Poker Rush

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Well I'm glad I decided to play some poker tonight. I got home a little late from school since it was raining really hard and I didn't really want to get poured on on the way home. When I finally got home, I threw some laundry in and decided to fire up full tilt and play a little 2/4. I ended up over $300 in the space of maybe an hour and a half! (two tables). This was a big relief - I have been having a pretty poor couple of weeks at the tables, so it was nice to hit some cards again. My profit in online gambling has been coming from online casino promos. I cashed out over $700 from casino-on-net on only a $200 deposit (yeah, that's $300 on top of the $200 bonus!), and got a nice win at Intercasino as well on a nice reload bonus. It is this money that will be funding me when I go to Foxwoods in a little over a week! Oh yes! I think I mentioned previously that I will be going to Boston and New York this month. I leave on Saturday morning (at 1:00 am so essentially Friday night). AAAI is being held in Boston and we have a paper there to present. Then a few of my friends and I are going to go to New York with two of us stopping at Foxwoods on the way there for a night. I'm looking forward to giving some live poker a try. I haven't played any real live ring game poker before this, though I do have my half a dozen or so live tournaments I've played in. It's pretty exciting! Then we'll spend a week in New York returning on the 27th.

In other news, my thesis is starting to take shape in my head if not on paper. I have an outline that I think will help organize my thesis a little better. In other research news, the paper Darse and I submitted to the ICGA special issue on poker has been accepted! The reviewer was pretty positive about the paper and his suggestions were all helpful in helping make the paper a little stronger. Yay! Soon DIVAT will take over the poker world! (We think its powerful enough to anyways).

Do pay attention to my photoblog. I plan on adding a flurry of photos in the next week to pre-emptively make up for missing a couple weeks of updates while I'm gone. Enjoy! I'm pretty happy with the set I'm going to upload ... soon!

Heraldk

Torino Journal: Day Six onwards

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Finally, I finish off my Torino journal and can get back to doing other stuff on my blog! For previous entries in my Torino Journal, see Day One, Day Two, Day Three, or Day Four and Five.

We got up on the morning of our 6th full day in Europe early enough to head in to the conference area for the last day of the conference. The talks were pretty interesting, including a couple of cool ones from the computer billiard people. After the conference we decided to head off to some touristy stuff. We chose the mole (pronounced mole-lay) which is a cinema museum and incidentally the tallest building in the city. Apparently, the building was started by a religious group. However, they ran out of funding so the city bought it from them and now its in its current state - a cinema museum.

Before checking out the museum which we could see for free due to our conference passes, we bought tickets for the elevator. This really was something else. The elevator had no dedicated shaft. Instead, its cables hung visible from everywhere in the building. The elevator had glass sides which meant we could see almost the entire museum as we ascended to the roof.

The view from the top was incredible. The signature red roofs spread out in every direction and nestled and climbed the surrounding mountains. It was an awesome sight. We wandered around taking photos of the area before we descended again and checked out the museum.

The museum was pretty neat, though because I'm not a huge movie go-er, a lot of references were lost on me. Still, the setup was pretty neat. Outside of the elevator I already described, there was a small amount to see before you made it to the main room, but after that the remainder of the museum used the entire inside of the building. A ramp built along the wall wrapped around the building a few times with pictures and movie displays set up all along it. After checking out the ramp, you can then descend to the floor where several little themed movie watching areas around the wall. The main floor held several comfy lounging chairs with speakers in them for watching movies projected on two large screens. Coool!

We wandered around for awhile and then left deciding we needed to head back to the oval to check out the end of the pool competition. Turns out things got a little intense. The first place winner (Mike from the UofA!) was well out in front, but the 2nd and 3rd place programs actually tied in the standings!

After the tournament we were late for our reservation at the conservatorio ... but we headed there anyway hoping we hadn't ruffle too many feathers. The food was just as good as last time, but it was missing the atmosphere of the first night. It was pretty late and the staff we had befriended were not on hand to banter with as we had the first night we ate there. Too bad we didn't get there on time, though I'm not too sure if they were all working there that night or not.

Anyways, this time we took a cab to our hotel room and again sat down to play some cards before bed. It was pretty fun, but we were up until a pretty late hour. We slept in pretty late the next day before finally rising and facing our last full day in Torino.

What was neat about this day was my friend Madeleine had been spending the last few weeks touring Europe on her own. She happened to be in Lyon when we got to Torino, and conveniently enough, she was close enough to catch a train over to see me! So she hopped on a train and we met her at one of the train stations in Torino.

