Silicon Palms

Reefer Poker Announces Surf's Up Promotion to Celebrate Launch of New Online CasinoBeach.com

Malta, June 29, 2010 - ReeferPoker.com, in partnership with ReeferCasino.com, has announced the launch of their new online casino partner; CasinoBeach.com.

As part of the launch promo for this new Real Time Gaming casino, the group of sites, which includes the social network ReeferPeople.com, has created a promotion that has players visiting all of their sites on a hunt for branded surfboards.

One of my favorite movies is called "Layer Cake" a 2004 film set in London that focuses on an unnamed successful cocaine dealer (played by Daniel Craig). At only 29, he has a respected place amongst England's Mafia, and is secretly planning to retire from the business. There's a couple of quotes in the film that I find particularly relevant to my career, first is the main advice of the entire plot, imparted upon the main character by the wealthy businessman near the end of the story:

The art of good business is being a good middleman.

This is a meaningful quote to me because for most of my career I've been working at being a good middleman, even if you consider the purpose of web publishing, more often than not, it's about providing information to readers related to places, people, products or knowledge in the hopes of bringing them together to consummate a deal. Web publishing is about being a good middleman, it's important not to forget that the surest way to become successful in this business, or any business, is to help other people get what they want.

Another favorite quote is from the same character, the successful businessman to the dealer:

You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son.

My slant on that advice as it relates to web publishing is that, over time, if you consistently publish respectable web content and learn the tricks of the trade, sharpen your product-knowledge and focus in on reaching your target market, the day will come when the work get's easier, generates more revenue, and brings you closer to that point in time, when you own a valuable web publishing business and control your destiny.

Silicon Palms has continued to grow, the products have improved and more and more opportunities are introduced to me, whereas one upon a time I had to seek products to sell. Now the process has become easier and more lucrative. Perhaps the rarified atmosphere of having forgotten what shit even smells like has finally arrived?

10PIPS Review

With the large choice of trading systems available, with almost any trading markets can be traded on certain systems, including commodities, stocks or Forex, it's very difficult to choose a whole trading solution. The leading trading systems are very good at what they do; however, a comprehensive solution for all trading instruments with a simple interface is very rare. 10PIPS offers a real multichannel online trading system; its goal is to present a trading solution for all the available instruments with a variety which increases all the time. To create this solution an innovative system was built which is focused also on the ease of use with no lack on professionalism.

On this day 50 years ago I entered this world on a night that was so stormy in Vancouver that electricity was knocked out through much of the city and phone lines were down in North Vancouver. It was in the very early hours at Lions Gate Hospital, so I'm told, that my mother delivered me. Truthfully, she's the person who deserves the congrats not me, and her and my Dad deserve a great many thanks for encouraging me to participate in sports. As a child I was taught to ski by my second birthday and since my parents were ski instructors at Mt. Baker in Washington State, I grew up "ski racing crazy", so it was especially enjoyable for me to watch the various skiing events taking place on the slopes where I used to race.

To say that I'm thankful for the 50 years of life (btw: I'm 49 years old today) is grossly understated. I've enjoyed the most marvelous lifestyle so far and it's about to get even better. What a blessing to have spent so many days every winter, for the first half of my life, up in the mountain pursuing my own gold medals. Sure I've had my fair share of bad days too, everyone has got to, or we'd never recognize the good one's but all things considered I'm content with my lot in life, I like who I've become and don't regret the decisions I've made, although on blazing hot days in Brazil (like today) I sometimes miss the snow-covered mountains of British Columbia.

Love is the key to a good life. Luck and love may have something to do with my own level of happiness but just like the famous quote: "The harder I work, the luckier I get" (either Gary Player or Samuel Goldwyn said that) when applied to my life, relates to the understanding that the more I learn to love life and the people in it, I luckier I get with love in return. In case you're wondering; I think I've been very, very lucky in love and life and consider myself very fortunate just to have been born and raised in Canada.

Vancouver Winter Olympics, from my perspective, as seen from the comfort of my home in Brazil, exemplifies everything that is wonderful and decent about Western Canada for the manifestation of the Olympic spirit. Peace on earth and goodwill towards mankind and may the best competitor win! Let the world bear witness that there is only one love, no-matter how many interpretations and expressions of beauty there may be for athletic perfection, in the end it's all about harmony and forgetting our differences to work together for the common good of sport, to make something bigger and better than the sum total of all our parts and purposes. The people of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver have done an excellent job hosting the Winter Olympics and made us proud to be Canadian, even if we don't win enough Gold medals.

As we entered this new decade at the turn of the new year, despite having every intention, for the first time since I can remember, I neglected to write a new personal mission statement. I did however read over some of what I had written to myself in the past several years. To commemorate this new year I even had in my mind the steps I was planning, to write my mission statement for 2010, complete with spreadsheets for tracking my progress. However, not a word of my mission was written until today because in my heart I could feel that something was wrong with my thinking this year, or maybe for many years.

Over the last several weeks I became aware that I wasn't thinking completely for myself, one of my concerns was that I had allowed myself to become comfortably numb about the world around me. Sure I've been distracted by things in my personal life, such as loss of family members including someone I loved who left before his time, plus my business interests had been exceptionally tumultuous and occasionally stressful, on top of all this my own creature comfort habits had reached a level bordering on obsessive compulsive but none of these things alone was what was bothering me deep inside.

