Updates from Vegas

Polaris Wins! Our computer poker program took on some of the best poker pros and came out on top!

Sorry for the lack of updates here. If you haven't figured out, my travel blog has moved over to minoragenda, so if you want to read about our adventures in detail, please head on over there. I forgot to post a message like this earlier, so sorry about not letting you know.

I have a big todo list of stuff and not much time to do it. I want to get around to posting photos and post poker reports for the couple of live sessions I've managed to squeeze in. But that will have to wait for a little while.

Hope all is well with you!

Heraldk

Crazy

I'm starting to go a tad crazy I think. This week has been insanely busy. It seems like I keep getting things piled on me. Work has been exceptionally busy as we madly prepare for the upcoming man-machine poker match. I've had a pile of fairly little tasks to do along with a couple of larger tasks. There's a huge list of directions we want to go before the competition happens, and we're going to be madly trying many of them right up until the competitions. This week my Mac Pro arrived, so I've been pretty distracted by setting it up. It's taking me a surprisingly long time to set it up. There's a lot of things that go into my computer environment that I need to get just so. That, and copying large numbers of files to and from my drobo takes a little longer than I'd like it to.

The wedding planning continues at a relatively slow pace. We've got a lot of the things that we need checked off the list, but there's still lots of things to do. It's hard to believe that it's only (less than) a month away!

Last night I finally caught up uploading photos to Flickr. That took entirely too long, but now I've got over a thousand photos up on my flirckr account. Pretty sweet to break that milestone.

Today I stayed home working and waiting for a package that contains some additional RAM sticks to put in my Mac Pro. Unfortunately, they haven't yet arrived and I need to go join Diane for dinner at one of her coworker's place. I don't understand how UPS scheduling works -- I saw one of their trucks stop at the building across the street, and my package had arrived in Edmonton yesterday morning. Why wasn't my package on the truck that came that close to my place?

It seems every so often UPS just doesn't work well for me. I was so happy to see that my RAM was scheduled to arrive today, but now it looks like it'll be Monday or Tuesday before I get it. *sigh*.

Anyways, sorry for the haphazard-ish update. I've got to get going pretty soon here.

Heraldk

In Ireland

I've got a bunch to say, but it might have to wait for after we get home. It's been pretty busy - we've been wined and dined and I spent a bunch of time at the office chatting with people. It has gone really well so far, but I'll wait until I get home until I talk about it a bit more. For a sneak peak, you can check out my flickr stream for a few photos I took when we got here. Just figured I'd weigh in and say that we're here safely and are enjoying ourselves (aside from the jetlag).

Heraldk.

Week of Busy

It's been pretty busy the past few days. In the evenings after work I spent a large amount of time uploading backlogged photos to Flickr. I've gotten pretty far into my backlog, and I've almost got caught up to the point where I can start to post new photos again (and I've got a few to upload already). I've been forced to change my focus though. Diane and I are headed to Ireland next week so I can meet some people at Full Tilt and hopefully get myself a job. I've been thinking for awhile what I could do for a demo if such a thing were called for. I was fast running out of time to make something brand new since that would take a lot of effot over a very short time period. Plus I didn't really have any good ideas for stuff to do.

I remembered though that I had my lose-checkers program from my search course a couple years ago. So I've resurrected that, and my little demo program is one that utilizes sockets to play one program against another. It's not all that flashy, but it was a really good review of socket programming for me. I've got the basic code working and will be testing it and adding a few features over the next couple days before we leave on tuesday night for Ireland.

I'm getting pretty excited about the trip. I don't know what to expect, but it should be cool to see Dublin and meet some people working in a field that I'd like to be a part of.

Wish me luck!

Heraldk

Changing Paradigms

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

Blur

Diane gets the credit for this photo. On our way back from Jasper last month we found ourselves in some pretty snowy and windy weather. Diane tried taking some photos from the moving car, and this is the best one of the lot. I think it's pretty neat, myself.

Lunar Eclipse

Okay, two photos today. Here's one of my photos that wasn't cropped. Enjoy!

