JerseySmarts.com – Page 52 – Joe Palazzolo's Blog

Goodbye Atlantic City Gambling?

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Joe

Atlantic City casinos have been hit with a double whammy of late, and many are questioning exactly where the silver lining or future hope may lie for. Casino revenues have slid dramatically year after year as rival casinos opened in Pennsylvania and New York, with no real response from either AC casinos or the state of New Jersey, other than to cross their fingers and hope that the economy and situation magically improves.

While Las Vegas is in a similar situation and battling declining gambling revenues it at least has other revenue streams to fall back on, including the ability to cross-sell many of its offering such as MMA fights, which draw a steady stream of fans to Vegas to both attend the events and place wagers in sportsbooks. With no sportsbooks to fall back on more dated casinos and hotels in general, it’s a much harder sell for AC casinos to cash in on MMA mania.

MMA isn’t a magic bullet for casinos but it’s a step in the right direction, as far as getting out of the old-school mentality that all a casino has to do is cram in a lot of slot machines and table games in order to be profitable. Casinos have to fight harder for the dwindling entertainment dollars that customers are willing to spend, especially as more and more players embrace online gaming sites where they can play real money blackjack and other casino games without ever leaving home.

While recent steps by the New Jersey legislature to allow smaller boutique casinos in more locations and implement an intrastate online casino site are steps in the right direction, it remains to be seen if it’s a case of too-little, too-late for gambling in Atlantic City. With newer, slicker options available on nearly every front, it’s becoming a harder and harder draw to convince customers to come to Atlantic City to spend their gambling dollars.

How Many Pills Do YOU Take Each Week?

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Joe

Yesterday, I did this thing where I tweeted all day. I don’t know why – I just wanted to get that vapid, share-every-minute-of-my-life feeling that all of these stupid kids seem to have as they run around on their smart phones all day. Honestly, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but I still don’t get the fascination with Twitter. Seems overrated to me.

At some point yesterday, I tweeted all of the pills that I take each day. Here is a cropped version of that picture for you to take a look at (and be sickened by, I would guess):

This is the collection of pills that I take each week. Yummy!

Want some explanation on what all of that stuff is in those boxes? Okay – here we go!

Well, the pills at the top of the picture are the ones that I take each morning either right before or right after breakfast. Thus, the pills at the bottom of the picture are the ones that I take each evening either right before or right after dinner. Thankfully, I don’t take any pills during the day.

I take two types of pills: those that are prescribed and those that aren’t prescribed. I’ll go over the prescription pills first. Those big white pills are 1,000 MG of Metformin. That circular pinkish pill is 100MG of Januvia (which is incredibly expensive). Those really small, circular green pills are 2MG of Glimepiride (two of those each morning – not sure if you can see both pills in the top boxes). Finally, if you look at the third box on top, you’ll see a small yellow pill – that’s 81MG of Aspirin.

And those are my prescriptions. Now, for the other pills in the boxes…

The bright orange pills are 400MG of Turmeric Extract and the orange/brownish pills are Ultimate Man Daily Multivitamins from The Vitamin Shoppe – I take two of them each morning.

So there’s my daily regime. Once I get rid of this Type 2 Diabetes, I should be down to just taking the Turmeric Extract and the Daily Multivitamins.

Retro Video Game Review: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Joe

Sometimes you have to face the music. For example, at some point over the last ten years I lost just about all of my video game skills. Gone. Sure, I can play a game here and there, but I can’t dominate them like I did when I was a little kid. I’m just not very good at the high end video games that are produced and released these days. The truth is that I suck at these Call of Duty games, I’m horrible at that Resident Evil stuff, and when it comes to Madden and other sports games – I just can’t keep up!

I suspect that there are many people out there just like me – people who used to be good at playing videos games, but try to play today’s video games and generally find themselves on the short end of the stick. If you’re one of those folks who has been passed by in the current generation of video games, then I’m here to tell you that there is hope thanks to the Nintendo Wii! More specifically, there is hope thanks to Nintendo’s Virtual Console – where you can download hundreds of old games from previous gaming systems.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest - A Quick, Fun Way to Spend 10 Hours

Last weekend, I was flipping around the Virtual Console looking for a nostalgic way to spend a few bucks and there it was – Final Fantasy’s Mystic Quest. Frankly, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it on the screen because I didn’t think that Mystic Quest was the type of big-time game that you’d find on the Virtual Console. But there it was and a few bucks and a few minutes later it was downloaded to my Wii and I was ready to play.

