.tasteofhome.com/for...42/224293.aspx

Here's a good grocery store tip. It's almost always a good idea to buy shrimp in the big frozen bags instead of buying the ones at the counter. Almost all shrimp are frozen as soon as they are caught so the ones at the counter are just thawed out. Buy the frozen instead. This applies to a lot of fish also.


I'm going to be doing nothing but sleeping for the next three days because once the new baby is here, I won't be sleeping anymore.

Hope everyone has a great November. Later, John

I'm trying to be positive in a negative world. If you really think about it, there is only one time in your entire life when everyone around you is positive. Unfortunately, even this situation only lasts for a short time. I'm thinking of when you take your very first steps as a child. That scumbag who kidnapped that little girl in California and held her captive for 18 years I bet even he was positive when his two little daughters took their very first steps.

It's hard to really capture the coolness of it to anyone that has never seen it and I'm guessing anyone reading this has never seen it actually go down. i'm not talking about watching it on videotape either. I'm talking being right there in the room on your hands and knees and watching your kid take their first steps. It's honestly the coolest thing ever.

You do a lot of practicing and a few trial runs and then BAM out of nowhere it happens. When my daughter took her first steps there just happened to be a few people over and every single person was telling her that she could do it. I hate to break it to you, but there will never be another time in your life when everyone around you will be positive on whatever it is you're doing. You're graduating from college? Great time right? Not for everyone I bet. Someone very close to you is thinking something negative about even this

So what does all this mean? I have a lot of great things in my life and I still somehow always seem to focus on negative things. In poker especially, there is a ton of negativity. I've listened to Tommy Angelo's series probably 20 times on my Ipod while I run, but it isn't helping a lot. I've actually thought about doing his 3 day $10,000 seminar in California. And not even so much for poker, but for just everyday things

I'm not unhappy though. i'm generally happy about a lot of things, but I think I could be so much happier if I didn't focus on negative things. I was watching Shootaa's video this morning and I was sitting there thinking "man this guy seems so happy and laid-back like nothing bothers him." I get the same thing when I watch Bobbo's videos too. Why can't i be that guy.

Thankfully there is help for everyone and just so happened to find a book on being positive. The very first tip I noticed stated that you should approach two random people and strike up a conversation. I walk outside my house right after this to go to Chic-Fil-A and I instantly notice 10-12 Mexican guys installing a Comcast cable through my front yard close to the road. I stop thinking to myself "why are these guys installing cable when everyone in the neighborhood has a satellite dish?"

So I walk up to the guy leaning on my mailbox drinking some kind of Mexican fruit punch and I ask him how he is doing He looks at me like I just asked him some long calculus question. So cool I get to do an approach in Spanish. Easy. We then have a 5 minute conversation in my remedial Spanish. I learned that his name was Pedro. He is from some small town in the state of Hidalgo in Mexico. His mother's name is Inez. He enjoys his work. He likes his eggs scrambled and his favorite color is blue. My Spanish ran out at that point and we ended the conversation

Chic-Fil-A drive thru was super busy so I went to the post office and looked for a random to converse with. On my way inside I came upon a Georgia Department of Corrections inmate edging the grass or attempting to edge it, but his edger wasn't working. I smiled and asked him how he was and smiled back and said that he was fine. He couldn't get the edger started so I tried to help with my limited landscaping skills and we talked for a few minutes. He was doing ten years for armed robbery but only has six months left so they are letting him do work detail to prepare him when he is released. I'm standing there thinking how is this idiot convict going to get a job in the worst job market in twenty years, and yet he was very positive on his prospects. I'm wished him luck and I told him that the "flux capacitor" on his edger was obviously flawed and he needed a new one. He nodded in agreement and walked up to the guard as I was leaving. I couldn't help myself

watch this redneck. It's hilarious

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM3vOzq8fCY

I haven't updated in a while so here goes.

