JamesSlusher.com

Congratulations to the Columbus, Ga team for winning the Little League World Series.

You make us all proud.

Via Wired News, this is a very cool engine. I find the concept of this engine highly intriguing and can’t wait to see what becomes of the prototypes due out next year. This could be the wave of the future. I hope some day to work on one of these.

I wonder if they are going to go public at any point. I’d like to get in on some of that. They have contact information for interested investors, but I doubt I’m kicking the kind of cash they are looking for.

Listen to this:

Indeed, that is the old F100 firing up. I ended up cheating and turning it back into a carbureated engine rather than fuel-injected. But I had to do what I had to do. There is still a bunch of work that it needs, I am steadily progressing towards full utility.

I’m excited.

This is a story via Emily Slusher.

Emily had a doctor’s visit yesterday. As part of the visit the doctor began asking her a series of questions to help determine her mental development. Here is that conversation as it was told to me:

Doctor: So how old are you?

Emily: 4!

Doctor: Can you count to 5?

Emily: 1 2 3 4 5!

Doctor: What color is your shirt?

Emily: Pink!

Doctor: What color is your Mommy’s shirt?

Emily: Purple!

Doctor (who is wearing a yellowish-green shirt): What color is my shirt?

Emily: Umm, green.

Doctor: No, try again.

Emily: Chartreuse!

End of conversation.

Sad part: I had to ask if chartreuse is a yellowish-green color.

I madethe F100 make noise for the first time in well over a year today. It is getting gas and it has spark but it hasn’t actually started up yet. The noise it was making was actually the cranking noise, but that is still better than the paperweight noise it had been making.

So I need to figure out exactly what is going on. There are 2 possibilities that seem most likely: first, the timing could be off. When I put it to top dead center to install the distributor, i might have put it on the exhaust stroke rather than the compression stroke. Second, the gas could be old enough that it is no longer any good. It is a year and a half old. I’m gonna get some new gas and pour it into the intake to see if I get any reaction. If not, I will try changing the spark plug wires around to see if I had it on the wrong stroke.

Unfortunately, I’m going into work some OT tonight (and tomorrow and the next day) and then I work my normal shift this weekend, so it will be a week before I get to try to delve further into the mysteries of the F100. But it made noise.

If you are like me and have to wear a uniform to work, there is a quick way to tell if you are working too much overtime. When you gather up your clothes to do a load of laundry from the past week and realize that only one shirt was not a part of a work uniform, you have been working too much.

Thing is, I will probably have many more loads of laundry like this over the next month.

Tourney Win

Originally uploaded by jaslusher.

As you all may or may not know, I’ve progressed into real money tournaments. Yesterday I came in 2nd in a 45 player/$5 buy-in tourney that netted me a hair over $50.

Today, as you can see by the picture, I came in first in a 96 player/$5 buy-in tourney that netted me $148.10.

The real money tournaments are a far cry from the freerolls I started out playing. The freerolls were good to get a feel for what playing online is like, but as far as poker strategy goes, they were worthless.

As an example, the last freeroll I was in had 90 players starting out and was down to 45 before we got out of the first level of blinds. That’s 6 minutes. Half had busted out in the first 6 minutes. The tourney was on the final table at just over an hour and was over in an hour and a half. This tournament I won this morning had half the original players at the 1 hour mark and lasted more than 3 1/2 hours.

It was a blast and added substantially to the poker coffers. 2 or 3 more wins like that and I can move up another level to the $10 buy-in tournaments.

Man, am I psyched.