Mad Thesis Writing

Well now is the time that I concentrate on my thesis. Yikes! It's already August! My main goal now is to attempt to get as much of my thesis written as possible over the next couple of weeks. This will require a lot of concentration, but hopefully I'll be able to get as much done as I can with the hope that I can try to graduate without having to pay for another term of tuition fees.

So really, that's what is going to keep me occupied over the next few weeks. That plus the bazillion other things that happens in the summer in the city of Edmonton. The Fringe is coming up and I understand there's going to be several plays that I need to see!

In other exciting news, Diane received her keys to her apartment with Shelly today! I will be helping her move all her stuff in on Thursday. There's always some excitement that accompanies moving into a new residence, so times are pretty exciting! Speaking of Diane, we're still doing wonderfully together. We've been able to spend a pretty decent amount of time together since I got back from New York which was pretty nice. I think one of the big reasons I was feeling homesick was because I was missing Diane! Yeah I know ... too much sappiness. But I don't really care!

Check out the new photo on the photoblog! Heraldk

Adventures on the way Home

Well the last day in New York really wasn't all that eventful from a sightseeing perspective. We all slept in, which I was grateful for since I was still feeling pretty sick. We were actually woken up by housekeeping at 9:30 reminding us we needed to check out by 11:00. Bleah. We finally got up and checked out, leaving our bags for $2 a person at the front desk. We stopped for brunch at the cafe/deli we've been stopping at every day since we found it. We had some NY style pizza again, and then headed down to central park to wander around for a little while before we made our way to the airport. Central park is pretty cool - we walked all around the reservoir which is a big lake in the middle of central park.

After making the circuit we walked back and retrieved our bags and made for the bus. Mike S had previously found a bus that was only 10 short blocks (NY city blocks are short across the streets, but long across the avenues) away that would take us straight to the airport. So we walked there and caught the bus right away which was pretty sweet. It was a pretty long bus ride, but finally we arrived at La Guardia airport.

We had a mixup at the frontdesk when we checked our bags. The guy asked me if I wanted to get on the earlier flight out of NY with the added note that a thunderstorm moving in might make it hard for our flight to take off. I asked him if he had 4 spots for all four of us in our group, and he said yes. So we said do it! The problem happened when Nolan went to get his boarding pass changed ... the guy ended putting him on the standby list! Woops ...

Turns out Nolan never got on our new flight. But the story continues. We boarded our flight a bit late, but figured we wouldn't have a problem connecting in Toronto because we had a 3 hour layover. Well the stormy weather was already playing havoc with planes getting off the ground, so we ended up waiting on the runway for almost 3 hours! Nolan's plane got off the ground just after ours and we arrived in Toronto abou the same time. Funnier yet, since Nolan didn't check any bags, he was able to make the connection whereas the rest of us were rescheduled since our bags had no way of making it from the customs to the connecting flight. *sigh*. So ironically, 3 of us left before Nolan, but Nolan was the one who got into Edmonton first!

Anyways, it is good to be home. I've spent some time cleaning stuff up around the house and I'll probably do more of that tomorrow before I head to a family BBQ. I'm very glad to be out of the humidity of the East coast and back to Edmonton weather - though I'm told that it was really hot while we were gone!

Heraldk

Spamalot, and meeting Stephen Colbert’s “Black Friend”

Alright, so the exciting thing that happened last night didn't really pan out as I'd hoped. But it still makes a good story. At the comedy club last night, the first comedian to standup was introduced as recently being featured on "The Colbert Report". I was shocked and wondered who he was ... turns out he was Jordan Carlos. For those unfamiliar with the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert has frequently made mention of his "black friend Alan". In more recent episodes, Colbert found out that Alan was at some sort of student rally, which made him unhappy so he was no longer his "black friend" but rather just an aquaintance. This is where Jordan shows up - he plays the character Alan on the Report, in an episode that happened within the last couple months! So it was rather a shock to see him perform his standup routine at this random comedy club we just happened to have chosen. After the show, I talked to him, and made mention the fact that we were from Canada and got my picture with him. He offered to try and get us tickets to the Report which we had tried to do before but couldn't. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to get us in, but that would've been super cool if he could have!

Anyways, that's that exciting story. This morning Mike S and I slept in since our plan was to sleep in and head straight to the Spamalot show we had bought tickets for yesterday. The other members of our crew headed out early in the morning for their own endeavours. I was happy to sleep in though since my cold had worsened.

