Tonight on A Current Affair they reported about all of the famous tennis stars you can see in Melbourne during the Australian Open events. Usually at this time of year, I would be knocking about Crown Casino in Melbourne for the Aussie Millions (Australia’s biggest poker tournament). I am not going this year, but for the past 3 or 4 years I have seen many of those tennis stars in the Crown hotel complex.

Anyhow, on tonight’s show of ACA, they reported spotting “big hitter James Blake” in Melbourne. They showed footage of their crew interviewing “Blake” outside Crown as he stepped into a limo. They must have asked him “What are you doing?” as he replied “Oh I’m just going off to play some golf, I might play some poker in the car”.

Unbeknown to the ACA reporter, they were in fact speaking to professional poker player Phil Ivey (pictured below in the shot of mine from Aussie Millions 2006). Phil loves two things, poker and golf. I am not sure if James Blake likes golf or poker, but it seemed to make sense enough for ACA to air it.

I can just imagine the Nine ACA researchers or reporters typing “black male tennis star” in to Google, to which they are presented with the first result which talks about James Blake. “Yeah that looks like him” they must have said to themselves. Or maybe they thought, “How many rich black people can there be in Melbourne? It has to be him”.

According to Wikipedia, Phil Ivey has over $8 million of recorded poker tournament winnings, a few million more than his stunt double James Blake, who has won over $5 million playing tennis.

I shot ACA an email to tell them they confused the two, it would be interesting to see if they say anything about it.

Phil Ivey has often been referred to as “the Tiger Woods of poker”, maybe James Black has been called that in the tennis world at some stage too? I am surprised ACA didn’t say they caught up with Tiger Woods.

Just in case you’re reading my blog and thinking “I should have Paul Cherry around for dinner, I wonder if he likes steak?” well, wonder no more. If you follow these simple guidelines, you can have Paul over for a steak dinner any time:

• Large.
• Eye Fillet / Rib Eye.
• Cooked Medium.
• Accompanied by some form of potato.

We cooked steak here the other night. We visited a local butcher and got some large rib-eye on the bone. They were probably 700 grams each. I put them on the grill plate, about 1 minute per side, turning half way through to get some nice grilled lines. Then it went into the oven for about 30 mins at 160 degrees Celsius with the mini roast potatoes. The steak came out a beautiful medium, like a little roast beef.

Served with a side salad of cos, beetroot, red onion, capsicum, carrot, cheese, celery and soy crisp croutons.

Enjoy.

Over our holidays we have planted some herbs in a few big pots. I want a proper herb garden eventually, but because we rent it has to be in pots for now. We started with “seedlings” rather than from seeds to give us a bit of a head start.

We have some rosemary that is a little more mature than the others, and it’s actually good enough to start using straight away. We have also planted some thyme, basil, celery and capsicum.

Rosemary is a woody, perennial herb with fragrant evergreen needle-like leaves. The fresh and dried leaves are used frequently in traditional Mediterranean cuisine. They have a bitter, astringent taste, which complements oily foods, such as lamb and oily fish.

Thyme is often used to flavour meats, soups and stews. It has a particular affinity to and is often used as a primary flavour with lamb, tomatoes and eggs.

Basil should be used fresh; in cooked recipes it is generally added at the last moment, as cooking quickly destroys the flavour. The dried herb also loses most of its flavour, and what little flavour remains tastes very different, like hay. Mediterranean and Indochinese cuisines frequently use basil, the former frequently combining it with tomato. Basil is one of the main ingredients in pesto.

We used some of our rosemary to make this delicious roast lamb on Christmas Eve.

Merry Christmas to all!

Those who know me are generally aware of my elite craftsmanship when it comes to making poker tables. Ever since the first one I constructed in 2004 and published the “How To Build a Poker Table” plans on Poker.com, I have been known to throw the odd table together. After that first one, I started building poker tables (to sell) with an old workmate of mine Jason, who continues to build poker tables under the Card Shark brand.

Anyway, I recently completed a special poker table for my sister for Christmas. This one has some nice patterned vinyl for the padded arm rail and hot pink playing surface. It sits on Ikea legs (with built-in storage) and some LED lighting. I took a few photos during the build process and am still considering whether to re-publish the “plans” with the all-new methods.

Here is a photo of the end result.

Ok so my first post is a bit off topic to what I promised, but hey, it’s my blog and I can do whatever I want, I’m an adult.

Welcome to PaulCherry.com.au, I am Paul Cherry. I started working in the online industry in early 2000 for a company then known as Toast.com. I responded to a advertisement in the local paper for a position as a “Search Engine Updater”. When I started, I actually joined a small group of developers who became the foundation of a brilliant SEO team.

The direction of that business evolved and it soon became known as DarkBlueSea (ASX: DBS). Within DBS I served many roles. I became manager of the SEO/traffic team and worked on various products including the beginning of DarkBlue.com (an affiliate network) and Fabulous.com (a domain name registrar and parking solution). There are close to 1 million names in total parked with Fabulous.com, half of which are owned by DBS. That’s right, DarkBlueSea has one of the largest domain name portfolios in the World, with over 550,000 registered to the company itself.

I left DarkBlueSea in 2005 to pursue another interest of mine, poker. I began working on Poker.com as a webmaster/SEO, where my only job was to keep the site at number 1 for the term “poker”. After several years, as internet businesses do, the direction changed. Poker.com became more than just an affiliate portal, we had a shot at building and running our own poker software client.

At Poker.com I helped design the software, became tournament director and then managed the affiliate team. We had a considerably small team (for a poker room) and I performed many tasks from software concepts through to marketing campaigns. I traveled to several industry events representing the poker room and even to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas with some of our best players.

October 2006, all hell broke loose with the online gaming industry as the US House of Representatives passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act by slipping it in to the SAFE Port Act. The World’s biggest poker room, PartyPoker.com, lost 60% of its share value overnight.

The Poker.com software became CarbonPoker.com and continues to accept US players, while other poker rooms closed their doors to the USA. The owners of the company who I like, got out, and I soon followed. Poker.com became a poker information portal once again. CarbonPoker.com (and the software management company) has created a new poker network called Merge Gaming.

Early 2007, I began working for Boomerang.com.au (Australia) Pty Ltd. Boomerang is an Australian owned and operated web publishing company based in Brisbane. I am currently employed as the Business Development Manager and am involved in domain management, affiliate advertising and the company’s web development programs.

I am starting this blog quite late in my “online career” however I believe it to be a necessary platform for my future endeavours and also my current rants about the industries I am involved in.

Over the coming weeks, and in to the future, I will write my thoughts about (mostly Australian) affiliate programs, domaining, SEO/SEM and anything else in between. Welcome to PaulCherry.com.au.