Posts tagged site
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
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
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
Back to Poker
Oct 16th
I had an urge last night to play some poker for the first time in quite awhile. The last time I had played any poker at all was in August when I needed to clear some money at Party so I could cash out. So I logged into my trusty PSO account to check on the latest promotions and found 4 promos that I haven’t done yet. I chose Carbon poker because I could get the highest amount ($120 worth) of PSO points. I went through the typical steps to start the promo and sat down for a couple hour session. There wasn’t a lot of action at the $50 NL tables, so I stepped up to $100NL, a limit I haven’t played since January or February.
I just opened two tables, partially because it was a higher limit than I had played recently and partially to get used to the new interface. The first thing I noticed is that the software seemed very responsive and slick — it’s certainly better software than many sites have. The second thing I notice? There’s an All-In button in a primary spot on the screen. This is a one-click-put-all-your-chips-in-the-pot button. Man do I ever hope I don’t make a bad misclick with that button!
I got off to a fast start early on. Within a couple rotations at a six-max table, I get dealt pocket aces. I make a standard raise and get called. The board comes up 655 with 2 diamonds. I make a healthy bet, and the guy across from me pushes allin. I call and he shows JJ and I take down almost a full stack!
Another hand a little later, I flop 3 clubs holding the king of clubs. I make a bet and get raised a small amount so I call and turn a fourth club giving me the 2nd nut flush. My opponent promptly shoves and I call – he shows Q6 of clubs, and I win 3/4 of a stack there.
Later on, I’m up over two stacks and get to see a free flop with 64 and flop trips. Unfortunately, I run into a guy who had A6, so I lost a bunch in that hand. I probably lost more than I should have, although it was tough to fold to the guy’s river bet.
I made back a bunch of money with KJs when I flopped a flush draw and turned the nut flush to beat my opponent’s trip aces. That got me back into the 2.5 stack profit range.
Late in my session, I flopped top pair of tens with TJo. I bet the flop and get called and then turn two pair. I bet again but get raised so I just call and the river is another J to give me a full house. I promptly push and get called by a guy who flopped trips on the flop. Whoops! Got lucky there.
All in all, I finished my session up $300, and a little less than 1/4 done my PSO promotion. Not too shabby for not playing in a couple months! Hopefully the rest of the session goes as well!
Heraldk
The New heraldk.ca
Aug 27th
Welcome!
I have decided that it is more than time to put some work into this website again. As part of this work, I’m re-introducing the root level heraldk.ca as a new blog-style format. In it, I’ll be posting my rants and thoughts about things. At first, it’ll probably be fairly sparse, but I will fill it in over time (hopefully fairly frequently) with my latest rants. I hope the quality will improve over time and that you find some use out of it.
One of the reasons for this is I want to make a distinction between my personal diary style blog entries and some of the more content heavy posts. As well, I want to keep this blog free of poker related content so that I can once again serve up some google ads. The reason they’ve been lacking is because the policy for google ads does not allow you to place ads on sites with gambling related content. By separating these, I can keep this content separate — plus many of my random readers probably don’t really care that I won $25 in my most recent session of poker.
So I hope you enjoy my new site, and the forthcoming new look for both heraldk.ca and my personal blog.
Heraldk
Match Aftermath
Jul 26th
So the match is over, and I had a mere four and a half hours of sleep. Ouch. Still, it was a lot of fun. I got up and got some coffee and breakfast at Tim Hortons before heading up to the poker round table. I think people’s tempers were short which meant that there was a bit of unhappiness amongst some of the team members. I hope things sorted themselves out, but it wasn’t too pretty for awhile. Anyways, it was cool to meet up with some people who’ve started to gather and research computers playing poker. It should be cool to see what these guys come up with as they come up to speed.
After the round table, I hung around to see the general games playing man-machine match. From what I’d heard, the generic game playing competition was poorly run this year, and it even ran with some controversy. The games that were selected for the playoffs were all very similar and were from a class of games that the best preliminary round player had trouble with. Ugh. Plus, the man-machine match they had was a little pathetic. The played a game that if the humans figured out how the rules work, it was trivial for them to win. So … that’s not a good thing to have in a “fair” match. Oh well. My friend Yngvi won the title, but that was partly due to an error by the other program. Yngvi himself knows the system for the games competition needs fixing, so hopefully changes are made soon.
