For the few people who have stumbled upon this site, I’ve always been known as one who will bare his soul at the drop of a hat.  I’ve drifted away from that, partly for lack of dialogue with others, partly due to a struggle I’m in the midst of.  I feel that I’ve slipped closer and closer to superficiality.  It’s complicated, and I’ve deleted about eight posts that I’ve written over the last few days.  That’s all I have for now on that.

I was taking a break when I stumbled upon a CNN video of President George W. Bush awarding the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously to Army Pfc. Ross A. McGinnis.  His parents were on hand to receive the highest military honor our nation bestows on its men and women.

His story is a war movie cliche, that of the Private jumping on a live grenade to save his fellow soldiers.  There was absolutely no reason to take this action, this ultimate sacrifice.  It’s one thing for a General to trade a dozen lives to save a hundred with some military decision.  It is quite another for one man to trade his own life for four strangers who had become brothers.

His profile has a statement from his mother and father.  Could their be more poignant words than these of his parents shortly after his death?

“Ross did not become our hero by dying to save his fellow Soldiers from a grenade. He was a hero to us long before he died, because he was willing to risk his life to protect the ideals of freedom and justice that America represents. He has been recommended for the Medal of Honor… That is not why he gave his life. The lives of four men who were his Army brothers outweighed the value of his one life. It was just a matter of simple kindergarten arithmetic. Four means more than one. It didn’t matter to Ross that he could have escaped the situation without a scratch. Nobody would have questioned such a reflex reaction. What mattered to him were the four men placed in his care on a moment’s notice. One moment he was responsible for defending the rear of a convoy from enemy fire; the next moment he held the lives of four of his friends in his hands. The choice for Ross was simple, but simple does not mean easy. His straightforward answer to a simple but difficult choice should stand as a shining example for the rest of us. We all face simple choices, but how often do we choose to make a sacrifice to get the right answer? The right choice sometimes requires honor.”

An online slideshow shows photos of him as a newborn, with his siblings, as a Cub Scout, as a youth baseball player, with his family, and with his unit.  His MySpace page is alive and well, with best wishes from friends and fellow soldiers still pouring in daily.  He would have been 21 in a couple weeks.

Ross McGinnis.  I hope I remember his name and face for the rest of my life.

Alot going on with the new site, and it’s been a first month that beat my expectations.  The design launch has gone well, and we’re tweaking things as we go.  One of the really neat features is the ability to subscribe to C2Choices via email, which you may enjoy while you are working if you can’t spend time online.

I’ve also been working hard to sigh up new advertisers here.  I want  to be sure that they are only top notch companies, and I can vouch for them.  I won’t put them here if I don’t feel they have great products.

My favorite place to find chocolate in the world is Angelina’s in Paris.  My second favorite place is Ghiradelli’s.  I’ve been to their original store in San Francisco, as well as their spot on the Vegas Strip.  They get the top spot currently for advertisers, and they have a great deal of free shipping plus a special gift for any purchase over $50.

I’m a golfer, and I’m planning on playing more frequently this summer.  The Golf Warehouse makes a great partner to offer you all of the equipment you need.  Their new PING lessons can be downloaded onto you iPod, as well as can be viewed when you are ready to work on your game.  MiamiDon can tell you how important the little things are in golf.

I’m a Barnes & Noble customer (we were just there last night).   I’d recommend “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch as a great Father’s Day gift, but really any of these stores can help you find the right gift or secret pleasure for you!

Another long night last night unfortunately, with a good bit on my mind in work and life in general.  I headed to the basement sofa around 2:00 and found the 1968 version of “Planet of the Apes.”

Linda Harrison was the love interest of Charlton Heston (Taylor) in the film, and I saw the movie fairly early on (when their spaceship was in the lake).  I didn’t recall the early part of the movie for some reason, and I was sucked in for most of it (I ended up falling asleep after Taylor was speaking with Dr. Zaius.

The above clip was the famous scene where Taylor speaks in the midst of the apes for the first time, with the great line, “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!”  After a long Google chat session with one of my soccer mom’s, it got me thinking that I’ve lost alot of the my ability to speak and have a conversation.

I’m a terrific presenter and speaker, having addressed a maximum crowd of a few thousand on some topic before.  I grew up as a fairly chatty guy when I was with people, full of confidence and unafraid to strike up a conversation with strangers.

Somewhere in the last few years, I’m simply stopped speaking words very much.  I prefer to communicate via email or these posts, don’t make very many phone calls, don’t create the opportunity to make presentations or speaking engagements.  I have conversations with my wife and our boys, but I’m guessing I speak out loud less than 5,000 words a day.  It may be closer to 1,000 actually (an interesting experiment).

