Alright, the latest update to the site is completed, at least with respect to the regular user. By clicking the manifest option on the left, you can get listings of my movies and TV shows. If you see something you'd like to borrow, let me know and I'll do that for you. I've set up a backend for the manifest which includes the ability to have different userlevels, allow users to add/edit items, add/edit users, and loan/return items.

Ordering of manifest items is possible by clicking on the column headers, and two column ordering is possible by clicking one column, then clicking another column. The application remembers the last column that was used to order the entries.

The system uses PHP and MySQL for its back-end, and uses a little bit of javascript for some of the tricks like setting the filters.

If anyone wants a copy of the code, just ask me and I'll send it your way - it's pretty lightweight.

I just finished the code, so I haven't put too many entries in to the manifest yet - I'll be filling them up later on tonight.

Oh, and lastly, if you see anything that isn't working properly, let me know so I can fix it.

This is the first journal I wrote after playing poker. I've had to remove the names of people, so that they don't realize which piece of information pertains to them, but thems are the breaks.

• One player in particular is very impatient, and prefers to check or call when not holding anything. He'll throw money at the pot pre-flop solely to push people out of it. He will also call the big blind just to see the flop, regardless of what he's holding. Very easy to suck him into a hand by raising twice to three times the pot.

In retrospect, reading back over this journal, it would seem that he's making correct plays, but he's actually not. I'll elaborate on the reasons why in another journal. Being impatient makes for a loose player. The general rule is that whenever you're playing someone loose (they'll play with worse hands, and are more likely to call a bet), you need to tighten up. The best way to take down a loose player is to wait until you've got a good hand, and then milk them for all they're worth. Try to put bluffs past players like this is generally a bad idea, as they will blindly call.

• Another player will play with lots of poor hands, and will play with suited cards right to the river, calling most bets. He prefers check when not holding anything, though will rarely check-raise. The odds of that happening are pretty low, and likely not worth the risk. He'll call a high bet without holding too much in his hand, and finds the prospect of taking someone out when they go all-in almost irresistable. He too will call the big blind just to see the flop, and is likewise easy to suck in to a hand.

Another player that will call most bets. Generally speaking, if this guy is raising, he's probably got something decent. Trying to bluff him isn't likely to work for the same reason as above, and so taking him down with a decent hand is the way to go. The most important thing to realize about players like this is that when a flush draw hits the board, caution is the best approach. Because of his tendency to hang on to suited cards, it's not a good idea to raise the pot holding something like top pair.

• Between the two above players, usually only one of them can be pulled into the pot with an all-in bet

This is actually an incorrect play on their part, generally speaking. If they both feel that they have a decent hand, they should likely both be going all-in - the pot odds are better.

• The third player in our group often wastes away his chips, raising at the wrong spot, then folding his hand when either re-raised or being raised post-flop when he didn't get the draw he was looking for.
• When raising, I need to start including calculations for implied odds

More on this later

• Not many people in our group are raising pre-flop, and I think this is causing more people to win on the draw. By raising pre-flop, I knocked a lot of potentially strong hands out, and was able to protect my decent hands more often.

Okay. Those are the notes I've got written down here from my first poker journal. The first thing I'm going to do is explain some of the terminology here.

• Flop

We play no-limit Texas Hold 'em. In this game, everyone is dealt two cards, face down. Then there's a round of betting. After everyone has called (met) the bet or folded, three cards are dealt to the table, and these are the community cards. This is called the flop. There is another round of betting after the flop, then a fourth card dealt, another round of betting, a fifth card dealt, and then a final round of betting. The community cards can be used by everyone to make the best hand possible. The idea of the game is to try and get a feel for your opponent, and figure out if he's got something better than you do.

• Small blind/Big blind

The small and big blinds are mandatory bets that are made to the two positions immediately left of the dealer. At the beginning of our games the small blind is a five dollar chip, and the big blind is a ten dollar chip. As play continues, the blinds increase in amount.

• Raising pre/post-flop

Raising pre-flop means raising before you've seen any of the community cards. This is typically done for a couple of reasons. The first reason is to bluff and try to win the pot right there (if everyone folds rather than call your bet, you win the pot). The second reason is to protect a good hand. If you've been dealt two aces, you've got a great hand. However, if you don't raise, you'll likely be playing against everyone else at the table. Let's say you've got six other people that call the big blind and are playing this hand. The more people you have, the more likely someone is to make a better hand than you are. Two aces is the best starting hand, but there's not a lot more you can draw from the community cards to make them better. As a result, you want to protect this hand from being out-drawn, and you do that by betting pre-flop. This is done to get people with hands that are likely to beat you on the draw (a seven and a two of the same suit, or something like that) to fold.

To finish off, I'll talk a bit about odds and implied-odds. Poker has many aspects to it, but odds calcuation is a big one. Whenever you make a bet, you should be thinking in your head, "If I made this bet a hundred times in a row, would I come out on top more often than not?" This is what statistician's call expected value. It can be summed up with the long drawn out example below:

BEWARE, there lies math below!

