At about 11pm one of my flatmates (J) and our unofficial 4th housemate (K – she only lives a couple of streets over) come stumbling in, completely trollied with KFC. After they mumble incoherently at me for a bit I deduce they’ve been thrown out of the pub (a first for a Walkabout I think) and are drunk.

After about 10 minutes my other flatmate (M) stumbles in, takes 2 bits of KFC and immediately vomits before passing out face down in the living room. Also as part of this arrival K’s boyfriend (KB) comes in and starts violently wrestling with J, resulting in her going face first into the armchair (and leaving a pretty good bruise round the inside of her lips the next day).

At this point it’s all a bit much for me so I retire to my room.

About 20 minutes later I hear what sounds like a window smash. I listen for a few minutes but the music continues and there’s no screaming so I assume they’ve managed to upend the small table with everybodies drink on it. Things quiet down after a few minutes and I assume they’ve calmed down or even that K and KB have gone home.

10 minutes after the smash I hear a knock at the door and initial thoughts are J has gone to the off license or even walked K and KB home and forgotten her keys, alternatively I’m expecting the neighbours about the music. So I nip downstairs to let her in or apologise to the neighbours and open the door to 2 paramedics! They ask me if I called an ambulance and I tell them I don’t think so, but let me check.

Wandering into the living room I’m confronted by a bit of carnage. J is rocking herself in the corner like Rainman’s less intelligent cousin, there’s blood all over the floor and KB has the oven mit strapped to his wrist which is dripping blood everywhere.

I usher in the paramedics telling them they’ve got the right place and while they attend to KB I check that J is alright. As I offer soothing words and confirm she’s alright the paramedic not busy strapping up KB asks me over the table if I was talking to the dog. Well… :p

At this point the police turn up being fairly accusatory towards KB asking why he punched a window. Not having been in attendance I don’t offer an explanation straight away, but as it becomes apparent that there’s no sense to be had in the room I explain the earlier wrestling and that it was likely a continuation of that that’s ended badly. They all pack up after a couple of minutes and KB is rushed to the hospital.

J is immediately up suggesting we continue to drink but I soon send her to bed, after finding out where the mop and bucket is (women’s work, why would I know?) and begin cleaning up. The problem with blood is as soon as you add water all you have is more blood, so after about an hour of mopping and sopping up blood with kitchen roll the kitchen no longer looks like a crime scene. Of course I took photos before hand. It’s times like this that the iPhone’s 2MP camera doesn’t do it justice.

Of course now we have a gaping hole where the window was and while the back garden is completely enclosed I’d hate for burglars to get in just for lack of watching it, so I set up camp to sleep in the living room. Luckily I did because for some reason the iron was on which would have involved unwinding the cable, moving the sideboard and plugging it in. What was going on last night?!

At about 4am J wanders down looking for her phone, which I provide and then as we chat I bring up that you know it’s a good night when the police and ambulance are called. She stares at me blankly and it soon becomes apparent she has no recollection of last night’s activities, much beyond 6pm actually. So I explain what happened and she wanders off to bed.

Later M comes down and had no idea about the night before’s shenanigans so I briefly fill her in and show her the pics.

As more of the story comes to light the next day it seems as if my assumptions about the drunken wrestling were correct, but after slicing up his arm KB didn’t notice and proceeded to punch out the rest of the window slicing up his other hand in the process. Quite how you don’t notice slicing your wrist so badly it severs the tendons and cuts the artery I don’t know, but after losing a litre of blood and passing out it was a good few hours of surgery to put him back together.

You wanna see it? …

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Nice.

After contacting Twilight Creations about their intentions to create a XBLA game version of Zombies!!!, the creator, Todd A. Breitenstein, replied saying that very project was in the works.

I informed Joystiq, who later caught up with Todd A. Breitenstein at comic-con and they made a post about it with a little credit coming back to me at the end.

Linkage.

Not really focused on putting forward a decent portfolio yet but suppose I’m going to have to. Started a new site who’s URL I bought a while back but seems quite pertinent to some recent changes in the SEO world. You can see what I know about optimising Flash at Flash SEO and if you think that’s any good feel free to hire me for various projects.

