Fucema

I brought back one particularly interesting Cuban (fake?). I suspected it was a fake once I looked closer at the band and had a few draws on it—turns out it might be a non-existent Limited Edition. It’s marked as 2007, but as far as as I can tell, Habanos SA never released any 2007 LE cigars. Their first Pyramide style LE was rolled out in 2008. Interesting fake cigar.

I had one possibly good/great cigar (Hoyo De Monterrey, tubo, a No.2?) but it was so plugged I couldn’t get a draw on it. Tried up til the middle but I gave up by then. The flavor was pretty darn good, so was the construction. Ah well.

There was a very nice Petit Edmundo from Montecristo. It had great construction, with a super looking wrapper. The smoke was a little light but good tasting nonetheless. The draw was excellent—and I never had to relight it. But It comes in metal tubes and I didn’t really feel like unpacking 25 metal tubes and bringing them into the states… I’m lazy. Must also mean that the cigar was not that memorable compared to ones I’ve smoked in the past. To be honest, I rather pay the same amount of money and buy a VSG or a Fuente.

I tried a Cohiba Lancero (or pig-tail). These Cohibas they sell in Bahamas are pretty rough and shoddy in appearance. Almost every Cohiba has a rough and veiny wrapper. The smoke was not that glorious either. This particular pig-tail however was one of the better Cohibas I smoked while in the islands. It really improved at the mid point. The beginning was a bit rough but nowhere near as bad as the other Cohibas. Other Cohibas I smoked: the Sublime, the Esplenido, 2004 Limited Edition, 2008 Limited Edition.

None of the cigars I smoked during that week evoked any Cuban-ness or Cuban vibe. There is a certain smell/flavor that I associate heavily with Cuban cigars and I didn’t get them during this time. It might partially have been due to some windy days during my trip. It was pretty difficult to light up a cigar with just box matches outside, thanks to remnants of Paloma.

Oh, found some really good looking Series D, Partagas No 4 cigars… they had some great dusting on them. But they tasted crappy. In retrospect I did smoke alot of these cigars outdoors, usually while sitting in the hot tub. In my opinion the smoke you exhale and the smoke from the burning end of your cigar add to the experience. I think the windy days may have removed that aspect for me, unfortunately.

The Dominicans and Nicaraguans I brought to the Bahamas with me were great smokes however. The Romeo Y Julietta No.2 in tubes were a solid smoke – I recommended them to VA and Min and they both liked them. I was actually hoping to find a stronger smoke though.

I couldn’t find a Trinidad habanos for the life of me… Bahamas sucks for Cuban cigars. Cohiba is pushed really hard there, along with some Partagas, Romeo Y Julietta and Hoyo De Monterrey.

This is my third trip to the Bahamas (Freeport) and I am fairly certain now that the Cubans are sending the lower-quality cigars to the islands. I can’t imagine that England is getting the same mediocre quality Cubans. If you take a trip to the Bahamas, make sure to bring a few of your own favorite cigars from home. Your visions of great Cuban cigar smoke while at the Bahamas will just be blown away and leave only a hole in your wallet.

Highlights of this trip in random order:

• My quad 6s over villain’s Aces full at Hard Rock
• AR-15 on full auto (damn that clip went by fast)
• MP-5 on full auto (need more bullets)
• Benelli shotgun on full auto (joking, but I shot and pumped as fast as I could)
• Gambling with the guys at Hard Rock (check out the high limit tables)
• The last RehabRX pool party of the season at Hard Rock (got in free with a trick
• 1/2NLHE with Paris & Benji, Nikki & David at you guessed it… Hard Rock
• Up ~300 after shooting in craps (I rarely shoot)

I know the ladies had alot of fun too, doing their ‘thang’ also. Thanks to everyone who made it out to Vegas for us, it was a fun time.