From the train station, the group of us (being Phil, Broderick, Madeleine and I) traveled to Madeleine's hostel to drop off her luggage. From there we went to the egyptian museum which is apparently the largest one outside of Egypt itself. It was pretty neat with many interesting things to look at and take photos of. The interesting part of this story is ... we kinda accidentally walked in a side door and didn't pay for tickets. Honestly, this wasn't on purpose ... but also us conference goers would have received free admission anyways with our security passes. So the museum wasn't really missing out on anything it would have got in the first place.

We wandered around for awhile ... in particular, we were trying to find a replica of the Rosetta stone that we had seen mentioned in one of our tour guide books. We finally found it - near the front of the exhibit which we had conveniently missed when we came in the side door. *oops!*.

After exploring the museum we wandered back outside to find some Italian gelato. After all, it was one of the remaining Italian foods I had yet to try! We enjoyed our treat immensely.

Next, we wandered back across the river Po to a church on a high hill in the city we had seen. Unfortunately, it was closed ... but we did get a tremendous view of the city (not quite as amazing as from the mole, but still rather nice).

I was quite tired at that point, so once we descended from there I really felt like taking a break. We stopped at another little church which also was closed and then sat down for a rest. Our conference dinner was fast approaching though so our rest was shortlived before we hiked back downtown to the fancy restaurant the conference people had reserved for us. The organizers let Madeleine stay for dinner for a fee, which was pretty nice of them (I wasn't really sure whether I should ask or not, but it was nice to see Madeleine a little longer).

The dinner was ... a little odd. After having so much simple but good Italian food, the food almost was ... too complex? We ate, and I guess it tasted alright. However, I was a little underwhelmed for a dinner that reportedly cost a great deal more than I would be comfortable paying. Oh well. The speeches took a whole lot longer than necessary, but such is the way these things go.

We returned to the hotel late ... and since our plane departed in the morning at 6:00, we really needed to be there at a ridiculous hour in order to check in. We got there via taxi since no other form of transportation would take us there at that hour. We got on our plane and were already on our way back home.

My strategy for the flight home was to attempt to stay awake the whole time since we were getting back to Edmonton around 8:30. I drifted off a few times, but not for very long and overall, my strategy seemed to work. We had another tough 5 hour layover in Frankfurt, which was more than a little challenging to make it through without falling asleep. Not a lot of items to mention happened on the trip home ... it was a pretty nondescript flight back which was nice I suppose.

I finally returned home after the very long travel time and was glad to be back in some ways. Certainly, it was good to be back in Diane's arms! I kind of miss Italy, particularly the food ... but its also very nice to be home. I think I can't wait for my next overseas trip!

Heraldk

Torino Journal: Day Four and Five

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Yup, my journal is coming slowly but surely. Soon, I'll find myself catching up on my boston/new york journal! Uhoh... For previous entries in my Torino Journal, see Day One, Day Two, or Day Three

We got up the next morning for the first day of the conference. The conference was held at a different location than the olympiad so we needed to find our way to a new location. Unfortunately, we got turned around and missed most of the first talk. The conference was held in a really cool room with two statues at the front of the room. It totally didn't feel like a place you'd attend classes, but I gather that's precisely what one does if taking classes at this university.

The room was situated in a building which had an inside courtyard. In fact, there was quite a blurry line between inside and outside. As soon as you step outside your room, you may have a roof over your head, but the balcony you happen to be on is filled with fresh air from the outdoor courtyard. The building was totally beautiful and I wandered around the area taking photos of the various statues that lined the walls of the area (during breaks of course!).

After the morning conference talks were over we traveled down the the oval to begin the olympiad (making a quick stop for lunch). After making a couple preparations, we thought we were ready. We beat the Australian program with no real trouble in those two games, but then we lost two games against the champion from the last olympiad. Argh! It turned out we had a couple of rather embarassing bugs. Frankly, none of us really could believe that we had missed them. Oops! Shows the need for some real play testing hmm?

After the competition we madly tried to fix the bugs. They were really dumb, but also quite elusive and took us a long time to solve. By the time we had tracked down the problem it was quite late so we decided to return to our hotel room. Once there we left to get some food and that outing turned out to last quite awhile as we enjoyed quite a bit of red wine, and some tasty Italian cuisine. I wish I could get late night food like that here in town!!

