General Life Clutter

Isn't mid December a wonderful time for all of the clutter you've piled up to come crashing down all at the same time?

I have 3 blogposts in draft mode right now and highly doubt I will end up publishing them. They seem like interesting concepts to write about based off changes happening in the poker industry and recent posts from other blogs I read, but once I actually get down to writing them I've been hitting a wall because I either can't convince myself of the factuality of the general statements I want to believe or the concept is too big for me to encompasse everything that needs to be taken into context and make it a cohesive read.

I still need to start Christmas shopping for my nieces and my immediate family. My extended family has said for the last 3 years that we should just stop buying each other gifts and just buy some toys for the kids instead and be done. It's kind of silly when me and my brother swap $50 in Staples giftcards for $50 in Walmart giftcards effectively tying up cash that doesn't need to be spent at those stores in the first place and no one can think of anything they actually want or need. Has it always been this way with adults or is it just a function of the newer card swipe society buying everything they want when they want it? I seem to remember being able to buy awesome gifts for people until I was ~16... But we always end up reverting back to the status quo to make sure that one side doesn't end up changing their mind and getting nothing in return. This year I think we're actually going to stick to it since we decided on a good alternative. We're going to lump our Christmas gift money together and buy some cows/goats/chickens for people in Africa or South America.

My 5 year old PC went into a coma on Thursday due to successive power failures resulting in black screen of death (KSOD) where you get a black screen and your mouse cursor and that's it. Stupid me disabled sticky keys which apparently lets you hack back in to fix this problem. PSA to everyone that puts too much faith in technology: have multiple physical backups of anything important like family photos. We have taken about 2000 pictures per year since our kids have been born compared to the 200 max our parents took, yet we haven't developed anything due to photo overload whearas they had 50/200 decent pictures to add to an album. Luckily I was able to retrieve them through the file backup wizard in my recovery program and I'm going to start looking at cloud options and actually taking the best of them down to the printers.

I bought a new PC on Friday, which I was planning to do soon anyways even though I'm 95% confident my old one will work once I factory restore it, is having issues installing all sorts of stuff. Windows 7 64 bit is driving me a little bit crazy with 2 factory restores already and all sorts of installation errors. My biggest issue is getting both HEM and postgres installed properly at the same time. 4 failed attempts so far. Thankfully I have all 45 massive HH files from Stars to start the days long re-import process. Everything else is kind of meh for how I expected this to be a massive upgrade over Vista.

Random: I fell asleep watching TV last night. The next thing I know my 3 year old daughter is talking to me at 2am "... [with her hand over her head] and there was a spider this tall!" In a daze, I look at the TV. omg Starship Troopers... desperately mash buttons on the remote wondering how long has she been here and how much did she see. She didn't seem scared so hopefully not much. I've been feeling terrible about it all day.

Poker: There will be the inevitable end of year where am I going to play based on new information post. It could be huge in a good/bad way depending who you are and depending on whether the current almost factual rumors based on the source turn out to be true and implemented. Will post a couple days after the announcement which is supposed to be ~Dec 17th iirc once I've run calcs and listened to all of the sky is falling vs this is an awesome change static forum. Anything until then is just wild speculation.