Let's say that a lottery ticket costs me one dollar to buy. Furthermore, on that lottery ticket, I will win three dollars 70% of the time, and win no money the other 30% of the time. So, that can be broken down to this: 70% of the time, I win two dollars (three, minus the cost of the ticket), and 30% of the time, I will lose a dollar (the cost of the ticket). The expected value on this lottery ticket is computed as follows:

0.30 times -1 + 0.70 times 2 = -0.30 + 1.40 = 1.10

That's a lot of numbers for people that hate math, but basically what this equation shows is that everytime I buy one of these lottery tickets, I can expect, on average to get back $1.10. So, if I bought ten of these tickets, and averaged out my wins and losses, I would be getting back $11.00 on my investment. And so on. Clearly, these lottery tickets are a good way to go.

Okay, now that we've got a grip on what expected value is, you can see that poker is very much like that, only a little more open to chance. Let's say I'm playing poker, and there are 16 cards left in the deck that could be dealt that will guarantee that I win the hand. There's one card left to be dealt, so at this point I have seen six cards out of the deck (The two in my hand, plus the four that have been dealt). The odds that I will be dealt one of the cards in that deck and win the hand are:

16 / 46 = Roughly 1/3 = 0.3

This can be confusing because you would think that I haven't factored into the equation that my opponents may be holding the cards I'm counting as letting me win the hand. However, because all of the cards are randomly dealt in a deck, we deal with this by including the cards our opponents are holding in our denominator. That's why we're dividing 16 / 46. If we knew for a fact that one opponent was holding none of the 16 cards we needed to win, the denominator would actually be 44, and our odds would be slightly better at 16 / 44. The odds of 16 / 46 basically can be thought of like this: "If I were to choose any one face down card (be it from my opponent's hand, or the top of the deck), there is a 16 / 46 chance that it will be one of the cards I need to win"

So we've figured out that our odds of winning this hand are about 0.3. The next step we need to do is determine how much money we are expected to win on average if we make a given bet. Let's say that the pot has 8 dollars in it, and it will cost me 1 dollar if I want to play. Should I make this bet? The easy way to figure this out is to determine if the percentage likelihood of you winning is greater than the percentage of your bet relative to the pot. So, is 0.3 greater than 1 / 8? Yes. 1 / 8 equals 0.125. This means that on average, if you make this bet, you will win more money than you would lose. That's basically how you determine whether or not you should make a given bet.

Math section over

This of course doesn't take into account the chance of you knowing what your opponents are holding, them knowing what you're holding, and about a billion other factors, but it's the basis for good poker playing.

Anyhow, likely that was boring and totally unhelpful, but it provides me my basis of comparison. Next week I'll go into why some of the plays that I was mentioning above (about the various players in our group) weren't good, and further elaboration on strategy, or at least what I've developed so far.

If anyone has questions, or wants clarifications, please post them, or just go read an actual poker strategy site, there's about a hojillion of them out there.

Being back in the realm of relatively frequent updates is weird - I'm so used to writing an entry maybe once every four months that it feels like I achieve a major accomplishment everytime I post a new entry.

Anyhow, there will be some upcoming changes in the near future to the site. Well, not changes actually, just additions. As you can see on the left-hand side, I've already added categories to the site, and you can now skip over the boring stuff and go straight to the things that you want to read. Hopefully that will help justify me filling up entries with ramblings about squash and poker - at least you no longer have to scroll through the entire page to get by that. If anyone's read some of the journals, you'll notice that they're probably quite long. My poker journals will likely be about the same length, so make use of the categorized entries from now on if you hate the massive amount of punishment that I'm putting your scroll-wheel finger through.

Upcoming changes to the site will include:

• A journal related to my process of relearning the basics and foundations of dancing.

Again, this will be categorized so that people don't have to read if they don't want to. A couple of friends have expressed interest in popping - nothing specific, but just that they think it's cool. I'll be posting videos of my progress as I'm learning the most basic steps. Keep in mind that some of these videos (probably all of them) will actually be really boring to watch. By basics, I really mean basics. A basic move for popping is flexing the muscles in your forearm. Don't expect anything too exciting at the moment, but hopefully they'll provide some insight into how the dance actually makes simplistic body movements look so bizarre.

In addition to providing an inside look to outsiders, the videos (and thoughts) that I'll post will hopefully give my friend Michi the chance to see how I'm progressing, and give me help in terms of what I need to stop doing, and what I need to practice more of.

• A small web-application that will display all of my TV Shows, Movies, DVDs etc. that I currently have, along with who currently has borrowed items from me.

I'll be working on this over the holidays, and probably some time afterwards. The purpose of this tool will be two-fold: 1) It will make it much easier for me to keep track of what I've loaned out to who, and 2) It will make it easier for people to see if I have anything they want to borrow. A lot of people at work (and friends) always want to borrow various TV show seasons that I've got, or various DVDs I own. This just makes that easier. Nothing particular fancy.

• A small About Me page.

The only reason I put this here is so that I have something to hold me to actually getting this set up. I've been meaning to do this since I first put the blog up over a year ago, but just haven't been motivated too. This should be about a night's worth of work, and should go up pretty soon.