After witnessing that, I worked on the man-machine web site for awhile as I spent my first session in a real AAAI talk. Heh – too much stuff for me to do. The man-machine web site needs a ton of work, but I’m gonna have to get to that slowly over the next few days. Lots of press articles to link to!
In the afternoon I got the video done that you see in the post before this. I felt that it needed to get done and uploaded since people needed to see what Ali and Phil said about the bots and the outcome of the match.
After that I hung around for awhile and ended up going to the poster session. That was really cool – there was a bunch of food, and I got to talk to a few people including Brett from the University of Minnesota who started working on poker. We talked for a long time about DIVAT and variance and vexbot, and … how to calculate celcius from fahrenheit. Fun times.
After the poster session, we had found out that there was going to be a huge fireworks display in town. Apparently they do a fireworks contest and so Spain’s turn was today and Canada’s turn is Saturday. So we bustled down to river front and I borrowed Neil’s tripod and I got a ton of photos. I hope some of them turned out! It was hard since people kept moving into my photo 
So now I’m just waiting for my photos to finish copying and then I’m gonna crash for the night. G’nite all!
Heraldk
Poker Bankroll Updated
Jul 12th
I haven’t been playing nearly as much as I used to, but I have played a couple of PSO promos since the neteller fiasco. Just before neteller closed its doors to Canadians for online gambling transactions, I cashed out all of my money from online poker rooms. Since that time, I’ve done the new PSO promotions for Pokerstars and Gnuf poker, each worth a $120 bonus from PSO. The Pokerstars one was okay, I lost about $40 at the tables, but since the Pokerstars deposit bonus was $50, I ended up ahead at the site so the PSO bonus was pure profit on top of that.
Gnuf poker was pretty interesting. I deposited $500 to max out the deposit bonus only to discover that points are extremely hard to accumulate. It took me almost a month and a half to get through the PSO required 400 points, and the $500 bonus required more than 3000 more points. Screw that. But I did very well at the tables scoring more than $600. Add that to my PSO bonus of $120 and I was quite happy with that outcome. There’s been a little bit of nervousness on my part as I tried to get my money out. They finally added another cashout option that looks like it’ll work for me, so hopefully everything will all be sorted out soon.
My poker bankroll page has been updated to reflect my latest winnings.
So I’m pretty happy with the last couple of months. I might get into poker a little more once the man-machine match is over and done with. Until then, I think I’ll be pretty busy!
Heraldk
Mar 21st
Wow, I can’t believe I’ve found a social networking site I actually don’t hate. I can’t stand myspace — most pages are garish and poorly presented. Orkut became meaningless when people lost interest with it in the first couple months. So I never really considered joining facebook since I assumed it would be another waste of time. Eventually though, I heard enough people talking about it that I decided I needed to give it a try. Boy was a surprised.
The first thing that struck me is that the site is well-organized and easy to browse. It is very much a web2.0 style done right. Just enough AJAX (I’m assuming) to make the elements of the page interactive to the right degree. Everything feels very easy, but the lack of full customization means that viewing other people’s profiles is actually pleasant (unlike myspace … *shudder*). So all in all it is an impressive piece of software.
The other big thing that struck me right away is just how many of my former schoolmates were on facebook already. I suppose mileage might vary depending on whether facebook has hit critical mass for the people you know. Definitely, however, a large number of people I went to high school, junior high, and even elementary school with are already on facebook. What that meant was within a few days of creating a facebook account, I already had more than 50 people on my friends list. Insane.
The last thing that I think facebook does amazingly well, is it gives you a big reason to login on a regular basis. When you login, you get a list of ‘news items’ for the people on your friends list. This means that whenever you login you are notified whenever someone adds a new person to their friends list, or when they update their profile, or … all kinds of stuff. This means you can see what’s going on with other people’s friends networks and update your own if you see someone you know get added to someone else’s list.
So, I have now fallen to facebook and it appears to be another good time waster. Just what I needed.
Heraldk
Major Site Overhaul
Jan 23rd
In addition to installing WordPress 2.1, I’m working on a new site design. I figure it is more than time I made my very own blog design … rather than tweaking an existing design. If you see some weird stuff happening with this blog, you’ll know what’s going on (not that I have all that many readers!).
Heraldk
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