Today I take a look at results from a variety of strategies in the Hard N Soft Bot over the last eight days, provide some analysis on the ones that are working and the ones which can be improved, and provide a few hints and tips on ways to get the most out of the bot including my method of getting the bot to just bet on harness only for certain strategies.
Samuel
Add comment March 20th, 2025 at 09:06pm
Today was Canberra Cup Day for harness racing, and in between races they had a variety of fun events, one of which was dachshund races.
Naturally, for little dogs with little legs, the races were very short. In the first heat though, one of the dogs was not satisfied with this very short race and wanted to continue on, having seen the horses go right around the track, and managed to take people on quite a merry little chase.
Alas I didn’t see who won the final as the weather turned and I went home before the Canberra Cup and the final of the dachshund races. Still, it was good to see quite a decent crowd for the race meeting. Afternoon meetings are unusual for Canberra harness racing as they’re usually evening meetings, but if today is anything to go by, Sunday afternoons might be a good way to attract more crowds in future.
Samuel
Add comment March 16th, 2025 at 07:49pm
Last week I noted that the TV series The Bill is being officially released on YouTube and so this week it seems fitting to go off on a tangent from there.
One of the longest-serving actors on The Bill was Trudie Goodwin who played WPC (and later Sergeant) June Ackland. In the show right from the start and until only a few years before the end, Trudie was rightly seen as one of the main faces of The Bill and, unlike many other characters over the years who left quite suddenly, Trudie and her character June were honoured with a long parting storyline which culminated in the brief return of Mark Wingett as Jim Carver, alongside whom June had spent many of her years on The Bill.
To go off on a tangent from there, Trudie Goodwin had a daughter, Elly Jackson. Around the time Trudie was finishing up on The Bill, Elly was starting a band called La Roux of which she was the lead vocalist. Later on, as a solo act, Elly used La Roux as a stage name.
Elly’s main vocal range is that of a soprano and most of her music takes that form. It’s also notable that unlike a lot of music in the synth-pop genre where lyrics are often very few and highly repeated, La Roux’s songs tend to follow a more traditional lyrical structure of having a bit of a story through the main verses and a repeated chorus. The first #1 hit for the band was Bulletproof and is a good example of Elly’s soprano vocals.
Personally though, while Elly’s soprano is quite powerful, I think Elly’s voice is just a bit better when she dials down the volume a notch and sings in a slightly lower register. My favourite song of La Roux’s is the somewhat creepy stalker song Fascination, which very much seems to describe a character that June Ackland would have taken great pleasure in arresting!
My 2nd favourite, and definitely in a lower register, is Tigerlily, which to my mind demonstrates Elly’s quite wide vocal range much more than any of her other songs.
I sometimes wonder if Elly had any interest in acting, because Trudie was no stranger to the stage and I think there could have been potential (and maybe still is) for them to team up as mother and daughter duo in a musical.
Samuel
Add comment March 2nd, 2025 at 06:48pm
As far as dreams go, this one was right up there on the peculiarity scale. And it was nice to see Roger Stone make a brief cameo after his regular appearances during Trump’s first term in the White House.
In this dream I was, for some reason, walking to work, which is strange considering it would take about two hours to do that. Regardless, that is was I was doing. I was walking with Roger Stone who was telling me about some of Donald Trump’s plans. Roger couldn’t walk with me the whole way as he had to rush off to do something for President Trump and, in his haste, cut me off in the middle of an intersection which somehow stranded me in the middle of the intersection when the lights changed and the traffic started to move.
A truck headed my way and I couldn’t get out of the way in time so instead I had to jump onto the truck. I landed on the right-front wheel well and hung on while the truck went down the street. Eventually I was able to get the driver’s attention, so the truck stopped and I got off. This made me late for work by about twenty minutes.
As I was late for work, the building was empty and I had to unlock it. I went inside and started the machinery and started doing my work, and after about fifteen minutes realised that I hadn’t deactivated the alarm yet. The alarm was sounding but I hadn’t noticed it over the machine noise. So I went over to the alarm panel which had moved to a different wall of the building and deactivated the alarm. I then tried to call the security company to explain that there was no need for them to send anyone, but when I rang I was put on hold and before I could speak to anyone a security guard came through the front door of the building. They were then followed by another guard, and another and another and another in rapid succession. It wasn’t long until pretty much every security guard I have ever seen in my life had entered the building, and I was still on hold.