Lunar Eclipse Mosaic

Well I had a free night, so I thought I'd give shooting tonight's Lunar Eclipse a try. I think I did alright, with quite a few images turning out okay. Probably the toughest shots were the ones where there was still a bunch of the moon not eclipsed yet. My telephoto only goes to 200mm (multiplied by 1.6 for my rebel XT), so I wasn't really able to get up close to the moon. I decided that each photo on its own wasn't all that amazing, but put in a mosaic seemed okay so that's what I did. Hope you like it!

Light!

When I get new lenses I tend to run around my house looking for stuff to shot. This was taking with my new lens, but it was a shot I had never tried before and it turned out better than I expected.

I'm jumping around a bit in my backlog of photos. I've taken so many photos in the last couple weeks that I've wanted to get some of my favourites out earlier than they would've had I posted them in chronological order.

I'm also playing with Aperture 2 which came out earlier this week. My impressions: It is waaay better than Aperture 1.5. I'm really impressed with the performance improvements. Anyone else use Aperture?

Nothing Out of the Ordinary Here

... or is there? This rather cool looking bug was not easy to pick out. Really cool bug. I like how this photo turned out, but I'm disappointed that the stick bug cages were so dirty so I couldn't get any good photos of those.

Yummy?

Okay, continuing on my museum photo backlog, here's a photo in the dinosaur part of the museum. This Dinosaur's shadow looks like it's gonna eat some of that plant over there.

SNOW!

I've suddenly got a huge backlog of photos to go through and mark for upload, and I still haven't uploaded all my museum photos I want to.

Last night I returned home from a ski trip to Jasper to find the city in a blizzard. The snow had collected in drifts in front of my condo and it made it impossible to enter or exit from the side door. Woah. I don't think I've seen snow pile up like this in front of a door in a very long time.

Shadows on the wall

The afternoon sun at the museum was low and caused some interesting shadows on the wall. Here are the shadows of the five of us standing next to the railing on the upper level of the royal alberta museum. My fiance Diane took this photo.

Another display

Taking photos at the Royal Alberta museum is kind of fun. There's so many displays that were setup perfectly - these would be tough photos to get in the wild with real animals! Anyone know what type of bird is this? I keep forgetting to read what things are :P

Photoshoot

This scene was at the Royal Alberta Museum yesterday. Some of my friends and I went there to take some photos. From top to bottom, we have Vadim, Jeff, and Steve. It was a pretty fun trip, and I got some pretty nice shots I'll be sharing over the next couple of weeks.

Christmas Lights

Just a couple more photos from Christmas and then I'm going to go back and continue running through a backlog of photos. Hopefully I'll be able to finally get all my photos tagged and rated by the end of January. We'll see how it goes!

This is the mantle over the fireplace in Diane's parent's place. It looks real nice!

Crystal

This is a rather neat crystal droplet that hangs in my parent's dining room window. It catches the light in a lovely way, and figured it was worth taking a photo of.

Butterdome Craft Sale

I've had a pretty busy holiday and haven't really had a chance to work through my photos from the last couple of weeks, so I've got a recent backlog of photos to post over the next few days. This one was from the craft sale that is held in the University of Alberta Butterdome each year. This was the first year I've been to the show, and I was pretty pleasantly surprised. For the $5 entry fee, you get to tour the large number of booths and collect more than $5 worth of food samples. Very cool. I felt a bit awkward taking my camera out in the crowd, but afterwards took a couple of shots when we were ready to leave. I rather like how this shot turned out.

Maligne Canyon

I continue my backwards trek through my photo collection. This particular one was from back in 2005 on the computer science department ski trip. Each year the department goes to Jasper and spends Saturday skiing (or doing whatever) and Sunday trekking down Maligne canyon. It's a sight to see in the winter time!

This was taken with my little Canon powershot A10 since I didn't have my DSLR at the time.

Juniper

This is Diane's family dog, which came with us to the family reunion we went to not too long ago. Her name is Juniper and she looks like she's behaving in this photo, but the very next photo I got of her she's got a pretty good snarl going. She's a well-loved dog though :)