Archive for May, 2005
Darth Vader Reads Your Mind
May 30th
Yep. Play 20 questions with darth vader. The only one I’ve done so far is 20 questions … and he got it. Craziness. Give it a try and post a comment with what your object was and whether he guessed it or not!
Heraldk
MSPaint 1337 skillz
May 24th
Yeah … this guy is nuts. 500 hours of work to create this masterpiece of artwork … but it wasn’t done in photoshop or illustrator or any other conventional artist’s tool on the computer. It was done in MSPaint.
*shudders*
some people have waaaay too much time.
Heraldk
Star Wars Episode III
May 24th
Last night I was able to go see the new star wars movie as part of Nolan’s birthday gathering. The critics generally agreed that this movie restored some of the former glory to the star wars franchise. Episode one was terrible, and episode two was better but still not as good as the classics. Now that I have seen the movie I’m not too sure how much I enjoyed it.
My overall impression though was that the movie very smoothly made the transition from the end of episode two to the start of episode four. My problem is that this transition was almost too smooth. The movie hits all the points along the way, but there are no surprises along the way. I got the feeling that many of the events in the movie happened “because they had to” rather than for the value of that particular scene.
So while the movie was a nice close to the series, I was overal kind of unimpressed with the movie. Perhaps the problem is that we all know what has to happen to get us to the proper place for episode four… but still, I felt that the movie was missing some excitement that could’ve been there.
Anyways, that’s what I thought.
Heraldk
Collective Soul
May 22nd
The night was Saturday, May 21st. The occasion? To see a band that I have grown to love – Collective Soul. They played at Red’s for their second concert in Edmonton in less than 6 months. I missed their first arrival here in December and was kind of annoyed because I had really wanted to see them, so I was really glad when they announced another date in May!
The group I went with included Mike, Nolan, and my girlfriend Diane. We had supper at the Old Spaghetti Factory beforehand and then wandered down to Red’s where we proceeded to wait for the show. The doors opened at 7:00, but oddly enough the show didn’t start until 9:30. So we wandered around for awhile. Mike got some game tokens to play in the arcade with. We played some air hockey, foosball, and table hockey. T’was good fun.
When it got closer to show time, we went to try and find a spot to stand an watch the show. We got lucky and found a spot that we got an excellent view of the band at. The house was packed – the concert had been sold out for a couple of weeks. As usual, the show started late, but finally the opening band The Waking Eyes took the stage and I was pleasantly surprised by how good they were. Aside from their known garage-rock style, they brought out a few surprises including a piece where they ditched their conventional guitars and the bassist picked up a stand up bass, the lead guitar sat down at a keyboard and the singer/rhythm guitar took up a trumpet! They proceeded to play a jazzy sounded track with a quite catchy bass-line. Very cool!
Finally though, Collective Soul took the stage. Its been awhile since I was last at a rock concert, but it was probably the most intimate rock show I’ve been at. All my other concert experiences were at the Shaw conference center or Rexall place – both of which are very large venues. Red’s is quite a bit smaller than either of those and as a result created a very nice atmosphere for being up close to the band.
The thing with Collective Soul is that they have a *huge* number of hit songs, and for them to just play all of these songs would take them quite a long time. They played all these songs plus a couple of songs off their new album. It was pretty incredible – hearing the hits like Precious Declaration, Why pt2, Gel, Where the river flows, Heavy, and Shine. The years in the business of touring has obviously made them very good at what they do. The show was very very well put together with a proper buildup to a rocking and loud conclusion to the concert. The encore was three songs long finishing with the song Shine – where everyone in the audience was singing “Oh oh oh oh – heaven let your light shine down”. I always like it when bands give the audience a chance to sing 
All in all, it was an amazing evening. There are many unpleasant aspects to the concert experience … but the part that matters was amazing. For the others, here’s hoping that the no-smoking bylaw gets passed this year like planned!