That's most of the changes for now. I anticipate having the poker journals up by the end of this weekend, most likely I'll have them up on Friday.

That's all for now.

Missed a week there, because Stuart was away at a tournament for junior girls. This week we focused on drop shots and lobs.

1. Keep wrist cocked back, and bent backwards. Wrist shouldn't move very much through forehand swing. Remember the bartending analogy: at the top of the backswing, the wrist should be bent backwards, as though I'm carrying a tray of tasty drinks. Like beer, or maybe some martinis. Or a combination of those items.

Aha! This seems to be the problem with my swing. I've put some time into making sure I'm keeping my wrist in the bent back and cocked position mentioned above, and what do you know, no pain! That's a relief!

2. Remember to use lots of high shots. Keep them soft and aim them to hit high on the front wall and arc back into the corner.

Recurring theme here, but these shots are so good that it's worth mentioning them again.

3. Lobs shots should take wall at a severely obtuse angle

The ceiling is pretty high on a squash court, and there's lots of room to play around with. The ideal lob shot hits the very back upper triangle of the squash court's rear corner, bounces off it, and dies in the back corner. This makes it difficult for your opponent to volley, difficult for your opponent to hit the ball, and difficult for your opponent to not lose.

4. Get RIGHT under the ball

Seriously, like RIGHT under it. The best way to think about the positioning of yourself is with this exercise: Throw the ball directly up. Let it bounce once, then, using your racquet, hit it directly up again, trying to hit the ceiling. The swing and position for this exercise is essentially the same for a lob. Damn, this is so hard - it's really weird. It seems like it should be really easy.

5. Keep swing smooth, and use wrist to bring the racquet up to strike the ball

There's a bit of wrist flick involved in this motion, but don't make it a jerky flick, the flick should be part of the swing, and should only be used to give it a little more power.

6. Don't follow the ball's path with head - keep your head down

Stuart summed this up by telling me that sometimes, to prevent people from doing this over and over, he'd tie a rope connecting their nose and testicles. I silently made an oath to myself never to sign any waivers that Stuart puts in front of me.

7. Left foot in front for forehand shots.

Yet another recurring theme here. This will make it a lot easier to follow through correctly, and avoid my tendency to hug my arms in for a forearm shot.

Holy cow the lob shots are difficult for me to wrap my head around. I guess that really, last year when I first decided I wanted to improve, I was basically using the exact same swing and positioning for each shot I made. Squash basically has four main shots:

• Drive/Rail shot

This, as Stuart, and many other pros put it, is the bread and butter of squash. The shot is simple - shoot the ball so that it comes back really close and parallel to the side wall. The closer the better. Avoid the ball coming off the side wall and towards the center of the court. Drive shots come in all flavours - hard and low, soft and high.

If you can't make this shot work, you should go back and practice it until you can before you try moving on to any other shot. If you can reliably put the ball in the back corner, your opponent is going to have a tough time returning good shots, and moving you out of position.

• Boast shot

This shot can be used either defensively or offensively. As I described in a previous journal entry, a boast shot is any shot that hits one of the other three walls before travelling forwards and hitting the front wall.

When used defensively, this shot is typically made from a back corner, because it allows the player to make a greater swing (digging the ball out of the back corners is really tough).

When used offensively, this shot is used by fooling the opponent into thinking you're going to make a drive shot, then suddenly he finds that the ball is in fact in the front corner opposite to where he's heading. If your opponent anticipates a low hard drive, he'll typically start heading back in that direction, or at least start shifting his weight. By boasting the ball low and hard into the wall along which you'd normally be driving the ball parallel to, the ball will smack into that wall, and come to land in the opposite front corner. Hitting the ball into the side wall will take away a lot of the ball's momentum, so typically the opponent will have very little time to return the ball before it hits the ground twice.

Stuart feels that boasting is not a very good shot, and I think he's probably right. The reasons I can think of it being a poor shot are that you have a slightly less accurate shot (you've got an extra ball/wall interaction to worry about, so it's more comlicated, and thus more error prone), and most of the time a well placed drop shot or lob shot will have the same effect. In squash, simple seems to be better - that's evidenced by the drive shot being the best shot.

• Drop shot

The drop shot is a soft shot that hits the wall a couple of inches above the tin, then dies on the ground. These shots have the obvious benefit of making the opponent run like hell to get to the ball before it dies. Though Stuart hasn't mentioned it in our lessons yet, I believe that the drop shot is typically undercut by the racquet, so as to impart the ball with bottom spin, and have it die faster, and stick closer to the wall after it has bounced.

Making a drop shot requires thought. Where are you positioned relative to your opponent? The first rule should be that you should not put the ball close to the front wall if your opponent is closer to it than you are. This is the reason that the defensive boast shot is a pretty weak shot - you're going to be putting the ball in the front corner, where your opponent will be able to run up and drop it there for you. Try running the diagonal of the court three times in a row and see how good you're feeling.