I put the phone down on speakerphone and we all waited for someone at the security company to answer the phone (maybe there was nobody left to answer the phone because they were all in my workplace). After a couple minutes I went to check on the machines and attended to my work for a few minutes, and then went back out to the room where the guards had congregated. To my surprise the guards had decided to hold a pro-Hamas rally in the middle of my workplace and there was a lot of flag waving and chanting.
Still, the phone call was on hold, and the dream ended.
Samuel
Add comment February 25th, 2025 at 12:54am
As many of you would know, I am a fan of The Bill, although I suppose seeing as it has been fifteen years since it finished production in 2010, some people reading this might not know what I’m talking about so a brief explanation is in order.
The Bill was a long-running British police procedural drama which started out as a one-off program called Woodentop in 1983, and became an ongoing series in 1984 which then aired continuously until 2010. Originally airing as an hour-long program post-watershed (the time in the evening on British television where more adult-themed programs are permitted) it switched to being a half-hour program pre-watershed which is a format it held for most of the 1990s, often airing three times per week and producing in excess of 150 episodes per year. Later on it went back to being a one hour program but remained pre-watershed. At the height of production, over 100 hour-long episodes were being produced each year. Towards the end of its run the number of episodes was reduced significantly as was the size of the regular cast and the show moved back to a post-watershed timeslot in an effort to reinvigorate the ratings with grittier storylines, but the audience reaction to the changes was poor and the show was eventually ended.
2,425 episodes were produced in total and the show went through many changes over the years, both in line with changes to policing methods in Britain, and production style. Originally very little was ever seen of the private lives of the officers, but these became more frequent over the years. Poor ratings in the early 2000s led to ITV bringing in a new executive producer Paul Marquess to dramatically overhaul the show, making the lives of the officers a more central focus, introducing much more sensationalised storylines, bringing in a larger supporting cast of people related to police work in some way and recurring criminals, and serialising the format which meant that often many storylines were ongoing for many episodes, rather than the old format where most storylines were wrapped up within a single episode. Ratings surged and a whole new audience came in, although reaction to the changes among the existing audience could be described as mixed at best. After Paul Marquess left, new executive producer Jonathan Young slowly returned the format to something resembling the period immediately before Marquess, and the results of slowly declining audience were predictable. Young’s final change to make a gritter version of The Bill, while probably an improvement on the product he had been producing, felt too much like a spin-off show and lost a lot of audience early on. While that version improved as it went on, the audience didn’t recover.
I happen to be quite a fan of the Paul Marquess era. Among fans of The Bill this is probably not the most favoured era, and I admit at times the show did become quite silly in just how many police officers turned into psychotic serial killers, but if I put those excesses to one side, there was a certain realism to the fact that crimes were often not solved in a single day and seemingly innocuous minor events from one episode could turn out to be key information in a case a few episodes down the line. Having recurring characters from other parts of the police force and among the criminal fraternity also lent credibility to the events as, in reality, police often use resources outside their station and deal with a lot of the same criminals over and over and over. I’m a fan of the intricate writing and the effort which went into tying storylines together and slowly weaving a storyline through months worth of episodes. The attention to detail in this was remarkable and it’s something I appreciate greatly.
The first half of the 90s in the half hour format is also a time I am a particular fan of. From Burnside and the move to the new station set through the wholesale changes to the senior ranks and station budgets of the Metropolitan Police being reflected on screen, and the way The Bill seemed to really capture the tough economic times which Britain went through. You can almost feel a nation in recession when you watch The Bill from that time.
The Bill has a strange history with YouTube. While the show was still on the air prior to 2010, people were uploading their VHS recordings of The Bill from around the turn of the century and just beyond. The picture quality was awful, but watchable. These videos would eventually get taken down and then reuploaded by someone else. This game of whack-a-mole continued intermittently until eventually the rights holders decided to start releasing The Bill on DVD and swiftly had pretty much all of The Bill removed from YouTube.
Some years later episodes started to appear on YouTube again. Some were VHS recordings, and some were copies off the DVDs. These would often disappear fairly quickly. They all disappeared when a new round of DVD releases of The Bill occurred.
In the last few years a website turned up which had copies of just about every episode ever released on DVD. These copies had interlacing issues but were otherwise decent. Around the time this website disappeared, pretty much every episode of The Bill was uploaded on a couple YouTube channels, again being copies off the DVDs. Recently these started to disappear, not entirely but many of them which made following a storyline through a season quite difficult as random important episodes just wouldn’t be there. The reason for this most recent disappearance has recently become clear.
An official channel for The Bill has turned up, with a couple episodes being uploaded each day starting from the beginning. They’re currently part way through season six and could be there a for a few years uploading episodes if they keep going at this rate.
