Updates from Vegas

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

Crazy

I'm starting to go a tad crazy I think. This week has been insanely busy. It seems like I keep getting things piled on me. Work has been exceptionally busy as we madly prepare for the upcoming man-machine poker match. I've had a pile of fairly little tasks to do along with a couple of larger tasks. There's a huge list of directions we want to go before the competition happens, and we're going to be madly trying many of them right up until the competitions. This week my Mac Pro arrived, so I've been pretty distracted by setting it up. It's taking me a surprisingly long time to set it up. There's a lot of things that go into my computer environment that I need to get just so. That, and copying large numbers of files to and from my drobo takes a little longer than I'd like it to.

The wedding planning continues at a relatively slow pace. We've got a lot of the things that we need checked off the list, but there's still lots of things to do. It's hard to believe that it's only (less than) a month away!

Last night I finally caught up uploading photos to Flickr. That took entirely too long, but now I've got over a thousand photos up on my flirckr account. Pretty sweet to break that milestone.

Today I stayed home working and waiting for a package that contains some additional RAM sticks to put in my Mac Pro. Unfortunately, they haven't yet arrived and I need to go join Diane for dinner at one of her coworker's place. I don't understand how UPS scheduling works -- I saw one of their trucks stop at the building across the street, and my package had arrived in Edmonton yesterday morning. Why wasn't my package on the truck that came that close to my place?

It seems every so often UPS just doesn't work well for me. I was so happy to see that my RAM was scheduled to arrive today, but now it looks like it'll be Monday or Tuesday before I get it. *sigh*.

Anyways, sorry for the haphazard-ish update. I've got to get going pretty soon here.

Heraldk

Updates

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

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

Killer Session

Things have been pretty busy in my camp these days. I keep meaning to post a more meaningful post concerning some things I've been thinking about lately, but I haven't had much time to sit down and update things here. Yesterday I had one of the best sessions of poker I've had in a long time. I rode a wave of spiking cards and stacking players for a glorious run of about 2 and a bit hours of play. I ended up with more than 5.5 stacks of profit, playing $100NL.

I know that a lot of that is just variance, but I can't keep myself from feeling good after a session like that. I'm still kind of amazed at just how well that session went.

More posts to come soon I hope. Heraldk

Catchup

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

A Lively Weekend

It's been busy, so I haven't had a chance to work on heraldk.ca anymore since I launched it. Don't worry, it'll be updated! This weekend I got to be part of a real special weekend for my friend and colleague, Darse Billings. He got married this weekend, and I was proud to be one of the select people he chose to include in part of his special day. He decided to essentially elope, and the only reason I was included was I was the photographer for the event. So at the ceremony, there was just 6 people. The happy couple: Darse and Alexandra, the marriage commissioner: June, the witnesses: Dr and Dr Buro, and the photographer: yours truly. The ceremony was quick, although that was partially due to the weather which didn't entirely cooperate. Darse was pretty happy though -- he loves the rain. The ceremony went off with no problems and the happy couple shared their kiss and then we all dashed off to June's car to finish the paperwork.

By the time the paperwork was over the rain had already quieted down, so we drove down to the museum grounds hoping that the rain would subside for us to get some photos in. It turned out we were in luck, and we joined the FIVE other weddings in a competition to find good scenic spots to get photos. I think we did alright, and you'll probably be seeing quite a few of my photos get posted to Flickr (that is, if Darse and Alexandra are okay with that). There were quite a few rather good photos, in my humble opinion.

After the photo shoot, I picked up Diane and we met up with the rest of the wedding crowd at the Blue Pear. The six of us enjoyed an incredible 5 course meal. Each course was amazing. I felt kinda funny taking pictures of my food, but it was good enough that I'm gonna want those photos to remember. I just justify it by saying that Darse and Alexandra will also want to remember their food... right? I took several more photos of the couple and the rest of the guests throughout dinner. All the while, really really enjoying my 50mm f/1.4 canon lens that can take some pretty fantastic low light photos. Just about any other lens would've had issues, but this one had no problems with the ISO set to just 800 for most of the photos. Hooray!

After dinner, our next stop was a games party at my supervisor, Jonathan Schaeffer's house. By the time Diane and I got there, Darse had already broken the news that he had decided to go to Ireland ... and that he happened to have gotten married earlier in the day. He brought four magnums of champagne to celebrate - and when Diane and I came in the door we were passed glasses and quickly had them filled. As usual, the games party was lots of fun, but because we got there late I didn't get a chance to play many games. I did play a new game called Ingenious, which Darse had found. It was pretty fun. I might have to pick up a copy of that (even though I already have too many games that I don't play).

