Applying for a new job!

Finally some updates worth posting about! As you have all noticed the blog has been pretty dead for the past 2 months (I focused mainly on my work with sc2gg.com, more on that later, and on my political blog).

As you guys know, I'm a big fan of poker and I've been looking for a job I can truly dedicate myself to, something I feel useful in. Well good news! I might have found the perfect match. Some of you might know of PokerStrategy.com, one of the best and biggest online poker schools. Originally a German based site, PS is now offered in a multitude of language and supports a healthy community of poker players worldwide. Well, I have decided to apply for a job as a community manager over there! This also means I will have to relocate close to their offices in southern Spain, if they decide to hire me (cross your fingers, I really wish they hire me, you guys know how much I love Poker and online work).

Also, for those of you who know about my personal life, you know how much I have been hoping to move to Europe, well it seems this might be it! Although the relocation might be delayed a bit, because of the financial state my last job left me in.
That's something else my close friends know about, I was a day trader on the NASDAQ/NYSE but with the current market crisis and housing crash in the US, the markets have been pummeling and things have been looking pretty dim for a young day trader with little experience like me.

I am so excited for this that I have a hard time structuring my blog post correctly! But hopefully all goes well and I can soon enjoy the Mediterranean climate :)

Oh, by the way, many of PokerStrategy's staff comes from a competitive gaming background, how cool is that? I really feel like I might have found my niche with this company! So keep me in your prayers (or whatever you believe in, heh) as I anxiously wait for a response from their HR department. After all these years of giving time and working with online communities, it seems my experience might come handy for a paid position!

As I mentionned in the introduction, I have spent a lot of time working with sc2gg.com recently. In the next 2-3 days I should have a detailed post with some information on this new Starcraft community for all you gamers reading my blog. All I can say right now is you should visit the site if you enjoy SC, as they provide some of the best english commentary of the Korean scene. Visit the forums, as the front page is not fully functionnal yet (I am actually designing the new page layout which should go live around the 1st of June).

Stay tuned!

I'm f****** Matt Damon

Yeah, really!

Website!

For quite some time I have had this idea in the back of my head to centralize my blogs or to find a way to create some sort of portal to the webpages I maintain. I have taken a few hours yesterday to set myself up with a nice website, which is located at www.fcnz.tk and contains links to all of my pages, as well as a profile of myself, some useful links and files, results from my trivia bot on IRC and finally some of my dj mixes.

Hope you like the new site, keep it tuned to my blogs for some new posts in a day or two!

EDIT: The www.fcnz.tk address is currently down, I moved on a new hosting service and decided to design a new front page for it, so it will not be back until I am done with that (and I have a few other priorities so no ETA for now, although it should be done before the end of July 08)

Formula 1

So as the racing fans amongst you already know, the Formula 1 season kicked off 3 weeks ago in Australia with the Melbourne grand prix and the second race of the season was held in Malaysia the week-end after. Next week-end is the Bahrain grand prix, stage 3 of the 2008 season. For those of you who enjoy speed, this season is particularly interesting because of the removal of traction control, in an effort to give more control back into the hands of the drivers. That gives us more spectacle, more action and fighting and allows for driver's skills to shine, compared to the last couple of seasons where it was a battle of the cars (and teams). If you are new to the racing world, here is a page you might want to visit with information on the current 2008 Formula 1 season: LINK

Here is a preview lap of the Bahrain circuit by Nick Heidfeld.

Updates

I thought I would make a post to update you on what's been happening recently with my blogs, job and hobbies. I had not posted anything on any of my blogs for about a week as I have been pretty busy and the last 2 week-ends (where I usually prepare most of my content for the next week) have been too crazy for me to put the time I should have put into the blogs.

Blogs: Well "The Frenchie's Pit" has been unlocked in a timely fashion and I want to thank blogspot for that. I have posted my endorsement of John McCain and I am working on two rather long and detailed posts about Canadian politics. Traffic has been higher than expected for such a young blog so I am trying to make it my first priority. For my personal blog (the one you are reading right now), I might rant about the American society and some of the things that make me really angry about people in North America, but I'm not sure how it would be perceived yet. I'll also put up a couple of posts regarding more personal stuff either later today or tommorow.

Poker: The last weeks have been rather calm, I have not played any poker in over a week. I am sitting on about 250$ in my bankroll on UltimateBet and might wait until I can deposit a bit on top of that before playing again, the reason being I hate playing microstakes, they are so random and people with big bankrolls who still play microstakes will sometimes play very loose on them, making it a crapshot many times, even with winning hands. Variance on the micros shouldn't hit as hard as on higher stakes but I still feel more comfortable playing the 10/25NL tables. So that's that...

