I’ve been playing online poker at Party Poker for the last couple of months but I hadn’t been playing for real money up until tonight when I made my first $50 deposit.

On the play-money tables, you can win a lot and it’s not always that much fun because players will bet stupidly, not caring about losing points as you can just sign up again and get more. So all the poker sites that I’ve been reading to get advice has all seemed pointless because the tactics don’t work when people don’t care if they win or lose.

But on the real money tables, it’s a completely different story. Players take the betting much more seriously and there are a lot more folds than on the play-money tables. So all of a sudden the pro’s tips started to come in handy and I started to play with a bit of controlled agression.

Granted, I was only on the 25c/50c tables, but you feel the pressure once you realise that you’re playing with your hard-earned cash. I had to force myself off the table to get to bed as it really was fun. I finished on $13.20, up from my original $10 I started with so I was quite pleased with that.

If you’re thinking of giving it a go yourselves, drop me an email and I’ll send you an invite. (There’s a referal system that includes bonuses for signing up.)

Another juicy bit of documentation for the AD geeks out there. This is an updated version of Microsoft’s best-practice documentation for recovering your Active Directory forest.

Brief Description

This paper is a best-practice recommendation for recovering an Active Directory® directory service forest, if forest-wide failure has rendered all domain controllers in the forest incapable of functioning normally.

On This Page

Source: Download details: Forest Recovery

This is more of a bookmark for me rather than a blog post, but there may be others out there interested in this MSDN blog focusing on (much-needed) ADFS documentation.

Link to ADFS Documentation Blog

Less than a day old and there is already a critical security alert for Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 7. This vulnerability only affects IE7, so I guess it’s not recommended to upgrade just yet.

This is a big blow for Microsoft as they have been touting this as their most secure browser ever. Let’s hope they can get a fix out for it soon.

Link to Internet Explorer 7 “mhtml:” Redirection Information Disclosure – Advisories – Secunia

Sun are breaking all the rules once again with a datacenter in a box product. Dubbed Project Blackbox, this is essentially as many servers, networking and storage devices as possible all crammed into a shipping container. Using revolutionary cooling systems this thing is guarranteed to stay cool in any situation. You could even consider it ‘portable’ as all it needs is network connectivity and electricity. There’s a bunch of photos on the site showing different scenarios – I especially like the mars landing! But this is a serious product and although I can’t think of too many uses for it off the top of my head, I still want one, just to run my little empire from the back garden!

CEO, Jonathan Schwartz blogs about it.

Link to Project Blackbox

Here’s a nifty site that may or may not be useful to you. FeedRaider lets you set up your own pages with feeds that you choose displayed in a variety of formats. Not too sure what market this is aiming for as you can already do this with Netvibes and the other home-page providers. But it’s a cool site anyway and worth checking out to see if it’s useful for you. I created a page here, which should accessible to the public: http://feedraider.com/u/amanzi/p/4fxd1/

Updated review on the Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta email/feeds/news/contacts/calendar client with new screenshots. This is an overhaul of the antiquated Outlook Express client and is targeted towards MSN/Live/Spaces users mainly.

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The red, iPod nano that everyone has been talking about is now available from the US Apple website. This was launched by Bono and Oprah Winfrey and $10 from each sale goes towards the fight against AIDS in Africa.

I really like the colour of this, and if I was in the market for a nano I would probably buy this one. I am looking to get a shuffle before the end of the year, so if Apple want to release one of those, then I’ll definitely get the red one.

• Link to Apple – iPod nano – (PRODUCT) Red™
• Link to Blogtown Gagdets » Apple – iPod nano – (PRODUCT) Red™

Microsoft today released Virtual PC 2007 to beta testers via the Connect website and I must say I am quite underwhelmed. We were expecting some form of multiple snapshots and a better management console, but neither are to be seen in this release.

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Internet Explorer 7 is just about at RTM and will be delivered to all Windows users as a high-priority, automatic update this month. What does this mean to you? Well, whether you like it or not, shortly you too will be running IE7 if you aren’t already.

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