Kurt's Thoughts

Ozymandias, aka Andre Vrignaud, is a Microsoft employee and a veteran of the computer gaming industry.  He is part of a team that determines the strategy of our gaming division and the direction of both Xbox Live & Xbox as a whole.

He’s got a blog on which there is a helluva debate going on with a friend of his Mark Deloura, who coincidentally is another industry veteran who works instead for "the other camp", aka Sony Developer Relations.

Ozymandias says Blu-ray’s larger capacity is irrelevant.  Mark disagrees.  You be the judge.

• Blu-ray Disc Capacity Irrelevant for Games? (Original posting)
• Blu-ray Drive Speed More Relevant to Games Than Capacity
• Mark Deloura Comments on Relevance of Blu-ray (Oddly, We’re in Violent Agreement)

As an aside, there’s a comment made by a fellow named ExTester on one of the discussions about the announcement that Sony would have 75% fewer consoles at launch than originally promised (500,000 down from 2,000,000).  It’s so poignant I couldn’t help but replicate the content and put a pointer to it:

You know, I am almost sure that Sony will be taking a huge hit, and file for Chapter 11. Ok maybe, Chp.11 is a little far, but the company will not be doing well. I wonder what they will announce @ TGS cause the reality is, if they don’t announce any news like "We got good news we are back on track with our original launch figures" or something.. its bad news for Sony period. And I have to agree, for whatever reason I think they will do well selling their consoles. But I liked my Dreamcast and I didn’t see it coming when Sega announced that its out of the console market. And I loved my Dreamcast 4 or 5 games for it. Controller felt great for me, and I am loving the 360’s cause it remindes me so much of it.

To your "Playstation" brand loyalty comment. Sorry, I have asked a lot of people hands down. No matter who it is. Would you pay $600 for a game console if it was the next best thing since sliced bread(its not, but just to be fair). And all of them said No. They even mentioned that $400 was high, but not nearly as bad. I then mention if Playstation was behind the $600 version. It didnt change the response.

Fact is this is a razor on razorblade market, you cut your profits to make them up on title sales. But you dont take a big enough loss pushing out as many consoles to market, and there will be less 3rd Party to help recoup the loss because there is no market to make a profit. And this is where Sony is pushing themselves into. Samething wit Sega with the Dreamcast.

Now you mention that "Sony inserted themselves into the market as the cool system". But last I checked they lost that cool when they became arrogant and try’s to force a standard on people. The system that gains the cool factor is the one that works "with the people" to give them what they want. Granted, Microsoft doesn’t see eye to eye on the prices people suggest for their products, but they have come a long way. I used to be a serious hater of Microsoft in early 2000, but slowly I started to see a different company emerging that has a huge monkey on its back. Its past. I honestly can say that Microsoft is a different company that it once was, and I can honestly say that it probably started with Bill Gates getting married. That aside, Microsoft has a huge shadow to overcome. But, Sony is working ever so hard to become the shadow that Microsoft is trying to get rid of.

Now about the the HD-DVD drive, I have to agree with you on this completely. Every second the HD-DVD drive is not out for the 360 is every second that is giving blu-ray to fight back. I think HD-DVD is the better format mainly because it boils down to one thing.

Consistant video quality releases. And this is something a buddy of mine that was a huge blu-ray fan(now in the middle) agrees with me. Since blu-ray has come out it has done about everything wrong. But the biggest crime personally is inconsistant quality in the release of the movie titles that are released. I mean how do you know which codec its using? With HD-DVD is simple. Its VC1 and thats it. blu-ray has yet to fully support VC1 as they take their Mpeg-4(h.264) to 50 gig blu-ray discs. Personally h.264 is great for conference or email, which it was developed for, but looks like crap for movies. So what happens to all the movies that have been released on MPEG-2, are they going to be re-released in a better quality like the SuperBit BS? And its these simple screw ups that personally will undermine blu-ray.