Mystic Quest was originally released in 1992 and you’ll be able to figure as much as soon as you turn the game on. The graphics, gameplay, character movement, audio, and sound effects are all straight out of time warp when George H. W. Bush was still President and I was kicking butt playing on the recreation soccer team in Mount Arlington. Good times, but I digress.

It took me about 10 hours of playing the game in order to beat it. Now, I don’t specifically remember how much time I spent playing this particular video game back in 1992, but I have to imagine that it was a number greater than 10! So, while I tend to fail miserably at today’s video games, I think I’ve actually gotten better at yesterday’s video games. Ha! That’s improvement right there, people! And, honestly, I could have beaten the game a little bit quicker, but it took my some time to get my bearings about me (hey, it’s been almost 20 years since I last played the game – give me a break!).

Mystic Quest follows a tried and true formula for Final Fantasy games: something bad is happening in the world, a fabled hero appears, the hero defeats a series of lesser “bad guys” which lead up to fighting the major bad guy, and the world is saved. Hey, if the formula ain’t broke – don’t fix it, right? After you save a bunch of crystals, you’re faced with going through a tower and refighting a different form of each of the lesser bad guys before you come before the Dark King (creative name, right?). After you defeat a few incarnations of the Dark King, Square-Enix (actually, Squaresoft made the game, but since they’re now Square-Enix, I’m using that name) puts together a montage with the hero visiting all of the major locations in this very small land that the game takes place in. The hero gets an update from everyone, borrows a ship from his girlfriend’s father, and goes off sailing around the world with a treasure hunter named Tristam.

And that’s it – the game is over. There’s nothing else going on after you beat the game unlike some of the newer Square-Enix games where you can go through the game from the beginning with a powered up version of the hero. But hey – this game was made in 1992 and the idea of going back through the game at top performance was probably crazy talk back then!

However, better than actually beating a game again, I was able to take 10 hours of my time (broken into an hour here, two hours there) and feel like I was good at a real video game again. So if you’re on Nintendo’s Virtual Console, like role playing games, and are a fan of Final Fantasy and Square-Enix – go ahead and download Mystic Quest. You’ll love it!

Up next from the Virtual Console… Secret of Mana released by Square-Enix in 1993. Awesome!

Governor Christie Talks Pension Reform with PBA Leader

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Joe

For my friends over in Wisconsin, I thought that I would post this YouTube video from a recent town hall meeting where New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie had a reasoned discussion with someone who asked questions about upcoming cuts. I’m also posting this video for my friends who work in the public sector (police and firemen) and are annoyed that there are likely going to be job cuts in the coming weeks and months. Watch the video and then I have one or two more comments below it.

For me, this is a simple situation and one that really doesn’t require any protesting or arguing or petty “left vs. right” political comparisons. In short, there’s no money. No money = no jobs. Take the private sector over the last three years – people have been losing their jobs left and right. Why? Because their companies couldn’t afford to staff the position. It might suck, but New Jersey can’t afford to pay some of its policemen and firefighters, among other public workers.

And it’s silly to blame Governor Christie when Jon “Money Bags” Corzine, Jim McGreevey, and Christine Todd Whitman (among many other previous political leaders in this state) are the ones who raped our state’s finances. For my friends who aren’t from New Jersey – for decades it hasn’t mattered whether a Republican or a Democrat has been in office because both parties fleeced the state.

Yet, I understand that people need someone to lash out at and Governor Christie is the head of the state so they’re going to lash out at him. In fact, there’s a protest of public workers going on up the street from my office in Trenton today. And while I think contemporary protesting is so fabricated and false that in 2011 it typically gets Americans nowhere, I don’t mind the folks up the street protesting. I do mind that they added 45 minutes on to my commute this morning (because I wanted to spend nearly 2 hours in the car). But at least the folks protesting today are from New Jersey versus the idiots who protested in Trenton last week who were primarily bussed in from Pennsylvania and New York.

At the end of the day, though, there’s no money and cuts have to come from somewhere so jobs are going to be lost. For anyone to be surprised at that simple economic math means that they either had their head buried in the sand as the private sector was rocked over the last 3 years or they just don’t understand that no money = no jobs.