Today I have two equally entertaining useless stories ... and to think a few electrons will waste their lives sending you this horribly written entry to your screens... but I digress.

Story one: There were guests coming to our house today. Before they came, I started playing some poker in a single table tourney. In the tourney, you start with 800 chips ... by the third hand I was down to 375 chips, while everyone else was at about 800 chips. Then I decided to leave (I knew I had lost and didn't want to waste itme). I checked the "Fold my hands" option and left. I came back about two hours later ... to find I had won 2nd place in the tournament simply by folding every hand starting from 375 chips! WOW! I was amazed and got a good laugh from it. I profited a net of $20 by doing nothing... which leads me to my NEXT story.

Story two: For those of you eBayers, here is a great TIP for you (although I'm sure you're well aware of it). There was an auction I was watching for a few days now ... I knew that the final price would be in the $10 range, so I had the auction tracked, and I signed online during the final few minutes in order to bid.

Now, a novice would bid $10 and be done with it. But NO! That's wrong! If you bid $10 and the person before you set a max of $10, by default it goes to that person. You need to bid at least $0.01 more ... so a semi-novice would be $10.01. But this is also folly. Some people, in an attempt to outsmart those semi-novices, will bid $10.50 as their max. But people like me (uber-experts!) know to bid $10.51 ... thus eliminating the advantage of the $10.50 bid.

I ended up bidding $10.52 (there are some people who will bid $10.51, and the $10.52 is to outbid them) ... and the final price came out to be $10.50, which means I had the other person read right... Muhahahaha. Or something. Yeah, it doesn't really work that way, but at least I can make it SOUND cool :)