According to Stuart, the worst thing you can do when you're returning a drop shot is to make another drop shot. I think this is probably because your opponent is usually going to be back on the T, see the drop, and just run up and belt a low hard drive to the back corner. Shots like these usually require that you be behind them in order to make a return on them, and good luck outpacing the ball on your way to the back of the court.

The drop shot is tricky, but I feel better about my drop shots than I did last year. I put some time into getting the shots accurate, and can drop fairly reliably up near the front of the wall. I still have problems though - I need to prepare for both my drop shots and my lobs the same way, so that my opponent is unable to determine beforehand which shot I'll make. I don't impart any spin to the ball, so my drops bounce a little higher, but I think that's a more complex aspect of the drop, and something I should ignore for now.

• Lob shot

This shot is good. Really good. Why? Because, if your opponent isn't very good at volleying, this shot can be equivalent to a guaranteed point every time you make it. That's only partially the reason that this shot is used, since most players that are semi-decent are able to volley. The lob shot is used from the front of the court (typically) and gives you time to get yourself back to the T before the opponent can make a return. In addition to giving you time, a good lob shot will end up in the back court, forcing your opponent to move off of the T, and putting the ball in a position that is difficult for him to return from.

Okay, so back to my original point - last year, I was making each of these shots the same way: I'd use the same backswing, prepare my racquet the same way, and strike my ball with the same swing, and same amount of openness on the racquet face.

Given that, it's not too much of a surprise that I wasn't having any luck getting my lobs down. I wasn't using any wrist flick, and really, until Stuart had me trying to hit the ball directly upwards and into the ceiling, I had no notion of the motion that was required, and how much space I had to play around with. My attempts at lob shots were basically just slow drives slighty above head height. My high and soft drives were still hitting the wall too hard, and were basically just drives that came off the back wall and ended up towards the center of the court. And my drop shots were bouncing their way back out towards the T.

All of this information has really solidified in my head why lessons are so important. I had gone on loads of websites and read about squash strokes, and even watched video clips showing how to make the shots. I own several books about squash, and have read through them a bunch, and I was practicing regularly. The amount of progress I made over the last year is probably less in total than what I feel I have made in the past month and a half since I joined Victoria Squash Club.

Until you truly understand what you're doing wrong, and why what you're doing is in fact wrong, it is very difficult to progress.

I don't have another lesson until the week after the 9th of January, as Stuart is going away (Alas!), but hopefully I'll get some good games in, and some drill sessions with some friends, and that will give me something to write about.

That reminds me - if anyone from Victoria is reading this and would like someone to do drills with, please e-mail me, or post a comment - I don't mind sitting there repeating the same motion over and over, and the more drill partners I have, the better.

Here's installment number three of my squash journals.

1. Don't use a full swing for high soft shots

Start with maybe two-thirds of the normal preparation - there's no need to make a huge wind up for a shot that doesn't require a lot of power. It's a waste of time, and will increase the likelihood of putting too much power into the shot. This is doubly true for shots tight against the back wall. Winding up for a full swing just means the racquet is going to collide with the back wall on the downswing and mess up the shot.

2. Don't forget wrist flicks out of the back corners

Keep practicing these. Right now, the idea of choking up and flicking with my wrist is completely contrary the way I think about making a shot. More practice will help it feel more natural.

3. Take forehand shots facing the wall

And again, with left leg forwards. Ideally, the racquet should make contact with the ball when the racquet is parallel to the front and back walls, and when the ball is directly in front of me (given that I'm facing the wall, as I should be).

Short set of thoughts here - these aren't from a lesson, but after a couple of drill sessions done with my friend Jesse, trying to get the technique for high soft shots down.

My grip is still causing me wrist pain - I'm hoping that I can talk to Stuart about this next lesson, and see if it is related to something I'm messing up in the swing.

Here's journal entry number 2.

I wrote this one out after my second lesson with Stuart and Adam (my lesson partner), and the focus of the lesson was soft high shots aimed to travel the length of the court and die in the back corners.

1. Hit ball with open racquet face to ensure that it hits high on the wall.

Seems pretty obvious, but I don't do it enough anyhow. This shot is extremely valuable - if your opponent is sitting on the T, ready for your next shot, hitting anything hard and low will be easily cut off by him. If I'm making a shot from the back corner, and my opponent cuts it off at the service-box line (about mid-court), I'm very quickly going to find myself running the diagonal of the court. By placing my shots high, and having them land in the back corner, he has no option but to move off the T and dig my shot out of the corner.

2. When ball is very tight against back wall, choke up and use a wrist flick to hit the ball high on the front wall.

Most people will boast when the ball is in this position, since it allows them to prepare their swing parallel to the back wall. However, the danger of this boast is that it puts the ball right up front when you yourself are in the back of the court. This almost guarantees that you're going to be chasing the full diagonal of the court to get to the next shot your opponent makes - it may not seem like much, but that's a hell of a long way to run after a long rally.

When using the wrist flick, the ball should hit nearly at the very top of the front wall. Don't try and hit the ball in the middle of the court and then continue to arc upwards, before falling back down on its path to the back wall - the ball should hit the front wall at the top of its arc, then fall gracefully back down into the rear corner, thus giving your opponent the ol' screwgie.

