Daily Report: Pool

I'm going to start practicing billiards again. I used to be an excellent player, probably a high B ranking. I was in the bar league in New York City and took 2nd place in the individuals 8-ball championship in 1999. I reached a point where pool had become such a big part of my life that I was putting in 20 or 30 hours a week. I decided that I either needed to dial it back, or quit my day job and go professional... which would have been a mistake.

Then I moved to Thailand and just stopped playing, and my entire game went to pot. About 3 years later, I tried entering a 9-ball tournament in Pattaya and embarrassed myself by getting stomped 9-1 in the first round (by a guy I would have beaten at my peak). I essentially lost interest in the game at that point and have played perhaps only a dozen times in the 5 or 6 years since then. So, maybe I'll start putting in a couple of hours of practice a couple of times per week... get my game back a little bit.

I was talking with Bob of Bob's BBQ in Pattaya the other night. Actually, Bob has sold the restaurant and moved back to America with the wife and kids. That's sort of sad, although it does mean that the World's Best Ribs are no longer half a world away from me should I choose to hunt them down.

I was also chatting with my friend Mike (still in Pattaya) who turned me on to SoundTap Streaming Audio Recorder, which lets you record whatever sounds your computer is making (e.g. whatever music your computer is playing) and turn it into an MP3 file. That's great, and I've already gotten back my favorite 50 songs from my lost music collection. The only problem is that you have to sit and play each song all the way through like in the old days with a tape recorder. I'm not even sure that qualifies as piracy since I'm not distributing what I record... more like a Tivo or VCR. If it is, at least it's not "out in the open" piracy, like downloading 4 or 5 thousand songs via LimeWire... the kind of stuff that gets the copyright police knocking on your door.