Category: Observed (Page 20 of 24)

Friday office fun: A coworker has put a cupful of Jolly Ranchers atop the water cooler.

Suddenly the mouth is 11 years old once again, tasting raspberry but yearning for watermelon, getting the corners of the candy stuck on the molars, tongue flipping the candy lengthwise, waiting for the blob of glucose to become thin enough to bend in half, a feat of momentous proportion and assured glee.

Lunch will surely pale in comparison.

“Texas Hold ‘Em: deal two cards down to each player, five cards down to the table. A round of betting is held after the deal, then three of the table cards are turned up. Another round of betting follows. One more table card is flipped, followed by another round of betting. The last card is flipped, a final round if betting ensues, and finally a showdown in which players make their best hands using their two cards and the table’s five. High hand wins.

“Omaha is identical to Texas Hold ‘Em, but each player gets four cards. Final hands must include exactly two of the player’s four cards and exactly three of the table’s five cards. High and low hands split, but the low must be 8-high or better (lower) or the high gets it all. Cards speak for themselves.

“In Guts, everyone secretly puts a chip in their hand if they are staying in, otherwise they leave their hand empty. Players then hold their closed three-card hands in front of them and open them simultaneously. Players who held chips (and thus stayed in) reveal their hands. The winner takes the pot and the losers have to match what the pot was. New hands are then dealt. The game continues until only one player stays in, and thus the pot is emptied. Highest hand, without straights and flushes, wins. Many variants exist.

“The object of Seven Twenty-Seven is to get as close to 7 or 27 as possible. As in Blackjack, Aces are worth 1 or 11 and numbers are worth their face value. Face cards, however, are worth half a point (.5). The player to the dealer’s left is the lead player, with the lead rotating each round. Each round, each player starting with the lead has the opportunity to take one additional card. The lead then starts a round of betting. This continues until nobody takes an additional card. After a final betting round, players declare high/low/both and hold a showdown. Closest to 7 and closest to 27 split the pot.

“Screw Your Neighbor has no ante. Instead, each player places three of the highest-ranking chips in front of him. The lead begins to the left of the dealer and rotates with each hand. Each player in turn may opt to keep his current card or exchange it with the player to his left. If someone tries to take your card and you have a King, you may stop [the swap] by revealing your King. The last player may keep his card or exchange it for the top one from the deck. When all players have gone, everyone reveals their cards and the lowest card (Aces are high) tosses a chip into the pot. When you run out of chips, you’re out of the game.”

I love poker night. Here’s to many more evenings of high hands and laughter.

(Definitions quoted from Gamereport Poker Variants, lightly edited)

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission is still running its talking cab opinion survey. Vote no. Twice if you have to.

The T&LC site is chock full of information, including how to be a medallion owner and how to get a hack license. And they’re hiring.

An increasing number of design and IA sites are designing pages without any visual heft. The current move toward minimalist page design is prudent in the world of RSS and PDA feeds but makes for a rather lifeless browsing experience.

Gray text instead of black is the biggest offense. My eyes are feeling the strain of too many #666666 references on sites like IA/ and Xblog. On an LCD screen, the text is more difficult to read, not more pleasing to the eye. Note that Boxes and Arrows, an early adopter of the so-light-it’s-going-to-drift-away color scheme, has wisely pulled its body text designation back to black. The rest would be wise to follow suit.

Similarly, visual minimalism in page layout is pleasant enough, but please, give your pages some weight. The current weblog trend is gray text, pale non-underlined links, two spartan columns, and not much else. Yawn. A very fine line exists between basic and boring. C’mon, insert a third color or fill that open space a bit. Go ahead. I dare you.

What innovation can there be if leading-edge Web thinkers are publishing pages that look like glorified .txt files?

A furnident is the indentation left in a carpet by heavy furniture that has settled into place.

Somehow not everyone knows this word, but everyone should. Even mighty Google turns up just one search result for furnident. Let this be number two. furnident

The Ideapad celebrated its fourth anniversary on November 1.

On the ‘pad’s second birthday I wrote this, which is still fairly accurate and worth a read by the curious.

I occasionally wonder how long I’ll keep this going, but the site inevitably metamorphoses in style and keeps up with my whims. Here’s to another four years.

Comments

Lawyers have filed suit against McDonald’s trying to pin child obesity on the fast-food chain. Lawyer Samuel Hirsch calls children eating McDonald’s “a very insipid, toxic kind of thing.”

Here’s an idea: Americans could take responsibility for the children in their homes, and stop trying to blame someone else for their own families’ decrepit eating habits.

Then again, why bother? It’s easier to point fingers at someone else. And those fries taste so good. And it’s only 39 cents to SuperSize that soda….

Update, Nov. 25: The kids are suing McDonald’s, not the families. To which I say: You know fries are fattening, Tubby, and so do your parents and guardians. Give it a rest.

At Bice, an upscale Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan, the kind of place where men in suits can order $90 truffle pasta platters to impress other men in suits during their business lunches, in the men’s room, above the urinal:

WE AIM TO PLEASE
YOUR AIM WILL HELP

And apparently it’s hip now, too. How fucked up is your social life when you have to smoke crack to be “cool?”

I’m considering auto-deleting emails from certain country codes as a simple way to avoid spam.

No offense to the nations mentioned, but more than half the junk mail I receive is from Brazil and Denmark thanks to lax security by foreign sysadmins. I don’t know anyone in either country; why not filter them out? Seems far more straightforward than installing some half-brained spam software that may junk my real correspondence.

Which begs another question: do the spammers really think I’m going to “llame, por favor!” when the x-sender is .dk?