Happy New Year

Well we've now reached 2007. For some reason, it doesn't feel any different ... then again, that's what I usually say for most milestones. Diane and I hit two of the several parties we could have attended. I was hoping to hit another, but we didn't have time. It is a shame that we couldn't spend the evening with all of our friends, but it was still fun. We ended up at a party that was held at a community hall - there was games and music and fun to be had be all.

Speaking of milestones, today marks the 3rd anniversary for Diane and I since we started officially dating. To be honest, it is surprising just how fast time has gone by. Three years is a long time, but it feels like a very short time in many ways. It has been a wonderful time and hopefully we continue to add more good years to our memories!

I hope everyone has a great 2007!

Herald

This blog, and other stories

This goes out to my readers. I'm gonna try really hard to keep posting here more often. If the last post was more than a day or two ago, please leave a comment somewhere pinging me about it. I totally want to post more often, and am sure I've left out some important events in recent days since I haven't really been posting here all that regularly. That is, if you really find this blog all that interesting! Herald

Poker, Poker, Poker.

I know, it seems like all I talk about is poker. However, it has once again captured my attention now that I've gotten into no limit. Here's how I did after the quad party poker bonuses: $800 in bonus money. $231 from an above average run at 2/4 shorthanded. $68 from a grind of 1/2 shorthanded. $818 from 50NL! Throw in a couple of bonus prizes and about $50 from a surprise party casino bonus, and I made almost $2000 over the past week and a half or so. Sweeeet. So my cashout hit neteller late Friday night and I had one thing on my mind. You see, I've gotten a little annoyed that my current 19" LCD monitors can't display multiple poker windows without overlap. So, in part because one of my friends was talking to me about buying an LCD, I looked around and saw that dell was selling their 24" monitors at a really good price. Having just made a large profit playing poker, I decided to splurge and buy myself a pair of those beauties. They'll be shipped in the next week or so and I'll have them in my hot little hands really soon! I'm really excited, can you tell?

Since cashing out of party, I've returned to UB to play some poker. It has been a long time since I last played there, but I figured that given my new interest in playing 50NL, and the fact that I still had more than $300 of bonus money sitting there AND that I have rakeback there through PSO, I figured it was high time to try out their NL games.

So far I'm up almost $150. Hope that trend continues!

Herald

No Limit

While I worked through the first of the party poker bonuses, my friend was doing the same except he was playing no limit. It seemed like every five minutes or so he was telling me that he had picked up another stack. So when I started my second party poker reload bonus (one of FOUR), I decided to give this no limit thing a shot. I jumped right in to the 6 max $50 NL. In my first couple hours I won $300! It turns out that a lot of these players really don't know what they are doing. Now that I've finished two more bonuses, my NL profit sits at about $600 + $400 in bonus money. It has been a good poker week!

The last day or so has been a lot slower profit-wise. Part of that is because I'm trying to grind these crazy bonuses, and so I'm playing 4 tables of $50NL which is taxing my still young understanding of the game. Still, after 3000 hands yesterday, I was only down $50. Considering that I was four-tabling and knew I made some pretty bad blunders, I'd call that a pretty good day.

So I have one last party reload bonus to clear before the 2nd of January. I should be able to make it at a bit of a slower pace, so we'll see if I can bring the win rate back up to something much nicer!

Heraldmk

Mountain Arch

This arch is actually visible from the aqueduct picture I posted last week. This picture is taken facing the aqueduct. I was pretty surprised with how well this picture turned out. Most of pictures I took like this ended up with the arch being entirely too dark.

Merry Christmas everyone!

More Variance

Thanks to CasinoOwnage, I learned about a Party poker reload bonus that I decided to try. So I made my deposit for the $200 bonus for which I need to play 2400 raked hands. Last night I played some 3-table 2/4 shorthanded and took away $230. I realized though that the 2/4 limit was going to take a long time to clear the raked hand requirement. Since I only have a week to clear it, I needed to make sure that I can clear it. So today I dropped down to 1/2 shorthanded where raked hands happen much more often. It didn't go nearly as well. After losing $140, I decided to stop and take a break. I did succeed at one thing ... I cleared a lot of hands. I'm over half way to clearing my $200 bonus. We'll see how the bonus clearing goes tomorrow I guess! I'm starting to feel a little more comfortable playing shorthanded. There are times that I really feel comfortable. Even when I'm losing, a lot of the time I feel like I know what's going on and when I make mistakes I can quickly identify them. So the shorthanded learning process continues ...

Heraldk

Inconsistencies

So I thought people weren't commenting on my blog ... turns out I was wrong. Thanks to the couple of people who've commented! Unfortunately, I had the moderation system settings screwed up so those comments weren't showing up. The reason for the delay was that it wasn't emailing me when a comment was made.