3. Don't pronate elbow!

This appears to be my subconcious effort to adapt to the new grip Stuart has shown me. As I'm about to hit the ball on the swing, I'm rotating my arm with my elbow. This reduces the accuracy of the shot, and will really mess up the tendons in my arm if I'm not careful. It could be that this is happening because of I'm not preparing my swing properly.

4. Follow through forehand should end up at shoulder

Had this in the last entry too, but it's important and I need to work on it.

5. Point at the ball with my free hand as I'm taking the forehand shot, and follow through with that hand, out and away from my body.

I have a tendency to hug my arms together, bringing my free hand in towards my body as I make my forehand shots. This reduces the amount of power I can get on my shots.

6. For drills, throw the ball at the backwall, then hit it high on the front wall to have it bounce once on the ground, then off the backwall. Repeat this as many times as possible. Current goal should be twenty times in a row. Make use of wrist flicks for especially tight shots.

Being able to make tight rail shots from the back corners adds another dimension to my game. If I can only boast the ball when it is in the back corner, my opponent can begin to anticipate my shots and wait for them in the front corner, then let me run like hell when he puts a drop shot there. By reliably being able to place the shot back in the back corner, he has to wait on the T, or find himself running the diagonal chasing my shot.

That concludes the second lesson I had, and what I learned. I've already started to pick up on my grip a little, and feel that the benefit gained solely from no longer having to change back and forth to my forehand/backhand grips is substantial - If I was anticipating a shot on my front side, and suddenly found it coming to my backhand, it would take me valuable seconds to quickly adjust my grip before I could make a semi-decent (translation: suckless) shot.

I'm not sure why I'm pronating my elbow through my shots, but I can definitely tell I'm doing it, so hopefully practice and drills will erase that bad habit. I've started trying to make my shots higher on the front wall more often, but need more practice. So far, most of my attempts are semi-high, but usually turn out to just be a lob that ends about mid-court. So not only does my opponent still cut them off, but he has all the time in the world to sit there and figure out what he wants to do with his shot.

With regards to the lessons I'm taking, and Stuart as a coach, they're awesome. It is literally an entirely different game for me now than it was a year ago, when I first joined the UVic squash ladder and started practicing with Jeff and Mark. Having Stuart there to help is indispensable - he can feed the ball in the perfect spot everytime, making drill time much more efficient, and it's incredibly helpful (and humbling) having someone there to point out the mistakes you make, as you're making them, rather than having them incorporated into your game and become bad habits.

Just to finish up, I'm including a definition of some of the squash terms I'm using, just in case any non-squash players are following along.

Diagonal: The diagonal is the maximal length that you have to run in the squash court, and is from one of the two back/front corners to the opposite front/back corner. Making this journey will wear you out pretty damn quick, so it's a really good idea to avoid giving your opponent the opportunity to force you to run it.

Boast Shot: The boast shot is any shot that hits one of other three walls before hitting the front wall. In squash, each shot you make must hit the front wall before bouncing on the ground in order for it to be in. On its path up to the front wall, it can hit any number of walls, as long as it doesn't hit the ground before the front wall. A boast from the back corner typically immediately hits the side wall at the back, then travels diagonally up to the front wall, usually landing close to the front corner opposite to where you made the shot.

Open/Closed Racquet Face: The more open your racquet face, the more parallel it is to the floor/ceiling. The more open your racquet face is, the higher the ball's arc will be on the way to the front wall.

Alright, so this kicks off the first of my squash journals. I wrote this one out shortly after my first lesson/assessment with Stuart Dixon, the pro at my squash club.

1. Aim drives to land in the service box

Most of my drives are coming down along the side wall pretty well, but I'm putting way too much power into them. Aim to have the ball land in the back of the service box, then hit the rear wall. It's better to be softer and not have it hit the rear wall, than too hard and have it bounce right off the rear wall. Any shot that bounces off the rear wall is a poor shot, because it doesn't make the opponent run the full length of the court, and it gives him a lot more space within which to make his next shot.

2. Use less power

This coincides with the above note. When playing my shots try to aim softer and higher. I have a good shot at about the service line level, and should keep making shots there, but take the power down a good deal.

3. Take forehand shots off left leg

There's always going to be times when it won't be possible to take a forehand shot off the left leg, but doing so will allow me to generate more power (a good deal of the power in a squash shot is caused rotating your torso around your hips - taking a shot off the back leg cuts off a lot of the range of this motion).

4. The motion for a forehand shot is a lot like skipping rocks across a lake

The wrist should be cocked at the top of the swing, and the swing should be begin by leading with the elbow and butt of the racquet. As you approach the ball, the racquet head should swing through and connect with the ball, then follow through back up to your shoulder. For a graphical representation of this, see my friend Jeff's blog.

5. Don't flick wrist through shots

Doing so will rob me of most of the power I would have, render my shot less accurate, and mess up my wrist. The motion of the swing should be a clean and effortless motion, and should flow smoothly - flicking the wrist isn't smooth.

