This is a test of Jiglu. I wonder what it does?

(It does nothing apparently. A week of "tags not yet ready"...)

The last poker game I reviewed on this blog was World Championship Poker. That game was the worst poker game of all time in my estimation.

I'm happy to say the 2008 edition of World Series of Poker is the exact oppostite experience. I'm glad I bought this one.

This game has a lot of cool things going for it. The number of recognizable professional poker players in it is impressive. The poker action is realistic (WCP had a player going all-in every hand in a multi-table tournament.) One of my favourite features is that you can speed up the hand when the computer is playing. So if betting is taking a long time to get to you, you can speed up other players betting. And if you've folded you can make the rest of the hand go a lot faster or just watch it at normal speed.

There is also one feature of WSOP 2008 that lets you observe other players "tells". So if a player plays with their chips or plays with their hair before betting, it may be a sign that they have good cards or that they're bluffing. The game also comes with a number of easy to access calulators so that you can see your pot odds, your outs, the history of other players betting, etc. in seconds.

There are a couple of annoying bits, but nothing too annoying:

1) Some characters in the game seem a bit culturally insensitive. There's one black player who keeps talking about how he likes his cards as much as he likes his "jambalaya" - which is a southern (Louisana) dish. The politest thing to say about that is that is playing into a stereotype.

2)  The game seems to have a small flaw in its hand odds calculator. I'm holding two pairs, Kings and Sevens. And the board reads K, 10, 7, 5, 2 with no more than 2 of any suit. And the Hand Odds Calculator says I have the 12th best possible hand, with the best possible hand being a Royal Flush.

Huh? How can K, 10, 7, 5, 2 yield a Royal Flush? There's not even a regular flush possible. I think I had the 7th best hand, 5 possible trips, and one K-10. Other than those hands I can't be beat. The testers need to go over that one again.

Other than that, I'm liking this game. Best part is being able to skip ahead when things are too slow for me.

 

I have to give credit where credit is due. Sometimes even MFA (Made For Adsense) spammers have smart ideas.

I recently received a trackback (requires approval) for my Marketing Blog. A trackback is an automatic comment that is posted to a blog entry when someone else links to that entry.

So my post was about loyalty programs, and how effective they are in the airline industry. Someone has a MFA site called airefaresrockbottom.info which says:

"scottjduffy wrote a fantastic post today on "Loyalty Programs". Here is only a quick extract:" The rest of the post just quotes a line or two from my blog entry. Nothing wrong with that right? Someone thinks I had a fantastic post? Well, he has hundreds and hundreds of identical comments about other people and their blogs. So he's basically written a program to scour Google or Technorati for any new blog posts that mention the word "Airline" and then automatically posts it to his own blog with a rave review.

A word of advice to my new (robot) fan... Why not improve the program a bit to make the rave more randomized? "wrote a fantastic post", "had an interesting post", "posted on his must-read blog"... You can easily come up with 20 or 30 different strings. Have your program pick them at random.

Also, your own site is covered with ads, at the top, at the right side, in the middle. Why don't you reduce the number of ads a bit to make it less obvious it's MFA? Have you tried that? Maybe you'd get more clicks? And maybe even you'd trick people into subscribing to your blog! Wouldn't that be tricky?

 

I'll admit to only being an iPod Touch owner for two weeks, but so far the device has acted perfectly until today.

I was playing some music, and while I was playing with the music selection menu, something strange happened. All the controls disappeared. So I can see the album cover, but none of the play, pause, fast forward type controls. But the music was still playing.

So anyways some time later, I go to unlock the device and I get the familar Earth wallpaper. But no "Slide here to unlock".

It's really weird. I made a video of it here.

Anyways, rebooting the device has fixed it for now. But does this have anything to do with upgrading to iPod software 1.1.1? The same version that bricked a bunch of iPhones? Don't know.

 

I find myself getting spam messages that have the subject line: "Check out my new yacht", or "This new yacht is the coolest". I received six yacht related emails today alone.

I don't bother to read the body of the message, but I am wondering if the spammers are thinking that I, Scott Duffy, specifically love boats (I do) or if that's just the latest technique to try to get people to open their messages? Strange.

 

The original Miss Moneypenny, a Canadian actress named Lois Maxwell, has passed away. Rest in peace.

 

For the past 4 years, I've worked for a marketing company in Toronto. This has provided me some invaluable insight into traditional marketing (which is not the same as advertising).

And to think that in 2007, we are witnessing success after success online. Companies like FaceBook turning down $1.6 billion dollars by refusing to be bought out. Google generating billions of dollars in advertising per year. Every year, more and more money is spent online, as people get over the fear of the technology and get on with the convenience of buying what they want for the best price available, all from the comfort of their living rooms.

So with all this going on, I've decided to launch Not Another Marketing Weblog - http://namw.wordpress.com/

NAMW will focus on all of the new types of marketing there are these days, most of which did not exists even 2 years ago. YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, SecondLife, Blogs, Podcasts... And new technologies are being launched all the time, and we will cover those too.

I hope you check it out. My first post is on SecondLife, and perhaps you'd be surprised to learn I don't think much opportunity exists to market there. Go over to NAMW and let me know what you think.