Gaming: Well a couple of things happened with my gaming, I have reformed team Flawless Execution with some oldschool friends of mine. Team fe used to be a powerhouse in North America back in 2002, we remade the team a couple of times without as much success as we would've wanted to but there is only us to blame. This time we have not set any specific goals, we just wish to have some fun and play with old friends we feel comfortable with. For those of you who use IRC, our channel is #fe-team on irc.gamesurge.net

I also opened my own club for friends and fans, it is also located on IRC, #fcnz on irc.gamesurge.net so join it up if you are a IRC user and I will give you access!

On another note, I've been thinking about writing a long post about the CGS, CS 1.6 vs Source and my feelings on the whole debate but I have a hard time making a logical train of thought on the topic. There are so many things that come into play and I feel like I would need a whole book to cover the subject completely. (If you're an editor and wish to fund me to write a book, then it's another story!)

Work: Nothing much really, the usual routine, I have been working on an online consultancy business I have been wanting to set up but I have come short on time recently and decided to put that on hold for now. If either my trading or poker goes well, I should be able to resume work on that within about a six month-one year period.

Locked blog

This morning it seems that Blogger decided to lock my political blog for no apparent reason other than it was somehow identified as a "potential spam blog". So if you don't see any updates on "The Frenchie's Pit" within the next couple of days, blame blogger's staff. I have a couple posts ready that I will upload as soon as I get access back :)

In other news, I've started playing on Full Tilt Poker with 50$, I will try to convert it into a decent bankroll within a month (or at least that's my objective). My ingame name is "fakshun" so hit me up if you're a FTP player!

That's all for now, enjoy the week-end!

More gaming!

So yesterday I posted about Starcraft which is something I enjoy watching, but it should be obvious I don't only watch video games, I play too (duh)! I mostly play online and am not what one would call the "average" gamer, I guess, mostly for the fact that I don't buy new games, actually, I don't remember the last time I bought a video game. I don't really touch consoles either, although I do own a PlayStation 2 and a single game for it (Gran Turismo 4). So, I've pretty much stuck with the same online game for many years(it has been updated though) and I've become quite good at it.

This game of choice is called Counter-Strike 1.6. It is a first-person shooter played in multiplayer only, where 2 teams face each other on a variety of environments (called "maps"). One team is the "terrorist" team while the other plays as the "counter-terrorists". The goal of the game is for either the terrorists to sucessfully plant and detonate a timed bomb in one of the two bombsites in the map or to eliminate the counter-terrorist team (from now on called CTs); all of this within a fixed time limit (usually around three minutes per round), if they fail to accomplish one of these objectives when the clock runs out, the CT team wins. In contrast with this, the goal of the CTs is to either defuse the bomb when it has been planted (the bomb has a 35 seconds timer in most games, although you can change the settings to make custom rules) or to eliminate the terrorist team. The CTs worry less about the clock as they will automatically win if the terrorists don't plant the bomb before the round ends. A round is around 3 minutes as I said and it lasts from when the player spawns to when either the clock runs out or one of the two teams won by accomplishing an objective. Once you die, you are dead and have to spectate the game until the end of the round, which makes strategical thinking and individual skills very important, you cannot carelessly run into the enemy and create a numerical advantage for the opposing team and hope to win. The game being so old, the skill involved in it is immense, especially considering that many of the top players have been around for almost 10 years now. Competition has been at a high level as Counter-Strike is widely played and one of the hardest games to master in First-Person Shooter history. Speaking of competition, let's just say that the top teams worldwide can live off of their CS tournament winnings, sponsorships and endorsement deals, almost to the same extent as Starcraft, without the insane fans and groupies.

Now that you are introduced to the game itself, I'll tell you why I decided to post on this topic today (and also partly why I talked about starcraft pros yesterday). I will once in a while post videos related to CS matches, players and tournaments. I might rant on things within the community, the leagues and the forums. I might report on big events and happenings within the eSports world. If you're already a fan, everything I just said is old news to you, but if I have caugh your interest and you are curious about eSports and competitive gaming, I will end this post with links to some major news and community sites for eSports. If you're completely lost, bored or don't care at all about gaming, just ignore the game-related post, they should count for about 10-20% of my blog posts.

**Quick Starcraft update, Jaedong won the KeSPA Player of the Year award, as well as Best Zerg. Flash took Best Terran and by popular vote, Stork won Best Protoss award over Bisu in a somewhat controversial decision when viewed from the stats perspective (Bisu was very hot in the first half of 2007, although Stork came back with two second place finishers in the GSI and the Bacchus OSL, Bisu was expected to win this award).

Links for eSports sites.
GotFrag #1 source for Counter-Strike news, biggest gaming community in North America
TeamLiquid Best source for Starcraft news in English
ProgamingTV Viewers guide for competitive gaming, lists all games being broadcasted on the main match casting networks.
ESRealityOne of the major European eSports website.