Heraldk
Poker Source Online
May 18th
I’ve been playing online poker for the past several months and have done really well at it. The dazzling popularity of poker these days has brought millions of people to start playing poker and there is nowhere as convenient as playing online. Tons of people who think that what they see on the WPT is how the game of poker should be played sit down with large amounts of money convinced that they too can win large amounts of money.
Poker is a game of skill. However, the majority of people who play do not gain the skills necessary to win consistently at it. I like to think of a lot of these players as people who are not playing poker, but rather treating the game as a VLT (video lottery terminal). It is many of these players whom I make a fair portion of my money from with my much more solid understanding of the game.
Anyways, that’s a short editorial on the state of poker these days. What I’m going to talk about here is the promotions offered by a web site called Poker Source Online. The short story is that this website offers free gifts for signing up for online poker through them. There is no catch to this … you simply create an online account at PSO, sign up with one of several poker rooms (9 of them in fact) and choose the gift you want. You deposit some money, play the required number of hands and they send you your gift with free shipping to anywhere in the US or Canada.
Pretty sweet deal huh? Here’s the list of stuff I’ve got from their promotions:
- 2 five hundred count 11.5 gram clay composite poker chips in aluminum cases
- 1 padded rail texas hold’em style poker table top with cup holders
- 1 Poker Genie tournament timer
- 1 deck of KEM plastic playing cards
- Amazon.ca gift certificate worth $90 with which I bought 4 poker books: Theory of poker, small stakes hold’em, internet texas hold’em, and texas hold’em for advanced players.
- A couple cut cards and a chip rack to hold some cracked chips (which were replaced)
- 1 copy of Poker tracker software
That’s right – a pretty nice list of free stuff eh?
The question probably on your mind is how can they do this? Its pretty simple. Online poker rooms make more money by having more people playing on their site (the more tables they have, the more rake they collect, the more money they make). What they do to get people to come in is they pay affiliates to send people to their poker room. Almost every poker room imaginable has affiliate programs – but many of these affiliates simply spam people to get more referrals. PSO does it differently – they offer free gifts to the people they refer and take only a portion of the referral money for themselves. Combine this with excellent customer support and a rapidly growing list of satsified customers, PSO is the most successful online poker affiliate in the business.
So how does the process work? There are several different options for PSO, the main ones being the straight forward promotions. There are a couple of side promotions also that you may be interested in so I will describe each in detail. If you sign up for any of these, please use my referral ID Heraldmk – I’d be very grateful if you did and it makes no difference to the gift that you get.
Instant Bankroll
This promotion is one of the most popular ones. The premise is that you start your first real money poker account at Party Poker and PSO deposits $75 of free money into it for you. Once you’ve played 500 raked hands, you get another free $25 bonus and are free to do with the money as you please. This is an excellent way to get yourself an initial bankroll to do the rest of the PSO promotions without putting your own money at stake. What’s even better is you can start up a Neteller account and transfer that money around without ever needing to provide a credit card number!
Anyways there are a couple caveats to this promotion. First of all, you must not have an existing real money poker account. Secondly, if you want to do the frequent flopper program or one of PSO’s normal promotions at party poker (see below), then you can’t do this promotion first or you won’t be eligible for the other promotion you are interested in. If you want to check it out the web site is http://www.instantbankroll.com.
Normal Promotions
Normal PSO promotions are ones in which you select a gift, deposit some money and play a certain number of raked hands or acquire a certain number of “points” at the poker room before PSO sends you your gift. There are currently 9 poker rooms you can do these promotions at, and if you don’t have accounts at any of them yet, you should be eligible to do them all (each for a free gift!). Possible gifts include free poker chips, free poker table tops, free WPT dvds, free KEM cards, free gift certificates, a free copy of poker tracker, or lastly PSO points which you can save up to get even nicer gifts.