Sorry about that! Thanks for the comments and keep them coming!

Heraldk

Aqueduct

This is just outside the small town of Susa in Northern Italy. I waited for a long time to try and get a people-less shot, but the couple sitting on the left there never left. I lost patience (and the group I was with) so I snapped this picture and moved on. Now that I look back at it, I kind of like how this turned out!

I believe this structure is an old aqueduct dating back to Roman times. A little while later, we would see a small arena as well which was pretty cool.

I loved this little town, and I was a little surprised to see that I hadn't uploaded any pictures from it yet. I will get around to that in the next few weeks because I got some lovely pictures of this town nestled in the Italian mountains.

Poker Variance

At the moment my poker game is in a swing. I'm trying to make the switch to shorthanded limit play at limits of 2/4 ... but I think I'm making a few too many mistakes and its costing me in variance. At times I feel pretty comfortable and then I start having problems and lose my comfort level. The problem I think I'm having is shorthanded involves far more close decisions. Stuff like what do you do with bottom pair facing a bet on the turn ... it can't be correct to throw that away every time. But I'm having trouble figuring out the right conditions to call there. The variance is causing my bankroll to fluctuate by a hundred dollars up/down ... and I know poker is high variance so I should expect this. I can't stop having the feeling that I'm making mistakes though ...

Heraldk

Admiration

It took me awhile to find a word that I wanted to entitle this picture with. I finally settled with Admiration, because it works for me on several levels. First, Diane is admiring the plants at the Devonian Botanic garden. This was at my cousin's wedding that was held there this past summer.

Really though, admiration is a good word because I very much admire the love of my life ... Isn't she beautiful?

From a photographic perspective, I happen to also love this photograph even if it was someone else in the photo. The colours of Diane's dress are lovely next to the green plants and the warm rocks shining in the sunlight. What do you think?

ICGA Journal Vol 29 No 3

Darse was nice enough to give me a copy of the ICGA journal that our paper appears in, and boy is it a nice issue for me to own. Not only is our DIVAT paper in this journal, the writeup for the Hex competition in Italy, as well as the writeup for the AAAI poker competition are both present in this issue. I don't think this will happen again, but my name is all over this issue somehow! Its almost enough to make me feel important. Too bad our hex program didn't take first. That would've been real nice for this.

Heraldk

Cell Phone Enabled

Ugh. I hate these things. At the same time, over the last few months I've realized just how handy having one would be. So yesterday Diane and I got ourselves cell phones on what appears to be a fairly decent offer. It's a free incoming calls shared package with free evenings and weekends. It combines quite a few free minutes all over the place making it very unlikely that we'll actually touch our 200 minutes of shared time. It should be a pretty good fit I think! If you know me and didn't get the email I sent out today with my new number, send me an email and I'll update you. Chances are I just skipped over your name accidentally when going through my address book in gmail.

Heraldk

Butterfly

My cousin got married last year on a lovely sunny day at the Devonian Botanic Garden. We were there quite early so that Megan could set her harp up, so we wandered around the garden for a bit and checked out the butterfly house. This was the first shot I got, and it turned out to be the best of the lot. I need to practice my closeup shots. Often I end up focusing on the wrong thing, and the picture looks kinda weird!

It is a really neat place, and I definitely want to go back and see if I can get some better butterfly pictures!

Busy Times

Over the past couple of weeks I've been pretty busy. My thesis continues to get a facelift as Darse gives me low level feedback on it. I think my thesis will be a whole lot stronger due to his help. In other news, I should have a confirmed defense date set soon! Admittedly, the prospect is a little nerve wracking, but we'll see what happens with that!

The ultrasound I had returned with "results being normal". I'm not too sure what that means since my stomach still isn't the happiest camper in the world. Oddly enough, it appears the foods that my stomach has the worst time with is milk and cheese. I really hope I'm not lactose intolerant all of a sudden! In general, I'm finding that I can eat most foods with no trouble outside of that category, so life isn't all that unpleasant at the moment. I still very much miss milk and cheese though! My mom convinced me to call my family doctor, someone who I haven't seen in ages, and book an appointment. Surprisingly, I was slotted in on Friday. So we'll see what he has to say about the whole issue.

I saw Stranger than Fiction a few days ago, and was rather surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It is definitely a very different movie than the standard run-of-the-mill ones. Personally, I found the film quite enjoyable so I recommend you take a peek at it. In other flicks I've caught, I saw I Happy Feet with JR, Shelly, Andrew and Leah a week or two ago. It was a pretty fun show all in all, though it got a little weird for a children's film near the end. Oh wells.

Also, Battlestar Galactica continues to impress. That is all.

