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Ram’s Island isn’t even big enough to merit a name label on Google Maps (even if you zoom in!)
Still, on Saturday we traipsed off there to take part in a de-littering. There are already a bunch of pics up on the official Ram’s Island site about the event.
I like the way they’re trying to turn the island into a wildlife reserve. There’s no in-your-face environmentalism or conservation, just a bunch of folks trying to make that bit of the world a better place.
It’s only a small island, but there was a lot of litter washed up from the recent floods (and a huge number of spent shotgun shells). I think we managed to make a big difference on the day, but we probably need another one to tackle the bits of the island we didn’t get to last time… If you want to join in, let me know.
You probably couldn’t give a monkey’s about such things, but SWMBO and I went for a walk around Glenariff Forest Park on Friday and I used my phone’s GPS to trace the path. Here’s where we walked:
It may not look like much in the map, but it’s a beautiful bit of the country.
As a side note, even though we took a brief detour, we did the 8.9km walk in only 8.7km. Our next job is to do the Kessel Run in less than ‘less than 12 parsecs’.
‘How To Speed Up’ Score: 3/5
I didn’t get a lot from this book. That’s either because:
Much as I’d like to believe it’s the former, it’s pretty clearly the latter. I don’t think the things this book tells us are particularly obvious, just common knowledge these days. I reckon the time for this book has passed. It may have been good in its day, but its day is gone.
And it was only published in 2008.
Just over a week ago, I ran my first public 5k. With other people! I still find 5k tough going, and I’ve only run beside another runner once (and that was only about 3k), so it was quite an experience.
I thought I’d beaten my fastest 5k time because RunKeeper pinged the 5k alert at 33 minutes 40 seconds. (Look, it’s a record for me, OK? I’m slow – I admit it.) Unfortunately, the iPhone’s flaky GPS had got a couple of points wrong, and it thought I’d run further than I had.
I edited the GPS track on RunKeeper’s web site (I love being able to do that!), and it tells me I did the 5k in 36 minutes 9 seconds, which isn’t my best. (The course was a bit easier than the one I did my fastest time on too!)
Still, it was a good experience, and it was fun seeing folks I’d only ‘seen’ on Twitter. And – most importantly – it raised a lot of money for charity. They’d hoped that the fun run and the music event would raise £20,000, but one week later it’s raised (so far) £40,819.79! Well done all!
It’s a fairly damning indictment of someone who has set up a system for playing poker via Twitter, but it looks like I’m just no good at poker.
I busted out of the 19th annual World Rec Gambling Poker Tournament (WRGPT19) in 674th place. That’s out of 1059 entrants. I’m not even in the top 50%!
Still, it’s better than last year, when I came 1029th, when I was eliminated in November. That was a bit embarrassing. At least this year I made it to January (and nearly February!) My best performance is still WRGPT15, where I came 72nd.
Here are my results from all the WRGPT tournaments I’ve participated in:
(* That’s the number left in after the first hand, which is all the data I have).
My excuse is – this year I just didn’t get the cards. I know, I know, we all say that. This time though, I really felt the hole cards were against me, and I couldn’t get anything to play with. I was getting blinded out of the tournament, and everyone else’s stack was increasing. So I went all in pre-flop with suited AQ. I know it’s not the best possible hand to go all in with, but my options were limited and it really was the best hole cards I’d had in a long time.
I lost.
Ah well.