In reference to the HD-DVD price, its most likely gonna be 200. But I think if they sell it @ 180 they will sell themselves. I mean its really close to 150, but its not 200. I will buy one regardless, but I think it will hurt Sony even more if they were going for 180 say the first three weeks. Take a sligth loss on the drive. It would help push the product even more so. I honestly cant wait for the HD-DVD for my 360, and neither can my wife. And you better believe I will be getting the HDMI cable for the 360. Cause I know it can handle dual DVI output with that nifty ATI video output chip. Anyhow thats the other thing that is going to hurt Sony..

Every single 360 that has been sold is HDMI ready, they have just been waiting for the lame format to finalize. Get a fancey adapter and presto change-o HDMI. Betcha its gonna be the 1 thing that they have not revealed about the 360 that they mentioned @ X05 and will annouce @ X06 or TGS. But that will be another bad day for Sony…

Lastly, one thing is for sure. I have to say that Microsoft has done an excellent job in reasuring the customer that they made the correct choice, everyday that goes by. Especially when you compare Sony to Microsoft, seems like Sony has been doing everthing wrong. Can’t wait for Gears of War, Halo 3, Forza 2, and Mass Effect.

And I agree with the above comments about the HD-DVD drive.  You guys have GOT to get that thing out on the market as soon as possible and hopefully at least a month before Christmas.  I’m probably not alone in saying its a sure purchase for me compared to the 500 Toshiba players and honestly, as noted, 6 million potential sales?? It’s a no brainer.  Let’s put an end to this ugly and stupid format war before it gets even uglier and stupider, and show Sony that they are not yet over the curse of the Betamax.

http://ozymandias.com/archive/2006/09/06/Thoughts-…

If any of you are interested in submitting feedback on the Xbox360’s user interface, you can do so at WildChicken’s blog.

WildChicken’s real identity is as a user experience manager of the real Xbox360 development team so your feedback is going to the actual people that create requirements documentation for the dev team.

Translation:  It’s going to precisely the right people.

Yesterday Sony announced a few key things:

1. EUROPEAN PS3 LAUNCH POSTPONED
   They are going to postpone the European launch of the Playstation 3 until March 2007.  This is delayed by 5 months from their original plans to release the PS3 in Europe at the same time as in North America & in Japan – November 15th.
   
2. ONLY 500,000 CONSOLES AVAILABLE AT LAUNCH
   They are going to have 400,000 consoles in North America and 100,000 consoles in Japan at launch for a total of 500,000 consoles.  This is down from their original announcement of 2,000,000 consoles at launch in November.
   
3. 6,000,000 CONSOLES BY MARCH
   They are still promising 6,000,000 consoles by March 31st, 2007 as originally planned.

That last point is of considerable debate.  The fact that Sony has production bandwidth problems has most people believing that there’s very little chance that they’ll come close to shipping 6,000,000 consoles by the end of March.  Their previous promises and reputation of "exaggeration" doesn’t exactly help either.

But c’mon folks:  A 75% drop in the expected shipments?  No one knows more than we do how hard it is to launch a console worldwide… but at least we never lied about it.  Sony has repeatedly exaggerated, overstated, and broken promises about dozens of aspects about the PS3 and Blu-Ray:

• The number of Blu-ray players out there at Christmas
• The nature of the KillZone 2 demo at E3
• The wireless router capability of the PS3
• The 50GB capacity of Blu-ray discs which have yet to materialize

…and people still believe them time and again.

This has been a helluva year for Sony to say the least.  I know that Microsoft hasn’t exactly been picture perfect in it’s long and storied history of product development but I can’t remember the last time any company has made so many catastrophic errors in a single year:

• POOR E3 SHOWING
  Watching Sony’s E3 was downright painful.  Universally acclaimed as the loser in the 2006 E3, Sony managed to completely take out all the steam from the momentum they’d built up since E3 2005 where they came out as the winner, despite having shown fake video rendered demos that they claimed were in-engine play – in particular a much criticized KillZone 2 demonstration that turned out to be a pre-rendered fraud instead of actual gameplay.
  
• THE "FIRST" PLAYSTATION 3 DELAY
  Playstation 3 was supposed to ship in April 2006.  It was postponed to November 2006 because Blu-Ray hadn’t come together.
  
