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Sewer Update
Oct. 22nd, 2010 02:34 pmWell, the MTS people arrived early yesterday, eventually consisting of two vans and a tanker. An hour or so later they were joined by the guy from Thames Water, and the mob-handed team went to work.
Four hours later, they had got the stuck hose out. For the technically minded, this entailed "crimping a metal band round the hose, another metal band round another same sized hosed, and then a bigger metal band to join the two -- thus creating a new longer hose. That gave them the leverage to upll it out, eventually.
Five hours after that the tanker had decamped to the car park of the Adult Education Centre on Granville Park, whence a large suction hose was moved over the garden of number 2 and into the drain at the back of my house, number 4.
By which time it was getting dark.
The only bad news to come out of all of yesterday was that they still haven't finished. Basically that pipe is all scaled up and needs a descaling, which requires different equipment and another full day's work. Even though the gunge has been sucked out, and the blocking hose removed, the pipe remains like a blocked artery.
The good news is that I didn't have to pay the three grand of cost I reckon yesterday would have come to if I had been liable for the expense. The other good news is that, by November 11th, a mere 11 weeks after the problem started, it might be over. In the grand scheme of things and in the scheme of my early estimations (admittedly when I thought the structural problem was far worse than it turned out to be) this is about four weeks ahead of schedule.
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On the poker front, I'm trying to battle "hand fatigue", as I think it needs to be termed. When you are bashing through 650 hands an hour on 10 tables, you kind of go into a trance, and this leads to playing badly. This really is a matter of mental fitness rather than technical ability. I made a bad call on the river for $62 last night because of this. It was onay, there were marginal justifications for it (I had a set of tens and opponent had nut flush which he hit on the turn -- which is the only holding apart from AK that I could see him checking), but the fact remains that an all-in pot-sized bet from this player made a nonsense of the theoretical range -- he would very rarely have bluffed AK for that amount, and he would have checked a lower set. A non-nut flush he would have "protected" on the turn.
All of which is so much waffle. The point remains that once you get up to what I'll call "fruit machine" velocity at online poker, the hardest thing is to avoid this "trance" and to know when to shift off autopilot and onto "let's think about this".
Why do this? Why not move back to "what I know"? New challenges, I guess. It really becomes too boring to do the same thing again and again, so you just try different things, even if it's slightly negative EV.
______________
Four hours later, they had got the stuck hose out. For the technically minded, this entailed "crimping a metal band round the hose, another metal band round another same sized hosed, and then a bigger metal band to join the two -- thus creating a new longer hose. That gave them the leverage to upll it out, eventually.
Five hours after that the tanker had decamped to the car park of the Adult Education Centre on Granville Park, whence a large suction hose was moved over the garden of number 2 and into the drain at the back of my house, number 4.
By which time it was getting dark.
The only bad news to come out of all of yesterday was that they still haven't finished. Basically that pipe is all scaled up and needs a descaling, which requires different equipment and another full day's work. Even though the gunge has been sucked out, and the blocking hose removed, the pipe remains like a blocked artery.
The good news is that I didn't have to pay the three grand of cost I reckon yesterday would have come to if I had been liable for the expense. The other good news is that, by November 11th, a mere 11 weeks after the problem started, it might be over. In the grand scheme of things and in the scheme of my early estimations (admittedly when I thought the structural problem was far worse than it turned out to be) this is about four weeks ahead of schedule.
++++++++
On the poker front, I'm trying to battle "hand fatigue", as I think it needs to be termed. When you are bashing through 650 hands an hour on 10 tables, you kind of go into a trance, and this leads to playing badly. This really is a matter of mental fitness rather than technical ability. I made a bad call on the river for $62 last night because of this. It was onay, there were marginal justifications for it (I had a set of tens and opponent had nut flush which he hit on the turn -- which is the only holding apart from AK that I could see him checking), but the fact remains that an all-in pot-sized bet from this player made a nonsense of the theoretical range -- he would very rarely have bluffed AK for that amount, and he would have checked a lower set. A non-nut flush he would have "protected" on the turn.
All of which is so much waffle. The point remains that once you get up to what I'll call "fruit machine" velocity at online poker, the hardest thing is to avoid this "trance" and to know when to shift off autopilot and onto "let's think about this".
Why do this? Why not move back to "what I know"? New challenges, I guess. It really becomes too boring to do the same thing again and again, so you just try different things, even if it's slightly negative EV.
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