Felicia Day awesome-ness. Have you ever been in a MMO (UO, EQ, AC, DAoC, WoW, etc) guild? These episodes are so funny because they are so true. Or if you are true curious what your S.O. used to do in World of Warcraft!

http://feliciaday.com/videos/

I think at one point in time I was routinely drinking close to 1000mgs of caffeine. I remember drinking multiple grande lattes a day (2 shots in a grande vs 3 shots in a venti).

Starbucks Venti Twenty ounces = 415 milligrams caffeine

Based on some of the information in these articles, I believe a majority of my sleep problems are related to my caffeine intake. I am going to try cutting out caffeine intake from Starbucks drinks for a month.

• http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/breakfast/47395/
• http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0501/feature1/index.html
  
• http://www.newsweek.com/id/32848
• http://www.starbucks.com/retail/nutrition_beverages.asp

Polyphasic Sleep

I ran across a blog chronicling one person’s 5+ month experiment with polyphasic sleep. I had originally been Googling for information about sleep disorders since I’ve been unable to get a good night’s rest for a longtime (years?) now.

Polyphasic sleep involves taking multiple short sleep periods throughout the day instead of getting all your sleep in one long chunk. A popular form of polyphasic sleep, the Uberman sleep schedule, suggests that you sleep 20-30 minutes six times per day, with equally spaced naps every 4 hours around the clock. This means you’re only sleeping 2-3 hours per day.

One of the upsides is the extra awake time you gain for activities. The major downside is that you will be on a fixed sleep schedule that likely conflicts with the rest of your friends and family. It’s a very interesting set of blog entries to read, and provides a lot of food for thought. I think I’ll stick to improving my monophasic sleep for now.

This is probably old news, but I still get excited thinking about all the interesting solutions that are possible now using Mule and Gigaspaces for SOA problems requiring low latency and highly scalable architectures.

Gigaspaces released 6.5 with API integration with Mule 2.0 … this is just plain awesome. You can use Gigaspaces as the transport (e.g. in place of JMS) and quickly get a SBA up and running utilizing the same concepts I used at RHG when we were servicing B2B problems. You also get the advantage of the clustering ability and fault tolerance that comes with Gigaspaces – which is just pure sex – not to mention all the other great features that come with this advanced Javaspaces implementation (i.e. management tools, monitoring tools, data partitioning, performance features like batching).

Gigaspaces would have made a fantastic backend transport and shared data grid in place of ActiveMQ JMS, but at the time it wasn’t as fully integrated with Mule. We would have been able to solve alot of the high availability and clustering concerns regarding single points of failure with the messaging database and JMS brokers. I never felt comfortable with ActiveMQ’s clustering and fail-over features. Configuration seemed a bit fussy and it doesn’t seem to be as easy to scale out as a Gigaspace cluster.

References
• GigaSpaces-Mule Enterprise Service Bus for Stateful Service-Oriented Architectures
• Middle Tier Resilience – Fault-Tolerant SOA using JavaSpaces

Google’s awesome, they release some nifty software to the open source community. Here is the link to Google’s Protocol Buffer and more details are available on Google’s Open Source Blog

From what I can tell, it’s a solid format that can replace XML in most scenarios. It’s not as easily human-readable as XML, but then again from experience not many humans are actively reading the XML anyways. The proto format reminds me of a json structure, minus the curly brackets. Also, from skimming the proto java documentation there isn’t support for primitive arrays (at least for java). You should be using List containers instead along with the proto “repeated” scalar.

They include code for data binding source .proto files to C++, Java and Python. This makes it easier to adopt in your next project. I think this is a good data format for internal use, but you’ll probably still have to deal with XML/SOAP and other RPC formats (JSON, etc) on your external interfaces. This would require transforming the internal data format (.proto) into the external format. There is also stub generating code for producing server interfaces that you can drop into your native rpc server implementations. This is pretty cool also.

Hmmm, I see some useful Mule and Camel transformers that could be made to take advantage of this new format. And possibly service adaptors for Mule and Camel too.