So it was a pretty fun, and eventful day. Congratulations to Darse and Alexandra again! It was an honour to be part of your special day.

Heraldk

Recovery

It seems that after any big event, my work habits need a couple weeks to return to form. This has been the case after coming back from Vancouver -- for some reason I just have trouble ramping up to get things done again. Thankfully, today has seen some sign that these problems are starting to pass. I've started cleaning up the DIVAT code base, and have plans to make it a) more efficient, b) more correct, and c) implement a service for people to run the DIVAT analysis on their own matches. Another thing I've been trying to do is get some of the raw video files from the matches, and make a few highlight reels of quotes and good hands. The quote highlight reels I should be able to do now ... it's just going to take some time. I didn't realize just how long it takes to watch video to find good clips. I'm not really sure how people do this in real video editing, but my methods are extremely slow and time consuming. Ugh. So expect a highlight reel, but don't expect it soon.

What else? Things are going well in general. I've been playing super mario strikers on the Wii lately. It's a pretty fun game, but it's also frustrating. I can't seem to pass the "Crystal Cup" difficulty level. The game (which is soccer, mario style btw) format involves playing a 6 team double round robin tournament to seed a single elimination tournament amongst the top four places. When you win the two matches in the single elimination tournament, you get to play against a new team which you unlock if you win. The problem I'm having is that before each kickoff (at the start of the game and after a team scores), the level knocks out some number of players from each team for the entire time between kick offs. This seems to be entirely random ... but it seems to screw my team over every time. You see, each player on a team has his own unique traits. Some are slower, but have a better shot, some have a poor shot, but are fast and can pass really well. If you get stuck with just your slow scoring players, then the opposing team has the freedom to run circles around you ... and you give up a goal or two that way which so far has cost me the game more often than not. I've only managed to eke out one victory in this format in 7 games. So frustrating.

My roommate, Mike, has an interesting carrot-on-a-stick approach to writing his thesis. He's already bought an xbox 360, which sits under his desk until he finishes his first draft of his thesis. Incredibly, he's less than two weeks in and he's already got one chapter left to write. I can't really imagine how hard it is not to crack that box open and play some of the coolest next-gen games. Speaking of consoles, I'm pretty impressed with the xbox actually. I haven't played much of it, but it looks like it has certainly helped kill of the PS3. Of course, the jury is still out, but between the Wii and the 360, I really don't see the PS3 finding room to compete.

Diane and I have finally begun planning out our wedding. There's a pretty long list of things we've got to arrange. I don't suppose anyone has any suggestions on who we should go with for a photographer? It's really hard for me to tell how one person's photography style will suit Diane and I. I suppose the correct way to go about this is to meet with several photographers and see what they have to say for themselves and talk them through a typical wedding shoot. So that's the next thing we need to do. It's a little surreal, thinking about getting married. It doesn't seem like all that long ago when I was a socially awkward little kid running around. Now I'm a socially awkward person that's somehow getting married in a few months. Huh. Who would've thunk it?

It's been awhile since I last updated. Part of the reason for that is my shiny new Macbook pro which has had me spending time tweaking it and playing with my photo collection in Aperture. It's amazing how much time you can fill up just installing different programs and fiddling with settings. That might also be part of the reason I haven't been all that productive over the last couple of weeks. Fortunately, my productivity should increase now that I have my laptop all setup!

Anyways, I'm off to a games party tonight. Hope everyone is having a good summer and is planning on checking out the fringe this year. Should be fun!

Heraldk

Holidays!

Thursday was the last day of the conference. I went to a couple talks, but other than that sat around and caught up on updating the man-machine web page. If you see anything that's missing on the page, let me know because I really should fix it up. I'm on holidays right now, but will be able to get to it later this week after I return. Anyways. On Thursday night, Diane's plane arrived in Vancouver. She took the airporter to join Darse, Alexandra and I at the Hyatt where we walked her bags back to the condo. Then we wandered back to the Hyatt to play some games with Johnny, Jeff, Andrew, and Alborz. It was pretty fun. Of course, that meant that Diane and I didn't return to the condo until 2:00am, where we promptly went to bed.

When we got up that morning, slightly groggy from the lack of sleep, we enjoyed some rather yummy coleslaw that Alexandra made -- it had feta cheese in it! I need to remember to do that the next time I make coleslaw. This was the first day of our holiday and we had decided to spend it with Darse and Alexandra on their last day in Vancouver before they headed off to Victoria. So when we were all ready to go, we walked down to the seabus and took it across to north Vancouver towards the Capilano suspension bridge. The seabus is rather cool -- I'm glad I got a chance to ride it. It's pretty speedy, and certainly a distinctive way to travel (coming from a boy growing up in land-locked Alberta).

