Early on New Year’s Eve I visited the Bellagio with my Canon 30d and produced this time lapse with my SLR camera. The show lasted about two minutes and 15 seconds total and this is the fountain condensed into ten seconds. I shot this in the early afternoon of New Year’s and will have more to come from my week in Las Vegas soon.
Well I sat down early which ended up being a big mistake I think. I started imaging my first hand would be A/A and losing horribly. Well ironically it was my first hand, I went 3x the big blind with no callers. Phew…. still alive in this one. After making a great run up to 8200 chips I got moved tables.
Second hand the A/A is back and second from the button goes all-in. It is sort of automatic for me to call and I do. Everyone else folds and I flip over my A/A to his 10/10. The flop started with a 10 and never got much better for me. Now I sit with 2500 and unfearhered. Well I think unfearheted because I push a move I know I shouldn’t make very soon. After going back and forth on small pots I find K/9 H on the buttonand raise to 300.
I get one called who is the big blind. The flop is Q / K / 6 and I bet 300 again. He moves all-in and barely has me covered with around 4k. After saying “you should fold” in my head 10 times I call. He flips over Q/6 and after two dead cards he takes the win. Now did I make the right play or was I influenced by getting my Aces cracked..Not sure but I will think about it and report back if I shed light on the play. Right now Fiodor is at the end of hour two with 8k hanging strong. About 7 more out and he is in the money!!
After a couple hours Fiodor took home a victory marking our cashes up to two in the first two days. Not a bad average! The day of poker got cut short by us heading over to Mandalay Bay’s House of Blues for the Girl Talk x Dan Deacon x Wallpaper concert. It was totally amazing and a great way to finish up the second night of Las Vegas.
With things slowing down and people on vacation I deceided to spend my time through the New Year’s in Las Vegas to help the hurting casino industry. OK so I mosty went to win some money and have fun playing poker. My buddy Fiodor flew into LA and we made quick work of day one of our poker bash.
We grabbed the 11:00am at Sahara with around 55 entries and I was off to a strong start. I ended up making it down to the final two tables with a marginal stack and got myself in an interesing position. Three people in front of me went all-in and I had to call, with over 40,000 in the pot I had around 10k which gave me a great return on my investment of 10k into the pot with a decent hand of A/10 spades. I ended up losing the hand as the turn came A/2/2 and one of the players had a A/2 starting hand. No worries and a 17th place finish was a great start.
Then we ran over to the 4:00pm at Startosphere which is a more expensive buy in but less players. Same format which is a 4,000 chip purchase and you play until the end. This tourney had around 35 with first hour re-buys I think and I was holding strong. I won a bunch of small pots, nothing pretty and let it dwindle down to 8 left. I won a huge pot and it put me second in chips behind the leader who at this time had around 68k to my 24k out of a total 119k. With ante’s and blind’s things got crazy fast and I had money coming back and forth. We got down to four after a few rounds and the pressure was on. Only top three were getting paid and finally one more went down at my table. I was in the money and the chip inbalance was amazing, the leader had around 85k out of 119k and we split the other stacks. With blinds at 2k/4k and 500 ante I pushed all in on the small blind (another 8k) and got called by the chip leader which I counted on. I had a K/8 unsuited and he flopped a J/5. He ran a Jack on me across the river which took me out and left me for third place. All and all a great tournament and I got paid so that is always a plus in poker, I double’d my money basically from the buy-in which puts me up a little for the day.
So far I have stayed calm and collected by far playing the best poker of my life keeping myself from self-destructing. No bad beats have really been taken either so I guess that is pretty easy. The six month poker hiatius seems to be paying off and we are about to eat some quick dinner and tackle the 12am at Ceaser’s Palace, hopefully see some people I know!
I had some free time on Christmas and after reading about High School #9 on the BBC/Icecream blog myself and a buddy Jacob Agajanian wanted to go check it out. You cannot really get in, they have the place covered in fences and stuff but after driving around the school we found an overpass of the 101 and were able to snap some pictures of the side tower of the school in the background. Yes, this is a Los Angeles Unified District public school being built by the state that is going broke in like two months. On the bright side, the school looks super awesome.
Here is the first time lapse we did with it being a bit brighter outside.
Then we moved the camera once it got darker and ran another time lapse to the side of with it being much darker outside.
All in all a very fun Holiday. Finished up the night with some Indian food and NBA basketball down the street at a friends place. I should be doing more of these SLR videos when I have some free time, hoping to get some done in Las Vegas next week!