We got back to our hotel really really late, but still had to fix the problems we had discovered. Argh! We ended up crashing before everything was fixed, and the next morning missed the conference as we attempted to get the program up and running in a state we were comfortable with. Turns out that didn't really happen.

Finally we had to return to the oval so we packed up our program, and headed down there. The competition started up and we lost our games to the champion ensuring that we were fighting for 2nd place. Easy, we thought ...

Turns out that the Australian program had a learning algorithm in it and it was much tougher after playing the other games during the tournament. Our program was a little shaky, and we actually lost the first game against the program! Uhoh. We played the next game, hoping to win so we could avoid a playoff to decide the winning program. At this point we were pretty tired and really didn't want to spend that night looking at our program and getting it ready for a playoff!

Our program looked to have a good start, but then it got itself into trouble. Enough so that it actually figured it had lost the game. Thankfully, the part of the code that handled playing "tough" moves in a lost position saved our bacon as the other program didn't realize it had won (it wasn't a trivial win) and messed up so we were able to recover and win the match. Whew!

Having got past that scare, we journeyed a little ways to another little restaurant for dinner which served us another wonderful meal. Boy were we ever being spoiled with good food!

We returned to our hotel room to relax and play some cards. Then we fell asleep tired, but ready to get some rest for the next day which we planned to go see some sights!

The conclusion to my journal comes next time!

Heraldk

Torino Journal: Day Three

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For previous entries in my Torino Journal, see Day One and Day Two. On Sunday, our third full day in Torino, the conference organized an excursion to see some sights in the area surrounding Torino. We gladly signed up for it when they first announced it, so we needed to get on the bus fairly early in the morning. Unfortunately, we found ourselves moving a little slow that morning so we ended up needing to run for the bus. Thankfully, it hadn't left yet even though we were at least 15 minutes late.

The first sight of the day was Sacra di San Michele (Saint Michael's Abbey) which is a really neat building built on top of a mountain next to the Susa valley. The abbey was an amazing place with many picture worthy moments. Not only was the abbey itself picture worthy, but because of its height over the Susa valley there was some great pictures of the surrounding scenery. In particular, the signature red roofs that are seen everywhere in the architecture in Italy were very appealing from where we were standing. Our tour guide took us right through the abbey, where there was even a choir singing.

Once we were finished at the abbey, we returned to our tour bus which took us down the narrow winding road back down the mountain to our lunch destination which was nicely covered by the excursion which was free for us (I gather the conference footed the bill). The lunch was a full multi course meal with wine and bubbly (frizzante) and normal (naturale) water to drink. The restaurant was a beautiful lake-side location, though it was very warm on very sunny day.

After lunch, we drove a little further down the Susa valley and stopped in a charming little Italian town (I think it was called Susa actually). We wandered along the streets there and took in some of the local attractions including several little churches and some local roman ruins including an aqueduct and a coliseum.

A lot of us were real tired after our excursion so the bus ride back was pretty quiet. Once we got back to town we spent some time working on our program to continue getting it ready for the tournament the next day. So that evening was pretty quiet and wasn't all that exciting.

Up next! The tournament begins! Heraldk

Torino Journal: Day Two

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This is day two of my Torino journal. For part one, go here. Tired from almost two full days with only a couple hours of "sleep" on the plane, we got a good night's sleep and were up and about around 7am. We wandered downstairs and got some breakfast from the provided breakfast buffet - which was good for the first day, but started to lose its appeal later in the week. The greatest thing about the buffet was a machine that at the push of a button poured a very nice cappuccino or mochaccino or one of at least 10 other hot drinks.

After breakfast we returned to our rooms to work on our hex program. It still needed quite a bit of work before it was ready for the competition. However, we ran into some issues trying to get web access at the hotel even though they had advertised wireless internet access from within the rooms (which there wasn't). We got a little bit done though, and then we had to head down to the Oval to register within the 1pm-9pm slot that people were working the registration booth. So we made our first encounter with the Torino transit system. Boy would it be nice to have an efficient transit system here in Edmonton! Trams/busses/trains came with high regularity and it was very easy to get around on the system.

The trip down to the Oval didn't take too long, but when we got out at the stop we thought we needed, it turned out that we couldn't get access to the oval from the side we were on and ended up having to walk all the way around and through the large HUB-mall-style-only-larger Lingotto shopping mall and then around to the Oval. What's funny is we could see it several times, but there was always a gate or a fence (locked of course) in our way. I've got a good picture of our frustration that maybe I'll post to my photoblog at some point.