• BLU-RAY’S LOUSY VIDEO QUALITY
  Blu-ray has been savagely beaten by critics.  The announcement that Blu-ray DVD players would cost $1000 was a shocker, relative to HD-DVD player’s cost of $500.  Blu-ray DVD’s were then discovered to have visibly poorer picture quality than HD-DVD’ discs across the board.
  
• PLAYSTATION 3 ANNOUNCED COST
  Sony did something funny:  They announced that the PS3 would be sold for either $500 for the "core" version and $600 for the "premium" version – essentially $200 more than XBox360.  Much to everyone’s exasperated surprise, they dead panned the announcement as if it was an everyday occurance and "no big deal". 
  …then they topped the announcement by having Ken Kutaragi, Sony’s president tell the press that the price of the PS3 was "probably too cheap".
  
• PS3 GAMES = $60 OR MORE
  It was announced that PS3 games are going to be a bit pricey.  As in above $60 pricey.  Which is just peachy for PS3 owners than are already shelling out an additional $200 above an Xbox360 begging the question, if a person could get an Xbox360 Premium console + 4 or more games for the $600 that the PS3 will cost… unless you buy the hype that PS3’s first gen games are going to be better than XBox360’s 3rd gen games, why buy a PS3?
  
• NO DUAL SHOCK
  Due to a lawsuit with the company hold the IP for vibrating controllers, Sony will no longer be selling vibration-capable controllers.  They instead announced the ability to detect side to side physical "tilt" movement in the controller – a feature met with yawns, after the Nintendo announced full gyroscopic capability.
  
• NO HDMI CABLE IN PS3 $600 PACKAGE
  Wow.  Imagine telling everyone that you have to pay a $200 premium over your competitor to buy your console, then telling them that the games will cost more than your competitors… then telling them that to take advantage of one of your most highly touted features – HDMI digital interfacing for hi-def TVs, you’ll need to purchase an additional cable on top of everything else putting the cost at around $650.  Are you frickin’ NUTS?
  
• 3 LETTERS:  D-R-M
  Who can forget the fiasco regarding Sony’s rogue DRM rootkit installation that resulted in PC crashes worldwide?  It’s amazing that they thought they’d get away with this without any sort of backlash.  Put that one into the "What were they thinking?" column.

Wired Magazine has a great article about what it is that Sony’s had problems with and what this launch means to Sony as a company.  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/sony.html

All I can say a 75% drop in the number of consoles available at launch is either the worst projection in the history of manufacturing, or the biggest slap in the face of the gaming consumer.

Wow.  This is huge.  Sony might be taking a serious backseat in the European market with this announcement.

————————-

Sony Delay Reaction Story
Dean Takahashi, 01:13 PM in Dean Takahashi, Gaming

Here’s the story I’m working on for tomorrow’s paper:

If you want a PlayStation 3 for Christmas, you chances just got a lot worse.

Due to production problems, Sony said Wednesday that it will come up short with the supply of PlayStation 3 video game consoles for the critical holiday selling season and delay its launch in Europe until March.

Sony’s production problems with the PlayStation 3 could be a big boost for rivals Nintendo and Microsoft, but they could create big headaches for video game publishers such as Electronic Arts that have been counting on healthy sales of new software this holiday.

"Sony didn’t have their ducks in a row this time,” said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan. ""It hurts their image with investors and consumers. I think Euorpean consumers will be rightfully angry.”

————————-

FULL STORY:  Sony to delay PS3 launch in Europe until March
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2006/09/sony_delay_reac.html

(Thanks to Dave Delgado for the forward.)

A psuedo overview of the first Zune device’s new interface has been posted on iLounge.  In general, the authors have gotten some of it right and some of it wrong.

