My last module, the slideshow, was by far the one that I struggled with the most. I really wanted to do casino-type gambling as my slideshow. I had this whole picture in my head of the sounds and the pictures of the casinos with 100 people sitting on a slot machine. There would be people excited, pissed, anxious, nervous; you can get every type of emotion out of people from a casino, but it didn’t work out that way. When I went to AC the weekend before the module was due to take pictures, I was told that I couldn’t take any pictures inside the casino, this threw a wrench in my plan. So I was stuck on Sunday night trying to figure out what I could do for my slideshow. But it was too late, and I ended up doing online gambling as my slideshow, which really didn’t work.

If I could have gone back and done it all over again, I would have done sports betting as my slideshow and done online gambling as one of the other text modules, but what can you do about it?

All-in-all I think I did pretty well on my text modules and could have done a really good job on the slideshow if I was given the opportunity by the casino. It was definitely a tough project and a tough course, but I feel like the experience of speaking to people and the project prepared me more for the outside world than any other course that I have taken in my 4 years at Towson University.

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“I work a lot of late shifts, so in the daytime when I can’t sleep, I play poker.”

Pokerstars.net is estimated to have made over $1.5 million in revenues per day by partygaming.com.

And it’s the accessibility that makes the money for these gaming sites.

You don’t have to drive 2 and 1/2 hours to go to Atlantic City anymore in order to play your favorite games online. You can simply sit in your computer chair with a wife beater and boxer shorts on and gamble at any time of the day.

“There is always a game too. No matter what time you log on to play, there is always somebody to play poker with,” Henderson said.

And it’s not just poker, but slots online.

At slotsonline.com you can see all of the different sites that you can gamble on with slots.

“I don’t think I’d ever play slots online, but it’s nice to know if I ever wanted to that I could. But I think I’ll stick with poker,” said Henderson.

Along with slots and poker, there is also betting on sports and horse racing online as well.

So I decided to switch my topic for the slideshow to online gaming. Although it kind of goes hand in hand with my other topics, I feel that looking at online gambling is pertinent to this research project because it is becoming such a staple in the gambling world.

The article that I looked at was posted on articleblast.com.

Like my previous post with the video from Poker Pro Phil Hellmuth, this article talks about the importance of money management, especially in the online gambling world.

It is much easier to click a button and deposit money out of your bank account electronically then it is to walk up to the table with $100.

Most are smarter when it comes to physically going to the cage with $500 in your hand then they are with typing in a bank routing number on to an online gambling site.

I think that the article is very smart in saying that you should be careful with constantly re-depositing. If you put $250 in your online gambling account and it runs out, then don’t click that button and immediately put another $250.

Cool down, most people get hot when they lose a ton of money and immediately want to keep playing so they can “get it all back.”

But players need to understand that just because they’re in their Pj’s doesn’t mean that the money isn’t being taken out of your bank account.

This time around, I found a much younger man, who is not retired, unlike Grange, and believes that his number will hit one day and he will strike it rich.

Mike McCall, a 33-year-old contractor from Baltimore, has played the same four-digit number, his address, 9707, and he firmly believes that one day it’s going to come out.

“I just know my number is coming out tonight,” McCall said.

But what if it doesn’t come out tonight?

“I try to remain positive, because I know that if that number does come out, I’m going to have $250,000 in my bank account the next day,” McCall said.

And although McCall does expect his number to come out, and keeps his head up every day as he watches the 8pm drawing, he knows that he would be better off not spending 50 dollars a day on his evening Pick 4 number.

“Some days I feel like I should just go to the bathroom and flush the money down the toilet, that would save me a lot of time, and gas.”

Yet, he still continues to wager his hard-earned money on lottery in hopes that one day his fantasy will come to life, but until then, he will continue donating money to the multi-billion dollar company that is the Maryland Lottery.

It’s kind of a legalized “Fight Club.”

The website for the toughman competition is brilliant in it’s interactivity.

When you first long on to the website, you are introduced to the competition with a video complete with narration, sounds from the fight, and people speaking of their experiences being in the ring.

Once the video ends, on the side of the site, you get the option to watch the “Introduction” again, view the fight nights, or take a backstage look at the fighters that participate in the toughman competition.

The videos of the fights are great in telling the stories, especially of the fighters.

Charles Lee Grant, aka, the Beast of the East, speaks of how he just wants to get in the ring to get paid and will do anything to get the money. For him, “he’s not here to be no redneck asshole, he’s here to get paid.”

But Grant understands that in order to get paid, he’s going to have to win a fight, something that he’s good at. When he was locked up, he was fighting all the time in jail.

The videos serve as a great compliment to the text that you can read below the video if you move your mouse over it.

What is great about the site is that once you move your mouse over the text to read it, the video stops. Which is great because on most sites, you’re reading something, and trying to watch the video at the same time. And what ends up happening is that you don’t take away what you should from either because the text is distracting you from the video and the video is distracting you from the text.

What also works well is that when you drag over the thumbnails for the videos, it provides a quote or text to describe what you will be seeing or who you will seeing in the video, and a little blip of what they are going to be saying.

For example, when you scroll over Wesley “Toot Toot” Tuders’ video, the quote below the thumbnail reads, “I want to knock somebody out. That’s one thing I do want to do.”

So when you read something like that, you want to hear what else this guy has to say.

Then when you view their video, it provides a little bit of background as to who they are in their every day life and why they want to be in the toughman competition. At the end of the video, it tells you how they faired in the fights, Toot Toot lost in the 2nd round.

