Posts tagged blog
Updates from Vegas
Jul 9th
Polaris Wins!
Our computer poker program took on some of the best poker pros and came out on top!
Sorry for the lack of updates here. If you haven’t figured out, my travel blog has moved over to minoragenda, so if you want to read about our adventures in detail, please head on over there. I forgot to post a message like this earlier, so sorry about not letting you know.
I have a big todo list of stuff and not much time to do it. I want to get around to posting photos and post poker reports for the couple of live sessions I’ve managed to squeeze in. But that will have to wait for a little while.
Hope all is well with you!
Heraldk
Dinner and Edmonton Tweetup
May 10th
Last night after I finally had to give up on the UPS guy coming with the RAM for my Mac Pro, I went to go pick up Diane on our way to her coworker An’s place for dinner. An had spent the entire day cooking up a storm. When we got there, her entire kitchen was filled with lots of food! We started our dinner off with salad rolls — they’re kind of like not deep fried spring rolls. Next were some freshly deep fried spring rolls, and then a bowl of wonton soup. After that the other two guests arrived and we continued to eat. There was grilled pork ribs, shrimp and chicken skewers, shrimp and squid stirfry (I’ve never had squid so tender and non-rubbery before!), and a bunch of other great foods as well. I ate so much that I didn’t eat anything all day until dinner.
Today was the Edmonton Tweetup. A while ago, I joined twitter and blogged a bit about the experience. To put it quickly – I was a bit bummed out that I was the first of my group of friends to join the twitter experience. Well that’s changed a bit, thanks to @mastermaq who found me using twitter local. After just a couple of weeks, I had several twitter friends and the service became useful for me. Not long after that, Mack started organizing a twitter meet, which apparently is affectionately called a tweetup. The planning and organizing ended up with today being the day for the tweetup.
I showed up with Diane and we had a great turnout. We had at least 14 or 15 people there, and it was great to meet everyone. There was quite a large range of people who showed up — young people, older people, and a fair range of fields (although most were tech related in some way). It was quite a fun time actually. I spent a lot of time chatting with @bruceclark since we shared an interest in photography, but I also chatted with quite a few other people. It was a most enjoyable afternoon.
After the party seemed to have waned a little, I returned home for a short time before heading out to the airport to pick up my parents who were in Europe on holidays for a month. I took them out for supper as a mother’s day thing since the actual Mother’s day involved driving my sister to a couple of gigs. I got to hear a little about their trip, and it was good to have them back in town 
This evening I played a bit of poker, having my first real downswing at 200NL since an early downswing when I first moved up. Downswining 7 buyins is not my idea of a fun time. All sorts of crap happened to me that I had somehow avoided for the most part over the last little while of playing. Oh well, it can’t all go my way. I’m still up playing those limits, it’s just unfortunate that I couldn’t continue the trend that’s been lasting for the past little while. I guess it brings my winrate down to a much more sustainable level. It just sucks for it to happen all at once like this.
So I’m off to bed. I’m taking Megan to her first of two gigs tomorrow at the Radisson Hotel (formerly the Coast Terrace Inn) tomorrow morning. If you’re in the mood for some fancy brunch with some harp music for entertainment, feel free to stop in between 10:15 and 2:15.
Heraldk
Ireland Bound
May 2nd
Just a quick note to tell anyone who reads this blog who doesn’t know already – I got the job with Pocketkings in Dublin (pending a successful work permit application of course). So in addition to everything else that’s going on this summer (getting married, honeymoon, computer bot competitions), Diane and I have to pack up our lives and move them overseas for my August 1st start date.
Does anyone have experience in moving overseas (or know someone who does?). If so, I wouldn’t mind chatting with people about good shipping options for the stuff we want to send over to Ireland.
Should be an exciting summer!
Heraldk
Changing Paradigms
Mar 27th
I’ve let this blog sit around a little more than I would’ve liked. I’m trying to figure out how I should manage my online identity — I have too many accounts at too many sites, and I want to see if I can simplify my online existence a little bit.
One of my biggest issues has been how to handle the photos I share with the world. Up to this point, I’ve been using my Flickr gallery as a photoblog – usually posting one photo a day. There’s some good reasons to do that – I get to share the absolute best photos I take at a relatively leisurely rate. That, and people can view my stream of photos as I post them without having to spend a lot of time sifting through a giant pile of photos if I posted them all at once.