Here’s the log of the hand from the WRGPT server:
! Table c17, Hand 71, Day 77 ! unn folds ! Pot right ($73325), flopping/dealing/drawing cards ! 3 players, 3 all in ! Flopped cards: 5s 8s 6s ! Flopped card: 7d ! Flopped card: 5c +-+----------------------------+--------+--------+------+----+--------+ |#| Name |Bankroll| Action |Status|Pot#|Pot Size| +-+----------------------------+--------+--------+------+----+--------+ 1| Ed Kearns | 0 | 25375 |all-in| 2 | 23150 | 2|D skatesave | 0 | 31450 |all-in| 1 | 6075 | 3| Randy Collack | 48650 | 500 |folded| | | 4| ksbigfoot | 121000 | 900 |folded| | | 5| Marc Rind | 29500 | 100 |folded| | | 6| ncvandy | 32950 | 100 |folded| | | 7| OpinionatedGeek | 0 | 13800 |all-in| 3 | 44100 | 8| erich | 25875 | 100 |folded| | | 9|> unn | 81750 | 900 |folded| | | 10| Puddy | 33500 | 100 |folded| | | +-+----------------------------+--------+--------+------+----+--------+ ! History of this hand: ! 01/28/10 20:19:21! Dealing a new hand ! 01/28/10 20:19:21! Everyone antes $100 ! 01/28/10 20:19:21! Randy Collack blinds $400 ! 01/28/10 20:19:21! ksbigfoot blinds $800 ! 01/28/10 21:28:15! Marc Rind folds ! 01/29/10 07:07:10! ncvandy folds ! 01/29/10 07:17:34! OpinionatedGeek calls ! 01/29/10 07:17:34! erich folds ! 01/29/10 07:36:22! unn calls ! 01/29/10 07:53:29! Puddy folds ! 01/29/10 08:55:57! Ed Kearns raises $24475 and is all in ! 01/29/10 10:10:53! skatesave raises $6075 and is all in ! 01/29/10 10:10:53! Randy Collack folds ! 01/29/10 10:10:53! ksbigfoot folds ! 01/31/10 09:50:11! OpinionatedGeek calls - side pot ! 01/31/10 13:31:39! unn folds ! 01/31/10 13:31:39! Pot right ($73325), flopping/dealing/drawing cards ! 01/31/10 13:31:39! 3 players, 3 all in ! 01/31/10 13:31:39! Flopped cards: 5s 8s 6s ! 01/31/10 13:31:39! Flopped card: 7d ! 01/31/10 13:31:39! Flopped card: 5c ! Hand over, current board is: 5s 8s 6s 7d 5c ! Ed Kearns has: 8d 8c ! skatesave has: Ks Kc ! OpinionatedGeek has: Ah Qh ! Pot 1: uncalled $6075 returned to skatesave ! Pot 2: Ed Kearns wins $23150 with Full House (8 8 8 5 5) ! Pot 3: Ed Kearns wins $44100 with Full House (8 8 8 5 5) +-+----------------------------+--------+--------+------+----+--------+ |#| Name |Bankroll| Action |Status|Pot#|Pot Size| +-+----------------------------+--------+--------+------+----+--------+ 1| Ed Kearns | 67250 | | | | | 2| skatesave | 6075 | | | | | 3|D Randy Collack | 48650 | | | | | 4| ksbigfoot | 121000 | | | | | 5| Marc Rind | 29500 | | | | | 6| ncvandy | 32950 | | | | | 8| erich | 25875 | | | | | 9|> unn | 81750 | | | | | 10| Puddy | 33500 | | | | | +-+----------------------------+--------+--------+------+----+--------+ ! OpinionatedGeek is eliminated! ! 673 players left in the tournament, 0 tables down to six players ! A new hand will be dealt shortly
I enjoyed the book ‘The Next 100 Years’, and thought the arguments about what would happen in the future made some sense.
I got the book because I’d read a few Stratfor briefings - the briefings are normally very expensive, but permission was granted to John Mauldin to pass a few specific ones on last year, and they were very interesting.
Now I find they have their own ‘channel’ on YouTube. The video briefings are quite short, but they still have a bit more insight than you see on the news. (Or, perhaps, a lot more insight than you see on the news, depending on what news you watch.)
The videos are worth checking out, but I feel the need to embed this one in particular, where the author of ‘The Next 100 Years’, George Friedman, describes some of the topics the book covers.
“Ender Back On Form” Score: 5/5
I’ve written before about how I like a lot of what Orson Scott Card writes, and when I haven’t liked one of his books I’ve said so. But I was starting to get concerned that I liked early Orson Scott Card stuff, and the later stuff was less and less to my taste.
Well, that’s changed with this book. It may turn out I mostly just like the Ender saga – Ender’s Game was what started me reading his books after all. Maybe not though – I still think he’s a great author. But the Ender books seem especially good to me.