Heraldk

Statue of Liberty (back)

Oddly enough, of all the photos I took of the statue of liberty from just about every side, the one that turned out the best was of her back. *shrug*

The Statue of Liberty is kind of one of those sightseeing things you do because everyone does it. I wasn't particularly excited to see it myself, but it is actually a really pretty little island with a tremendous view of the New York skyline. It was a blisteringly hot day that day but it made for some nice pictures. What I like most about this photo is there really isn't much going on in the sky and there is no view of the crowds of people who were on the island at the time!

Wii Enabled

Success! My friends and I got in line at the ungodly hour of 4:20 to try and get ourselves Nintendo Wiis at the South Edmonton Common Walmart. Lucky for us, we were early enough to earn us each a ticket to buy one of 75 Wiis available at that particular store. In reality, we could've joined the line maybe an hour later and still got them, but it would've been a lot closer and more worrisome for us. We ended up getting tickets number 37 through 39. So now all 3 of us now own Nintendo Wii consoles, a second controller each and a copy of Zelda. Jeffu also picked up a copy of Rayman, while Curtis and I decided to wait for awhile before deciding on future games.

What do I think about the Wii? It is awesome! Wii sports has some hits and misses. Of the games, Bowling and Tennis are the most polished and feel like the most fun. Tennis is also not too bad, but I'm looking forward to a full fledged Mario Tennis like game. Baseball and Boxing aren't as much fun for me, but I'm also not all that interested in either game in real life either! All of the games on the Wii sports disc are pretty easy to pick up, and there should be several parties coming up where we have some serious tournaments!

The game of the minute, day, hour, month, ... year ... is definitely Zelda. I haven't got too far in yet -- just to the entrance of the 2nd dungeon. So far though, the story line is much more engrossing than any previous Zelda I've played. The plot is enhanced a great deal to some very well made cut scenes.

So far, the game is a little more linear than I expected - but I haven't made it far enough to see if that trend continues. Overall though, I'm really impressed with the game. It is extremely fun, and will likely take up a great deal of my free time as I attempt to work my way through the game!

Heraldk

All That Glitters

One of the days while we were in New York, we decided to try and see as many things on our list of things to see as possible. We walked a lot, and saw a lot too!

Part way through that trip, I lined up this shot where the sun had a nice angle to glint off of shiny windows on two different buildings. I rather like the effect, what do you think?

Nintendo Wii-ness

So it looks like a couple friends and I are going to attempt to get the new Nintendo Wii console tomorrow morning. It sounds like there's a lot more Wiis available than PS3s, so it looks like we've got a pretty good chance at grabbing one. I'm really excited about the system. I'm getting increasingly tired of the same repetitive games. I'm not really into first person shooters, so "the next halo" is not something that particularly interests me. In a lot of ways though, the gaming world seems to be all about the next revision of the already successful games. Thanks to Nintendo, we may finally see some new innovation in console gaming. Plus I'm very much looking forward to the new Zelda game!

Hopefully I'll be able to talk about how fun the Wii is when I next post!

Heraldk

Stomach Problems

So the past couple weeks have been uncomfortable for me of late. A little while ago, I started feeling uncomfortable -- my stomach was unsettled and I couldn't really sit still. On Thursday the 2nd of November, I had a lot of pressure build up in my stomach while I was talking to one of the profs at Darse's free beer. The pain started around my waistline up to my chest. I excused myself and went to the bathroom where I relieved some of the pressure by throwing up. I still was in a lot of pain so Diane and I ended up catching a ride from campus security over to emergency where I would sit for 4 hours waiting (yay emergency!). By the time I had to talk to anyone, the pain was already fading and by the time I actually got to see a doctor the pain was just about gone. The doctor concluded that I didn't have anything serious like appendicitis because the pain went away too fast. Over the week since then, I was unable to keep much in the way of food down. I threw up three times over the week, and finally went in to the medi-centre on Thursday morning. Another couple hours later, the doctor I saw now has me booked with an ultrasound to check for gallstones. That appointment is set for the 22nd so hopefully we find out what the deal is.

The good news? The doctor gave me some anti-acid pills which seem to have helped me out. I've been able to eat some more complicated foods than chicken noodle soup, and have been feeling decent afterwards. I also haven't thrown up since then, so that's another good sign. So hopefully I'm on the way to getting better!

So now you know why I haven't really felt like updating the blog. I want to get back to it soon, so hopefully you'll be able to read more about my last couple weeks!

In the meantime, be sure to check out the new webcomic my friend JR and I are starting. It's the new webcomic link on the right: http://www.guiltypleasure.org. Comments are welcome of course! Heraldk

3 Arches

Keeping up with last week's theme of arches, here's yet another shot of St Michael's Abbey on the way up towards the sanctuary itself. These arches were added after the original building was built in order to provide structural help to keep the Abbey from sliding or leaning.

I really like arches, if you hadn't guessed.