User Interface:  They’re right that the screen is white on black, making the interface easy to read and not-so-blinding in the dark.  And they’re right that the UI is similar to that of iPod’s… after all, we actually have a patent on the iPod UI.  And when you are scrolling through many songs, just like the Windows Mobile "contacts" interface, you start to see the first letter of the songs superimposed on the screen going from A…. down to Z, allow you to jump from the B’s to the T’s relatively quickly.  There’s more to this than they’ve mentioned but I’ll leave that for the launch.  The mockup to the right is a pretty good representation of what the device’s beta UI looks like from what I’ve seen.

Screen:  The display is much larger than the iPod’s making videos viewable in landscape with a much higher resolution and a much clearer, more relevant view of photos and images like the covers of the album of a given song.  This may not seem like a big deal to you unless you’ve actually tried to watch a movie on an iPod or you get to see what photos & album covers look like on the screen of the Zune player making the difference evident.  When it comes to screen size on these devices, it’s become apparent that size matters.

Weight & FM Radio:  This is REALLY important and really downplayed by iLounge which to me shows how out of touch they are with the average consumer.  Seriously.  iLounge dings the player for being made out of "plastic", which is ludicrous.  Most of the iPod casing is plastic.  Every cell phone casing is plastic.  The Compaq iPaq, the Palm Treo, and the case of every PDAPhone or Smartphone on the market is made entirely of plastic – even though the outside is a faux metal and most people don’t know it.  Yet somehow having a lighter weight device that still feels well-constructed out of solid material and a quality frame is a "bad thing".  No – these folks completely missed the boat on this point. 

For a large segment of media player owners, having an FM Radio is ridiculously important.  Why?  Anyone that works out at a gym regularly knows why:  It’s because when you’re working out, nothing beats an FM tuner for music when you’re bored of your own blather.  It’s just something about having new, live, random media that’s important.  And remember that most gyms have privately broadcasted TV audio operating over FM frequencies.   I belong to two gyms and each broadcasts over 88.1FM, 89.3FM, and 91.1FM to allow you to listen to 3 different TV stations being shown on the overhead monitors while you’re busting your butt on the elliptical machines or stairmasters.

(NOTE:  If they’d install racing games into the exercise machines linked to said monitors based on how hard I worked out, allowing me to compete with others in the room, I swear I’d be back to my old college physique when I has 8% body fat and could benchpress twice my body weight.  Hell – if they made it possible to SHOOT other folks working out "virtually" in some sort of video game linked to the stairmaster, I swear I’d never leave the gym.  I can’t understand why someone hasn’t done this yet.  But I digress.)

Wi-Fi:  This is the one feature that they really "didn’t get" and the fact that they used the term "apparently" meant to me that they didn’t really know anything about the feature or even try it out.  Zune player allows up to 4 people with players to all listen to music that you’re broadcasting over a very battery efficient 802.11b transceiver, effectively making one person a "DJ" of the group.

This is really big folks.  Ask yourself how tightly knit networks learn about what’s hot and what’s trendy in the music world.  It’s through personal communities & friends.  By sharing.  The iPod isn’t just an ‘island’ when it comes to sharing… people with iPod’s NEVER share their content between devices, nor is there any easy way to communicate what you’ve got between devices outside of "telling people what’s in your playlist". 

Not on the Zune player. 

• Wanna share music just by being in broadcast range with whomever?  Zune can make your broadcast public.
• Wanna have a private session between just friends?  Zune can do that and make your playlist the center of attention.
• Wanna NOT share anything but rather just "listen" for other people’s broadcasts?  Zune can do that too.

The great part about all of this is that it’s FUN.  Sharing content and being the DJ of your own playlist for people is really really cool.  It puts the focus on you and challenges you to get the best music… to showcase your insider knowledge of a music genera.

And it encourages legal music sales as well.  When you hear a tune, you get a link that allows you buy the song using the Zune Music Store – kind of a like a "history of songs heard".  No more guessing or having to remember "what was the name of that song that that friend played for you.