The suspension bridge is kind of cool, but I'm not sure it's worth the price of admission. Diane and I got in as students though, so that reduced the hit of the admission. At the ticket booth, we found out that our credit card suddenly didn't work anymore. Odd ... so worried, I called the credit card company on my cell phone and found out that when the credit card charge Diane made on her card when she caught the shuttle bus in Edmonton, the credit card company thought it was suspicious. Never mind that we had two separate cards and one was used to take a shuttle to the airport ... and it was used again in Vancouver for the airporter. Hmm... I think they need to work on their security check. I'm all happy for good security on my credit card, but please make sure that the activity on the card is actually suspicious!

Anyways, we wandered around the suspension bridge park for awhile. It was rather nice, though there were a few too many people around for my liking. Still, it was nice to see some rather tall trees, and the bridge itself was an experience. It'd probably be better to just take one of the many hikes throughout the rockies though.

Afterwards, we went back to the seabus terminal, but stopped off at the market to buy some yummy fresh fruit before we headed back to the condo. Diane and I picked up some nectarines, raspberries, cherries and grapefruit. Mmmm ... fresh fruit. Alexandra added some blackberries and fresh figs to that (I'd never had fresh figs before -- they were pretty interesting). After our shopping, we returned to the condo via seabus and a brisk walk. Then we walked to Bin 941 which I wanted to return to and try some of the other stuff on their menu ... plus it was good to use the excuse that I needed to introduce Darse and Alexandra to it! We ordered several items, all of which tasted wonderful. I highly recommend checking out this restaurant if you're in Vancouver -- it's pretty fantastic.

Anyways, we wandered back to the condo and this time I got a little more sleep. First night in several that I'd get some sleep. The next morning, the group of of us packed up and headed out. We said our goodbyes to Darse and Alexandra as they headed off to take the ferry to Victoria. For our part, Diane and I needed to get to our B&B. Our attempt to take a bus failed ... we waited at a bus stop and the bus came -- but passed our stop! The bus driver waved at us, but we misunderstood and started walking down the street to chase after us. A moment later, a second bus that was completely empty followed along after it! We missed that one since we weren't at a stop, and it didn't really occur to me to wave it down. So instead, Diane and I walked to the B&B. It was a pretty long walk, but I'm kind of glad we did. It's nice to walk around in a foreign city ... it helps get you oriented, and lets you see some of the stuff you might not ordinarily see. Still, I'm not too sure my feet agree with that assessment.

After plopping our stuff in our fancy B&B room, we set out for a trip to Stanley Park and the aquarium. Of course, I forgot it was Saturday and when we arrived, the aquarium lineup was probably 50 people deep. Whoops. We quickly reverted our decision to visit the aquarium, vowing instead to come back on Monday when there would presumably be a few less people there. Instead, we spent the afternoon wandering around Stanley Park taking photos and admiring the flowers and wildlife. In one amusing encounter, we stopped to look at some paintings in the painters circle where the lady there was clearly crazy. She was quite willing to explain all the names of her child-like paintings and after each name she would giggle in a high pitched voice. I was a little creeped out, but wasn't really sure what to say. Diane and I got ourselves away halfway through the paintings she was naming. Whew!

Stanley Park is beautiful. Lots of wonderfully magnificent trees, and many photo opportunities. I filled up one 2GB flash card, and started on a second one (that I had picked up at best buy on the way to the B&B).

Around 5:00, hunger started to set in so we consulted a list of restaurant recommendations Shayna was kind enough to forward to us, and found a nearby restaurant called Musashi (Japanese sushi restaurant). The food there was fantastic. Diane and I ate some lovely salmon rolls along with some tempura and even tried some scallop rolls, octopus, and sweet shrimp sushi. All of it was extremely good and we left there with full stomachs and only down $25 for the two of us, including tax and tip. Wow, I'm still surprised at how cheap that was!

After dinner we wandered down the the beach where we staked out an area to sit and wait for the fireworks. It took three hours, but by then we really needed to sit down and relax. So sitting down to wait for the fireworks suited us just fine. When we got there, the beach was already crawling with people and it was tough to find a spot, but we did. 3 hours of watching people and taking photos of the various things was pretty fun, but I kind of wished I had brought my book. Oh wells.

The fireworks were awesome. They were all done to a variety of jazz tunes, which was pretty cool. I liked seeing the fireworks drumrolls, for instance. Fun times! Unfortunately, I had forgotten my tripod at the B&B, which meant that I was doing handheld shots. It didn't work very well, but still surprisingly well. Being that close to the fireworks certainly helped since you didn't need to hold the shutter open too long.

