www.sporcle.com

Basically, they have a million timed quizzes in basically every category you can think of.  There was a movie character one with a bunch of popular actors and movies and you’d have to name the character they played.  ie. al pacino – scarface, you’d have to type in Tony Montana.

They had some cool sports ones like naming all the multiple MVP winners in baseball or the top 20 all time TD leaders in football.

Check the site out.  It’s pretty fun to start a quiz at the same time as a friend and see who gets more.

We’ve been moved in for maybe a month now and last week as I was leaving the apartment, our neighbor flagged me down in the hallway.  She’s an obese middle aged woman.  Pause.

Jay and I had bought some bottles of wine as gifts to greet the neighbors with.  We were planning on meeting them later in the week but I figured she beat us to it.  I was wrong.

She asked me to stop slamming the door shut because apparently it rattles her walls.  Um, hi, I’m XXXX.  I’m your neighbor.  It’s very nice to meet you.  Nope.  I will stop slamming the door shut.

It’s not a big deal or anything but I feel like this is the type of thing I would never complain about.  It’s not like we’re slamming the door or anything either.  We open it with an average amount of human force (probably below average because the door handle is on the right side so we use our left hand to open it) and let the momentum of the door cause it to shut itself.  It’s what normal people do.  I feel like she should be complaining to the building about a solution.

We had a few friends over for the superbowl and as one of them left and opened the door using an average amount of human force, and let the door close itself, she decided to come out again and ask him to stop slamming the door shut.  OK fat lady, we are not slamming the door.  We also took into consideration what you said and notified the people other than ourselves who will be coming in and out of the room often (ie. our PA), but has it occurred to you that on superbowl sunday, it’s possible we might have guests over who don’t know to not let the natural momentum of the door close itself?

I think the other reason this bothered me is that we are planning on having a housewarming party this coming weekend.  I will report on the drama to come.

I think the iphone is incredibly overrated and my old phone (razr) which probably cost a lot less can do a lot of things the iphone either cannot do or does very poorly.

I should start out by saying that I’m not someone who needs all sorts of features on my phone.  I want a phone that can do the following well:

1) Has a reliable ringer, both in ring and vibrate modes.

2) Has an efficient texting interface.

3) Has a reasonable battery life (This is nowhere near a big deal for me as it is for others because I am religious about making sure that if I’m in the house, my phone will be plugged into the charger.  I’ve never had a phone die on me).

4) Is lightweight and compact.

I think that the iphone does a terrific job functioning as an ipod.  It basically gets rid of the need to ever carry an ipod.  I’ve used it to listen to music on many occassions that I normally would have no other way to kill the time waiting for a flight, etc.  I also think the internet on the iphone is  pretty easy and efficient to use.  It’s painfully slow and only usable for really quick tasks like googling an address or checking an e-mail.  I assume this has more to do with the service than the phone though, so compared to the competition, the iphone probably does the internet slightly better.

The texting interface, however, had to be programmed by an idiot.  The fact that my old POS phone, which probably cost a lot less and was made a few years before the iphone came out, can do things that the iphone cannot is laughable.

First, the iphone has an inefficient interface for sending text messages to more than one person.  On my old phone, if I wanted to send a text message to multiple people, I could simply type the message, scroll down my address book, and checkmark anyone I wanted to send the message too.  I could also select all/deselect all.  Somehow, the iphone is unable to perform such simple tasks.  So, when I got my phone and address book set up, there was no way to just send a mass text message letting everyone know what my new phone number was.  The iphone would require me to make about 3-4 clicks to send the text to an additional person.

The second thing the iphone cannot do is insert someone’s contact info into a text message.  How many times have you had a friend ask you for another friend’s contact info?  My old phone had an insert function to quickly insert someone’s contact info into a text message if you had them in your address book.  The iphone requires you to navigate back and forth between the text message you are typing up, and the person’s contact info you want to send.  This seems pretty neanderthal to me.

The third thing the iphone cannot do is forward a text message.  Again, my old razr was able to do this.  If you forget to send a message to someone, which is pretty easy to do considering the inefficient system of selecting who to send it to, you have to re-type it.