I reset my iTunes plays at the start of 2008 and here are the top 10 albums I listened to according to my iMac iTunes play count. I guess this is more of my “work” albums since my iPod plays are not counted. Here we go.
10. Nirvana - Nevermind
9. DJ Am x Travis Barker - Fix Your Face
8. Chimaira - Resurrection
7. Girl Talk - Live at Chop Suey in Seattle, Washington
6. Kayne West - Graduation
5. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
4. E-603 - Something for Everyone
3. Cake - Prolonging the Magic
2. Neptunes - Presents the Clones
1. N.E.R.D - Seeing Sounds
This is a time lapse I shot from a second story porch in West Hollywood yesterday. It was taken my with Digital SLR Canon 30d picture camera and interlaced together in a video. It’s almost 700 photographs and then sped up to add more motion and effect. I am going to work on some longer ones in the near future. This was mostly a test with my camera to see how it would work out. I will have quite a few of these coming out so subscribe to me on Vimeo or my Youtube.
So after going back and forth with two not so “Internetie” friends for months now on the impact and influence of the Internet I finally have a bet we have agreed to and settled on. The Internet is really it’s own society and for 2009 I want to be a good citzien by contributing as much as I consume of the Internet for 2009. So with all that being said I have been given 10 tasks that must be met for me to win this bet.
The bet has a fair play doctrine as well, since the bet is about me being a good citizen I cannot just go accomplish these tasks on December 30th and declare victory. So each month I will blog a report of my progress and hopefully I can crush most of these “requirements” of the contest.
I was just in Miami, Florida for Hot Import Nights producing a NOS TV episode and got to spend some time with one of my favorite east coast photographers Warren Shim-quee. We were talking about Infiniti’s a good bit and when I got home he sent me this gorgeous silver G37 that he just shot this week. It is sitting on Vossen VVS-082 wheels and the car looks amazing.
So every Miami trip doesn’t even come close to being complete without a stop at Pizza Rustica in South Beach. Located in the heart of the party scene this place is insane on the weekend late nights and the first thing I did when I hopped off my flight at Miami International was drive here. After a check on their website tonight they have one open in West Hollywood on Sunset which I will be visiting promptly upon my return. Myself and Will Roegge are out here shooting a NOS TV episode at Hot Import Nights tomorrow and we are pumped up and ready to go. We swam a ton of laps in this crazy pool at our resort that changes colors from yellow/green/blue/red/purple with tons of lights within the pool. The thing always tripped me out a little when the pool went red for a minute. Here is my Yelp review of Pizza Rustica in South Beach:
This place is a must stop for me every time I come to Miami Beach. I prefer this one since it’s the original location and love to just order more food than I could ever eat and hope for the best. Once you cram into this New York sized place you will be greeted by a glass display full of pizza. Huge square sicilian style pizza ready for your order. A friend and myself ordered a Hawaiian slice, Pepperoni, and Sweet Sausage.
Three slices and drinks out the door for under $20 (which could feed three easily) and we sat down enjoying ourselves and people watching in the crazy part of South Beach. Each slice of pizza was top shelf as always which is a combo including minimal sauce and a ton of dough. It’s an interesting approach for pizza and it works, Pizza Rustica knocks it out of the park.
While eating someone spotted us for non locals and picked up that we could never finish these four huge slices among us. We brokered a deal to sell two squares for $1.00 so this man wouldn’t have to “wait in the long line he claimed” and we were happy to receive some return on our pizza investment. My buddy wanted to hang out and sell the rest of our leftover pizza but I was ready to check in to our hotel at this point. Our left over pizza didn’t make it to the trash can outside as a homeless person asked if he could finish it. Mission accomplished, we ate amazing pizza, people watched in South Beach, made a return on our pizza investment and fed the homeless all in twenty minutes.
No where else are you going to find this kind of silly entertainment while gorging yourself in delicious pizza. A+ for atmosphere, location, and taste by me. The only issue your going to run into is PARKING. Especially if it’s a weekend night note that this is a huge post night club scene here. This is the South Beach fourth meal (not Taco Bell) and things can get a little crazy. If your flying in for some food and Washington has no street parking my approach is always to go one block over onto Pennsylvania and park in the residential permit parking (illegally) and hope people take pity on me with my rental car decals! Even though parking will be a battle you will realize it was worth every moment of frustration when you step inside.