I just started it last night though, so gimme a bit of time to get some content up

Back from Vegas, will do a write up later. In the meantime, lemme test this little banner thing for work.

*update*
Fuck wordpress and it’s lack of div support. I’ll shove it in the sidebar and see what happens.

Here’s the code.

<div style=”width: 125px; background-color: #fff; font-family: tahoma; font-size: 10px; text-align: center;”>
<div style=”border: 1px solid #05afc0;”>
<div style=”display: block; height: 24px; font-size: 0px; background-image: url(‘http://www.lolcatpics.com/images/dp/betfair.gif’)”></div>
<div style=”color:#000; height: 90px; overflow: hidden;”>
<div style=”padding: 3px 0px 0px 5px;”>
Qualify for the <a href=”http://wsope.betfair.com/”>WSOPE world series poker europe</a>
and <a href=”http://www.betfairpoker.com” target=”_blank”>Play Online Poker</a> or <a href=”http://www.betfair.com” target=”_blank”>Bet Online</a>.<br />
</div></div>
<div style=”overflow: hidden; font-size: 10px; height: 39px; background-image: url(http://www.lolcatpics.com/images/dp/betfair2.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat;”>
<div style=”padding: 5px 0px; text-align: center;”>
Betfair is the only place to qualify for the <a href=”http://wsope.betfair.com”>WSOP Europe</a></div></div></div></div>

All I’m going to do is throw the keyword God of Poker SEO into this post a few time. Focus on making sure there’s the keywords broken apart into sentences, so throw the words God of Poker and the explain to all you folks at home that I am in the SEO industry and my new bosses boss knows about SEO. I think his decision to tell us he ranks number one for God of Poker SEO is probably a poor example as I doubt there’s any competing traffic.

It is possible that getting to rank for this deity term is quite difficult, so I’ll throw in a few objects like using Google Sets which gives some humorous linked words for the term God and Poker.

I don’t know if this will end up as a red card to Google or not but if nothing else it is a good test of my onpage search engine optimisation.

I might now empahasise the words rabbits and cards for no other reason than it appeared in the sets. SEM is also in there as a synonym.

In this last sentence I’ll add the term God of Poker SEO one last time and then sort out my meta tags and title, etc.

*UPDATE* Heh, heh. Been rumbled. Managed to get 3rd having practically forgotten about doing this, lol.

I’ve now spoken to him and he does actually know what he’s talking about and I’m not just saying that cos I’ve been busted.

For the real Poker God of SEO check out his site and I’d like to thank him for increasing my user base on this blog by 33%. Expect spammy email marketing coming your way soon

Anyway, whilst on my way to the gym on Thursday I stopped into HMV for a quick look. They had Rock Band and peripherals for £150. I had a £50 voucher from my last work to spend bringing it to a reasonable £100 so I bought it and skipped the gym

It’s pretty good. Drums are fun, although if Neil wasn’t a drummer I doubt we’d be playing on expert. Vocals aren’t too difficult and I hope to improve my (already awesome) singing. Guitar is easy compared with GHIII.

Only problem is the guitar itself is shit. I do a lot of down strokes compared with an up/down strum and the Guitar Hero  guitar is very well equipped to spring back in time for the second stroke. Not so with the Rock Band guitar, it has a much spongier feel to the strum bar and is harder to play.

Also, I don’t know if it’s my imagination but Neil kind of gets it too in that the timing is a bit off. Considering that it may be the lag in the calibration but I’m not convinced that it’s just not plain wrong. Sometimes I keep, what I think is at least, the same rhythm and it tells me I’m wrong about half way through.

I would play with the GHII controller but my xbox has stopped recognising it. It did work briefly through the Rock Band hub but not any more, so that just leaves me with the GHIII guitar which is very temporamental. Le sigh.

Also I bought all the download content which came to another £150! Yowsers. Plus there’s new content every week so I’m looking at another £5 -£10 weekly on the game.

Anyway, still lots of fun.