After the fireworks, Diane and I walked back to the bus stop we had waited at earlier that morning. This time we caught the bus and jumped on it to get close to the B&B. We walked the rest of the way and fell into bed rather satisfied with a rather full day.

I'll have to cover today's activities later. I'm pretty tired and need to collapse and get some sleep so I have some energy tomorrow! G'nite all!

Heraldk

Match Day 1

I got up relatively early this morning. I had had trouble sleeping due to being excited about today's match! After getting up and ready to go, we wandered over to the hotel to finish setting stuff up. Our match started at noon today with Ali Eslami taking the first match in the public room and Phil Laak in the private hotel room. After getting everything setup, the match began with a bunch of fanfare from Jonathan Schaeffer. For the blow by blow details, check out the official home page for the blog that I worked on throughout the two sessions in the public room. To make a long story short, we drew the first session and won the second session by a large margin. We won! Wow, that was an incredible feeling. I'm frazzled right now, so I need to head for bed. Let me quickly give some other hilights from today before I run. I didn't really get a chance to eat lunch before the match started so I was starving by the time the first session was done. When a group of four of us (Neil, Nolan, Josh and I) descended to the lobby to go find food we ran into Phil, Ali and Ali's girlfriend Ana who were about to pursue food themselves. So they asked us if we wanted to join them and we said ... YES of course! So we went to a restaurant called Cactus Luv Cafe and got to chat it up with these poker pros (all three are pros: Ana plays limits of $100/$200), and talk about technology, and research, and life. It was awesome. All three of them are incredibly nice people and I'm so glad I've gotten a chance to meet them and talk to them about stuff that interests me.

After the match I had to make some updates to the website and finish off the liveblogs for the day. I then ran DIVAT analysis on the matches, and those graphs will hit the webpages when I get the chance to do it. Ali seemed incredibly interested in the DIVAT analysis and where they went wrong. It'll be interesting to see how they adjust tomorrow.

Anyways, I'm off to bed. This is incredibly exciting, but I'm totally beat and I've got another long day of blogging ahead of me. Woohoo! G'nite all!

Heraldk

Mad Preparation

By this time next week we'll be halfway through the man-machine poker match against Phil Laak and Ali Eslami. It should be a fun time. I'm excited to meet these pros in real life and get a chance to chat with them for a bit. I also hope our bot beats them!

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We're getting ready for the match in many ways. We're making sure all the technical details are ready to go, and the bot is getting played against a wide variety of competition to make sure it is the best that it can be. It is super exciting, and we think we've definitely got a shot at winning. Lots of work to do before I hop on a plane on Saturday though!

Apparently I'm going to be in charge of live-blogging the event. Hopefully I can give you something interesting to read during the match. I'll be updating the official match page with the live updates during the matches. If you can't come to the event itself, you should check out the blog to see how we're doing!

Heraldk

Poker Bankroll Updated

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

Update

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

Stomach Update

You may recall that I posted about having some stomach problems a few months ago. I'm still having issues with my ability to eat certain foods - so after a few months of waiting for various doctor appointments I went in for a gastroscopy on Friday afternoon. For those who aren't in the know, that means they put me to sleep and stick a tube down my throat so they can take a look at what's going on in my tummy. It wasn't a painful procedure or anything -- though it certainly isn't comfortable. I believe I wasn't totally asleep during parts of the procedure and I have a hazy recollection of the tube being removed and someone saying they found something. However, the results haven't been told to me yet. It sounds like they took some samples to run a biopsy on. So the results should be in on Monday and maybe I'll finally find out what's going on. It'd be really nice to know what it is -- and hopefully it is treatable, whatever this is. Heraldk

Facebook

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

Updates

I'm continuing the improvements to this blog more slowly now, but I still intend on fixing stuff up. Today's update includes the re-introduction of Pages -- which will be used to show content that doesn't really fit into the blog style. Most importantly, these are pages that will contain data that people might be more interested in at a static moment in time. So I'll use these pages for stuff like: longer articles that might be of interest longer than a blog entry, as well as stuff like my resume and my list of publications. Hopefully these can grow as I continue to contribute to this blog! The menu to the upper right that displays the pages actually took me a frustratingly long time to make, and it still doesn't display properly in IE 7. Ugh. However, it does work in the browsers I have to test with, so hopefully it looks okay. Let me know if you have problems with it. It isn't perfect, but I'll try tweaking it later when I'm less frustrated with it!

Heraldk