I have most of the seasons of The Bill on DVD (just a few gaps to fill) but it’s still nice to have them on YouTube. My only gripe with these episodes on YouTube is that they have cut off almost all of the iconic opening titles, and also cut off the end credits. I do wonder how they’re going to handle this in later years when the opening titles were not at the start of the show but after the first scene.
At the time of writing this, the latest episode to be uploaded is Season 6 episode 30 “Big Fish, Little Fish”. By this stage plans to move to the new station set, which remained the station set until the end of the series, were well underway and were being explained on-screen by “renovations” of the old station set. It’s almost amusing that they expected anyone to think it was possible to renovate the old station to make it look anything like the new station. Part of this transition was the first and often-forgetten station fire in episode 41, with the new station debuting in episode 44. People often think the fire in 2002, which Paul Marquess used to make drastic cast changes and brighten up the set, was the first, but it wasn’t. Two more fires followed after that with another explosion a few years later (again under Paul Marquess, for another renovation) and a small fire during a hostage situation in Jonathan Young’s reign.
So, here is the most recent episode to appear on The Bill’s official YouTube channel, Season 6 episode 30 “Big Fish, Little Fish” which just happens to be a great example of The Bill at this period in time, featuring D.I. Burnside running around doing Burnside things, and plenty of June, Tony, Tosh and Jim doing much of the legwork, while the management ranks put their two cents worth in at the edges.
Samuel
Add comment February 23rd, 2025 at 07:38pm
It is probably redundant of me to tell you that I had a peculiar dream when pretty much all of my dreams are peculiar.
Yesterday’s dream occurred during a lunch break. I was walking back from lunch to a training conference. This seemed to be along streets in the Woden Town Centre surrounded by buildings which looked like the old concrete Cameron Offices in Belconnen. It turned out that I was walking back to some sort of police training conference, except the police who were being trained were fictional characters from The Bill and Water Rats. I was chatting with actor Steve Bisley on the way back who played Detective Sergeant Jack Christey in Water Rats although it seemed I was actually talking to an amalgam of the actor and the character as he was telling me about some cases he was working on while also talking about the guest appearances he was looking forward to on The Bill as a shonky real estate agent trying to fraudulently sell off bits of Sun Hill.
As Water Rats and The Bill both ended many years ago, I don’t know how any of this seemed plausible to me, but it did, and the Steve Bisley I was talking to was the age he was in Water Rats, not his current age, so I suppose it made sense to some extent.
When we got back to the building where the training was occurring, I left Steve and the rest of the people to go inside as I had to go back to work. I went to some place which looked a bit like my old high school’s front office and was informed of a bomb scare. Everyone there thought it was a hoax and ignored it but I was tasked with investigating it anyway. After a short time I discovered that the bomb was in a newly installed vending machine in the front office and was very powerful because all of the drinks had been replaced with flammable liquids.
I went over to the fire alarm panel and smashed the glass to activate the fire alarm, and then had to reach in further behind the broken glass to push a very small button which turned the general alarm noise into an evacuation tone. After this I determined that there wasn’t enough time to evacuate the building and I would have to defuse the bomb. This turned out to be quite simple as pulling the vending machine’s power cable out of the power outlet shut down the timer.
The next thing I knew I was in a supermarket which seemed to be the old Supabarn as it had appeared in the late 1990s in the old City Markets but with much taller shelves. I had a gun and was searching for explosive jelly beans. The dream ended while I was carrying out this search.
Samuel
Add comment February 12th, 2025 at 02:54am
It has been a while since I have had a dream memorable enough and interesting enough to write about here. Yesterday though, one did occur and it was quite remarkable. It was one of those dreams which was vivid enough to feel very real at the time, to the point where it is hard to accept afterwards that it wasn’t real despite the events which occurred in it.
The dream started with everyone in the world being summoned to attend one of the many very large and tall new buildings which had appeared overnight and had apparently been rapidly constructed by aliens. It was required, by law, for all people to be in one of these buildings by 8:30am. Anyone not in one of those buildings by that time would not be allowed in and would be left behind to face the end of the world. The deadline was to be strictly enforced without exception.
I went along, although it seemed the rest of my family did not. The first order of business was to defend the buildings against anybody trying to get in late. Nobody tried. The view from the window, which looked like the window half way up the “going down” staircase of my primary school, showed the streets were mostly deserted. Security radio chatter indicated there was a train delay on the coast (which I somehow knew meant just south of Wollongong) but otherwise all was well.