Monday – Dunno. Missed breakfast, had lunch which was…eh…dunno. Had dinner. No idea. Didn’t eat much crap anyway. Say about 1500 kcal total. Exercise = none.

Tuesday -

Breakfast. Rice Crispy caramel and chocolate bar = 150 kcal.

Lunch. 6″ Veggie patty subway on wheat, no cheese. =  450 kcal.

Dinner. Ham salad and dressing = 260 kcal.

Snacks and drinks. Cup of tea = 15 kcal, cake (diet) = 65 kcal, 1ltr diet Coke = 10 kcal, apple = 40 kcal, yoghurt = 45 kcal, cup of coffee = 30 kcal. Total snacks = 205 kcal.

Daily Total = 1065 kcal. Exercise = none. 

Wednesday -

Breakfast. large bowl Frosties = 250 kcal.

Lunch. 12″ Ham subway on wheat, no cheese = 500 kcal.

Dinner. Turkey salad plus dressing = 300 kcal.

Snacks and drinks. 2x Cup of tea = 30 kcal, 1ltr diet Coke = 10 kcal, yoghurt = 45 kcal, 1 beer = 200 kcal. Total snacks = 285 kcal.

Daily Total = 1335 kcal. Exercise = none.

Anyway, went on tilt this morning and lost 2 buy ins. Made it back in heads up STTs and then played a $3 + $0.30 MTT. 1,554 entrants and I finished 101st but wasn’t too happy about how I went out.

Blinds 300/600, I had 20k-ish, on the button with AQh, 1 limper and I raise to 4xBB. Limper calls. Flop Q5J and he pushes all in for about 11k more. I call, not scared of anything there and he shows J8 and then the standard J on the turn comes, sigh.

Claw back up double to about 12k-ish through no hands in particular. Blinds are 500-1000 with 100 antes now and make a move with 44 get raised all in from the SB, hope it’s a race and call but he has JJ. Brief respite on the flop with a 4 but river J and I’m out

Played pretty well I cracked Aces with KJ early doors for 400 chips, but it wasn’t a terrible play, wasn’t great but for 400 chips didn’t make that much of a difference either way.

Anyway, finished for the day now and have $124 odds so about $25-$30 up. Going to do some more MTTs over the bank holiday and hopefully take down one or two.

Here’s some SharkScope stats. Ignore the crossed out bit, I put $25 or $50 into Stars before and spunked it rapid.

Also got a prop bet with Scott starting Monday about who can lose the most weight in a month. £75 on it, but I’m absolutely going to cane him. BRING IT!

Read his blog at The Scoop Troop 

I was at City Bunker at Canary Wharf last night and now I’m aching. Played simulator golf and Wii bowling for 6 hours and my thighs are sore and my neck’s incredibly stiff and sore. I was there for Poker Player Magazine Grand Prix, sponsored by Betfair, with the first prize of a WSOP package. Well I say I was there for that but I was just there to drink and play games. It’s a really cool place and I’ll totally be going back.

Also organised a $525 + $25 seat to Betfair’s $125k GTD for Raise The River bloggers and started reading a few of their blogs, mostly very low limit players but enjoying it, so I thought I’d have a go again and do it seriously. It helped that I was playing $5/$10 limit on Adam’s account earlier.

Anyway, back on the poker proper although at uber low stakes. Deposited £50/$97.48 in Poker Stars and played a few warm up tourneys before going to the 1c/2c tables with $5. I was writing some notes so I’ll stick them up here. The graph at the bottom should pop into a bigger version.

