I'm in Vancouver! Today is day 1 of several, and I'll be trying to keep up with the blogging over the next few days. We'll have to see how well that works ... My day started really early. I couldn't sleep for some reason so I spent some time working on the man-machine website starting at 5:00 in the morning. My parents came to get me around 7:00 and they dropped me off at the airport with plenty of time to get through security and wait for my flight to board. En route, I picked up a copy of the new harry potter book at the airport bookstore. No lineup!

The flight was pretty painless -- I was on a flight with Maria, Duane, and Neil which was cool. We ended up hanging out for most of the morning and afternoon. For lunch we stopped at a place called the "Bellagio Cafe" ... which I thought was fitting since the Bellagio is only a huge casino in Vegas, and we were here to compete in a poker match!

After lunch we went to go visit the Planetarium, which was pretty neat. I was a little disappointed with most of the displays, but it was a good way to kill some time that's for sure. There was one of the motion simulators though which was pretty fun. We also went to two shows in the planetarium dome itself. Both weren't that great and I found myself drifting off to sleep which wasn't very good. That might have had something to do with my being awake at 5:00! We also attended two live demos. They were pretty neat, but the second was particularly fun because the second potentially good omen was that the presenter gave particular emphasis to the north star ... Polaris. Which just happens to be the name of our bot.

We ran into Nolan, Mike, Josh, and Andrew at the planetarium which was cool. We separated early though since we had been there for a few hours already and we needed to get back (I needed to meetup with Darse whom I am sharing a condo apartment with).

It took a little while to get organized, but finally we confirmed that we'd be going out to dinner with Ali. It was pretty cool -- Ali seems like a pretty smart guy. Phil should have arrived by now, but I haven't had a chance to meet him yet. Dinner was a pretty fancy restaurant called Cin Cin. It was pretty good, but certainly more expensive than I'd eat on a regular basis. I mean, $11.50 for dessert? COME ON! (Arrested Development anyone?)

Tomorrow there will be a press conference with both Ali and Phil. I'll try and get some photos during that to post to the website. Afterwords there'll be a players meeting where we confirm all the rules ... and we get to test all our equipment (again) to make sure everything runs smoothly. The match runs on Monday!!!! That's just 2 sleeps!

Hope everyone is doing well. I'm having fun! Heraldk