The current rooms are: Party Poker, Pacific Poker, Absolute Poker, PokerRoom, Paradise Poker, Bodog, Gaming Club Poker, Golden Palace Poker and Ultimate Bet. These represent almost all of the biggest poker rooms available on the internet right now, and if you’re going to play online poker, chances are you’ll pick one of these rooms anyway so there is no real reason *not* to go through PSO to get free stuff!
If you want to do one of these promotions, go to http://www.pokersourceonline.com and follow the instructions. Be very sure that you follow all the instructions – and if you have a question, ask it in the forums before you sign up. There are a couple of crucial steps in the process that if you screw up, PSO cannot fix and will not get paid for you so they cannot give you your gift. The process is simple and there shouldn’t be any problems if you follow the instructions.
Frequent Flopper Program
This program is for people who plan on playing lots of poker. At several rooms, you can get 27.5% of your rake back in either PSO points, or at some rooms in cash. Sweet deal for those of us who really like online poker and play on a regular basis. PSO point rooms are Party Poker, Ultimate Bet, and Aztec Riches. Cashback sites are Absolute poker and Carribbean Sun. These programs are amazing for people who play a lot of online poker because 27.5% of your rake is a very large amount of money in the long term! To register, go to http://www.frequentflopper.com.
FreeWSOP
How sweet would if be to go to the world series of poker for free? Instead of choosing a free gift, you can get a entry chip into a small freeroll tournament where the 1st place prize is a full paid package to the world series of poker. Yep, you heard me right. They only have one freeroll tournament left so if you want to get in on this, you’re going to have to move fast. If you’ve been dreaming of playing in the WSOP, you should definitely check this out. http://www.freewsop.com.
If you have any questions, the PSO guys are extremely helpful and very good about making sure your questions are answered. So if you are interested in playing online poker, you should definitely check some of these promotions out! You’ll be happy you did.
Heraldk
Household innovations
May 16th
Now this is a cool site. It hilights interesting advances in the world of architecture and interior design – and some of the products it hilights are super cool. Like this expanding table, or this LED table, or tetris shelves! Cool eh?
The site is inhabitat.com and I very well may start reading this on a regular basis because it has some really cool stuff!
Heraldk
Research
May 13th
In the fall last year I started my master’s degree at the University of Alberta. This program means I spend a full two terms of masters level courses and then I get to work on a research project in preparation of writing a thesis.
My first semester of courses saw me take CMPUT 603 (Teaching and Research methods), CMPUT 642 (Network Protocol Design), and CMPUT 657 (Heuristic Search). It was a pretty cool semester – particularly 657 where the course had us write a program to play lose-checkers. A variant of checkers where each player tries to make the opponent win. We also wrote a program to solve a solitaire game of cards. The course took over my life for that semester – but it was really rewarding. I learned a lot Networks was not as exciting, but it did teach me that I didn’t want to do networks research (a valuable lesson – its hard to shave off areas of potential interest when trying to pick out a research topic). 603 was not a fun course, but it was required so I made it through it.
The second semester is the one that just finishe a couple weeks ago. I only had two courses – CMPUT 672 (Graph Theory) and CMPUT 681 (Parallel and Distributed Systems). 672 was difficult (as any computer science theory course tends to be). 681 was a really good course where we spent a lot of it reading research papers of the prof’s selection and then discussing them in class. Our project was to try and solve hex positions in parallel. While we got something working with decent speedup on a small number of processors, there’s a lot more work to be done to make it work well. For those who don’t know, hex is a 2 player game that I’ve done some previous research on. Its a very interesting game, and you can read about it at Jack’s hex page.
So now I’m finished my courses requirement for my master’s degree and I’ve started working on my research project. Get ready for a big surprise here … I picked the poker project! The UofA has had a strong poker group, which has given rise to several impressive outcomes towards the goal of creating a poker bot capable of beating world champion caliber poker players. The AI that they’ve worked on are now integrated into the commercial product Poker-Academy.