PRICE & MARKETSHARE:  But this is only cool if MANY people have Zune Media players.  Damn right.  And I don’t believe that marketshare is going to be a problem.  Remember that WiFi connectivity is a theme amongst Zune devices (Zune is just one of at least 3 different devices to be released) and people will finally have a consistently themed, consistent UI, and a consistent series of devices that will be released for the Media Player market.  People will be able to depend on Zune to be revised and around for the long haul.  People will know that a v2.0 version of their device will be released and that their music libraries won’t need to be completely retrofitted, nor will they need to learn yet another UI on either their device or their desktop.

Here’s a list of communities that I believe will immediately flock to the Zune:

• Enter every XBox360 owner on the market.  I can assure you that those folks with XBox360’s are going to go out and get one.  Why?  Besides just having the thrill of an affordable media player practically designed for their entertainment console, more than 60% of the 7M XBox360 owners in the world have them wirelessly connected making them immediately ready for Zune – you can turn on both Zune & the Xbox360 and without plugging anything in, have your XBox360 sound system play your Zune’s music.  No USB, not connector, no nothing.  More importantly, the demographic of a Xbox360 owner is one in which the purchase price of Zune isn’t going to be a problem come this Christmas.
• Enter kids.  This is a network effect device designed for completely invisible, wireless peer-to-peer sharing in school, at home, at work:  If I get a Zune, unlike the iPod, I as an owner have a direct incentive to get others to buy one because the more people that own one, the cooler my experience is.  If I get bored, why not listen to someone else’s playlist?  iPod owners really could give a damn whether or not anyone else owns either an iPod or a Creative Labs player.  It’s not like you share accessories or media files and in fact, Apple’s iTMS and the iTunes interface pretty much makes sharing an impossibility.  But not with Zune.  Sharing is an integrated and crucial part of the experience.
• Enter every Windows operating system owner on the market.  At least those that have used iTunes on Windows and felt jilted.  Apple’s going to finally get their come-uppance for providing a crummy experience for iPod owners on Windows.  iTunes for Windows is metallic grey and in no way conforms with the current theme of your Windows desktop.  You could have the coolest theme on your machine and iTunes grey interface, like Quicktime, sticks out like a sore thumb.  It doesn’t do CDDB album information lookups over port 80 making usage behind firewalls impossible.  It doesn’t seemlessly plug-and-play and show up as a hard drive – even though, like every other media player on the market, it could.  It doesn’t allow you to minimize the application to the System Tray like most other media players.  There’s no dynamic tagging, allowing me to select any music file I’ve got and have iTunes immediately do a CDDB search on it to pull album information, author names, etc. and associate it with the file in the iTunes metabase… every other tool on the market does this including Windows Media Player & WinAMP.
• Enter every IT Professional.   Very few IT administrators & help desk engineers that I know of like Apple for one reason.  Macintoshes are always the thorn in the IT administrator’s side – it requires different lockdown policies, different patching & management technologies, different applications & core tools like anti-virus & backup… it’s just generally a lot of work for only a smaller percentage of the actual systems in a company – usually 1 or 2%.  Imagine the number of end users whining to help desk about wanting to load iTunes for Windows on their PC’s.  The last thing IT pros ever really want is to support the company that’s creating more complexity for them by deviating from their clean, managable, standardized environment.  And anything that works well with Windows Media Player, the standard player for Windows, is a great thing.
• Enter every jilted Windows Media user on the Internet.  Windows Media is the single heaviest-used managed format/codec in the world beating Apple’s AAC & Real Networks RealAudio.  It provides playback in a format that is half the size of MP3 with the same fidelity, or twice the fidelity at the same file size.  Apple’s lack of incorporation of .WMA playability is going to come back to haunt them from the sheer resentment of individuals that do use Windows Media.

MARKETING:  The final frontier
Last but not least, one of the big reasons Zune will take off is marketing.

Huh? 

That’s right – marketing.  Ever notice how Microsoft as a company, unless the product is something like Windows Vista or Office 2007, it does a cheap-o, lame-assed job of marketing it?  The ghetto-budget, lackluster marketing of Windows Mobile for example almost doomed it and had it not been for the fact that the technology and underlying foundation was so good, the product would have died from lousy marketing.