I’m not sure why. It’s not as if I see myself as Ender. I think the author does a great job conveying Ender’s character, and creating a great deal of empathy (in me at any rate). I’ve felt that about Ender – and other characters – throughout the Ender saga. Less so in the Shadow saga though, even though it’s set in the same ‘universe’ and some of the characters are the same. I’ve generally had less empathy towards characters in other Orson Scott Card books. I wonder if he consciously does anything different when writing them…
The book is a little odd in that it’s a ‘midquel’ – a term I’d never heard before (and hope not to hear again). The book takes place between chapters 14 and 15 of Ender’s Game, so we know not just the events that led up to it but also the events that came after it. (Also, pedants will probably grate on the inconsistencies it introduces, but they’re noted in the author’s Afterword and my memory was nowhere near encyclopaedic enough to notice.) It does make me wonder in what order I would recommend reading the series. The general chronological order of the series? The order they were written? The exact chronological of the Ender universe (which would entail starting Ender’s Game, then starting and finishing Ender In Exile and the Shadow series before finishing Ender’s Game). OK, that would all be just too bizarre. Read them in the order they were written – it was how I read them, and it didn’t do me any harm.
For different reasons, I enjoyed Ender’s Game, Speaker For The Dead, and Xenocide. I can now quite happily add Ender In Exile to that list.
“This Really Is PsychoHistory” Score: 4/5
I don’t often read about politics, economics or history, but after reading a couple of StratFor briefings I decided to buy this book.
And it is good.
It really does read like psychohistory though – geopolitics + economics seems to be pretty much what Asimov envisioned psychohistory to be.
It’s fascinating stuff. Following the very rational course described in this book, we’re on course for a couple of wars, including another cold war with Russia. The US continues to be at the heart of it all. And there’ll be space battles.
The space section really does read like science fiction, but the author explains what drives countries to get to that point, and how the technology will be available to them when they get there. (It reads very like Kurzweil’s method of forecasting, incidentally.)
So after reading it I know who the likely powers will be throughout the next century, and what tensions will exist between them all. Great stuff. I have no idea if it’s likely to come about though. Will he be right? Will he be even half right? I don’t know, but it has given me an interesting way to look at things in future.
A more interesting question is that, now that he has listed potential future wars and forecast their outcome, has he changed the future so that the war won’t happen or will have a different outcome? Now there’s a question…
“Where Are We From” Score: 4/5
This is another expansive, deep science fiction book. Like ‘Replay’, I heard about it from someone else’s list of top science fiction – there were three books on the list I’d never read, and two of them (‘Replay’ and this) have been very good. The third, well, I’m struggling with it. It’s not a very enjoyable read so far.
This one, however, was fun to read. It tries to deal with humanity’s intelligence, where it came from in the universe, and how does it fit in with other, alien, races. While the main question the book poses is interesting, and never really resolved, it does leave a bigger question unasked. Maybe the author is hoping that question won’t become obvious until later books in the series.
Still, there’s plenty of good science fiction plot to get your head around, some interesting tech, and plenty of inter-species politics (like in the Dune saga). I can see myself ordering a few more books from this series.
“I’ve Seen The Future” Score: 4/5
I’d never heard of this book, even though it was published in 1986 and has been republished as a ‘Fantasy Masterwork’. That’s good because it means there are still plenty of good books out there for me to read that I haven’t heard of (which is great news because I have Amazon vouchers and today’s top 10 in Science Fiction & Fantasy seem bereft of originality. 3 True Blood books, 2 Twilight books, 2 Terry Pratchett books (much as I love him), 1 Dan Brown (noooo…), 1 Stephen King, and 1 Robert Jordan book that isn’t even by Robert Jordan.
So, the premise of this book is that a guy wakes up in his 18-year-old body. I’m not giving any of the plot away, don’t worry – this is the fundamental stuff which is the basis for the plot.
What would you do if you got to relive your life from 18 years of age up until now? What would you do differently? What would you do, now that you ‘know’ the future? Would you go for money? Would you try to undo mistakes you’d made? Would you try to shut yourself away from the world? Would you try and find out why it happened? Would you use the knowledge of the future to become incredibly powerful?
I haven’t a baldy what I’d do, but it was fun finding out what someone else thought.
