Well three people so far have asked me why I haven't been updating my blog. Since more people than I thought (zero) read it and are interested, and more to the point, since I enjoy rambling about myself--it makes me feel better--I guess I should add another entry.
The past few months have been a struggle. The initial thrill of being back in Las Vegas has not worn off per se, but it has been replaced by a lot of frantic worry about how I'm going to survive month by month. For those who don't play poker, let me just say that 50NL (aka $0.25/$0.50 no limit, the limit I'm playing) is not the limit at which one should be trying to derive a living wage. I feel like I have to play constantly just to keep up with my very modest expenses. And the past two months, I have not been running particularly well, and I'm sure I wasn't playing my best through a portion of them either.
July was the most swingy month I've ever had, and I was only up about $300 until the last day, which was a nice 700 days, bringing me to $1000 for the month plus another $600 in rake back. August ended firmly at that same original $300 but didn't end on any 700 dollar rallies, so with rakeback, I made a whopping $800. Amazingly, that's still enough to cover most of my monthly expenses, but I did get a speeding ticket ($200) and since my last oil change my car has seemed to get about half as many miles per gallon as it did previously. On top of that, I had to spend a very big (well big for me, right now) chunk of money that I wasn't planning on.
So all in all, I'm sitting on about $4200 of my original $6K I brought down to Vegas. Now that's not the end of the world certainly, I was down to $4700 a few months ago, but managed to pull back and make my expenses and get back up, but it feels like a constant struggle. Whereas before I used to feel like I was just staying afloat, after the past few months, I now feel like I'm slowly sinking.
I was officially "depressed" for a while when I was in Seattle, and in the past few weeks, I've felt myself trying to slip back into that state, where I just don't do anything, don't WANT to do anything, and just let the shit hit the fan. For some reason, I assume it's because I'm down in Vegas and at least attempting to make it on my own, whenever that happens, after a day or two I am revitalized and do any chores I've been putting off, make sure I'm shaved (which if you know me, you know I don't like to shave very often), and I go for a drive or short walk or something--something to get out in the sunlight mainly--and am reinvigorated to give poker my best shot and keep looking up.
And that has been working for now, but I have lately been worried about slipping into it and not pulling myself back up. I also have not been going out as much over the past few months as I would have liked; I have not met any new friends, and I have rarely attended the two poker discussion groups that I very much enjoy. It's been kind of lonely lately.
Also, my friend Jon is very unhappy with his job and has gotten fewer hours, and seems fairly unhappy with his overall situation, which is understandable, and which makes me feel all the worse for not knowing how to help him. I have no money to help him with, and I don't know really how to lend any kind of emotional support other than to say that sucks, dude. Another close friend has also been going through a lot of rough shit--it seems like he's always in trouble or about to be in trouble and on the brink--and I don't know what to do for him either. So in addition to my problems, I have two of my closest friends who have it worse, which makes me feel both bad for them and mad at myself for feeling the way I do about my situation. It's just that however it may compare to their situations, for me this is the scariest situation I personally have ever been in. So I'm just constantly terrified and ashamed of feeling that way.
Oh, and I just saw that the public option has officially been taken out of all potential health care bills, meaning and any health insurance reform is -- well, literally no change at all. Nice.
Wow, I am feeling fantastic at the moment. Letting all my anxiety out is a small part of it, but the bigger part of why I'm so happy right this second (as opposed to what I was feeling last paragraph) is because in between typing these, my computer got fixed. Let me explain. I got a nice fast new computer a few months ago as a birthday present for myself, but also because my old one just wasn't cutting it--PokerTracker and my on-screen HUD, and all my anti-virus and other shit in the background, take a lot of CPU usage and I just needed a new computer. Anyway, getting back on track, in my fancy new computer is another virtual computer, running a whole other operating system. And on that virtual computer is Deep Freeze, a $40 program which creates an image of your computer at one point in time, and puts it back that way when you restart it, no exceptions. (You can turn it off, so that on the next boot it doesn't do that.) So if I'm every worried about a file, I just move it to my virtual computer and run it with impunity. Well that certainly works, but I'm a bit of a security nut and I thought, well I might as well have that Deep Freeze program on my main computer and just have it turned off, then if I have a program which requires my main operating system (Windows 7 RC1) or I just don't feel like taking the time to boot up my virtual drive (minutes, versus the 20 second start-from-scratch of Windows 7) I can just do that too. Extra options are always nice. So I open it, and it tells me, sorry I don't work on Windows 7. I of course immediately go online and look at how to hack it to work. And I find out how. I simply run it in "compatibility mode" of Windows Vista. Vista and 7 have basically the same core operating system structure, which is way different from XP.
