Another Successful PSO Promotion

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The poker rewards continue to come in for me! Last night I finished up the requirements for yet another PSO promotion at Poker Rewards. I deposited $400 to max out the %50 bonus they were offering. During the time that I played those hands, I won $57 and now will be cashing out a total of $657 when I get home tonight. Not bad for a week worth of playing poker huh? Not to mention the fact that I'm getting another 6000 points towards purchasing a new 19" LCD monitor at Bestbuy! I need 32000 points to get $400 in Canadian Best Buy gift certificates ... this latest installment of points brings me up to just shy of 24000 - so I've got a little ways to go yet!

Hooray for PSO and its awesome promotions!

Heraldk

Double Date

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Well its been a long time coming, but finally Diane and I managed to steal JR and Shelly away for a double date. We've been trying (though not very hard, I must admit) to get everyone together to do it for over a year, and finally we managed to find a day and actually do it. We went to Sam Wok for dinner which is a really good chinese restaurant. Not only is the food really good, but it doesn't cost all that much either - a good combination! After that we ventured over to say hi to Leah and get some ice cream at the Marble Slab. This ice cream place is nuts - they make their ice cream fresh in store, and then roll it out on a marble slab mixing in one type of fruit or candy into it. Then they plop it into a waffle cone or a bowl for you and you get some of the best tasting ice cream I think I've ever had.

Mmmmm... ice cream. I think I'm going to have to go back there. Which could be dangerous. Or perhaps Dangeresque.

After ice cream, we went to JR's place where we watched indiana jones. All in all, a nice relaxing evening ... and really, who can complain with that?

Heraldk

Condo Update

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So I called my real estate agent yesterday and I finally know my posession date for my new condo! July 4th is the magical day that I take posession and I have an elevator slot booked for moving in between 1 and 5pm on July 5th. Hooray! Now I've got to make phone calls to all the utility companies so I can get power, cable and telephone hooked up. How exciting!

Heraldk

Whose Line in Edmonton!

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For awhile, the only TV show I watched was the improv show "Whose line is it anyway?" that generally promised a great deal of amusement put into a half hour TV show. So when my friend Kepi told me he had an extra ticket to cast of whose line coming to Edmonton, I jumped at the opportunity. Its really cool to see these guys live after seeing so many episodes of whose line on TV. The entire cast was there except for Wayne Brady and Drew Carey. The evening was fast paced and its really difficult to remember any of the specific jokes that were the funniest. Perhaps the most amazing point in the evening was the last game before the encore where they did the "greatest hits" game. The songs were a lot longer than the ones on the show in part because there were three singers this time around. The amazing thing was that the songs they sang could probably have been recorded and passed off as the real thing. They certainly are good at making stuff up on the spot!

So it was a very lovely evening and I quite enjoyed it. I haven't laughed for two hours for awhile now so that was nice :)

Heraldk

Priority Golf Tournament

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Saturday was Priority Printing's 9th annual texas scramble golf tournament (Priority is the company my dad works for). Since my mom was not able to play (taking my sister to harp gigs), I took her spot in the tournament. For those unfamiliar with the format, texas scramble tournaments are run in a style that is meant to make the game fun and exciting even for players who do not play regularly. Each player tees off like normal, but then the team decides to pick one of the balls as the one they like the best and everyone moves their ball that way and hits from there. A slight strategic twist happens when the tournament requires that each team takes three initial drives from each player. The format allows players who are not skilled at golf or who are inconsistent like me to have a competitive chance to win. Plus, its a lot more fun to be able to make par on a hole or even the occasional birdie because a player on your term makes a fortunate shot or two :)

Our team consisted of my dad and I along with two others that I had just met that day - Guy and Joane. My dad and I aren't all the great, but Guy is a really good golfer which would definitely work to our advantage. The weather was looking like it might rain on us, but we started up anyways and had a lot of fun. There really was only one amazingly good shot I made ... on one of the front nine holes, I made a full 9-iron stroke that not only landed on the green, but it was less than 6 inches from the hole. Amazing! We birdied that hole! Other than that, I was pretty rusty (since the last time I had golfed was last year sometime) so I struggled with my drives all day and was lucky to get my 3rd good drive on the 18th hole.

We finished with even par as our score which we were really happy with. Not only that, it was good enough to win the tournament! That was pretty cool. As a prize, I got a book on Wayne Gretzky that was signed by Al Hamilton (a former Edmonton Oiler who's number 3 was retired in the last couple years).

It was a pretty cool day that's for sure!

Heraldk

PSO new promos!

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PSO announced two new promos yesterday, and its pretty exciting. The first of the two promos is the big one ... Noble Poker. I started playing at this site through a link from PSO because they were offering a gigantic bonus of 100% of your initial deposit up to $500. PSO has decided to make the noble poker promotion a full normal promotion where you can get a set of free poker chips, or a free poker table, or free gift certificates or ... What's better is the deposit bonus has improved to 100% match of up to $800. Crazy! The bonus money seems to be a tad bit harder to clear than before, but the competition at the site is certainly fairly weak and the bonus is really profitable. To give you an idea how I've done so far, I still have $120 of my bonus money to clear but my account is well over $1100 - and I only deposited $490.

PSO is being nice to those of use who did the no-promo link from them. They are giving each of us one of the standard promo gifts in a retroactive motion and I am really appreciative of that! So I'll take my 6000 PSO points that will go towards my new computer monitor I'm saving points for!

The second promo is a site called Poker Rewards, and it is another standard promotion. Once again, a nice easy 6000 PSO points to add to my collection. I'll be getting my new computer monitor any day now!

Heraldk

My New Computer

It finally dawned on me to put up the specs for my brand spanking new computer system that I got this past weekend. I bought it at Memory Express - which is a store I was really impressed with. The store featured amazingly good prices, friendly staff, a nice clean wide open atmosphere ... and had all the parts I wanted! Here are the specs:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 motherboard Micron Original 512 MB PC 3200 DDR ram Seagate 200 GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive MSI NX 6600GT-TD128E video card BenQ 16x16 DVD+/- RW DL PRO optical drive Zalman CNPS7000B-AlCu CPU cooler Antec Sonata case with 380 watt power supply Panasonic 1.44 floppy drive

The package cost me about $1200 canadian which is a pretty darn good price for a fairly powerful system like this one. Its not top of the line, but top of the line is not something I think I'll ever buy ... its just too expensive.

The nicest thing about this setup is its the quietest computer I have ever had. With my music on or when I'm playing a video game, the normal volume sound coming out of my speakers renders the fan noise of my computer undectectable! It is unbelievable, and something that I am so happy with for this new system. Hooray!

So that's my new system. Oh, and it runs World of Warcraft oh so nicely!

Heraldk

Star Wars Episode III

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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

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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

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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

Research

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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

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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!

Heraldk

Condo!

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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

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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