Blogstuff

A while back I hooked up a statistics thing to the blog here so I could see if there was anyone reading this. Some of the more interesting of the collected data concerns how people arrived here.

I'm guessing some are using the "Next Blog" button to check out random blogs. The previous page visited by some of these readers has been, well, interesting. These pages often have nothing to do with poker, or anything else I'm even remotely involved with. Several have been in languages other than English, which makes me wonder whether these visitors were confused by my page, the one right before it in the blog-ring, or both. Most likely the last.

Even more surprising are some of the Google searches that land people here. I'm sure the person searching for "chips a hoy" didn't find quite what they were looking for.

The one that really kills me is that all my rants about the crappy internet service in my hotel have landed me very near the top of a Google search for "Guest-Tek internet". I'll bet Guest-Tek is real pleased about that. On the even more amusing side is that somebody got here after a Google search for "Guest-Tek sucks". I guess I'm not the only one with that opinion of their service.

So, it is with an eye toward fair play that I must state the internet service in the hotel, while still not remotely close to what I would call "high-speed", has of late been reasonably reliable. I've only disconnected from Full Tilt a couple times in the last week, and I'm not at all convinced that isn't as much the Full Tilt software as it is my internet connection.

Full Tilt really needs to take a close look at how they deal with less than robust connections. Several times I've had to kill off the client when it stopped responding after a lost connection, and when I tried to log right back in it told me I had to wait for some kind of verification, apparently because it hadn't yet figured out I'd shut down and restarted. You really need to fix this, guys. Right after you fix that stupid NL bet slider. Why does everyone think they have to reinvent the wheel? Or the slider?

On a different topic, I wrote a long time back about a gizmo I ordered to allow me to see the very high and poorly positioned traffic lights here in Orlando without requiring a visit to the chiropractor afterwards. I've had the LightInSight on my windshield for a couple months now.

I'm a bit reluctant to post anything resembling a review because I never did install it according to their instructions. They said to clean the window, then wet the glass, apply the flexible plastic LightInSight, and carefully push the bubbles to the edge. I, like probably 98% of their customers, just stuck the thing to my dirty windshield. So, what follows is with that caveat in mind.

The LightInSight does work pretty much as they advertise. It brings an image of the traffic lights high overhead into view without having to bend and twist or even change your normal driving position at all.

The one problem for me is an unavoidable consequence of how it works. It's a Fresnel lens that bends the light, allowing a very wide field of view to be presented in a small area. The consequence is that everything appears rather small through the LightInSight. The traffic lights appear to be a fraction of the size they are when I look straight out the window. It works okay at night because the lights are much brighter than their surroundings, but during the day it can be difficult to detect when the light has changed. I find I have to keep staring right at the light in the LightInSight to be sure I catch the light change. It's better than having to bend over and crane my neck to see the light, but it strikes me as still not quite the perfect solution.

Of course, the perfect solution would be for the idiot traffic enginners to put the lights where they can be clearly seen in the first place. But that would be too easy. I better stop now before I end up posting the rant about Orlando traffic I said I wasn't going to do.