American Roulette

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Just finished reading a fascinating book called American Roulette : How I Turned the Odds Upside Down---My Wild Twenty-Five-Year Ride Ripping Off the World's Casinos. The book details Richard Marcus's 25 year career stealing from the casinos using slight of hand type moves with casino chips. Of course first and foremost, I would not advocate attempting anything you read in this book (that is if you enjoy the nice, fairly normal life of freedom you currently have).

I found out about this book one day from an online article that mentioned Richard's online weblog. Here he details various stories and thoughts on the gaming industry. What I read sounded fascinating so I had to pick up his book.

To buy the book I used Amazon.com's used book purchasing capability. It has worked great in the past for CD's so why wouldn't it work well for books.....

Well it worked great. I found the book cheap, it arrived in under a week and was in great condition...all the way down to the Baltimore Public Library sticker on the front of it. Surely this was purchased from the library and not just stolen, but who knows.

I was held hostage for 3 days while reading this book because it was so enthralling. I would highly recommend it. Of course if you are in Baltimore, you probably will not be able to find it at the local public library. Now that I have just finished it I can go back to the main task at hand. Finishing preparing for the Sun Certified Programmer Java 5 beta exam. I have less than 2 weeks left, so let the cramming commence.

It was nice to break away from reading the techie stuff for a bit since I rarely read anything that isn't technical or financially related.

Speaking of that, are you going to file your taxes online this year? No you say, why not? Did you know that many of the online tax preparation sites have made deals with the IRS to offer free federal filing online. You get your refund faster than mailing and there is no way your neglect in carrying the one can put you in hot water. Follow the links on the IRS site