constant crises

CHRISTMAS WEEK & WHAT I DO AT WORK

the weekend turned out to be pretty nice up in tahoe. it snowed a dumpload on saturday night and sunday morning. nobody played poker. gookie and loooooooocy made a snow man/bunny. i drank hot cocoa. one thing i discovered this weekend is that reno might be the most depressing place ever. it's as if you put a few dirty casinos into a miniature detroit. this is of course based on my personal understanding of detroit. sorry, detroit. for anyone in the city on friday (12/23) night, come hang out at gordon biersch on harrison and embarcadero in the evening. say, oh, 9pm. if you somehow were missed on the evite, let me know. so i've been looking back over some posts from the past year, as i generally like to do in december, and i've found that all my posts can generally be grouped into three categories: 1. poker stuff: i like typing about bad beats, good hands, and the general process of trying to become a good all-around poker player. i'm gonna start pulling back on the bad beats and try to just relate hands that i find interesting. the end goal of this whole process is to someday do one of the following: 1) cash in a wsop event, or 2) sit down in a high-limit mixed game at bellagio 2. sports stuff: sometimes i enjoy using the blog to vent about sports stories or issues. it's almost like having my own column, i suppose. i think i'm relatively knowledgeable about the subject and i'm DEFINITELY opinionated enough about sports. 3. miscellaneous stuff: i think this is probably the stuff most people actually come here for. life comments. interesting notes from work. weekend events. etc. so, seeing as i am in the software business, i'm going to try to service the requirements of readers by allowing them to quickly determine what an entire post is going to be about. in the title of the post, i'll just put in parentheses the category. i think this'll be useful because, for example, someone like katie hill or glyzz will be entirely uninterested in poker or sports posts, but might be interested in miscellaneous. at the same time, someone like mike lee is wholly uninterested in my life, but is probably interested in poker and sports. some people might be interested in all three. other people might be interested in none of them (which begs the question: why are you reading this?). in case you're wondering, this is in fact one of the types of things i do at work as a Product Manager: 1. examine the use case of common users (gookie does not want to read everything that i write.) 2. develop requirements (gookie needs to know immediately whether he wants to read this thing. knowing this will give him more time to play video games and eat brownies.) 3. come up with a functional design (tell gookie when he opens the page what the new post is about, by putting the category in the title). in this case there's no real coding needed, which is where the developers come in, but you get the point. what would be nice is if xanga had the ability to actually stripe the posts, allowing people to just see the ones they're interested in. someone let me know if there's a blogging application that lets you do that. merry christmas, everyone tags: work, poker, sports

posted by Jack Chou @ 12/21/2005 11:17:00 AM