Is this common?  This is no great epiphany on the state of humanity, as others have already spoken quite elegantly on the subject (see Bruce Schneier among others).  But what has this done to me on a personal basis?  Am I lesser because I don’t speak?  Are there long-term impacts to me?

Unclear, but I’d be very interested in the thoughts of others.  btw, the last scene in “Planet of the Apes.”

Well hello there! Welcome to my new home at c2choices. It’s a new look and feel, a new locale, new topics intertwined with old. Let me show you around (and forgive the mess–98% done is done enough).

First, let’s look at the design. The inspiration came from several different places. Six Square’s icons gave me the inspiration to run with making categories visible and more robust. You’ll be able to easily find topics of interest, as well as pull feeds from a single category if you like (e.g., http://c2choices.com/category/mucking/feeds lets you subscribe directly to posts about poker). We made the categories verbs rather than typical names to add a little fun to it all (I’ll let you figure out where bokehing came from).

I wanted to move toward a cleaner design, with sites like Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction providing inspiration. Odds & Ends brought a more visual approach. I’m not sure how much of that really made it through to the final design to be honest, but I hope that images will be a significant part of this site. Rapid Eye Reality and CarmenSinCity gave me some guidance in moving into more life experiences, as well as Letters from a Small State and a host of others.

Some of the most significant content areas are still to be worked on. Get Goals! is a key section where I will spend more time on my own thoughts and experiences in goal setting. I’ll track my own goals, invite others to join in, and provide tools I’ve used as well as best practices. Hopefully it will be a benefit to me and others.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is one of my favorite parts of this site and something I want to do more regularly. I’ve found some interesting sites by hopping link-to-link from here, and I’d like to make that better and more interesting.

There are a few minor tweaks still to do (color, softening a few corners, moving links around, etc). If you don’t see your link, please shoot me an email at csquard@gmail.com and I’ll link you up. Believe me, it wasn’t any big judgment if you aren’t there, more my own fatigue in knocking it out.

The name of the site has changed, from Quest of a Closet Poker Player to C2 Choices (that’s superscript 2, as in squared). For long-time followers, you know that I try to put all of my struggles and emotions in the record of my posts. When I took many, many steps back over the last half a year, I saw that what all of this writing was really about: choices. It all boils down to what I choose to spend mental energy on, what I choose to do with my time, what I choose to do with my motivation, what I choose to do with my own fears and shortcomings. I’ve been pretty poor at choosing, more often choosing not to choose (if that makes sense). I hope this new direction reflects new directions and motivation in my own life.

I also hope that the new site brings more dialog and more people. A major reason I’ve blogged for close to three years is to connect with others, to chat and explore areas I struggle with. I hope this new site brings more of that, a broader community of people that doesn’t exclude my good friends.

So, welcome to C2 Choices, my new home. Link up, subscribe, let your friends know all about it. Let me know your thoughts on the design as well. Thanks to Paul and his team for dealing with me on the design–we’re almost done!

Special thanks to the following who referred visitors in April:

Up for Poker
CarmenSinCity
The Wife
Bankwell
MiamiDon
Hoy
Astin
PokerGrub
Mookie
Six Square

Top keyword searches

What should I do during a recession?
Poker Christian sin
Lynette Chan
kids of poker

We’re getting close on the redesign of the site. Anyone interested in giving feedback, please email me at csquard@gmail.com and I’ll forward a .jpg of the current design. Thanks to all those who’ve linked me here since I moved back. Old friends with old links still broken, but I’ll wait to fix that when we go live with the new site.

Idolatry is truly laugh out loud at times when they do the recap videos. By far, it’s better than watching Idol. btw, the only way to watch Idol is to fast forward through all of the commercials, through any song that you hate, and through any judges’ comments.

Hilarious diatribe as they rant (above) after Carly gets voted out with her terrific performance then Brooke skates through after she forgot her words, hit rewind, and started again (below).

Can’t wait to fast forward through tonight; oh, scratch that. Can’t wait to delete it from my TiVo.

Ronaldo Claims Bribery by Transvestite Hooker

Really, is there anything worse than “…claims bribery by transvestite hooker…” that you’d fear to see after your own name?

I met some of the PokerListings folks last year at the WSOP. Very nice group, and I’ve stumbled upon a neat feature to their website that you should bookmark. It is called the MarketPulse, where they show the biggest pots each day, week, month, and YTD (primarily on FullTilt, as that is really the home of nose-bleed poker).

“Grenade! Grenade!” (subsequently, he blows himself up with said grenade)
“He’s not a mean guy–he’s my friend.”
“Tanks! Cool!”
“Watch me blow the car up.”
“I wish I had that gun.”
“I’m not in trouble–Daddy’s in trouble.”

btw–if Soap is on your team, he may very well be a three-year old…