After we finally got up, we went down to the deli down the street that has become one of our new favourite places to eat. After having a big slice of NY style pizza, we continued on our way. I stopped at a drug store to grab a kleenex supply and some water before we caught the subway down to Times Square. I'm starting to get pretty tired of the area - its just *so* over the top, and so constantly crowded that its just not interesting to me anymore. Oh well. We had some time to kill so we walked around a bit and I bought a gift. And then it was time for our show!

The Shubert Theatre is absolutely stunning. I don't really know how to describe it, but I was quite happy to enjoy the scene before the show started. We were seated up on the upper balcony, but only 3 rows back so we had a pretty good view (I had no reason to complain anyways). They packed the seats pretty tight back there, but a couple hours of a little discomfort isn't new to us from flying so much in recent memory.

Spamalot was awesome! The show was roughly based on Monty Python's the Holy Grail, but with several twists and turns that didn't exist in the original movie plus a couple throwbacks to the other Monty Python shows. Sweeeet. Of particular note, they sang "Always look on the bright side of life" which was pretty awesome. Also a lot of fun was the Camelot scene where they made it as if they were going to Vegas ... and the memorable quote "What happens in Camelot, stays in Camelot!". The other hilight for me was several songs where they made meta references to the show. In both love songs of the show, the song goes (roughly) "Once (twice) in each show, there comes a song where we sing and kiss... this is that song". Pure awesome self referencing music!

Mike and I were totally entertained throughout the show so I think its safe to say we rather enjoyed it. We joined up with Mike and Nolan afterwards and headed out to dinner where we tried a Peruvian place (food from Peru). It was pretty good, though I really wasn't sure what I should order.

My cold had been bother me all day, so after dinner we headed straight back to the hostel though Nolan stayed out to do some shopping. Now I'm thinking about heading out to that deli again for a snack before I crash. Hopefully by the time I get back Nolan will be back and I can fall asleep without worrying about being woken up again when Nolan comes in.

Tomorrow is home time, and I'm quite glad to say so. Its been a long trip. Good, but I'm quite happy to get the chance to return home to my sweety and to the comforts of home which are seeming quite attractive at the moment!

Heraldk

Another day in New York

Well, New York is really overwhelming. Still, its cool to get to see some stuff, so we slept in a little later today because we were all pretty tired from our rather full day the day before. After we finally got going, we headed out for a quick brunch before heading to the United Nations. We got there just in time before a large group of people and took the tour, which was actually really cool. The tour guide was super awesome and the subject was interesting. The UN is a very neat building, and its cool to see all the different countries and how they interact in the UN.

Along the way to the UN, we saw the Chrysler building, which was reportedly the tallest building in NYC for a short while before the Empire State building claimed the title. More picture-ness!

We hurried back to the ticket office to see if we could get cheap tickets to the spamelot show, but apparently these weren't available. I guess the show is selling out regularly so they don't need to sell cheap tickets for it. Mike and I decided to pay full price for these seats. I figure we might as well check out a broadway show while we're here ... so we're gonna go. The other Mike (J) and Nolan will head out on their own to see things of their choice. We'll reconvene after the show (its a matinee) and hopefully have something super exciting to see! (more about that tomorrow, I don't want to jinx it).

After looking at tickets, we walked up 5th avenue to the Apple store and FAO Schwartz ... two big toy stores right next to each other (in fact, on the same block). The Apple store is a pretty awesome sight - the entire store is below street level with the only part that is visible being a big glass cube with an elevator and stairs decending into the center of the store. Only Apple, I tell you! Right beside it, FAO is a huge toy store for kids with multiple levels of toys and games and other fun things. The scale of this place is incredible! So many crazy things of any price (there's of course the big foot piano on the upper level that the price tag states a quarter of a million dollars ... heh). The extravagance of it all blows my mind!

We were getting hungry so our next stop was dinner at a quaint restaurant called Burgers and Cupcakes. Mike S had picked this place out as a place to go so we did indeed head there. Its one of these concept restaurants that kind of appeals to particular people. We had some fun with the restuarant. They even gave us free cupcakes ... because we followed the instructions on the sign in the window saying "Free cupcakes if you tell us you hate Bush". Easily done!

After dinner Mike S, Nolan and I went on to try out a comedy club - which turned out to be pretty fun ... and there's a little more to the story I think I'll share tomorrow once I figure out whether we've succeeded or not. Yes, I'm being all secretive here. Its a good story, just let me finish it up tomorrow!

So that was the day today - not nearly as full as yesterday, but still enjoyable. Unfortuantely, I'm coming down with a cold, so I've got to get some sleep before Spamelot tomorrow afternoon!

So on that note, to bed I go!