The only thing that I wanted on the site was more. It had about six fighters, and three fight nights that didn’t show everything that was going on. I really enjoyed watching all of the fights and listening to the different guys that were in the fights, so I wanted to see more.

$70 million in seven weeks? Are you kidding me?

Are people really not learning that 99.99 percent of them aren’t going to have their lives changed overnight by winning $100 million, it’s not going to happen, but people still continue to play lottery tickets.

This is what intrigued me so much about my topic of seeing how gambling was being affected by the recession.

And I figured that with sports betting and poker, the numbers wouldn’t really change that much because that it calculated betting, it takes a little bit of skill and knowledge to win.

And a lot of people figure that they have that knowledge, so they might be able to win a couple hundred thousand dollars on a football game or in a poker tournament, but the lottery? It has nothing to do with skill, it’s all about luck.

And I honestly thought that people would stop wasting that leftover dollar in their pocket on a Mega Millions ticket, but it turns out that I was completely wrong.

How does one state spend over $70 million in only seven weeks?

I guess it’s good for the economy of that state because a portion of that money is going to be given to provide services for the people, but stop wasting your money people.

John “Reds” Grange says, “Yes.”

Reds is an 82-year-old former steel worker from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He moved to Baltimore when he retired 17 years ago in 1992. But Reds, whose been playing lottery since he was about 60 years old, says that the economy isn’t going to slow him down.

“Lottery for me has always been about that chance to hit it big and never have to work again,” Grange said. “But clearly that never worked out for me, so now I just play to play.”

Grange has been coming into my liquor store for as long as I’ve worked there, and every day he plays Keno, and he never hits it big.

“Well when I was younger, I would play the Mega Millions in hopes of winning it big, paying off all my bills, and putting my kids through college, but now I just play for fun, one dollar here, two there,” Grange said.

Reds believes that people are going to continue to play the lottery no matter what, because as people are losing their jobs and making less money, they look at the lottery as a way to turn their life around.

“It’s sad and it’s stupid in my opinion. I play the lottery because money doesn’t matter to me, my house is paid off, my car is paid off, so I just do it because I have nothing better to do,” Grange said. “But there are people getting laid off that are still gambling, if I was in their situation back in the day, I wouldn’t be risking the money that I did have.”

Next time, I’ll talk to one of those people that are still playing the lottery despite being in a bad financial situation, hopefully they’ll talk to me.

Although many people would think that lottery sales would be way down because of the economic recession, WKJB FOX 2 in Detroit, Michigan reported on Monday, November 2nd, that sales have actually went up considerably.

They reported that from October 2008 through September 30, 2009, sales saw a 2 percent increase, totaling over $2.3 billion in total sales.

This is a shocking thing for me to hear. The unemployment rate was the highest that it had been during the course of that year, yet people are still buying lottery tickets.

It’s one thing for the people that bet on sports or play poker because that actually involves knowledge and skill, and although it’s still gambling, it is calculated gambling.

Playing the lottery, however, is a total crapshoot. The odds are completely stacked against you, and you’re basically relying on fate or some sort of miracle to win $10 million from the Mega Millions.

Also for the people that are playing scratch-offs like Chuck Dahlem, the man I interviewed earlier in the semester are relying on the 4:1 odds that are printed on the back of the scratch-off.

There are also the Keno and Racetrax players that are also just picking their birthdays, friend’s birthdays, and other special dates in hopes that they come out on the screen.

But these numbers are picked out from a computer. And in my experience of watching these Keno games, I’m telling you, the computer knows what numbers you pick.

The first map that I looked at on 10,000 Words was the Swine Flu Tracker.

This map shows the number of cases of the H1N1 virus in various countries around the world. What I really like about this map is the different ways that it presents the information. Each different color circle represents that status of the swine flu cases in each country. For instance, a yellow circle represents only “suspected” cases where as a red circle represents “fatal” cases.

Another subsection of the map is the bar graph section. Where it shows the daily number of confirmed cases of swine flu nationwide and also the the daily number of fatal cases of the swine flu. The only thing that I don’t like about this is that when you scroll over the bar it doesn’t give you an exact amount. I realize that it is probably hard to get the exact number of swine flu victims nationwide, but it would be pretty impressive if they did.

The second map that I looked at was the Geography of Jobs. This is also quite the compelling map because what are people worried about right now while the economy has been in the toilet, jobs.

And as people are losing their jobs, they may need to know where to relocate to find another job, and this map shows which cities and states are hiring the most.

It was comforting to see that Baltimore is in the black with net jobs gained since December 2008, with 8,600. The use of the circles was a good way to display the information because as the number gets bigger, either positively or negatively, the circle also gets bigger.

Another great feature of this map was that when you scrolled over the city or circle it gives you the number of net jobs gained or lost.

The last map that I looked at was my favorite by far, Away We Go is a map that is based on the movie, which I never saw, but you don’t need to in order to have fun with it.

In this map you type in a band name or a song and it gives you a list of “memories” that people have had and the songs that remind them of those good times.

This map is great because not only do you get to listen to good music, you get to see where the people listening to this music are located and the map takes you all the way to the street that the memory happened on.

Although all the bands that I searched for weren’t found, I ended up searching for Nirvana in the end, and found a memory from Craig where he describes the first time he heard the song and the party that he was at when he heard it.

This map is all-in-all just good fun and a great time to just mess around with for a while.