Archive for June, 2007
Caragana
Jun 30th
This was from that tree tour I’ve uploaded a few photos from already. This yellow flower is on a Caragana tree on the University of Alberta campus. Pretty huh?
I’m gonna try and go into an uploading spree over the next few days. Hopefully I’ll get some good fireworks pictures tomorrow on Canada Day, and I’ll aim to have the highlights from that shoot up for my 100th photo in my photostream!
Update
Jun 27th
Boy, I’ve been slacking with this blog. It always seems that there’s something more important to do. So I don’t end up posting more than the odd bit of news. So what have I been up to? Well aside from working on the technology behind our bot in the upcoming man-machine poker match, I’ve been trying to spend some time with Diane planning out our wedding next June, and planning stuff to do in Vancouver after AAAI is over. If anyone has any suggestions for what we should do in Vancouver, we’d appreciate it. We’ve got about 6 days or so after AAAI is over to spend doing various touristy things.
There has also been a fair amount of social activity over the past several days. Curtis’ free beer was Monday night — it was good times! My dad’s work golf tournament was on Saturday so I went with him to that. Company golf tournaments are a lot of fun. You get a golf cart to go wheeling around in and afterwards you get steak dinner (erm… lunch). After 18 holes though, I was pretty beat. Nonetheless, I ventured over to Curtis’ place where we played some board games.
Last Sunday was Father’s day, so I took the fam out for dinner. My dad chose a new Chinese restaurant that opened up that weekend. The name of the place was, no joke, Wok and Roll. Yup, I can hear your groans too. It sounds even funnier if you say it in a Chinese accent and turn Roll into Woll. Say it to yourself … yup, pure gold.
So that’s a little review of some of the stuff I’ve been up to. I’m really sorry I haven’t been posting here quite so regularly — hopefully I can do a whole lot better now. You can definitely look forward to my blog posts from Vancouver!
Heraldk
Back to XP
Jun 25th
Well my experiment with windows vista was shortlived. After trying to fix some of the problems that kept coming up for me, I finally decided to switch back to XP until some of those problems were fixed. Among them was my ability to stream movies and music to my XBOX, which worked flawlessly in XP, but I never really got to work well in Vista. I kept having problems with permissions. The stopgap solution I had needed to be uninstalled and reinstalled every time the system rebooted … and things just never were as stable as XP was for me.
So I’m back to XP for the forseeable future. I keep thinking of buying a mac — but that won’t happen until Apple releases new towers. Then I’ll have to evaluate whether it’s time to buy one or not.
Heraldk
Puppy
Jun 24th
Poker Academy Launches Poker Prospector
Jun 20th
Well our friends at Biotools (creators of Poker Academy) have just announced their new product: Prospector. It’s a hand history analysis tool that goes well and above what Poker Tracker does. A better interface, more efficient, and better in quite a few ways. I’ve been beta testing the product for a little while, and Prospector really is quite impressive. A lot of the annoyances I’ve had with poker tracker just don’t exist with Prospector. Efficiency is probably the biggest one. PT is really quite slow when it comes down to it. Prospector feels much faster when importing hands and moving around the interface. Not to mention that it’s prettier!
There is one component missing that I would really like to see … and that’s being able to show HUD stats on the tables. I’m hoping that this functionality will be available in prospector soon — but in the meantime, you should check it out!
Heraldk
Evening Glow
Jun 19th
A couple nights ago the sky was something to behold. Once again, I’m a little unhappy with how the photo turned out, though I think that’s because the sight is hard to capture well on camera. I think I need a good wide angle lens.
By the way, that was quite a thunderstorm last night! I tried to get my camera out, but I had never taken lightning pictures before and by the time I got the technique down the lightning had pretty much subsided. So I’ll have to wait until the next corking good thunderstorm to see if I can get some lightning photos.
Sinking Barge
Jun 15th
I finally got my shipment from the camera store with my new Sinking Barge backpack. It is awesome! I can carry my camera in a nice padded compartment in the bag. It has a laptop slot, and a small amount of room for a book or two or other carry ons. I am very happy with this bag already. I can use it as a day-bag which means I’ll have my camera with me more often than before. Maybe that’ll mean I’ll have more photos to upload to flickr!
Crunch Time part one
Jun 15th
Darse and I have been working super hard over the past few days trying to get an entry ready for the AAAI Computer Poker competition. I put in two 16 hour days the last couple days … so I’m totally taking today off.
It was kind of weird actually. I hadn’t worked that much or that hard on something at the university since my first year of my masters when I spent many days like that working on Jonathan’s heuristic search course. There was one late night while we were in Italy working on stuff – but apart from that, I haven’t put in a huge number of late nights on projects. So in some ways it’s good to know I can still put in a lot of productivity in a short period of time.
Heraldk
EAS Tree
Jun 14th
LRT Bridge
Jun 12th
Back to another one of my walk pictures – this one is of the LRT bridge on the south side of the North Saskatchewan River.
As a side note, I’m a big fan of the LRT – I use it almost every day to get to work and home again. I’m glad that they are finally expanding this great service. It is waaaaay better than the bus!
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