To kick things off on a sour note let me begin by issuing a giant FUCK YOU to apple and their latest release of iTunes. Yesterday when I started up iTunes it casually alerted me to the existence of its newest and most improved version – which I quickly and naively downloaded. The installation bombed midway through and subsequent attempts to reinstall crashed before even leaving the pad. I uninstalled, re-downloaded, and reinstalled… this time successfully? Not quite. The installation finished without incident but the program refused to load. Upon rebooting my computer I was granted the unexpected gift of massive and critical registry errors. Looking into the problem a bit further I have found that this is actually a serious problem in the coding of QuickTime 7 (a program which I despised already, though for unrelated reasons) that causes QuickTime to actually corrupt its own goddamn registry. Unfortunately for me and the rest of the world, QuickTime 7 is bundled into the installation of iTunes. The only possible solution that I have been able to find involves a lot of manual registry cleaning followed by the installation of an old version of iTunes/QuickTime that I can’t even find anyway. For their part, Apple denies that this problem exists and therefore claims no responsibility for fixing it. Back to winamp I go.

Oh well, at least it whips the llama’s ass.

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I flew back into Las Vegas last Tuesday with my brother and then was later joined by the rest of my family. My brother turned 21 on Thursday and it seemed a fairly obvious move for him to celebrate the occasion in the most 21-friendly city in the world. Oddly, sharing the days and nights with your parents and 3/6 year old nieces goes a long way to curbing one’s more outrageous plans and expectations. I also didn’t help the situation by refusing to drink alcohol, having suffered a particularly terrible day of after-effects less than one week prior. There were no strippers or lines of coke but hopefully he had fun anyway. The family weekend was spent gambling (duh) and going to shows. The shows were a lot of fun, but to say that the gambling went well would push understatement to an unfair and previously unattainable height. Over three days of rampant gambling there was not a single table at which I did not win, nor a single game at which I did not profit. Not until Saturday afternoon did I even lose a small amount of money, and that was only a $40 hit after 3 hours of poker which I quickly erased only a few hours later. My only real loss of the week came on Wednesday when I lost a game of Winning Eleven 9 to my brother in penalty kicks.

There haven’t been any new posts during the past week and for that I apologize. I don’t suppose anyone noticed, but the only part of the site that received daily updates was my gambling log. I had intended to write up daily recaps of my financial exploits, but that never happened. My brother and I went to the casino at midnight on Thursday (his birthday) and played poker until dawn before returning to my apartment and passing out. Upon waking up my sister gave us the news that while we were sleeping a very close family friend had been in an accident and was in the hospital. A man I have known my entire life fell twelve feet out of a tree and broke his back, completely shattering a vertebra to the point where the surgeons have removed the broken bones and replaced them with steel rods. The swelling is currently preventing the doctors from doing anything more, but at the moment things are not looking good. His family is obviously devastated, but to make matters worse his job provides for their family’s livelihood; a job which he may never be able to do again. Talks are in progress to sell the house that they may no longer be able to afford. The situation is surreal in its implications, even more so from 2000 miles away, but I would expect you all to understand that despite my almost theoretical connection to the crisis I find it pathetically trivial to brag about how I correctly folded pocket kings on a 7-high flop or split and then doubled 3’s against the dealer’s showing 5. I actually had the single biggest poker cash game win of my life last night at the Mirage, cashing out just under $1000, but in perspective that’s a giant Who Cares. There are more important things than money. Of all the things I am grateful for, winning at a card game doesn’t even make the list.