So I do that--well, I THOUGHT I did that. Just as I was rebooting as per the instructions of Deep Freeze, I thought "hmmm, I think I ran it for compatibility with XP not Vista, gee I hope that doesn't cause any problems". So it reboots, and just as the Windows screen appears it shuts down. I hit the power button, my computer turns on, Gateway BIOS appears, Windows logo appears for a moment, then boom. Off. No loading for me!
It was at that instant I realized how much I depend on my computer. I felt lobotomized. I instantly felt faint and almost puked. My entire life is on this fucking thing. And I have no way to get at it.
Oh and did I mention the entire hard disk is encrypted?
I'm good with computers, but I'm not a professional computer repair guy or anything, and I don't have the money to have a spare computer lying around, so I have no way to get at my hard drive to get at my shit, let alone maybe attempt a repair. But waitaminute! (Yes, one word, waitaminute.) I DO have an extra computer. My old computer which I never got around to taking to a computer recycle place. It's in my closet. So last night, I jacked out the hard drive from that and stuck it in my new computer along side my current fucked-up drive, reinstalled Windows 7 on that drive, reinstalled the encryption software on this second hard drive (via my external drive which has my most important backups), decrypted my main hard drive, and looked up how to repair it online.
Who knew that a program designed to undo every single thing done to a computer would try to change a few system files? And who knew that telling it it was a different operating system than it actually was would be bad? Uhhh..... right, moving on.
So I found a nice techie website detailing how to import the registry of another hard drive onto your current registry for editing (they call registry files "hives") and I found a nice hackers website detailing how to delete Deep Freeze from somebody's system manually when it's off and the computer is mounted as a drive on your computer. So I found about 40 registry entires telling my fucked-up computer how to try to load Deep Freeze (even in safe mode, by the way... which made me all the sicker when I originally tried to boot in safe mode--the last line before the crash was "loading... DeepFrz.sys") and deleted or altered them ala the website, and went in and manually deleted the applications that were loaded as the "services" of Deep Freeze. (Services are applications that run in the background that the task manager doesn't list and which tell you computer how to communicate with various parts of itself--you probably have 70 running in the background and don't even know it.) Of course I have irreparably fucked up my system by this point, so I pop in my Windows installation disk and tell it to do repairs and whatnot. It can't because the memory is fucked. So I ask it nicely to repair my memory, then do the startup repairs.
And lo and behold I turn it back on and it boots up! To my normal startup screen! All the way! Without fail! I've restarted about 4 times now just to make sure, but I'm starting to feel good about it.
An hour ago, I started typing this blog entry from a Notepad file on my second hard drive with my "normal" hard drive mounted as a virtual drive running repairs. And at that time, I was pretty ecstatic to be able to simply get at the file structure of my computer so that I could retrieve current backups of all my stuff. That might be a few days process to wipe everything and start from scratch, but at least my data was still intact.
But now, it looks as if everything is perfect! Well my hard drive isn't encrypted at the moment, but basically, I'm back where I was a day and a half ago and I'm THRILLED to death about it.
I'm torn now. Because I really love my computer and I think technology in general is pretty awesome, but at the same time it really felt like the end of the world when my computer crashed, and it made me realize how much I rely on this stupid fucking machine. My dad once marveled at how much time he has to spend nowadays to simply keep his computer from getting FUBARed and was very pissed that the state of the world was such that he had to fuck with his computer for so much of his life just to not be left behind.
I'm fairly intuitive with computers, and I know how to take preventative measures to prevent my stuff from getting fucked up to begin with, but after one little mistake of selecting "XP-SP3" instead of "Vista" for compatibility mode, I can certainly understand his point. And I'm much more aware of the cons of being so technology oriented. (e.g. Why go to a bar and hang out with friends IRL --in real life-- when you can just read Jimmy's Facebook comment about a bar he was at and IM him about it right now, and chat on Skype with 3 other people, all in different countries, who went to a bar recently...)
So the lessons I've learned recently are:
--I need to ghost my drive; I'm just too invested in my computer to ever have anything happen to it ever.
--I need to get out more and stop being so invested in my computer.
Additionally, I need to try to get back on track with all the good stuff I mention in ever blog but never do--exercising, getting out more, making new friends, eating right, having a more balanced life, et cetera. Whether or not I fail down here, doing those things won't hurt, and they'll help pick me up from my bouts of depression, and make it more likely I'll succeed by being a happier more balanced person who doesn't play poker so fucking depressed!
I'm obviously in one of my rejuvenating happy moods at the moment with my computer being fixed and all, and I hope it keeps up. The past week has been just fucking miserable and my computer crash was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. I was in bed about to cry, mourning in my failure down here. But fuck that. That's gone. All I have to do is make some decent money this money, and you know what I'm going to go hiking at Red Rock too. It's a pretty hike damnit.
40 buy-ins. That's what, 80K hands if I'm running slightly bad for the month. I can do that. No problem. Easy.
Also, everybody should get their news from The Young Turks. Excellent show.
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheYoungTurks
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