Starcraft stuff

Disclaimer: This post might be a little bit too hardcore for all of you non-gamers or casual gamers. If you get too confused, just ignore this post :) It is also a repost and was originally posted on my now strictly-political blog on March 19th, 2008 (yesterday).

Recently, the all-Korean Starcraft pro gaming scene has had a lot of action, many tournaments and it's fair share of drama. I do not play that game myself, but I do follow the professional scene on a weekly basis. Some of you (actually, most of you) might not understand why or how I could be entertained by watching two teenagers going at it in a strategy game. Well, to be honest, I don't know either! The games are just really exciting, the competition level is off-the-hook and in Korea, Starcraft ranks along regular sports like soccer in terms of popularity. The crowds at live events are huge (thousands of people), including people you would not expect in a video game tournament. The demographics of starcraft are actually quite spectacular; often you will see a majority of girls in the crowds. Yes, girls in a hardcore video game tournament, going crazy for their favorite players at every move (some of the pros have fan clubs of over 100,000 members). The players are part of teams backed by some of the biggest corporations in Korea: Samsung, KTF, MBC, OGN amongst others. Heck, even the Korean Air Force has it's own team. Not to mention that the proleague (where teams play against each other, rather than individual matches like most of the competitions are) is organized by the Shinan Bank, one of the biggest (if not the biggest) in Korea.

So now that I have explained why I am fascinated by professional Starcraft, back to the topic I wanted to touch on: the last month in the Starcraft scene. The Starleagues (yes there are two, a third one on the way aswell) are the top of Starcraft individual competition. The most influent one, the OSL (Ongamenet StarLeague) just had it's finals last week, while the MSL (MBC StarLeague) had it's finals about three weeks ago. On top of that, we had two very interesting events in the last month, the GSI (GomTV Star Invitational) and the MBC All-Stars Skin Games. And if all of these competitions weren't enough, KeSPA, the governing body for professional eSports in Korea, had it's annual awards today. So as an introduction to starcraft, I thought I would post some videos of these events for all of my readers to enjoy. Hopefully you enjoy them and if not, well at least you now know to ignore my starcraft-related blogs from now on. If you did enjoy it, rest assured that many more of these videos are coming in the future.

Here are the videos, as well as links to reports from some of these events (I do not own these videos, neither did I film or upload them)

KeSPA Annual Awards results: LINK
GomTV Star Invitational results and VODs: LINK

MBC StarLeague Finals (Jaedong vs Kal), this is game 1 in a best of 5
Links for the other games: Game 2 Game 3 Game 4


Ongamenet StarLeague Finals (Flash vs Stork), this is game 1 in a best of 5 also
Links for the other games: Game 2 Game 3

Author's introduction

Here it is! My personal blog. I know I had just opened "The Frenchie's Pit" but with the rate at which I was posting articles, it appeared clear to me that mixing my political blogs with random posts about my personal interests or personal life would not be very effective and would confuse or turn away readers. Since my objective with that blog is to focus on politics, the decision was fairly easy and I have now moved all of my articles from "The Frenchie's Pit" into this new blog, which for now is named "Momentary lapse of reason" (subject to change). As this page may be the first blog of mine that you read, I will also include a modified copy of my introduction from my political blog in this post.(political blog which you can find under "my links" on the left) here. I will also repost here all of my gaming related blog posts from the political blog, which will remain "The Frenchie's Pit". I hope you enjoy the new concept, as I think it will allow those who you who read my blog for gaming/music/lifestyle/poker related posts will now find only this type of post in here and the politically savvy of you can still visit my main blog. I would also like to hear from you guys, leave a comment to this post with ideas and opinions if you wish to be heard.

Introduction (from "The Frenchie's Pit", my political blog)

Well to start off, my names Francis Cloutier, I am 21 years old and as you may have noticed from my last name, my first language is french (so please excuse the occasionnal typo). I live in Canada, in the eastern part known as the province of Quebec (the french part of Canada, basically). I currently work as a day trader on the NYSE and NASDAQ as well as playing poker on the side for additionnal income. I am an avid fan of politics, personally a libertarian (right wing) and member of the provincial party known as the ADQ (Action Democratique du Quebec), the only conservative party in the province, currently sitting as the opposition in the house of commons. I also am a conservative voter on the national level, but not a big fan of Mr. Harper, our current conservative prime minister. Outside of politics and poker, I play some online video games, a hobby I have picked up during high school and have enjoyed ever since and am also obssessed by cars and racing (mostly Formula 1, ALMS, IRL, not a big fan of Nascar). I read a lot, about pretty much anything, although I have a preference for historical and political books, as well as science fiction (all hail Frank Herbert's "Dune" series). As you can see on the left side, I posted some links to other pages I maintain, my poker blog on liquidpoker.com as well as my Youtube channel.