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Just ordered some shoes from Toms. Love the shoes, but was a little disconcerted to find the following email in my inbox:

I redacted what was there -- my plaintext password, sent in an email. Wat?

Especially disconcerting because I told the website to save my billing information.

This is a response I wrote on a message board that I didn't want to get lost in the ether. It describes my thoughts on estate taxes and wealth generally pretty well, I think.

First, the comment to which I'm replying:

NEW: Follow up from AT&T posted below.

My original Jawbone bluetooth headset is on its last legs and I've heard great things about the new Jawbone Icon. After mulling it over for about a week, I rolled over to the AT&T store in Pleasant Hill to pick one up. What a mistake!

Great comment on Slashdot regarding climate change "deniers" by user Sycraft-fu:

It really does weaken the position of those who support the AGW theory. Why? Because it is name calling and over simplification. Pretending that everyone who doesn't agree with you is simply in denial of what is happening and then making up a cute little label is not the sort of thing that speaks to a rational debate. It is the kind of thing a con man would do, and thus makes people wonder, why would you use those tactics?

Over the last two years, I've been realizing how similar poker, business, and life are. Here are 5 nuggets of wisdom I've been noodling on:

1. Don't operate from a position of fear
Fear is a natural reaction to the unknown. Fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of disappointing people, the fear that you might go broke -- these are all pretty normal things to be afraid of. But when you start making decisions out of fear, your judgement gets tainted by that fear. When you get to a tough decision, ask yourself, "how is the fear of X affecting this?"

The wife and I flew to San Diego last weekend for my buddy Christian's wedding. We left on Thursday evening for the Friday rehearsal; we booked 4 roundtrip tickets on United from SFO to San Diego, and an additional 2 one-way tickets from SD to SFO, as we were flying back with some more friends.

Flying out of SFO, the 1 hour trip was easy -- until we tried to land. All of a sudden it felt like we were falling out of the sky, then we nosed up and took off out of there FAST. The captain came on and said there was too much fog to land the 737-200, so we were going to LAX.

If you're reading this post, you probably have an idea of what World of Warcraft (WoW) is -- the most successful massively multiplayer online roleplaying game of all time. Blizzard claims more than 11 million subscribers (!) but the real number is estimated to be somewhere around 5 million (still !!!) To cut right to the point: I'm just not having fun anymore.