At 9am the grand announcement occurred that the new society in these buildings would be air conditioned and run by aliens would had in fact been on Earth for many years. Everyone’s past misdeeds would be forgiven and forgotten, but everyone must be on their best behaviour from now on as misbehaviour would not be tolerated. The new society would be based on a number of fundamental principles including privacy and honesty. Earth would come to an end soon and the buildings would leave for a new planet before then. People could still choose to leave the new society that day if they wanted but would not be re-admitted, so leaving meant certain doom as the end of the world would arrive soon.
As the meeting concluded, I looked out a window and noticed a handful of people had left and already been served at a nearby fast food store. I noted with surprise how quickly they were served given how understaffed the store must be, and then walked upstairs. A small commotion was occurring in a room as a person had apparently misbehaved. To make matters worse they were arguing with an “official” about it. Other officials gathered and determined that the misbehaviour was that the person had walked into a room through the wrong doors, against a signposted direction that the doors were only to be used for exiting the room. A senior official decided an immediate “judicial occurrence” was required and ordered the unsealing of this person’s medical records for immediate public examination to see if they had any bearing on their misbehaviour. This, to me, seemed appalling and not at all in-line with the earlier-stated principle of privacy. The examination of the medical records showed the person had a medical condition which was “illegal” and that some sort of punishment was required.
I ran upstairs to see if there was anyone who could do anything about this and I found an office with Mr. Wood in it. Mr. Wood was not my Year 4 teacher but he did teach the class next door. Occasionally classes would swap teacher for an hour or two as the various teachers had specialty subjects which they would teach. Mr. Wood struck me as the sort of person who should have been a judge as he had a mind for fairness, but he wouldn’t have enjoyed being a judge as it would have required him to strictly enforce laws rather than applying his own fair-mindedness to each situation. So I was pleased to see him, although somewhat confused that he was one of the officials in this new alien society. I tried to explain the situation to him but he was too busy. It turned out he was a very senior official (and one of the aliens who had been on Earth for many years) tasked with creating punishments. He informed me that everyone in the new society is tracked and monitored at all times and privacy ceases to apply if a person is accused of misbehaviour, and then he rushed off to punish someone somewhere.
I left the building in a hurry, and along the way received evidence that the world was not coming to an end, but the aliens simply wanted to take all of the compliant people with them and leave everyone else behind, and they knew that the obedient ones would simply accept and follow a directive telling them to go to certain buildings to avoid the end of the world.
Going home seemed like a good idea so I started to walk home through a shopping centre where I noticed the concierge desk staff trying to work out how to staff all of the stores now that so many people had left. I continued to walk towards home and got about half way up the block next to my home when I noticed a group of cows having a large argument in the street near my home. The argument was generating some sort of nuclear radiation so I decicded to take shelter in an abandoned car. The wind was blowing the radiation in my direction so I rolled the windows up. However the radiation kept getting worse and I realised that the wind wasn’t the issue, but rather my shift was attracting the radiation as it had a tracking device embedded from the new society…so I changed my shirt. By this stage though the radiation levels were becoming quite concerning and I realised I had to leave the area and wait for the cows to finish their argument and stop producing radiation. It was too dangerous to open the doors of the car and get out so I would have to drive it. The car had the same idea and took off before I could start it! I eventually got it started anyway and drove to the other side of my suburb and parked in a carpark in the middle of a cafe.
I left the car there and started to make my way back towards home, but then realised my backpck was still in the car. I negotiated with the cafe owner to go back to the car but then realised I was already wearing my backpack and didn’t need to go back after all. As I was walking back towards home I became slightly concerned that the abandoned car would probably now be considered stolen and my fingerprints would be all over it, but then realised driving it a short distance to escape a radiation storm caused by arguing cows would be a perfectly reasonable excuse, so it was all OK.
I walked through the shopping centre again and realised that all of the surveillance agencies of government would have gone to the new society, and felt a sense of relief that spies would no longer by spying on people on Earth. As I walked through the shopping centre I noticed a jewellery shop owned by my friend Maritz with a very long sign out the front showing her very long full name. I then walked past the concierge desk where they were now trying to figure out where their abandoned car had gone. I kept walking.
Everything seemed pleasant and wonderful as I walked towards home. And then abruptly the dream ended and I was jolted awake, knowing without even looking at the clock that it was time to go to work.
The dream seemed so real and the unusual jolt awake despite everything being good in the dream at that stage (normally a jolt awake would occur at a perilous moment), combined with the correct but unexplainable certain knowledge that it was time for work, left the distinct impression that the dream was more than just a dream. Perhaps I had been visiting a parallel universe and whoever or whatever arranged my visit realised I had stayed a bit too long and quickly sent me back, leaving me with the knowledge that I had to be elsewhere imminently.
