Last night I had a dream, that turned out to be really shitty. I had just turned over or shifted in my sleep and I guess I woke up enough to wonder what time it was, or, there is a really good chance I was not awake at all, and that the entire thing was a dream. I thought I was awake, but in hindsight, I probably wasn't. I looked at the clock and it was 3:31am. I wake up at 5:45am, so I had plenty of sleeping time left, so I was happy that I could just turn back over and go back to sleep for a good while. I turned over, went back to sleep, and a couple of minutes later, the alarm went off. So, I suspect I was not really awake when I "looked at the clock", and that part was a dream, but it made me think about something. What if every single night, as soon as you got into deep enough sleep to start dreaming, you dream that your alarm was about to go off, or perhaps even worse, what if right before your alarm goes off every day, you dream that you just went to bed!

So yesterday some shady shit went on a work. Some management types who are afraid of losing their jobs are almost competing to prove that each is more important than the other. A big project is coming up and they both want to feel important by making decisions on their own, and working with a vendor and basically stamping their name all over the project. They have not bothered to engage the team in the project so far, so it was a bit of a surprise to us all. This is an alarming trend I have noticed over the last year or two. Anyway, so after spending 90 minutes on the phone listening to a vendor and our mid/upper management suck each other's ass, we went outside for a venting session. I spent 30 minutes talking quite animatedly about how I was not pissed off or bitter. If I was not angry or bitter, I would not have said anything and just ignored it, so I guess I really was. Everyone else agreed that they were not pissed off or bitter either yet all of continued to bitch about how shitty our jobs are. It was an interesting look at human behavior, and it was not until later that evening that I realized that I spent 30 minutes directly contradicting what I was saying. I wonder why people do that? I see it all the time.

Now that I am aware of what happened, I think I will be able to better control that type of thing. At the very least, if I am steaming fucking mad, it would allow me to retain the upper hand if I didn't spend the time venting. And we all know that having the upper hand is key in EVERY scenario.

Ok. I see that I have made exactly one post since the middle of November. It seems like every new post starts off with my surprise at how long it’s been since my last post. I checked back to when I first started the blog, and I realized that I used to post maybe a paragraph, sometimes two, about random thoughts I had. I believe what happened was that I started over thinking it too much, and forcing the content too much. I realize now that this is exactly the problem. I encountered the exact same thing when working on writing a book. Once I started changing my writing habits to serve the purpose of having a book, rather than serving only the individual stories within it, the work suffered, and I ended up getting burned out. I am going to attempt to take a different approach towards the blog, and take it old school, and feature shorter posts more often. Ultimately, the blog is for me more so than anything else, so if this bothers you, dine on some poo.

So, its playoffs time in football again. I bet on football. I will be in Vegas for the conference championship games, and I am rather excited about it. To prepare for this adventure, I have been doubling up my efforts towards capping the games building up to the conference championships, so that I can make quality wagers. TO do my research, of course I turn to the hard stats, but I also have spent countless hours reading forums, and learning which users on the forum are the best of the best, so that I can use their opinions to confirm my own. Any sports bettor worth his weight in gold knows that YOU cap the games, YOU decide what is right, then, and ONLY then, do you look for confirming evidence from your peers, rather than the opposite. If you go look for a "lock" pick, you will find tons of them, and they will be wrong. The odds makers set the spreads and the totals at exactly the right amount to make THEMSELVES money. These numbers are set based on all the statistics that are available to everyone. Just about any mathematical analysis you can apply to any set of available statistics, will invariably end at exactly the outcome, which will directly coincide with the outcome the odds makers have set. If you go look at polls asking sports bettors what they are going to pick, it will usually land about 50% on each side. So on any given game, half the wagers win, and half the wagers lose. If enough money comes in on a particular side, the odds makers simply move the spread until money starts coming in on the other side, to keep themselves balanced, to insure that half the people will lose.

So what does this mean? Well, I suppose it means you can use math or whatever you like and cap games all day long, and roughly be no better off then simply flipping a coin, because you really never know what is going to happen during a game. Most sports gamblers usually break even in terms of their win percentage, they may make larger wagers on certain bets to try and capitalize winnings, but overall their win percentage will be mediocre. A sports bettor who hits 60% or more is considered VERY good, or extremely lucky, and the latter is more likely the case. A gambler will always tell you about how much he won, and about his amazing win streak, but he will seldom mention his losses, or about his streak of breaking even. What does this mean for me? I guess nothing, cuz I'll be wagering anyway. Maybe I will flip a coin and bet 20 bucks on what the coin decides.