Finally we made it, and Ryan and I got registered. Phil and Broderick's security information had apparently got misplaced so we had to wait for Ryan to get one of the main conference organizers to come and give them access. Finally we all had our little security passes including our own picture and a strand to put around our neck that had "Torino 2006" written on the side. It kinda looked like they were left over from the olympics, but then again, there was no olympic rings on it.

Anyways, we got in and started to organize ourselves. We said hi to several people we knew including Jonathan (my supervisor), Yngvi (used to help us with our hex project), Nathan (post-doc at our university), Mike (fellow grad student, working on computer billiards), and a few others I can't think of right now. We set up our laptops and got some work done as well as started organizing the machines we would need for our competition.

The oval was pretty neat. It's like the Agricom here in Edmonton - a place where conferences can be put on. It would've been something else to see the place when it had the speed skating track all set up, but there really was no remnants we could see from that except perhaps the large stands that people could sit on. The computer olympiad was being co-hosted with the human chess olympiad, so it was really cool to see a room full of hundreds of chess boards right next to our area full of computers!

Fiat, the major car manufacturer in Torino was a major sponser of the event and had a large area with giant chess sets to play with. Kinda cool to see chess that you have to walk over to the piece you want to move, pick it up and haul it over to the square you want to move it to!

We wrapped up what work we were doing and decided to join Mike and some of the pool group in finding a place to eat dinner. Ryan decided he was tired so he returned to the hotel and have dinner at the place we had had dinner the previous night. The rest of us, a group of about 10 or so wandered downtown to find a place to eat. Mark, one of the pool guys, knew quite a bit more Italian than anyone else in our group, so we deferred to him to ask for a good place. A couple locals pointed us towards a restaurant called the "Conservatore" and it was amazing! The staff was really friendly and bantered with us throughout the meal. We got free appetizers and at the end they even gave us a bottle of limoncello - which is a lemon liqueur which was really really good!

You should check out that restaurant if you're ever in Torino - it was very reasonable cost-wise, but very very good food-wise!

Phil, Broderick and I decided to walk back to our hotel from the restaurant. Turns out that it really wasn't a trivial walk and it took us about an hour or so to get back. On the way though, we were treated to some amazing scenes of architecture. It seemed like every couple blocks there was another statue or cathedral or roman ruins or random other cool stuff. I had my camera out every couple of blocks to take yet another picture. Its too bad I didn't have my tripod with me because some of the pictures didn't really turn out. Turns out its really hard to keep the camera totally still for the entire time the shutter is open for night pictures. Oh well, I got some pictures and that's cool.

We finally arrived back at our hotel at a pretty late hour and the gates to the hotel were closed. There was a bell though that we could ring and the guy at the front desk who was taking a nap let us in. We felt a little guilty, but we needed to get to bed!

Day three, coming up next! Heraldk

Insane

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I've been pretty busy since I got back from Italy, so I haven't had much chance to update here, and those times that I have had a little bit of time I ended up playing poker or doing chores around the house. So ... updates here have been pretty scarce. Anyways, what's happened? The Oilers! Man, they put in a good run didn't they? Just one game away from the stanley cup and they came SOOOO close. A couple bounces didn't go our way and we didn't capitalize on a 5 on 3 powerplay which really was what killed us. But the whole post-season was an enjoyable run, and I'm so very happy they managed to be able to make the run they did. Maybe they'll make it next year?

Poker. I tried playing some no limit, but I think I need to do some reading on it. I had a couple of fantastic days early on winning over $140. Now I've lost it all again. Hmm ... I need to learn some more about no limit I guess!

My research continues slowly. The team is ramping up for a poker competition happening at AAAI (which I am going to, as it happens). So there's some stuff I've got to do for that. Also, my thesis really needs writing so that's starting to get more of my attention. I leave for Boston to attend AAAI on the 15th of July and I get back on the 27th. A few of my friends are going to spend a week in New York while we're in the area, so that should be fun.

I do plan on finishing my Italy journal entries, but they take awhile to type and when I'm not home for long before I have to head for bed nightly I'm gonna need a little while to get myself back into the blogging routine.

Anyways, more updates to come. Oh, and new photo will be up on my photoblog soon.