There are downsides though. Sometimes I want to share photos that I’ve just taken, but there’s a large backlog of photos from other recent photo shoots. So either I break chronological order, or I post them in order and the new photo gets shared weeks or months after I originally took it. Or, sometimes I’d like to link to a photo to a blog post that I’m making, but I haven’t posted it yet. So I can either post it somewhere else first and then fix the link later once I post it, or I just post it out of order. Not pretty.
What I’ve decided to do is to use my Flickr account in a more conventional way — post photos I shoot en masse and not worrying quite as much about keeping the quality of the stream as top notch as I have been. From there I can select my favorite photos and publish them on my blog. This has the added advantage that I can post “into the future”, which means I can do a batch of photoblog posts and people reading my feed will get a photo a day.
This also means I can refine how I post photos to minoragenda.com. Instead of relying on yet another service to post albums of photos I take, I can use the Slickr plugin to wordpress to show off Flickr photosets in a nice fashion. This solves a bunch of problems I was trying to solve in a pretty nice way.
I’m going to be spending the next couple of days back-posting all my flickr photos. If you’re subscribed to my RSS feed, you might see some odd artifacts of this while I’m doing it. Sorry about that, I’m not too sure if there’s a way to avoid this problem.
Heraldk
Updates
Mar 18th
It’s been quite awhile since my last general update, so I figured I’d give a quick update.
The interview process is still underway. I’m not entirely sure what the status is, but it looks like I might be scheduling a visit for Diane and I over there to check out the office and have a chance to meet people and show off what I can do. It’s a little nerve wracking not knowing whether I’ve got a job or not, but it should be cool to meet some of the people face to face.
Outside of that, the poker group is gearing up its significant resources prepping for the upcoming AAAI poker bot competition. We’ve got a couple new tricks up our sleeves which hopefully will be enough to secure some more first place finishes. We’re also hoping to put together another man-machine challenge. There’s some tentative support here, so it might actually happen, but I don’t really know the details. As soon as I can share details about that, I will. I’m really hoping it happens. In my ideal world, I’d get a nice job offer from FT so I could breathe easy about that. Then the man-machine match would go ahead and we’d play some high profile players in Vegas during the WSOP. Then I’d get a bit of holiday time to honeymoon with Diane before moving to Ireland to start work at FT. It seems plausible to me!
Speaking of honeymooning and wedding stuff, the wedding is getting close to two months away. That’s a bit scary … the time has never gone slow that’s for sure. There’s probably a bazillion little things we should be organizing for the wedding, but it feels like we’ve got most of the important details done. Probably the biggest remaining thing is to arrange a list of volunteers for various tasks at the wedding. We’ll probably be compiling a list of things that need doing and call for volunteers over at minoragenda.com.
I’ve been pretty busy working, so I haven’t had much time to put into poker. My 200NL experiment went pretty well, although I’m pretty sure I was running hot. I’d like to get a chance to play some more soon, but my evenings seem to be full of too many things. In other poker related news, I’ve been playing in the World Rec.Gambling Poker Tournament (WRGPT). This is a large play-by-email poker tournament that predates online poker. This is the first year I’ve competed in the tournament since I only learned of it last year but I missed the registration that time. I’m doing not too shabby in this tournament, although I’ve gone pretty card dead over the past couple rotations. Then this hand happened. Woohoo flush! I now sit in ~60th or so place of ~180-ish remaining players. I still have a shot!
So that’s a pretty decent update of what I’ve been up to. Lots of stuff going on, not a lot of time to update the blog. Hopefully I can get more regular updates in the next little while.
Heraldk
Transition complete
Jan 16th
Just a couple of notes to update what I’m doing with the site. I have now removed the old layout and blog content for http://heraldk.ca/blog. That address is still valid, but it points to this blog. Wordpress does a pretty good job of acting as the main page for a website, so I see no reason to keep wordpress sequestered in a /blog directory. Very little for this webpage has changed.
I hope to spend some time on the template to make it look prettier. Instead of doing it myself this time, I think I’ll probably steal/use one of the free ones from the wordpress templates site and modify it using my own images. Hopefully I get around to that sooner rather than later.
