OMGWTF 2nd Place!!!

I managed to finish 2nd at Smith's Olde Bar tonight.  It was surprisingly fun to see how many different personalities were there and how easy it is to pick up on some people's habits.  While my poker game is improving, I credit the majority of the success to the fact that I didn't have anything to drink all night.   The hand that really kept me in the game and knocked out two others was pocket 9's.  It beat pocket 8's and Ace-10.  The guy who beat me won a huge hand when the 3rd place guy went out so winning would have been a long shot.  I actually got a number of good hands but couldn't manage to sucker the guy into putting any chips on the table.  Oh well.  Next week.

Yay for poker.

Poker at Smith's

Rebecca, Stemmie, Mike and I tried out poker at Smith's Olde Bar last night. We usually go to Midtown Tavern on Monday nights, but this was our first time at Smith's, and man was it different. I'm used to around 20 players at 2 or 3 tables, but we had 6 tables and over 50 players. I did surprisingly well, finishing 6th. Rebecca made 9th again. She keeps getting screwed right on the bubble, but I predict she'll eventually break through and finish 1st or 2nd.

I think the huge crowd was a little intimidating for Mike. In retrospect, Smith's is probably not the best place to start out if you're not used to playing in public. I hope that didn't sour his experience. Maybe he'll play again some time.

I'm still doing the 100 pushups program, but I don't think daily updates are necessary. I'll do a 2 week recap on Saturday and probably another at the end of week 4.

Typography Addict

"Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration." -- Jeffrey Zeldman

I have recently taken a leap off the deep end in terms of understanding typography. I've spent the better part of this morning breaking my site down and trying to make sure that every line of text in columns that are side-by-side have common baselines. The whole obsession began with this article: http://tomayko.com/writings/administrative-debris

The main concern of this essay is to remove all distraction from content. So I have attempted to do that with my personal site (http://nirmalpatel.com). My main focus other than using only typography to highlight the various levels of my site is to maintain an elastic design. Designing a site in this way means that the layout is proportional to the font size. Go to my site and zoom the text up/down a bit and come back. While this doesn't seem to important at first, once I did it I felt warm and fuzzy. This is different from a fixed design or even a fluid design. For more details read this ALA article: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/elastic/

In the end I have combined a minimal color scheme (white, gray, black, light blue) with elastic/content-centric design to make my site something I am definitely ok with accepting even though I will never be satisfied.

My recent inspirations have been:

http://jontangerine.com/
http://tomayko.com/
http://diveintomark.org/

If you are seeing my site and don't have Baskerville as one of your fonts please get it. It is much prettier than Georgia. If you have a Mac, don't worry.

I Am Well

When Doug, a friend of my father who currently lives in England, was on his most recent visit to the U.S., my mother asked, "How are you?"  Doug answered, "I am well."  This is not the response I am used to.  My first instinct was that his grammar was incorrect (having used an adverb when he clearly needed an adjective).  But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it:  I am well.  Even if it is (by some standards) incorrect English, it also suggests that "am" is more than a simple state of being verb.  What a great idea!  Using an adverb there really changes the feel of the sentence.  I much prefer to think of my day to day existence as being an active process rather than a static state of being.  This is why I have adopted Doug's answer to that very typical (and often insincere) question:  I am well.  I am being well.  I am propagating my consciousness forward through time and I am doing well at it.  

This is not to suggest that adverbs should always be used to answer that question.  Imagine it.  I person suffering from chronic depression would answer, "I am reluctantly."  Ha!

One of my favorite conductors, Daniel Barenboim, talks about this sort of thing often when he gives lectures on music.  He points out the difference between static and dynamic "existence" of music.  He insists that "music should never be thought of as being.  Rather, music should always be thought of as becoming."  When talking about a piece called "Till Eulenspeigel's Merry Pranks" he asked:  "What IS Till Eulenspiegel?  The answer is that it doesn't exist.  It existed only in Richard Strauss's brain when he created it.  And then he took pen and paper... put black dots on white paper.  THIS is not Till Eulenspiegel.  Till only exists when, somewhere in the whole of this world, people in an orchestra come together and physically bring Till to life.  THIS is Till Eulenspiegel and THIS is how music becomes."

In other news, I have a wicked sunburn.

One Hundred Pushups, Week 1, Day 2

I hate to push down Mike's awesome post, but I wanted to record this while it's fresh on my mind. I just finished the second day of the One Hundred Pushups program and I did a lot better than I expected. My pecs and triceps were still a little sore from day one, but I'm amazed at the fact that I've shown improvement after just 1 workout. In the initial test I could only do 5 pushups, but in the final round of today's workout I was able to do 7 . . . and that was after doing sets of 4, 3, 2 and 2 with 90 seconds in between each set. My form still kinda sucks, but I'm hoping that will come with time too. If I can't improve my form by Friday, I may repeat week 1, but I'm amazed with the results of the program so far.

Fifty-two Factorial

I just spent a week at the beach with my family.  We do this every year and we always go to the same place: Fripp Island, SC.  One of the things I noticed while in Connecticut last Summer is that the sand quality up there is very different from that of the barrier islands of SC.  In particular, the sand in the northeast is especially coarse in comparison.  This brought me to take a closer look at the sand at Fripp this year and I started having math thoughts again.  

People often need to be around very small objects to start thinking about very big numbers.  I have to quote Mitch Hedberg here: "Rice is great if you're hungry and want 2000 of something."  Looking at the tiny (and I mean TINY) grains of sand brought me to attempt to estimate how many I had in my hand... and then how many were on the beach.  My mind then drifted back to something I figured out a few years ago and is worth sharing on the "Good for Poker" blog.  We may have talked about this before, but I find it to be really interesting, so it bears repeating.

Fact: The number of unique shufflings of a deck of playing cards is 52! = 52 x 51 x 50 x 49 ... 2 x 1

This number is insanely huge.  In particular, it is approximately 8 x 10^67.  This is on par with the number of hydrogen atoms in the Milky Way (which is estimated to be 4 x 10^68).  I find it fascinating that it is so difficult for us to visualize numbers that large.  The closest I can ever get is when I stand on a beach and pick up a handful of sand, zoom in and take a look at a few individual grains and then look down the beach.  And even then, I'm not even getting close to 52!.  

Poker at Midtown Tavern

Today was a success playing Hold 'em at Midtown Tavern. Rebecca was 1 position away from the final table, finishing ninth. Nirmal, Mansi, and I all got points, finishing 4th, 5th, and 8th respectively. No good stories from tonight though. I went out on a really stupid mistake, but it's not really worth rehashing. I'm up to 800 points now. I hope I can accrue enough to play in the big tournament this fall.

One Hundred Pushups, Week 1, Day 1

So today (Monday) was Day 1 the One Hundred Pushups program for me. I did the test yesterday and eeked out an embarassing 5 pushups. That put me on the lowest level. Today was the first day of the actual program. I didn't have a lot of trouble doing the four sets of 2 pushups, but the last set where you're supposed to do as many as you can (at least 3) was a real ballbuster. I managed about two and a half, but overall I'm calling it a success. We'll see how it goes on Wednesday.