Ahead of the Curve

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One of the problems I have with starting to move ahead on the technology curve is sometimes you don't get to benefit from critical mass. Recently I started playing with Twitter, but using it has made me feel kind of lame because I barely know anyone who uses it. I've added the one friend I know who has it, but he doesn't use it actively. I'm also following a couple developers in the mac community, but that's it. So. What is twitter? It's hard to describe it in a way to make it sound as cool as I think it does. If you watch the video on the twitter page it seems kind of lame at the worst, and no different than facebook status updates at its best. They describe it as a way to keep everyone informed on what you are doing, and keep up to date with what other people are up to.

If that's all there is to it though, then that doesn't explain why I keep reading about it all the time on the blogs I subscribe to. So finally my curiosity got the better of me so I looked into it a little more and found this post that describes some of the features that twitter offers for people who have learned to use it. Hmm. Intrigued, I finally signed up. But now I have a problem: I don't have the social circle of people on twitter yet which means it doesn't have the value for me yet.

So. Anyone want to sign up and help me make it useful to me?

Heraldk

Changing Paradigms

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I've let this blog sit around a little more than I would've liked. I'm trying to figure out how I should manage my online identity -- I have too many accounts at too many sites, and I want to see if I can simplify my online existence a little bit. One of my biggest issues has been how to handle the photos I share with the world. Up to this point, I've been using my Flickr gallery as a photoblog - usually posting one photo a day. There's some good reasons to do that - I get to share the absolute best photos I take at a relatively leisurely rate. That, and people can view my stream of photos as I post them without having to spend a lot of time sifting through a giant pile of photos if I posted them all at once.

There are downsides though. Sometimes I want to share photos that I've just taken, but there's a large backlog of photos from other recent photo shoots. So either I break chronological order, or I post them in order and the new photo gets shared weeks or months after I originally took it. Or, sometimes I'd like to link to a photo to a blog post that I'm making, but I haven't posted it yet. So I can either post it somewhere else first and then fix the link later once I post it, or I just post it out of order. Not pretty.

What I've decided to do is to use my Flickr account in a more conventional way -- post photos I shoot en masse and not worrying quite as much about keeping the quality of the stream as top notch as I have been. From there I can select my favorite photos and publish them on my blog. This has the added advantage that I can post "into the future", which means I can do a batch of photoblog posts and people reading my feed will get a photo a day.

This also means I can refine how I post photos to minoragenda.com. Instead of relying on yet another service to post albums of photos I take, I can use the Slickr plugin to wordpress to show off Flickr photosets in a nice fashion. This solves a bunch of problems I was trying to solve in a pretty nice way.

I'm going to be spending the next couple of days back-posting all my flickr photos. If you're subscribed to my RSS feed, you might see some odd artifacts of this while I'm doing it. Sorry about that, I'm not too sure if there's a way to avoid this problem.

Heraldk

Updates

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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

Interview Stage 2

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Well it didn't go too bad. I think. It's hard to say. I ... was a little nervous. This was the first real set of interviews I've had since I interviewed for a internship between my third and fourth years. I had a couple interviews then - one on the phone with IBM that went disastrously, and one with the math department that went far better, but they didn't give me the job. To be fair, the IBM interview was after a week of final exams where I had 4 exams, one on each day at 9am.

So yesterday morning I waited for my 9am phone call. Well, even that was complicated. They were calling 4pm their time 9am our time, but with the daylight savings time changed this past weekend I figured they might've not remembered we switched time. So I did the "math" ... and got it wrong. So I was ready for an 8am phone call that didn't come. Then half past nine I finally looked it up on the internet and found that it was wrong and that 4pm Dublin time was 10am our time. Well, that was a good start to my interview.

I don't want to go into tremendous detail about the interview here. I kind of feel like I'm not well-suited to interviews. I have this tendency to guard everything I say with conditionals, even if I'm relatively certain of the answer.

The interview consisted of talking with a total of 5 people. I first was asked questions from one pair of developers, one of whom did his masters on Poker in our research group. Then I talked with another pair for awhile, followed by the head of the IT division. The last part of the interview was the most pleasant, partially because he wasn't grilling me but partially because it was kind of cool to talk about shared interest in the computing area.

I have mixed feelings about how the interview went. I kind of feel like I didn't do well, but at the same time I think I didn't give any wrong answers and not too many blank answers. I stumbled through some questions, and I probably didn't sound very confident on the other end, but we'll have to see what they say in the next couple days. Hopefully at the least I've managed to earn another interview, if not an offer.

In the meantime, I've got a bunch of cool things to work on for work so I have some interesting stuff to occupy my time with in the meantime.