So I made a few major lifestyle modfications without even writing the new goals down, I just achieved them, almost like leaving one era of my life and entering another. Then in an attempt to understand the recurring notion that something in my life was misaligned I started consuming information at a tremendous rate, while at the same time stepped up my physical activity and exercise, reduced my food intake and eliminated all toxins. The data that I loaded in to my mind to process was very diverse and came from a broad spectrum of sources, mostly printed material, video segments and full length documentaries. Much of what I analyzed was not happy or uplifting but eventually I discovered one common nagging question I needed to answer.

While attending a Poker Awards Banquet earlier this year hosted by the good folks from Flop Magazine here in Brazil, I had the great pleasure of meeting Gustavo Andrade the legal counsel for The Brazilian Confederation of Texas Hold'em as well as legal adviser to the Sao Paulo Circuit, Poker Tour. We hit it off from the beginning, finding that we had lot's of things besides an overly healthy interest in the business side of online gambling in common, so it was always fun to get together and compare notes about the industry of online poker in Brasil, I recon Gustavo knows as much or more about this industry as anyone in the country, especially as it pertains to the laws.

For several months Gustavo and I would get together on Thursday nights for a few cold beers at the "Blue Pub" in downtown Sampa (Sao Paulo) and talk shop, then one day I suggested to Gustavo that he should publish a blog, focused on poker in Brasil and promote some of the companies we know, including Reefer Poker. Well back in August we came up with the name "Poker Brasileiro", registered it and I set-up a personal publishing system on the Domain and gave Gustavo a short tutorial about how to publish stories, now some 4 months and 100 articles later Gustavo is really getting some traction on his blog, with as many as 250 readers per day and a growing syndication via RSS to some leading Brasil poker portals. He's a true natural, loves blogging and people love reading his stories.

Poker Brasileiro is not just about poker in Brasil but also sheds some light on the popular players from here who play poker professionally, as well as sharing some travel stories and photos about the great lifestyle, beaches, cities, the food, plus the wonderful culture of Brazil.

Having been a huge fan of Movable Type personal publishing platform for so many years, I was thrilled to learn that MT founders had inspired and empowered an Open Source software called Open Melody. Now there's a group of web developers joining forces to collectively foster the evolution of a better content management system.

To test the software I installed a sandbox on www.macumbabeach.com, connected my web server to the Github (for social coding), joined the mailing list and community, I'm set-up to add my contributions to this great work in progress, while simultaneously developing a "Rio de Janeiro Travel Blog" called Macumba Beach.

About Melody;
Melody is an open source content management and publishing system derived from the popular blogging tool Movable Type. Melody is for those who find value in belonging to, supporting and contributing to a community of helpful, passionate and devoted users, but it is also for people who want a secure, proven and high quality publishing environment for their personal web site or their business.

PROJECT GOALS

Melody is actively maintained by a community of passionate individuals committed to the following goals:

• Make personal publishing easier and more enjoyable.


• Create the most progressive and innovative personal publishing application available.


• Inspire a thriving community of users, developers and contributors.

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DublinBet.com is a truly exciting online experience, using the latest Distance Gaming™ technology, DublinBet.com delivers Live video, and True Live results from real live tables located in the Fitzwilliam Card Club & Casino in Dublin, Ireland. Also Ladbrokes Casino have recently adopted the technology as a featured section of their popular online casino and other leading gaming sites are following suit slowly but surely.

The EGR Awards for 2009 were held this week in London and a were attended by over 900 of the online gambling industry's major players. The awards are billed by eGaming Review as the industry's equivalent of the Oscars, recognizing excellence across the spectrum of net gambling categories including casino, poker, sports betting, bingo and regionally focused operations. For the first time, this years EGR Awards included a category for "Live Casino" which (won by Unibet Casino) indicates how new this niche is.

Several gaming companies now offer "Live Deal" for Roulette, Black Jack, Baccarat and Sic Bo. Live deal casino games are the natural evolution in online casinos' battle to win over the skeptics of the Random Number Generator (RNG), associated with all other online casinos but the live dealer also provides an enhanced gambling experience to the players. This type of gambling technology is a platform that's been steadily gaining traction, as connection speeds and streaming technologies have improved. Live streaming video with real dealers or croupiers conducting play are the closest thing you can get to a traditional 'land based' casino experience and may be more enticing for players and may attract existing 'brick and mortar' companies to produce the live streams, so they can join in the media convergence.

I predict that within a couple of years live dealer casino gaming for Roulette, Black Jack, Baccarat and Sic Bo will become the standard for all online casinos. Silicon Palms will be right there to provide the product, technical support and management.

Casino Beach has always been my favorite Domain name because it encompasses two of my favorite things, casinos and beaches. Many gambling sites try to create a sexy image by hiring scantily clad girls to prance around with the their company logo displayed somewhere on their skimpy clothing but it's a stretch of the imagination to think of how the girls relate to the website name. Whereas, the word beach conjures up images of bikinis, so that it's exactly what I've been designing into the Casino Beach by adding a Bikini Gallery and also publishing stories about some of the great beaches of the world, many of which have Casinos on/or near them. A plan is starting to take shape for developing Casino Beach into a "live" gambling site.

Security Traders is a new social network for stock market investors. Please visit the new site I just launched using the Movable Type community software platform and feel free to sign-up, log in and post your own trade ideas, commentary, or global market observations. The Security Traders community is for sharing information and communicating with like-minded individuals who invest in global stock markets.