6. If I am going to hit a strong shot, make sure that it is aimed low on the front wall. The lower half of the section of the wall underneath the service line is a good place for a strong shot.
7. Soft shots, aimed high on the wall are great to use, and the lack of speed of the ball isn't an issue

Moving the opponent off the T, and into the back corner, is never a bad thing. Ever.

8. After every shot, clear by moving towards the center, then back or forwards to the T.

Don't make a direct path to the T, or you're likely to get a stroke called on you.

9. Keep grip loose when striking balls along the wall

And keep them looser throughout most of my shots as well. The racquet shouldn't be held in a white-knuckle grip - it should be held relaxed. For shots that I'm scraping off the side wall, the racquet really needs to hit the wall and kind of glance along it. Keeping my grip loose will make this easier - keeping the grip tight will cause the racquet to bounce off the wall when it first makes contact.

10. Backhand shots should follow through straight with the desired path of the ball, typically parallel to the wall.

Don't follow through around the circumference of the circle traced by the direction my hips can pivot, as this will increase the likelihood of sending the ball bouncing off the side wall.

That's it for the first journal. I hope to have more posted by the end of tonight. I'll also be putting up menu options along the side so that people can browse posts corresponding to a specific post, in case someone wants to read only the squash entries, etc.

Man, everything is happening so quickly lately. Wasn't it just Halloween? Now it's Christmas and I still have to do all of my Christmas shopping. It feels like everything is speeding by at breakneck speed, and I'm only accomplishing minor things at a snail's pace. Oh well, not too much I can do about it, except become more cynical and bitter at the whole world, and eventually take it out on the children that live on the same block as me when I'm old. I've decided in advance that my thing is going to be owning thousands of different shovels. Kids will be terrified of me and think that I'm burying bodies or something. AND MAYBE I WILL!!!

Anyhow.. I'm in the process now of tweaking the system I've setup. I've bought a TV Tuner card, and I'm in the process of setting my server up to also act as a Freevo station. Freevo is basically an open-source take on the Tivo system that everyone has probably now heard about. It's basically a digital recorder. It works like this - I set up my linux machine so that it is able to grab TV listings. I also have the TV Tuner card in the machine, and that allows my machine to capture the incoming video from the cable, and record that to the hard drive. Using the TV listings, I determine what I want to record, and can then set up my computer to automatically start recording at a given time. That's pretty sweet.

Naturally it's frustrating as hell trying to get all of these programs to communicate with each other, especially since the install and documentation for Freevo sucks ass. The typical answer you get when you complain about this sort of thing to a Linux user is "That's Linux. Get used to it". This is the clear sign of an asshole, and you should just go ahead and throw a bag full of cats onto his head. You'll be doing the world a favour.

The irony of all that is that I'm actually trying to get away from watching a ton of TV. Sometimes it's really nice to veg out and watch a hilarious TV show. And I enjoy watching shows like CSI now and then, but really I'd like to focus a little more on improving squash and poker. Those activites can only be improved so much in my own spare time (squash is much easier to practice with a partner, and poker really requires actually playing games to improve upon, and I don't want to start playing online poker).

There's other things I'd like to be doing more of as well. Reading books is always great, but I've had a dearth of good books at my disposal lately (bonus five points to the first person that can tell me what dearth means without using a dictionary - should be fairly obvious from the context).

If I really can't find anything else to do, I'd like to put a little more focus into improving dancing. Not so much anything extravagant, but just to take time to go back and properly learn the foudnations for the dance styles I'm into. As I discovered when I first started taking squash lessons (and pretty much every subsequent lesson thereafter), having a solid foundation is absolutely crucial in order to improve beyond a certain point, and I'm severely lacking that foundation for dancing. For a view of someone that has put the effort and time required to learn the appropriate foundation, take a look at Michi's website here.

Michi first learned about popping when he came out to a dance session with Graham and I at Beacon Hill park, back when we used to dance there. He's pretty insanely focused, and doesn't seem to mind sitting there practicing the right way to pop his chest over and over.. I guess I can understand - I don't mind hitting a squash ball against a wall for an hour in the morning, and that's really kind of the same thing.

Anyhow, now that Michi has taken classes from the founders of the funkstyles dances, I'm hoping he can give me some basic exercises to practice, and help me learn the dance properly. I've built up a ton of bad habits over the years, but you have to start somewhere.

With regards to squash, I had a minor breakthrough the other day. When I had my first session with Stuart he showed me the correct way to hold the racquet (yay, six years of bad habit and practice to break apart and relearn). Anyhow, the first day I was doing it properly, but I find that with a lot of things, I typically will do something right, then the next time I go to do it, I won't have totally solidified that technique in my head, and I'll subconciously make small changes. The end result was pretty bad, and my swing was different - closer to being correct than I originally was doing, but still bad, and kept causing me wrist pain, and to swing incorrectly. Anyhow, I only just figured out what I was doing wrong (with a bit of chastising from Stuart), and finally it feels like the puzzle has clicked one more piece into place. That means that it's slightly less frustrating to play. Then I'll start doing something else wrong, and spend the next month being frustrated all over again. That's why learning is fun.