Heraldk

Torino Journal: The Trip and Day One

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Alright, I'm finally sitting down to chronicle my trip to Italy. I'm going to do this is one-day size segments so that a) you'll have less text to read for a given entry and b) I'll have less text to type all at once! A win-win scenario as it were. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 2:00 pm on Thursday May 25th from Edmonton International Airport. Our itinerary looked like this (all times local to that location): May 25th, 2:00pm Edmonton: Depart for Vancouver; arrive 2:34pm May 25th, 4:05pm Vancouver: Depart for Frankfurt; arrive 10:55am (26th) May 26th, 4:20pm Frankfurt: Depart for Turin; arrive 5:35pm

Yup - that's an ugly 5 hour layover in Frankfurt airport. Ick.

On the day that we left, I stayed home in the morning and packed up the last of my stuff. My whole family came over to my place and met me along with Diane. We talked for a bit, and then my Mom went off to work and the rest of us went down to the airport where we met up with the rest of our Hex research group: Broderick, Phil and our supervisor for the project: Ryan.

I checked in my bags which was a suprisingly quick procedure. I also purchased 100 euros at the currency exchange counter so that I would have some cash to spend on the trip (lots more convenient than credit cards). I probably paid more than I would have at the bank, but there wasn't a lot I could do about that.

Before I knew it, I was saying some hurried good byes and I lined up with the rest of the group for passing through security. Its an odd feeling going through security - I know its a required procedure, but it totally makes me feel like I've done something wrong. That, and I got this paranoid feeling of "oh no, is there anything in my bag they might confiscate?". Really there was no reason to worry, but I'm not sure if there's any way to shake those feelings.

We waited at our gate for the boarding call. In the meantime, I opened my laptop and to my surprise there was free wireless internet access. After the remainder of my trip, I wonder now whether it will last very long like that. Its not free anywhere else!!!

Our boarding call came so I stepped on the first airplane I've been on since high school when I went to Toronto for a week. I'm not scared of flying or anything, but its a bit of a weird feeling stepping on an aircraft that will shortly be thousands of feet above the ground. Maybe its just me.

The flight was very smooth and fast with nothing really out of the ordinary happening. Broderick, Phil and I played a game of crib and before we knew it we were landing in Vancouver. We wandered around a bit there and Broderick picked up some food to eat before proceeding to our gate. The plane we got on after the boarding call came was *huge*. I guess that's the size of the aircraft they use to transport people overseas, but I was a little taken aback by the large number of seats.

We got ourselves settled near the back of the airplane and before we knew it our long flight was in progress. My strategy here was to try and sleep a little bit on the flight so I could be prepared to spend a whole day awake in Torino followed by crashing at the end of the evening. This plan would work out fairly well.

Our flight was with Lufthansa - which I get the feeling is a really big company. The best part of this airline? Free beer. Oh and baileys and cognac after the main meal too! The food wasn't terrible, though breakfast was a whole lot tastier than dinner I thought. I might've got roughly 2 hours of sleep, but it wasn't a very deep or restful sleep. Once I woke up from that, I gave up and proceeded to get some caffinated beverages to wake myself up and get myself ready for a day in Frankfurt and Torino.

We arrived on time in Frankfurt which is a *very* large airport but also a very dull place. We wandered towards our gate which was in the next terminal over. Finding it, we pondered a bit what we'd do to pass our time in the next few hours. Broderick, Phil and I played some cards (poker with go stones as chips) and Ryan spent some time looking at hex positions from the last olympiad. We got a little hungry so we wandered around and spent some our first euros on some pricey airport food. Nothing too special about them - but Broderick bought a glass of coca-cola ... a pricey €3.00 price (about $4.50 canadian) for what turned out to be a tiny little glass of fountain pop. "Never again" he said, and I was quick to agree!

Our layover finally ended and we boarded the last plane. I got a window seat, which turned out to be a real blessing. I nearly fell asleep, but I woke right up when the clouds cleared and I got an awesome view of Torino as we descended into the airport!

We got out and stretched our legs. We then found an information booth and found out that the best way to get into town was a bus. So we bought some tickets, picked up a map and hopped on the bus. Not long afterwards we got off (at a point in the city that I cannot remember). Consulting our new map we found where we needed to go and finally wandered in that direction. The walk took a good 45 minutes to an hour and by the time we got to the hotel we were exhausted, hot, sweaty and ready to crash ... but also starving.