$3.00 + $0.40 HORSE Turbo STT 8 Handed
- AK 3 of first 6 hands! 8 hands Hold ‘Em
- Gah, horrendous run heads up last three hands of holdem. 77 into AA, AJ beat by J6, K9 into AK. Finish 2nd.
- Win $7.20

$1.00 + $0.10 2-7 Triple Draw 6 Handed
- 4th, worst game evar, nothing nice, never got anything better than a 9. So many times drew to more pairs or the third of a kind.
- Lose $1.10

$1.00 + $0.10 NL Hold ‘Em 9 Handed
- AQd 1st hand. No good.
- Meh, got riv0red.
- 6th, AKs vs JJ. Cutoff had been raising a lot, I get AKs on the button, raise, he pushes I call. No help on board.
- Lose $1.10

$5 Buy in $0.01/$0.02 NLHE
- Got almost a double up with 67o, had the idiot end of a straight, which was enough. I raise as I was only seeing 13% of flops at the time and hadn’t raised for a while. 2 callers. Eventually got paid off.
- QQ two hands later on the BB. A on the flop, I bet it anyway. Players fold.
- 67o on SB, limp and ride my luck. Flop 588, I bet pot. 5 Turn, it’s over. Call for 1/5th. river three fold for 1/4 pot bet.
- Gone from 13% flops to 27% flops. Only 22 hands in so a few hands make big swings. Tighten up again anyway.
- Flop a set of 5′s. Not much action.
- 93 on the BB, flop A9x. Get a bit of action and takes me over the $10 for the first time. In 30% of pots after 30 hands. About right for this game.
- Hand 45 sees me flop a set of queens, house by the river. Stack a guy for $2. Up to $11.69.
- Coming in with a couple of low connectors. Difficult to play, 56, flop 588, cameout swinging, bet every street, flush possibility on river too and guy went all in for a $1 in a $0.80 pot. Folded. Lost about a $0.75.
- SB w/ Q9, Q high flop. Same guy involved. Get about $0.30 back.
- 54 hands in. Going to play 100 + my free hands and check out Poker Tracker 3.
- K9. Flop T95, same guy involved on BB. Get another $0.30 back.
- 99. I’ve been quite aggressive the last few hands and continue by raising this to 4xBB. Same guy calls from the button- Negrogaby69. Flop A high, bet it. get raised. Not much backdoor opportunities so fold.
- Not played a raggedy ace all night.
- AKs, pretty Raise to 5xBB. A high flop 2 diamonds. Bet about 65% pot. No more action.
- Meh, came in with A4d for a small raise. Nothing came down, got bet off it. Not seen anything for about 2
- Bet pot on turn with an u/d straight draw and A overcard. River the straight. Bet pot, no action.
- 33 on the button, 5xBB before me so I fold.
- A3s on the CO. Starting to get involved a bit much. 80 hands in and 25% hands seen. Got min raise from the blind and then bet off on the flop.Only hit an inside straight draw.
- AK next hand. Raise 4xBB. Button call. Bet 1/2 on flop, guy folded. Back to $11.67.
- 99 MP, raise 4xBB. No action. New high of $11.70, wooo.
- 89h, limped, min raised with 4 players in, called, no good.
- 89o, limped MP. 3 players. K79. Bet pot, no action.
- T7 BB, 3 players, 667 flop. bet pot, 1 caller. Turn Q. I bet about 40%, called. Q river. I bet about 1/3. He folds. Up to $11.86.
- Q9d SB. Fold. 96 hands in, going to play out free hands. Here’s where I lose my money.
- A8s on the button. Limp. K22, two spades. Checked round. Bet 60%. No action. $11.93 high.
- Finished on 105 hands.

And here’s the graph.

You know if I wasn’t so lazy I’d go back and fix my spelling mistakes in previous posts before I get kicked out of the grammar nazi union.

Okay, so continuing in chronological order.

Batty’s stag.

Went to Leeds, got drunk, watched the football and had a good time.

We stayed in a place that could have been the setting for Hostel 3 where those in the upstairs rooms had showers that leaked into those in the downstairs.

It was also directly across the road from a brothel, which Kenny dutifully investigated on the Saturday night before returning with horror stories of ugly Eastern Europeans and dingy surroundings.

Highlights included Kenny’s dancing and making Craig drink 19 vodkas in about 10 minutes.

Batty’s Wedding.

Flew back up to Scotland on the Wednesday of that week. BMI rather than BA which was a first and I would actually recommend them over BA. The police at Heathrow had good guns

Went over to Dundee on the Thursday night and stayed with the groom. Everything was very relaxed up all the way through to the event itself and we were wondering how it was managing to go so smoothly.