Anyhow, I have to finish screwing around with Freebo here, whilst watching nice tepid porn from the 80s on channel 13.

Awesome Update: Bay has just pointed out, that in addition to the hideously ugly female porn-gasgiant wearing a thong, her sex-buddy is as well! Rock on 80s, rock on.

Update: Well, I decided to SCREW FREEVO. Buggiest installation ever. Very little information out there as to how you're meant to get this thing to actually compile on your system, and in addition to that, I couldn't even get the drivers for my card to install properly. It's not that I gave up without a fight either - I spent the better part of about twenty hours this weekend trying to get this thing to work before I finally decreed "Screw thee, I'm just going to use Windows". While it's decidedly less "geek-cool", I plugged the card in and IT WORKED. That's all I care about at this point. I like messing around with the scummier parts of computers, and getting my hands dirty trying to tune everything nicely, but I think there's a threshold at which you have to say "It's not worth it past this point, especially since I can just plug it in and make it work properly on that computer two feet away from me".

So now I can watch live TV, pause, fast forward and rewind while I'm watching, and record shows onto my hard drive. That's all fine and good, because I don't own a VCR anymore (or at least, if I do, it doesn't work very well and is probably hidden in a box somewhere), and I don't want to own one again. In my opinion, the age of the analog format is finally coming to a close, and there's really nothing positive I can say anymore about tape format.

VCR tapes are big, ugly, don't provide random access, and degrade very quickly over time. I love everything about digital media - you can scan through it quickly, you can make backups to take with you anywhere, it's totally portable, you can copy it easily and take it with you, and you can rapidly send it to a friend to check out if you want to.

Unfortunately, these are all reasons that media conglomerates, and recording studios/artists generally don't like about the format. We'll all just have to sit and wait and see who wins the great lawsuit war of 2010.

Lately, I've been setting out some goals for myself, in terms of the hobbies I'm currently interested in - most notably squash and poker, but also dancing and computers to a lesser extent. I've been keeping journals of my progress, thoughts, and lessons in squash and poker on my PDA, but I'm going to transfer these (and future entries) to the blog, and provide categories for them (so that people can just filter right through them if they're not interested). The reasons I'm going to do this are:

1. Hopefully some people will find it interesting.
2. Hopefully some people with more experience than myself will read these thoughts, and correct me where I am wrong.
3. It will give me a basis for comparison between how my mindset has changed, and how I've developed.

In two years time from now, I'd like to be a B level squash player - capable of making all of the basic shots without any preventable errors, and learning to do more complex shots, like drops from the middle of the court, and better boasts. I'd also like to be able to contend with my friend Jeff on the court, have played in at least one tournament and joined a league by this time next year.

Poker is a little harder to gauge this way if I'm not willing to play online, but I'd like to have played in at least two tournaments by this time next year. Whether or not I win money is irrelevant, but I would like to observe as much as possible of the opponents I encounter, and try and figure out why I'm losing to the people that beat me.

The next two tasks I would like finished on the computer/technology end is to get Samba up and running on my Fedora Core machine, and have that and my Windows XP box networked together. I'd also like to see if I can get more functionality out of the remote that came with my tuner card - Ideally I'd like to be able to control Winamp from it, so that I can read on the couch and change songs/volume/etc. without having to get up.

Squash and poker journals should start getting updated sometime midweek.

Alright! I've got everything set back up. My whole FreeBSD server went down on Friday night, as promised. The process of setting Fedora Core 3 back up has been relatively painless. FC3 has a pretty decent package updater called yum (acronym for Yellow dog Update Manager), and that's made it pretty easy to install everything. I haven't needed to hack any makefiles (although a few of the Perl modules I've had to install have had a couple of hitches, but nothing ridiculous).

I just spent the better half of today getting Movable Type back up and running, and reconfiguring my template files so I have the same layout as previously. My friend Chris wrote me and suggested using a simple Turing test to determine if it is actually a spam-bot or a human entering my comments. I'd considered this a while back when I had initially set up MT-Blacklist as a means to regulate the incoming spam. Blacklists seem like a relatively poor method of combatting spam (it doesn't take too much effort to switch servers, or provide a new URL, or even to code the URL in some manner), and I was surprised to not have seem something like gif images being used to display a code that needed to be entered. Well, you'll now all be thrilled to know that there is exactly that. Horray!

I searched Google and tracked down what I was looking for and set it up. Feel free to test the install by entering a comment. If you can break it and sneak through without the correct code, I'd like to hear about it. Given that, it means I can actually open up comments again, which is good.

I needed a break last night, so I put up on my camera and threw together a quick dance video. At the time the music was really doing it for me, but it sounds pretty repetitive to me now. Some of the isolation I'm doing is very weak (my arm waves really suck). Some of the other stuff is cool. Halfway through Maui got irritated by the fact that I was dancing in her space and tried to intimidate me out of the way, but it didn't work. In retrospect, the bit at the end is pretty horrible - I was trying to strobe my way back to the camera, but it looks more like I have vertigo and can't properly balance myself. And I'm also retarded. And doing the scary walk.