I’ve encountered a typo in the JMS package from Oracle while I was debugging a problem with multicast routing under Camel and Oracle AQ. It seems that Oracle may have slipped up and misnamed the “JMSXRcvTimeStamp” property as “JMSXRecvTimeStamp”. I don’t have access to the source code for the ORacle’s implementation of javax.jms.Message (AQjmsMessage), however I poked through the class file with a hexeditor and found instances of the typo.

According to the Java JMS 1.1 specification, this is a property that is set by the jms provider when a message is dequeued. The spelling of the property is listed as “JMSXRcvTimeStamp” on page 39 of the spec pdf. Oracle Streams Advanced Queuing User’s Guide and Reference
10g Release 2 document referencfes the correctly spelled property in section 11.2.2 however elsewhere in the same document it is incorrectly spelled. I’m pretty sure this is a bug in Oracle’s implementation of the Message interface. The document for Release 11g shows the same errors.

Additionally, I get the feeling that either Camel, Oracle or Spring is incorrectly setting null values for several standard JMS headers and properties when they are not assigned or not present. If null values are allowable under the JMS spec, then Oracle’s AQjmsMessage.setJMSReplyTo(Destination) should accept null parameters without exceptions also. Right now passing a null Destination value to method setJMSReplyTo(Destination) results in this exception:

oracle.jms.AQjmsException: JMS-147: Invalid ReplyTo destination type, or use of reserved `JMSReplyTo agent name, or serialization error with AQjmsDestination org.springframework.jms.UncategorizedJms

Here is the post I created in the Camel users forum relating to this issue.

Here is the JIRA issue I created for camel-jms: https://issues.apache.org/activemq/browse/CAMEL-618

I survived the first round and got a ticket to a weekly 1M final. The final tournament starts this coming Saturday. I can choose from 3 different time/schedules (morning, afternoon, evening) and fight for a free entry into the WSOP!

PokerStars Tournament #91110049, No Limit Hold'em
Freeroll Super Satellite
1895 players
Target Tournament #84389994
50 tickets to the target tournament

Tournament started - 2008/06/12 - 00:05:00 (ET)

Dear [snip],

You finished the tournament in 1st place.

This qualifies you for a seat in Tournament #84389994.
A ticket to this tournament was issued in your name. You can use this ticket
to register.
See Tournament #84389994 Lobby for further details.

Pokerstars is running these freerolls daily – once an hour every day until June 27th. You can read about it here http://www.pokerstars.net/poker/promotions/giveaway/

Fun fun!

Update

Knocked out towards the middle of the tournament. My stack was about 7BB and the table was loose as hell. Pushed with pocket 9s and unfortunately met a slow roller who limped with pocket As. Gotta try again next week!

I can’t beat this guy at Guitar Hero and neither can you. Trust me, Dark Wing is just that good – pure perfection. Watch his hands fly across the buttons… but wait, what is that GREEN button?! Cheater? You decide!

On my last trip to Vegas, I noticed that most casinos had the H17 rule for 6+ deck Blackjack games. It seems like a very minor rule but it does give a slight edge to the house. I found a website that gives you the lowdown on what the H17 rule means to you and how you should play your cards to maximize your odds.

Modifications to Basic Playing Strategy for Soft 17 Rule

Single Deck

Hit soft 18 against ace

If double after pair splitting is allowed, split a pair of 9’s against an ace

If surrender is allowed, surrender hard 15 against an ace and hard 17 against an ace.

Double Deck

Double down on soft 14 against 4

Double down on soft 18 against 2

Double down on soft 19 against 6

If surrender is allowed, surrender hard 15 against dealer ace.

4, 6 or 8 Decks

Double down on 11 against an ace

Double down on soft 17 against 2

If surrender is allowed, surrender hard 15 against ace, hard 17 against ace, and a pair of 8’s against dealer ace.

Check out The Soft 17 Rule in Blackjack for the inside scoop and tips for your next (read: September 2008!) trip to Vegas.

For the poker fans among us, I like to read the AllVegasPoker blog and review site for the inside news on the poker rooms in Las Vegas.