After checking into our rooms we went down the street a block and had our first authentic Italian food in a little neighbourhood Italian restaurant. The food was awesome! We had some brushetta, some pasta and some house red wine. Mmmm tasty! We left happy and satisfied and went to our rooms where we prompty crashed.

Okay - enough text to read? I'll post Day Two's adventures as soon as I get a chance!

Heraldk

Photoblog Launched!

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I was talking about doing this for awhile, but finally got around to cleaning up the template and putting up my brand new Photoblog!. In the next few weeks I'll be uploading several pictures that I took with my trusty old Canon Powershot A10. These photos will act as a kind of ramp-up to the photos taken with my new Digital Rebel XT (including select shots from Italy). Excited? Well I am!

Heraldk

Alive in Italy

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Well I've been meaning to post here about my experiences in Italy thus far. But I haven't had an internet connection where I've had the chance to relax and just browse the 'net let alone post about my experiences thsu far. I promise - posts are coming. I have text written, I just need some time to edit it and make it more readable rather than a slew of messy notes. For now, with just a single full day left before I make the long flight home, just know that I'm doing great! I am also very excited to see the Oilers play in the Stanley cup final!!!!

Heraldk

Surreal-ity

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I was talking to one of my friends this week and we both agreed that the last week or two have been pretty surreal. For me, doubly so! The Edmonton Oilers are just one win away from making the Stanely cup final for the first time since 1990. That's a really long time ... long enough that I can barely remember sitting up "late" with my dad watching the games. At that point, I really didn't know what it meant since I was only seven years old. The last time I really was cheering for a team in the stanley cup final was 1993 when the Montreal Canadiens (for some reason, it is my favourite eastern conference team) won the cup. So a good 13 years later, and Edmonton is on the verge of getting back there!

The other reason I'm getting this surreal feeling is I leave for Italy at 2:00pm tonight! I'm there for about a week for a computers and games conference. Our hex program will be competing in the olympiad, so we're really excited about that. At this point, I don't think it has quite hit home yet that I'll be in a country a half a world away from home. Its only for a week ... but I haven't been that far from home before. At the same time, its really exciting to go see a new place for awhile - and I can't wait to see what I can take pictures of with my new camera!!!!

Heraldk

Escher-like paintings

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Wow. I think I have another favourite artist all of a sudden. His name is Rob Gonsalves, and his paintings are very satisfyingly Escher-esque ... and there's a lot of them! Now ... if only I could afford purchasing one of these guys. The trouble would then be, I guess, picking one of them! I think this one's my current favourite, but really, they're all very stunning.

Here's some more links to galleries and product pages.

Heraldk

PSO Poker Rewards Freeroll + Oilers Win!

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Quite the day today! My family decided to postpone our Mother's day celebration ... partially at my request since for some reason PSO's poker rewards freeroll was scheduled for tonight. I really didn't want to miss this freeroll because there was a huge overlay on it. It was a $10K freeroll which I qualified for by playing 750 raked hands at poker rewards. Less than 150 people qualified and only 75 people showed up! I finished in something like 17th/18th place or so for a profit of $210 dollars! Not bad for a couple hours work eh? The Oiler game was pretty incredible tonight too. The Oilers are playing pretty awesome lately. Hopefully they can wrap up their series against San Jose at home on Wednesday! Shawn Horcoff and Ryan Smyth were crazy awesome for the Oil, with Horcoff in particular making some pretty amazing plays!

Anyways, I gotta get to bed. 7AM will come way too early tomorrow morning I fear!

Heraldk

Improvements Keep Coming

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Hahaha. Instead of actually coming up with some more content, I decided to improve the "read more" links that I had on my site. Thanks to these scripts I was able to make the posts an automatic shrink/expand functionality possible. I really like it this way. Now I don't have to write my posts in a way that will split into two parts. This script will automatically make sure that each entry is the same length unless you want to expand the post to read the rest of it! This removes the problem I was having before where if I wanted a short post with no expansion, I didn't have a "Read more" link with nothing more to read there! (how disappointing if you wanted to read more!).

There's some ideas for actual content posts swimming in my head. I just need to find time to make them a reality. Sorry for the lack of updates ... I have been extremely busy with the hex project and getting ready for Italy. That plus everything else that's going on in my life is making this a crazy busy time which leaves little time for interesting blogging (not that this blog has every consistently had interesting content ... but I digress).

Hope everyone is doing well! I promise there *will* be more content coming, plus when I get a chance I'll continue working towards that photoblog I was talking about!

Heraldk