Heraldk

Interview Step One

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Well today I was a nervous wreck. For quite some time I've been considering applying for a job with pocket kings -- the company that writes and manages the software and details behind full tilt poker. A couple of former UofA grads have got prominent positions there and they've been making the case that I should go join them. It took me awhile to come around to their case. It's an awfully large amount of upheaval to move to a country so far away from home. I sort of feel though that it's coming to a time in my life where I need to get up and experience the world a little more than I have been. I've finally started to admit that I'm too much of a homebody, and I need to get out of my comfort zone a bit.

Ireland has a lot of appeal. It's situated in a spot where Diane and I could take frequent traveling trips to see Europe. Dublin is a youthful city with a huge amount of IT people flocking to it. The opportunity to head to out and see the world while having an exciting job seems to good to pass up. The downside is I'd have to leave a significant number of family and friends behind, and that might be harder than I am willing to admit just yet.

So, after thinking about this for quite some time, I've started phase one of applying. I had my first phone interview today with one of their lead server guys. It went ... decently well I think. The topics ranged widely, and I learned a fair amount about the company that I hadn't managed to glean from my other contacts there. I was asked quite a few questions about several things that he thought was of interest on my resume. I gave the best answers I could -- I don't believe I perform all that well under intense scrutiny like that, but I didn't do badly. The only question I botched was when he asked me to come up with an example of deadlock. It wasn't until I had hung up the phone and muttered to myself about it for a moment or two before I came up with the answer. It's so simple too! For those who aren't into systems stuff, deadlock is when two processes or threads try and access sections of code that you deem need to be run or used by only one process at a time. So an easy way to create a deadlock situation is to have a process that grabs the lock for resource A and then the lock for resource B, and another process that attempts to acquire locks in the reverse direction. That way, it can happen that the first process acquires the lock for resource A, but blocks because the other process has acquired the lock for resource B which is blocked because the first process already has that lock. Thus ... deadlock! *sigh*.

Other than that, the interview went alright. I answered his questions to the best of my ability and only stumbled a few times. It's interesting trying to pull pieces of my memory out from the last few years of work that I've done. As the interview progressed, I began to pull more and more pieces of details that I hadn't thought about in awhile. My maxflow algorithm implementation, my adding additional functionality to openssh, my building a user registration system for westgrid, and the details of the Trellis file system that I hadn't thought about in ages.

So I gather I'll be getting another phone interview sometime in the near future where I get to be "grilled" to find out how knowledgeable I am. I'm super nervous about that one. Anyone have any good interview questions that I can ponder as practice?

Heraldk

Stepping Up

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It has been awhile since I last seriously tried to move up in limits at Poker. I've only really done it a handful of time. From my starting ground of 0.5/1 full ring limit I moved up twice to 1/2 and 2/4 limit. Then I started playing 6max no limit at 50nl, and moved up once from there to 100nl which is where I've been at for awhile. This past week had been very good to me. I got a Party Poker reload bonus emailed to me, so I decided it was time to go back there and try and clear it. Well, I did rather well playing 100nl. I was up over 7 stacks in 4 or 5 days playing a couple hours per day. I felt confident and on top of the world. So it occurred to me -- what about moving up again? I had been playing 6max 100nl for quite a long time and had made a few grand at those stakes.

A few nights ago I gave it a shot. The first night I had 2 tables open and made about half a stack at 200nl. Not too shabby, but it was a short session. The next night was terrible. I dropped 4 stacks, and it just didn't feel like anything clicked. It seemed like every time I raised preflop I'd get called by people who would call my continuation bets -- but I wouldn't flop anything. I know I made a few errors, and I think I got a bit flustered. But even if I played perfectly, I doubt I'd be better than down 2 stacks.

The next night went quite a bit better. I was down a stack fairly early, but I got pretty comfortable and in the end managed to win a stack and a half or so. That brought me to last night where I thought I played alright, but for the longest time couldn't dig myself out of the one-stack whole I had got myself in. I had a great table with two incredible fish who were just asking to give their money away. It took me several hours to finally get one of them for about a stack and a half to finally draw even for the night.

It's interesting -- I don't think the game is that much tougher than the one I'm used to playing. I think it's just that the size of the swings is a little daunting. Like I said, it's been awhile since I tried moving up. So far, the experiment seems to be going alright even though I'm down a little bit so far. I've got a bit of a bankroll to sustain some loss, so it's not like I'm risking all that much. If I succeed in moving up, then I think my win rate in dollars goes up a fair amount which was the whole reason to move up.

Wish me luck! Heraldk