No sir – the Zune family will be marketed like the XBox:  Creatively, uniquely, autonomously, and without interference from the corporate mothership.  It has a massive budget to connect with specific demographics and seed devices to specific individuals in the limelight.  It will sponsor key events, key TV programs, key movies, and be in the public eye – much in the same way you have the ubiquity of iPod’s advertisements and product placement.  And it will get a lot of airplay from music companies and media outlets because the technology will be virulent AND these folks will want the opportunity to tap that massive promotional advertising budget that we have.

SAY HELLO… TO OUR LITTLE FRIENDS
But unlike Apple, you will have the innovation of the Zune networked community, the focus of a Microsoft organization with a budget analogous to Apple’s, and the integration with the Windows experience.  And that’s going to be big because while Apple’s always been a hype engine, bashing Microsoft and Windows, they’ve been historically treated like an annoyance.  Apple’s never gone head to head with Microsoft’s real guns: 

• Focused & unfettered creative talent on par with Apple’s in house folks.  Without naming names, we hired folks like the original creative hardware designers of the Macintosh, just as an example.
• Seamless integration with Microsoft’s Windows operating system which has 89% marketshare.  Apple could have produced a better integrated software product for Windows but they chose to ignore our UI Guidelines for Windows and go with a Mac look-and-feel for iTunes.
• A $50 Billion warchest unmatched in the industry.  That’s $50B in liquid capital to be used in whatever way Microsoft sees fit.  To put this into perspective, Apple as a company has a market cap of $57 billion.  To put this another way, in order to beat Sony in the game console market, less that $6 billion was earmarked over 7 years for the effort …much less appears necessary to compete with Apple’s iPod because of the existence of Microsoft’s backend "Live" datacenters which can of course be leveraged for music sales.

Have doubts?  Take a look at Xbox.  It went from having no marketshare to owning mindshare as the next-gen console of choice today beating out Sony Playstation.  While Sony hasn’t shipped a single next-gen console, Microsoft is already up to 7 million units.  Sony might gather steam this Christmas, but so will XBox360… and it’ll have more games, more accessories, and more users for a larger online community.

The sleeping giant has awoken, and its weapon of choice this holiday season is Zune.

Today, I found out that for each hour I volunteer at the local animal rescue that Anne & I got our adopted pet "Sheepa the Dog" (http://www.sheepa.com) from, Microsoft will "match" our time in much the same way that it will match my tax-deductible contributions to 509c3 non-profit organizations.

How does it "match" my contributed time?  By paying out $17/hour.  That’s right.  For every hour I work for our animal rescue (http://www.save-a-life.org) Microsoft will give an addition $17 in actual cash to the shelter. 

Now consider that both my wife and I work for Microsoft and we both donate our time on the weekends.  Just a single days worth of work (5 hours) between the two of us is $170 to the rescue organization. 

That’s $170 to pay for food, supplies, gas (to transport the animals), medical bills, grooming, electricity,… you name it.

This is the first time in a while I found my jaded-self thinking about just what a neat company Microsoft is to work for.

That’s right.  I said it.  Texas Hold’em is EVIL.

As you may know, XBox Live Arcade for XBox360 users can download for free (for another 36 hours as of the posting of this entry – the deal expires at the end of Friday, August 25th) their very own copy of Texas Hold’em Poker absolutely free.

Yep.  Free.  No charge.  Zilch.  Nil.  Nada.  And it has all of this:

• Xbox 360 Camera Support.  Sure the damned thing isn’t released yet.  But it’s supposed to be rearing its ugly head this September so it’s as good as here… right?
• Single Player Support.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal until you realize that this is a really good way to train and learn and otherwise hone your skills for real play.  It’s not like people get together for Poker every evening in LA.  Or do they?
• Evolutionary growth.  You start with $2000 and progress from $2/$4 blinds to tables with larger blinds and larger buy ins.  That’s the only way you evolve and play stronger players.  By the way, the Artificial Intelligence in the players is pretty cool.
• Multiplayer.  This obviously gets ridiculous.  No need to talk about this here.

