Grinding

[peterbirks]

We are entering what might be called the Birks grind season. This runs from the beginning of the summer school holidays to its end. At this point I do not take holidays from work, I do not take holidays from poker. I work to accumulate enough money to pay my bills for the rest of the year.

Which, I intend, will consist of at least two holidays, possibly three. That's a nice number of holidays to look forward to from September 1 to December 31, isn't it?

Possibilities:

A Spanish villa in early/mid September. May book one and invite some friends to come visit. How balla is that?

A solos trip to Morocco in November. This is a week that includes a night in a Bedouin tent, a trip on a camel, and a visit to the northern Sahara, "off-piste" (or whatever the desert equivalent of that is). Unique in that it would be my first visit to a country that I can never remember how to spell (there are others, btw; Lichtenstein, Andorra)

And a trip to LV in December. I'm trying to work out how to spend my soon-to-expire air miles on an upgrade, but it seems to me that if you book it online you just do so "on a promise". I may resort to the telephone on this one, although talking to Branston Inc Hyderabad will possibly not put me in the best of moods.

++++++++

It didn't take long for the Party Poker short-stackers to turn out in force (see my earlier post about the good rakeback deal). Mainly German, they seem to appear at between 5pm and 6pm CET, hanging around for four or five hours, indicating (to me) that they are mainly students.

More irritating than their existence (I actually like games where the manority of players is short-stacked) is their habit of sitting out when conditions are not perfect for them. It would definitely be nice if most of them suffered a fatal country-and-age-specific form of cancer....

The deep joy is to see their fury when they lose a 60:40 shot.

If you have to play these guys, try to get two immediately on your left and two immediately on your right. If the big stacks are sitting together on the other side of the table, you have a superb position, because effectively you can play deep-stack and short-stack simultaneously.


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Comments

ib4e, particularly before cht

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

So, now you're claiming that you can spell the new "name" for Burma without having to think, eh?

Apart from your lamentable lack of Arabic, which is really the only tool for spelling the name of some piss-pot dictatorship in the desert, I can't really blame you for mis-spelling al-Mamlaka al-Maġribiyya. It's a tough one. I tend to remember it as "the home of the Moors," which just means you duplicate the wrong letter. Or, worse, confuse it with Mauretania, a place which has almost nothing to do with Moors whatsoever. One could be classical and Western and neo-imperialist, I suppose, in which case one would spell it "Morroch;" a name which Wikipedia assures me comes from medieval Latin. Which I doubt. I'd believe medieval Greek, but that really doesn't look like medieval Latin to me. I mean, the bloody fools managed to mangle "Toghrul of the Cheraits" into "Prester John," and I don't see them passing on an unadorned guttural suffix. And it's not very helpful, either, because it just reinforces the mistake you're trying to avoid.

Blogs are, of course, a constant source of spelling conundra (which in turn, I suppose, should be conundrorum. I think). By nature ephemeral, by habit slapdash. Which leads me to two interesting thoughts:

(1) Why does no blogger on the face of the planet use a spell-checker? I'm averse to the things myself, and would rather make mistakes than go through the sheer wavy-lined hell of trying to prove myself correct, over and over again. But then, I'm not everybody. Why does everybody do this? Is it some kind of unwritten, masonic law?
(2) What on earth is your problem with "Andorra?"

Re: ib4e, particularly before cht

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

And I've just mis-spelled Mauritania, which no doubt reinforces some deep point of which I am presently unaware. That's what an education in the Classics does for you.

Lost Wages

[(Anonymous)]

Good grief, Doubles even got the gayn correct :-)

From my limited understanding of Mr Branson's flying Ponzi scheme - you need to book a ticket in a suitable class and then you can upgrade in comparative certainty. It's a bit like the Swiss "Business Upgrade" - it has to be available at time of booking, but once booked only a change of aircraft to a type with less J class seats can alter it (or if you try and alter the flights). You can do it at the airport, but that is in the lap of the gods and often gets the "No Catering" response (which actually means that the trolly dolly's boyfriend is on the standby list).

Of course, I'd be trying to work out how to either fly there on a EuroScam ticket or via the dreaded Bankfurt.

The Bowen of that Ilk

Re: Lost Wages

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Quite correct.

V-Flyer (http://www.v-flyer.com/) is a very geeky, but very good, unofficial web site about all things Virgin Atlantic. When you're talking about using your air miles for an upgrade, I'm not completely sure what classes you're thinking about upgrading from and to, though I have a good guess. This page (http://www.v-flyer.com/codes.asp) decodes all of Virgin's fare codes; if you're thinking of buying Premium Economy and spending 20,000 miles each way to upgrade to Upper then I'm pretty sure that you need to purchase a fare code S or W Premium Economy and make sure that there's a code G Upper ticket available for the flight you want to take.

This isn't quite as easy as it sounds, or as it ought to be, but I half-remember that if you try requesting a reward booking (i.e. spending all miles and no money, rather than buying a ticket with money and upgrading it with miles) for a particular date-and-time combo then it will try to book you into the fare code G bucket. If you could get a particular flight as a reward ticket, then you should be able to upgrade a suitably-fare-coded ticket from a lower class for that particular flight.

This may make no sense. If that is the case, I apologise; I've just finished my second night shift and ought to go to bed.

Re: Lost Wages

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

After some study of the page you referred to, and re-reading what you wrote several times, I think I understand what you are saying. In fact I wanted to upgrade from economy to premium economy (10,000 miles each way), so all of the codes are different, but the principle remains the same. See if you can book it solely with rewards. If you can, then there will be a space available if you book it on the basis of lower grade fare + miles for upgrade.

On the downside, these look very restricted in terms of availability (and rewards only were certainly no good for when I wanted to travel). Miles Plus Money, meanwhile, doesn't mention Las Vegas at all....

PJ

Re: Lost Wages

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Got it in one. Well interpreted!

Vegas seems to really have been struggling for much of this year - at least, when the conventions haven't been in. A friend of mine got a package deal to go and see Ricky Hatton get walloped a few months ago; return flight plus (sharing with only one other person) five nights at the hotel where the fight was taking place - possibly the MGM? - for half a thousand pounds. He couldn't get a ticket for the fight as such and so ended up paying a whopping great cover to watch it in a sports bar, but didn't miss all that much.

Re: Lost Wages

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Don't be a ponce, Bowen -- you know perfectly well that I just copied it straight from a Wikipedia article.

For us unwashed children of a prior prophet, the term "gayn" might cause some confusion. Naturally, therefore, we turn to that prior prophet (Google in this case) for Knowledge.

Well, I now know what a gayn is. It isn't just the speck of fly-shit on the vdu that I had assumed. However, you may care to try both "gayn" and "arabic gayn," and weep for the future of intellectual search.

Alternatively, you might wish to explore www.gayegypt.com. It looks like fun.

Re: Lost Wages

[(Anonymous)]

But, Pete, I am a ponce.

I suspect I've spent far too much time with Unicode over the last 18 months, so I can spot all sorts of odd characters such as ﻍ . I knew we should never have told academentics that they could start putting in characters in non Western European character sets.

Personally, I think I prefer gay lebanon to gay egypt.

The Bowen of that Ilk.