My role in the project is to work on expanding some of the ideas that the group has come up with for 2 player poker and apply them to the multiplayer case. It should be very interesting – particularly since the ideas that they came up with for heads up play are much stronger than previously known. So if these ideas are adaptable, then there is potential to have an extremely strong multiplayer bot. That’s what I’m working for.
Heraldk
Poker-esque
May 11th
Like the rest of the world, I’ve been sucked in. The game of poker is taking the world by storm and there is an amazing array of people who have become interested this intriguing game of strategy and gambling.
Why is it so interesting to me? I have to admit that I find gambling fun. The problem is that I hate losing – and any money gambled at a casino is not money you can expect to have very long. Poker represents to me a chance to gamble with money, but also to have the potential to win money in the long run.
I started playing poker for money in November when I heard about the poker promotions offered at Poker Source Online. For those unfamiliar with the site, its an affiliate site with many online poker rooms that offers free gifts for signing up with them. They have the best customer support I have ever dealt with and bend over backwards to try and make sure that you get the gifts you are promised (as long as you follow the instructions). To date, I have received several hundred dollars worth of free stuff from them. If you want to play online poker, there is no reason to not sign up through these guys! I will post later about the PSO promotions and the details on what they offer later so stay tuned if you are interested.
Anyways, I started playing for real money due to this online promotion through PSO and since then I have never looked back. Most players who start making money at poker go through an early learning transition phase where they lose some money before learning the mistakes they made. My transition phase was not very long – I lost about $30 in the first PSO promotion I did, and then broke even on the second PSO promotion. From there, I started making money playing poker online! To date, I’m up roughly $1300 US since November of 2004. Not too shabby for someone who just started playing poker at these low limits!
That monetary figure does not include an amazing run that I had in January. PSO sponsered me and several other people here in Edmonton for the Canadian Poker Tour. I had only been playing poker for money for a couple months at that point, but due to a good run of cards, some good coaching from a local expert, a little skill (I hope), and a lot of luck, I made the finals and finished in 6th place for a prize of $3490 canadian. It was an incredible rush, and I really want to be able to do it again – but unfortunately, even though PSO sponsered me in the followup even in Calgary, I was unable to repeat my performance. Maybe I’ll get another chance at it later!
So poker has been awesome for me so far. I’m really quite enjoying myself and the best part is that I can gamble with my money but win money in the long run – which beats blackjack or roulette anyday!
Condo!
May 10th
I’m excited. I’ve been wanting to move away from home for awhile. Its not that my family is terribly constricting or anything, but I want to get out and experience life on my own now. About a month or two ago, I purchased a condo! Its a brand new unit that is being rebuilt after it burned down last year in one of several really big fires. Thankfully, the new building is being built to today’s stricter building codes.
Anyways, my real estate agent called me the other day and said that the construction is on schedule for its end of may completion! So I get to move in to my new place in only a few short weeks. Woohoo!
The condo is pretty impressive. It is literally right next door to Clareview station which connects me to downtown and the university through a very convenient train connection. The neighbouring amenities include a superstore, a wal-mart, a blockbuster video, an east side mario’s, and many other stores and restaurants. Inside, the condo is a 1000+ square feet layout with 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. It comes with all the appliances including insuite laundry (which was a real selling point). I can’t wait until the move-in date now!
Heraldk
My New Blog
May 10th
Hello and welcome to my new blog!
I have had several blogs in the past, but all of them have been on my own server, and when something went wrong with the server I never really cared enough to save my previous blog entries. Now, I’m kind of annoyed that I lost all those entries, so that’s the reason I’ve decided to start a blog that is hosted at blogger … so now I have no excuse to delete it!
This blog will hopefully develop into a regularly updated, interesting read for those who share similar interests to me. I tend to peruse the internet for interesting stuff all the time, and the links that I think are shareable will be posted here. As well, I’ve gotten into playing poker on the internet, so I will likely share some stories or some poker knowledge I have learned as well!
So I hope you enjoy the posts here – feel free to leave me comments!
Heraldk
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