Who knows? Regardless, it was a very interesting and intriguing dream full of interesting themes which are well-worth further thought.
Samuel
Add comment February 7th, 2025 at 06:11am
In today’s video I answer a series of questions which have been asked about Hard N Soft Staking since its launch, covering topics such as how it works and various ways to use it.
And exciting news, and an answer to a question asked many times – a preview of a much-requested addition which will open up many new possibilities for the use of Hard N Soft Staking. Yes, a bot is coming!
Hard ‘N’ Soft Staking: https://hardnsoftstaking.com
I look forward to bringing you more news of the bot in the near future.
P.S. I thought this would be a quick video to produce. It wasn’t. Compiling all of those screenshots and demonstrative videos and getting the graphics firing at the right times. I’ve spent much more time on this than I expected but it has come out well so it was time well spent I think.
Samuel
3 comments February 5th, 2025 at 08:31pm
Apparently we’re coming into the year of the snake. Well, I don’t know about that, but whenever people start talking about the year of (insert animal here) my mind tends to go to Al Stewart and The Year Of The Cat.
Although I’m not entirely sure that my dogs are fond of the year of the cat. They probably like the year of the rabbit as they’re much more fun to chase!
Samuel
Add comment February 2nd, 2025 at 07:49pm
Today I’m taking a closer look at how Hard ‘N’ Soft Staking works
How the targets work
How the staking progression works
The thought process behind the system
And the optimal conditions for it
In the next video I will be answering some of the questions which have been asked about Hard ‘N’ Soft Staking. Many I have already answered here on in the YouTube comments or by email, but I think it would be good to compile a bunch of them into an FAQ video. If there are more questions between now and then, I’ll certainly consider adding them to the video.
Samuel
3 comments January 26th, 2025 at 05:11pm
Introducing Hard ‘N’ Soft Staking – a staking plan I designed to turbocharge your profits during winning runs and protect your bankroll in losing runs.
I’m very pleased to have been able to collaborate with Steve and Michael to take my idea for the staking plan, which I was calculating manually, and transform it into a highly usable and attractive staking plan available as both a cloud version and an Excel version at https://hardnsoftstaking.com
In this video I cover What Hard ’N’ Soft Staking is, show it in action in both good periods and bad periods, demonstrating its ability to make profit under various conditions while protecting your bank balance along the way. In the next video I intend to go into a more detailed explanation of the inner workings of the staking plan and some of the thought process behind it.
I hope you enjoy this and it brings you an extra edge in your betting.
Samuel
3 comments January 17th, 2025 at 07:29pm
Well, thank you for your patience in waiting for this one. I had hoped to have this video ready for you a couple weeks ago but my mother went back into hospital on Christmas Day which threw quite the spanner in the works. Thankfully Mum is back home and recovering well, having finally had the operation she originally went to the hospital for back in April.
In today’s video, an update on the AI stats powered soccer strategy I demonstrated a couple months ago, now with updated settings to improve performance. Also two new strategies which are both showing good results, also using the AI-powered stats and predictions of SPM Bot.
Plus a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it preview of Hard n Soft Staking, which I’ll discuss in more detail next time.
Samuel
Add comment January 10th, 2025 at 01:09am
Merry Christmas!
Samuel
2 comments December 24th, 2024 at 01:09pm
Samuel provides an update and revision on an ANZ Bot strategy to use stats to find winners and turn a profit on Australia and New Zealand horse racing, getting the ANZ Bot to find runners which have a good performance rating and a good jockey/trainer combo, but a poor Sky rating.
Samuel also explains why the revisions were made and a tip on filtering the Sky ratings in the ANZ Bot for better results.
ANZ Bot
ANZ Ratings & Analyser
Samuel
5 comments December 16th, 2024 at 06:01pm
Clive Robertson didn’t play a lot of music on his overnight show on 2UE, but there were a few songs which he would play more often than others. Many of these were quite sad and poignant songs, but one in particular was a very upbeat tune which seemed to have a message about the news and world events which mirrored Clive’s own observations. Something particularly notable about this song is it was released many years after one would have expected Clive to pay all that much attention to new music, and yet it clearly was a song of which he was quite fond.
The 1997 hit for Propellerheads, featuring vocals by Shirley Bassey, History Repeating
Clive took quite an interest in how things work, and I recall him once noting a couple videos available on YouTube about the workings of The Talking Clock. Hence, I’m sure he would have found this video about the making of the video clip of History Repeating to be quite interesting.
Samuel
December 15th, 2024 at 08:20pm