30 minutes before the ceremony though we realised that Batty had forgotten his sporran!

Luckily has dad made the 40 minute round trip to his house in the half hour time frame and the rest of the day went without a hiccup.

Lots of ceilidh dancing then I rocked out with the syncronised dance moves in the evning’s disco before heading to the casino and spunking money I didn’t have.

Next day went home and packed for New York.

New York.

Travelled to Glasgow and stayed with my two sisters on the Saturday before flying from Glasgow airport to Heathrow to JFK.

Flight was fine, flew AA but I’ll be going Virgin for trans-atlantic flights in the future.

I’ll just quickly reel off what I done in New York.

Sunday – Touchdown. New York is ghetto as fuck but it goes from being shit to being awesome in the same street and out apartment block was nice.

Monday – St. Patrick’s Day parade. Forget what people tell you it’s rubbish. Thousands of people parading up and down in stupid costumes. I could get the same thing at London Fashion Week.

Had lunch at an Outback, which is an Australian themed steak house. Steaks were good but we ordered a Bloomin’ Onion as a starter. It’s deep fried onion strips probably reconstituted to look like a chopped onion as big as your head. Ate about a quarter of it.

Went up the Rockefeller building which had some good views.

Tuesday - Natural History Museum, was there for about 6 hours and it still wasn’t long enough. It was really good.

Went to Ha’s comedy club. Cost about $8 a beer and they had a woman on headlining and as we all know women aren’t funny.

Wednesday – Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wasn’t bad, more museum than arty and spent about 3 hours there before getting fed up.

Tried to do some shopping. Again forget what people say about shopping in New York, it’s rubbish. Macys and Bloomingdales are pretty much the same as Selfridges and it’s fine if you want to spend several billion in Tiffany’s or something, but generic shopping is lame. I imagine you’ll have to go to out of town shopping malls to find something good.

Hung out in an Irish bar where we were getting beer. $10 for 2 beers + $2 tip x 3 rounds = 1x free beers. Always tip

Then we went up the Marriott hotel restaurant in the middle of Times Square called The View. It revolves and you get a view of the skyline except we weren’t on the edge and it was foggy so couldn’t see anything. Food was good but overall not a $200 dining experience.

Thursday – Can’t remember currently, I shall edit this later.

Friday – Tried to go a couple of places we couldn’t. Got to the ticket booth for the Statue of Liberty at about 11am and it was already packed out with no further groups getting to visit up the statue and a 2 hour wait just to buy a ticket.

Went to Central Park zoo, which is small but good. They have awesome small cotton tail monkeys and one of the sea lions acted like it wanted to eat the keepers at feeding time.

Went to see Drillbit Taylor at the Regal Cinema just off Times Square and the cinema was awesome. Huge with big arm chair seats.

Then went to see Spamalot, which was good, but I’d rather see it performed by people who really understood Monty Python, ie British people. There was a lot of hype about Clay Aitken having a role and I had no idea who he was. Turns out he was American Idol 2 winner or something, no wonder I hadn’t heard of him.

Saturday -  Got up at stupid o’clock to go queue at the Statue of Liberty. Got tickets and was over on Liberty Island by 9am. Statue isn’t that big comparing it with all the movies you see it in.

By the time we got back just after 10am the dock was literally covered with people, there was no way they were all getting over but they were queuing up regardless, crazy.

Then we went to see The Ringling Brothers with Barnum and Bailey circus in Madison Square Gardens. It was good, but I’d have preferred it without the animals I guess.

I had an awesome snowcone and the small girl beside me’s eyes kept popping out every time I had some.

Just went home and got a takeaway pizza, which was about 100″ and finished the beer we had in the fridge.

Sunday – Flew home.

Arrived in Glasgow 7am-ish went straight to Dundee to play poker.

DUSOP

 Went up to Dundee to take part in Dundee University Series of Poker. I sucked, lost about £80 playing stupid gambling games.

Then came home.

New job in 2 weeks.

Okay, you’re now up to date