…AND IT’S ALL EVIL.  Why?  Well, for one it’s really addictive.  I found myself playing over and over (and losing repeatedly I might add but learning a lot about reading behavior and hands and player tendencies which each AI/computer player does have) and to be honest… I DON’T WANT TO. 

That’s right, I don’t WANT to play this game over and over.  My proficiency is in Blackjack which is a very different, fast paced game.  I can see how someone could make their living playing poker being that humans are flawed and with enough skill and enough "fish", a person could be a professional at playing poker.  I get the feeling that based on a person’s stamina, a skilled player could continue to play as long as they could and continue to make money.

Meanwhile, Blackjack is different.  Blackjack is very fast paced and not really a stamina game in my experience.  It’s more of a rhythm game, meaning that sometimes the cards are there and sometimes they aren’t and unlike poker, you can’t ‘bluff’ your way out of a bad shoe.  But much like losing the blinds, you’re gonna lose some money on lousy hands over time because like one of my favorite players, Sam Farha, likes to say, "You don’t gamble, you don’t win."

That being said, you still watch players, you watch what’s been dealt from the shoe, you watch for patterns and face card runs, and most importantly, you leave the table when the cards turn and this can be after just 15 minutes of playing. 

Personally, I have a rule:  I have to see the dealer break before I sit down and play, after which I’ve been known to play at a table for no more than 5 minutes before leaving with a few $1000.  This pisses off some pitbosses to no end being that they start the clock on your rated play only to have to stop it but hey – you play to win… you never play for comps.

What does this have to do with Texas Hold’em being evil?  Well, it is a very different mindset – one that I don’t want to get accustomed to because I’m a Blackjack player and you can’t play Blackjack and Poker and be good at both.  You just can’t.   I read an article with Freddie Deebs in Poker Life Magazine the other day that basically says the same thing:  If you want to be good at a game, you have to focus on just that game and that game alone.  You can’t screw around on other casino games because you lose focus and you disconnect from what’s important. 

And if Freddie Deebs, a professional gambler who once turned $40 into $300,000 in a single night, says it’s true, who am I to argue?

So what am I gonna do re: Poker?  I’m gonna play and I’m probably gonna be someone’s fish.  But I’m gonna have a good time doing it, socializing and drinking with some friends and maybe if I get a few good cards, I might win a few hands, but I’m not banking on it.

Not like Blackjack.

When I get tired, my mind regresses back to a simpler time when all I had to do is worry about school work and the cute girl that sat in front of me in AP English. Today, I was dragging a bunch of books out of the
closet at work and I started to think about the greatest movie ever created: BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA

This movie is just begging for a sequel. I swear I’d be on that in a flash. I keep thinking of Jack Burton, played by Kurt Russell, yelling into his CB while he’s driving his 18 wheeler down a rainy highway, "You just listen to the Pork Chop Express and take his advice on a dark and stormy night…"

Remember that this was all before the advent of the Internet. I’ve never actually typed in the words, "Big Trouble in Little China" or "Pork Chop Express" into Live Search or Google or any search engine for
that matter. So return to my desk and do a quick search and I stumble upon this:

http://www.wingkong.net/shirts/index.html

Oh joy of joys! A Dragon of the Black Pool Leather Jacket! Pork Chop Express t-shirts! Egg Foo Yong Tours t-shirts! And a black shirt that has a picture of Jack Burton on it that reads" "Yes sir, the check is in the mail…"!

If you get this… if you find this funny… if you doubled over in laughter when you saw these, track me down on the Internet or just comment, because my God: I think I nearly died of oxygen deprivation I was laughing so hard! Must… Buy… Jacket! I swear, when I was a kid, I watched this movie over and over again. Not because I wanted to, mind you but because where I lived, it was the only damned movie that the station seemed to have the rights to play. I didn’t even understand half the campy jokes they have in the movie, but now I view the movie in a completely different light.

I now look back on that flick as an adult now, with a certain amount of fondness. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better: http://www.wingkong.net/southpark/index.html

It’s times like these, I just love the Internet. I really do. Crap like this makes up for an awful lot of garbage out there.