Heraldk
New Website
Dec 31st
No, I’m not moving away from heraldk.ca. But I am announcing that Diane and I have launched our own wedding/couple blog. You can find it at http://www.minoragenda.com. Go check it out!
Heraldk
Catchup
Nov 13th
Okay, it seems these catchup posts are getting to be the norm. I hope they aren’t though – so I’m gonna try and get caught up here and start getting myself back in the habit of posting here.
First up, the big thing lately has been my return to poker. I started playing a few weeks ago to catchup on some PSO promos that they’ve been adding with remarkable regularity. I started with Carbon Poker where I jumped right in at 100nl and did quite well and banked a $500 profit plus my $120 PSO bonus. Next was Action poker, which I didn’t do quite as well at. Even with the $100 deposit bonus, I was only able to claw my way back up to even a little after finishing off the $120 PSO bonus. I didn’t really like Action poker – there wasn’t enough tables, and I never really felt comfortable. So I was quick to move on. My next promo though was Cake Poker, and it feels much better. Being up $500 plus the $90 PSO bonus doesn’t hurt in that respect … but I’m also rather enjoying the fast bonus clearing rate. So I think I’m going to stick around at Cake for awhile before I move on to my next PSO bonus.
Work is going well. I just moved offices, and have started to get familiar with the code that produced the bots that played in the man-machine match this past summer. I’m super excited to work on the next iteration of these bots … and even more excited to pit them against the world’s best players. At the moment we’re trying to lock down some money to challenge some players with. Any ideas where we could get that money? We’d ideally like something on the order of $50K or more to use as prize money. I don’t have many ins with people, but if you have any ideas I’d love to hear them.
Diane and I are doing well. We’re currently in the midst of wedding plans which are going pretty smoothly I think. We’ve got several months to go, but we’ve got a lot of the important things locked up and several others in progress. Hopefully we can have invitations out in a month or so. We’ve been pretty busy with social stuff too – attending quite a few fun events over the past month. Too many to really recount in a short space here, but the latest was a Chili cook-off. We made some pretty awesome bison chili (if I do say so myself) along with some skillet cornbread, apple crisp, and cookies. Mmm – it was quite a cooking day! We had a lot of fun in the kitchen, and it’s making me want to force myself to spend more time cooking on a regular basis. I’d certainly eat better (and healthier) if I did.
The Oilers are maddening to watch at times. The most recent game against the flames was sweet to watch though – now if only we could put together an effort like that on a more consistent basis. I see a lot of potential on our club. If we get a few key members back and contributing, we could have a contender on our hands. I realize it’s a lot of ifs, but what else do we have? In particular, I’m really impressed with Robert Nillsson’s play. He’s been fast, creative, and strong with the puck – I’m starting to get excited every time I see him get the puck. One last thing: what the hell is with the hit on Hemsky? That should’ve got a suspension for sure! He could’ve been badly hurt on a play like that!!!!
Not bad for an update post huh? If you’ve got questions, let me know – I’m feeling a bit lonely in blog land!
Heraldk
Merge
Nov 13th
Times have been a little rocky for this blog. I’m trying to get it all under control, but it’s taking me some time, and time is in high demand these days.
A lot of the changes have been made to merge the two blogs, but I haven’t had time to complete all the changes. As you can plainly see, my blog design needs a bunch of work, but that will come with time. In the interim, I hope to start posting regularly again about whatever comes to mind. Hopefully my blog can make a speedy recovery!
Please let me know if you see odd things happening with the blog – it’d help me out tremendously.
Heraldk
Times are Busy
Oct 29th
So… I launch a brand new blog, and then let both my blogs wallow in un-updatedness. Yeah, I’m good at this!
As you might be able to tell, this site’s layout is only half complete. It seems that everytime I get the chance to sit down to work on it, I get interrupted after only figuring out how to style one element at a time. At least now you can kind of see the direction I’m heading in. I hope you like it – I’m going for a fairly simple white background theme. It’s fairly minimalist, but I think it’ll do well. If the layout works out well, I’ll probably adapt it for my personal blog as well.
Once the layout is done, I’ll go back to trying to write some actual content for the blog. Hopefully that isn’t too far away!
Heraldk
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