I also have a lot of problems w/ the vibrate mode and the switch on the outside to silence the ringer.  The vibrate mode is simply not strong enough.  I miss more text messages every week on the iphone due to weak vibrations, than I’ve ever missed with any phone I’ve owned.  I googled this problem and apprently this is a popular complaint about the iphone.  It doesn’t have anything to do with my epidermal nerves not functioning properly.

The switch on the outside of the iphone is something I’ve inadvertently hit so many times.  And because the vibrate mode sucks, I’ll end up missing a bunch of phone calls of texts because of this.  I wish there was a way to just blow up the button and manually set the phone to vibrate whenever necessary.  Obviously, the convenience of being able to quickly turn your ringer off is nice, but it needs to be presented to us in a more efficient fashion.

Lastly, my iphone lags.  I’ve had this happen maybe 15-20 times so far.  I’ll unlock it and try to type a text message and it’ll take about 4-5 seconds for it to register me typing a letter.  It seems to remember all the letters I hit though.  I experimented once when it was lagging and was able to punch in a 15 word text before the 3rd word was ever fully “typed” on screen.  It took 97 seconds for the whole message to finally appear when it should have taken 15 seconds.  This is another problem that is not unique to my specific phone.  If you google “iphone lag”, sure enough there are a bunch of other users out there who have had the same problems.

Please don’t interpret this post in the wrong way.  I think the iphone is a nice improvement over my old phone despite all these faults.  I just can’t stand how society seems to have a huge crush on apple when in reality apple is probably excellent at marketing, but merely above average in terms of actual product quality and functionality.  These issues I’ve mentioned need to be addressed before the next version comes out.

It’s really shocking how unexcited I am for this year’s superbowl considering the Steelers are one of my favorite NFL teams and have been all the way back to the Neil O, Barry Foster, and Eric Pegram days.  I also had both Kurt Warner and Larry Fitzgerald on my fantasy team and am a huge fan of both players.  I guess it’s difficult for me to choose who to root for as I sort of like both teams.  I will be rooting for the Steelers.  I’m sure come tomorrow, I will be pretty psyched.  In the HSNL superbowl squares $1k entry pool, I went halves w/ a friend for 4 squares and 3 of them landed in the 5 column for Pittsburgh (LOL?).  So basically, I need Pittsburgh to score 35 points or to get a safety somehow to have any shot.

In poker news, I’ve started to play some HU PLO.  I still think my game needs a lot of work, but having a strong analytical background has made the transition from HU NLHE to HU PLO much easier.   I have a prop bet that will prevent me from playing higher than $10/$20 until March 1.  I think this will be beneficial for two reasons.  First, I think it will force me to play more PLO and really work at getting better.  Second, I also think it will free up some time for me to pursue some other interests.  When I’m normally used to playing $25/50 and $50/100, if I see a soft game, I almost feel compelled to play regardless of what I’m doing because games don’t run that often and you really have to take advantage of the times they do run.

One of the things I’ve decided to do during some of the free time I will have is learn guitar.  It’s really shocking that despite how much I love rock ‘n’ roll, I’ve never attempted to learn how to play guitar.  I had my first lesson on Friday and purchased a cool epiphone electric guitar.  My instructor left me with some easy popular guitar riffs like iron man, pretty woman, smoke on the water, etc.  I’ve been having a lot of fun trying to learn them and definitely see myself continuing with guitar.

I’ve maintained a pretty good gym routine since moving back to NYC.  I still am stuck at around 120 lbs.  I feel like for the past month and a half, even though I’ve gotten stronger, I really haven’t put on any weight.  I have to make a conscious effort to just eat as much food as possible at every moment of every day that I’m even remotely hungry.   I squatted 175 lbs. last week which was a personal best.    I think I can definitely do a bit more but I’ve always had some ankle flexibility issues which have prevented me from getting down low enough.  I suspect this has something to do with the fact that I am stuck sitting in a chair whenever I am playing poker.  I’ve been working pretty hard at improving my flexibility and I feel like my squat is finally good enough to load up as much weight as I can handle.  I think within a couple of weeks, I should be able to squat 200 lbs.

In DeucesCracked news, I am incredibly excited about Phil Galfond and I’s new collaborative PLO series.  If you get a chance, I definitely recommend checking out the first two episodes which are up right now.  I think there is a lot of incredible discussion and I’ve never learned so much myself from making an instructional video.