I started exercising 6 days a week on April 20. Since that day I've only missed a handful of workouts. I've been running 2-4 miles every night and taking one day off each week. Then I lift weights probably 3 days a week. I'm not lifting anything heavy. I have 25lb and 45lb dumbells and I use whichever is appropriate. I also have a dip bar/set and the Perfect Pullup system that I bought after watching the informerical. I think it's really good and well worth the money. I've built up to 8 pullups with no kipping (sp?)

Since I started exercising I've had four straight winning months. Tilting off buy-ins is still a daily struggle. I think my winrate would easily be double what it currently is if I could do a better job handling tilt. Quoting John Locke (television version) "Struggle is nature's way of strengthening you."
I work at it everyday, but it isnt' easy.

Here's the graphs. Full Tilt and Stars respectively.
[IMG][/IMG]



I finally had an email conversation with the guy who runs the coaching department at Cardrunners. He thinks that it is perfectly ethical for me to pay one of their instructors to make a video of himself playing at my limits exclusively for me and then turn around and post it on Cardrunners for the world to see. I told him that it's that kind of ethical standards and attention to detail that has turned Cardrunners into the fourth best training site. I think it could easily be argued that they are even worse.

I'm getting a big laugh out of the whole Michael Vick saga. I live about two miles from the Falcons headquarters and training camp site in Flowery Branch, GA so I get an up-close view of everything. I think the guy was a scumbag lowlife and prison probably had little effect on him. In his last full year with the Falcons in 2006 he was arguably the worst passing quarterback in the league. The next year the Falcons used three different retards and they improved from being the worst passing team in the league to about middle of the pack.

One of the stories about Vick that didn't make the news is his experience with a local car dealership. They gave him a two year lease on a huge SUV and he let one of his cronies drive it into the ground. Right before the lease was up whichever retard was driving it had a flat tire and of course he called his sugardaddy Michael Vick. Michael then calls the dealership and tells them their vehicle is on the side of the road and that they can go get it. Classy guy. Have fun with him Philly

I'm still not sure how he spends 16 months in a federal prison for dogfighting and Donte Stallworth spends 30 days in a county jail for DUI manslaughter. Obv America doesn't like retards killing dogs.

Update on my plan to flee the country. I'm expanding my possible locations to Ireland and New Zealand. My in-laws just returned from an 8 day trip to Ireland and claimed that it was the greatest place ever. From what I can tell, New Zealand looks like the greatest place on Earth. Hopefully i can visit both within the next twelve months and make a better decision. My wife pretty much refuses to move to a country where English is not the main language. She's not quite as adventerous as I am. We'll see

I'm also having a blast watching Barry O and his healthcare fiasco/Waterloo. I can't depend on the government to effectively deliver my mail let alone have anything to do with my health. As I always advise, you need to look out for yourself because no one else is competent or cares enough to do it

Later, John

I was looking through the NSFW thread and I thought I'd post a funny story that happened about ten years ago

Here's a nice little saying a friend told me a long time ago. "No matter how hot a girl is, some dude somewhere on this planet has gotten tired of her."

He used to date Tiffany Fallon back in 2000 who ended up being the 2005 Playboy Playmate of the year. One time at his apartment we were playing Madden and she wouldn't stop calling him. She had just been dumped by Keith Brooking of the Falcons for the third time and I guess she wanted some more of my buddy. He finally told her to leave him alone or he'd get a restraining order. She's now married to a famous musician and is known throughout the world. Hilarious. Google her. She was smoking hot in person. I dated her roommate for a few months who unfortunately wasn't nearly as hot as Tiffany.

Here's the funny chat

kang413: im not leavin so
kang413: do wat u wnt
hobiejuan1: i want to tickle u
kang413: lmao
hobiejuan1: u said i could do what i want
hobiejuan1: what's your address?
kang413: come on...i dnt hav much left in my account
kang413: lets jus play


I just read this morning that the mayor of Hoboken, NJ has been arrested 3 weeks into his first term for corruption. I guess if you're going to be a scumbag, you might as well do it from the beginning. This is why I hate every single politician I have ever known. Mark, you must be proud