So.. Everything is up. I'm going to try and learn some 3D Studio Max, and catch some Zz's.

Update: I've had to purge almost all of the comments in the blog - there were about 6500 total, maybe 100 of which were legitimate. I didn't want to reinstall MT-Blacklist, because I don't like the way it hooks into the rest of Movable Type (it's actually a different comment script you're running altogether). That left me with two options - manually delete each comment, or massive SQL deletion. Option number two won out, for obvious reasons, so now there's 20 comments left.

Well, the time has come. Just as StrongBad must wish goodbye to his faithful companion Compy386, ushering in the new era for the Lappy486, I too must bid farewell to my FreeBSD machine.

We've had some good times, and it was definitely an interesting first experience for UNix. I'm not really sure how I let Myron talk me into using FreeBSD as the first UNix to try. In all fairness, FreeBSD runs very efficiently, and with little footprint in memory. I think. I really couldn't tell you for sure, because it's so damn un-user-friendly. It's an OS designed for people that want efficiency, and don't mind putting in ten hours to get their mouse wheel working properly. Me? I want my mouse wheel to work as though by MAGIC. I don't find it fun to spend hours trying to figure out how to make these things work.

In Myron's defense, I probably learned a lot more about the inner workings (or maybe nothing at all) of a UNix system than I would have normally - if I was running Mandrake or RedHat, I would probably have spent a lot less time mucking around with my XWindows setup, or in rc.d. Consequently, Fedora Core 3 will be the new replacement for FreeBSD once all of the dust settles.

I've chosen Fedora Core 3 because I was using it at my previous job, working for a professor at UVic, and I found the install easy, and the package support pretty decent. I didn't have to hack any make files or anything to get things to install properly, though I'm not making the assumption that that won't be required now and then. I'll miss the awesome ports system that FreeBSD has available - you can basically tell FreeBSD to download and install a given program, along with all of its required dependancies. Of course, I won't miss the problems that I ran into with the ports system - namely that sometimes I would get bizarre cross dependancy issues and have to do some major bushwhacking to sort out what was going wrong. Fedora is pretty user-friendly, and seems very polished. That probably doesn't appeal to some of the gurus out there, but I like it, and I like feeling like I'm dealing with a cohesive operating system, rather than a kludge of components that just happened to wind up in an operating system.

So that means there'll be a week or possibly more of down time. Given the frequency of my updates lately, I'm sure this will be near unbearable for everyone, but I don't care about anyone but myself, so you'll just have to cope. I recommend buying me gifts as a way to vent your frustration.

I downloaded the first season of Arrested Development today - it's a new show that's been airing on Fox. Anything that shows up on Fox is typically about as worthwhile a way to spend your time as standing on the corner actually taking the time to listen to the panhandler's reason that you should actually give your money to them rather than the other panhandlers.

Oddly enough, it turns out that Arrested Development is pretty hilarious. I don't know how it happened. How did this show land on Fox, instead of HBO, where it belongs? I can only guess that a comet struck the head offices of Fox and killed everyone in them, and the janitor got to choose what shows made the cut.

My first tip-off that the show might be good was that the cast had some promising members. Most notably, David Cross, all time awesomest comedian, and Jeffrey Tambor, from The Larry Sanders show (Hey Now!). There's a bunch of other interesting choices, especially Jason Bateman, who I recognized from his sublime performance in Teen-Wolf Too (that's spelt correctly). Not only that, but the creator and director's must actually be intelligent - or at least, be casting roles specifically to my tastes. The show has tons of cameo's with actors and comedians from a ton of shows and movies that I've loved, but have managed to fly somewhat under the radar: The two main actors from a movie called Melvin Goes to Dinner are in there, Bob Odenkirk shows up for a role played alongside David Cross's recurring character (who, as an aside, is a never-nude - someone that is incapable of ever being nude. He has to wear jean cut-offs all the time to accomodate for this), along with several of the other members from Mr. Show (The best, and only consistently funny sketch-comedy show in existence). They've even got Liza Minelli in a bunch of the episodes, playing, basically, herself, and just now I noticed that the weird guy from Saved by the Bell who was an actor/Max employee is in there.

The show has some similarities with News Radio, in that there are a lot of different types of comedy, and a lot of characters that are relatable, though each in different ways. The only person I'd really like to see in here is Phil Hartman. Tragically, this can never happen, but every now and then, I imagine the character he would be playing, and wish that it could be. The only thing I don't like about the show is that Ron Howard is the narrator. He does a decent job, and that's a petty problem. The main reason I don't like Ron Howard is because I think he's a dick for what he did with The Grinch, and I'm really not a very big fan of his style of directing. The narration throughout the show adds a slight tongue-in-cheek feel to the comedy, which I'm a big fan of (Sort of along the same lines as Amelie).

Anyhow, there's a kind of funny post in the works, but damn, these bastards take aeons to write. Oh, to have a job where I can devote four hours of my day to writing humour articles. Nah, I don't want that.