Heraldk

Marathon Day in New York

Okay, today was a heck of a day! We got up on our own accord around 8:30am ... after which we got ready and started out on our big day. Our plan was to try and hit some of the major tourist attractions that are "must-see" New York. We could've done this by transit for most of the way, but decided to instead do most of it on foot so we could also get a feel for the atmosphere of the city and see stuff we'd miss if we went on the train.

So after a short breakfast in a little bakery/deli, we started walking down Broadway with our first stop being Carnegie Hall. There wasn't much to see inside since the tour had just left and there wasn't exactly public access to the building. But we got some pictures of the outside of the building.

Next, we stopped at a ticket booth near Times square looking for tickets for a broadway show (we're aiming to see Spamelot, a Monty Python themed broadway show). The booth wasn't open until 3pm, so we checked a show schedule just to see if there was any shows for that night. Unfortunately, there wasn't any so we were forced to put that off until tomorrow. The advantage of this particular ticket booth is they offer discount tickets the day of the show - which we are a big fan of! So that's on the agenda for tomorrow and hopefully tomorrow evening as well.

The next stop was the Empire State building - but the wait there was over an hour so we decided to put that off until later on as well. So far, not a huge success rate on the things we wanted to do!

Tired, and out of gas, we stopped at a Mcdonalds (yeah, I know ... terrible). We were in a district that seemed to have a lack of snack/deli type food places that we could stop for a quick bite, a glass of water and get our wits back from the busy streets of Manhattan. By the time we found the Mcdonalds, I really really needed to sit down and take a breather. So that I guess is the reason for our stop there. From there, we caught a subway (being really tired and not willing to walk the rest of the way) to a stop near the NY stock exchange - which was yet another place we just stopped to take some pictures of the outside of and left.

Our next destination was a ferry to take us to the Statue of Liberty. Fortunately for our tired feet, this was really close by so we went there and got tickets for the next ferry. It is really a pretty cool sight, even if it really doesn't have a lot of meaning for us Canadians. We wandered around the island and took lots of photos. Unforunately, we couldn't go inside - apparently tickets for that are difficult to get and require more planning ahead than we were able to do. Oh wells.

After catching the ferry back, we walked through Battery Park on route to the World Trade Center site. This was a sobering place to go since it was obvious there was a gaping hole in the landscape. The area is under heavy watch, and construction has started on whatever they plan on putting there ... we didn't stay long, but it was kind of depressing just being there so I was glad to move on.

We had one more stop on our list ... Brooklyn bridge which was not too far away. But first, we needed to grab some food so we stopped at a little place next to the bridge for some pretty good Italian food. It wasn't Turin food, but who am I to complain? I got another chance to sample some juicy fresh shrimp. While not many of them, I was quite happy to have some! I totally have a new appreciation for shrimp!

Finally done, we wandered around trying to find a pedestrian entrance to the bridge. It took awhile, but finally we got on the bridge itself - it is a pretty magnificent structure and well worth the time to go see. We decided not to walk the full length of the bridge, partly because of our tired feet!

Catching a subway back to Times Square, we attempted to find a comedy show to go see (since that's apparently something to do in New York). Unfortunately, the only one we could find was half way into the show, the tickets were still a full $20 and there was a two drink minimum. Ugh - not too attractive. So we wandered a bit and found a Toys-R-Us that was pretty ridiculous. It was three stories tall, and had a FERRIS WHEEL in the middle of the store! That's right ... a ferris wheel. Pure, over the top, ridiculousness! Then again, I'm starting to really expect that here, particularly in the Times Square area.

Afterwards we decided to return to the hostel, perhaps with a stop for a snack and a drink. We stopped at a neat little deli where we got dessert and a beverage ... and there was a kind old man who gave us cookies as well! Yay cookies!

Finally, we're back at our hotel after a very long and full day. Typing this up even makes me a little tired ... and mildly impressed that we actually got through all of this. Amazing-ness!

But I need to go crash. We're sleeping in a bit tomorrow, and then we're going to check out fifth avenue which is reportedly the locale of the new Apple store here in New York. We really have to check that out, as well as some of the other shopping along the avenue. Perhaps I will be able to find gifts for some people even!

Take care! I'm going to go sleep for as long as I can!

Heraldk

New York, New York!

Well it was a long day today! Mike and I got into New York late last night, dropped our bags off at the hostel and went out in search of food since we were hungry. We bumped into Nolan and Mike on their way back from their dinner so they lead us to a fast food/sit down hybrid restaurant where we had some pretty good wraps.

After a quick bite to eat we returned back to the hostel and got ready for bed with a quick stop to use the internet to check our email.

The next morning we got up early at 8:00 to head for the Museum of Natural History here in NY city. We were meeting up with a couple of people we know from CS who were also in NY, so we needed to be there pronto when then museum opened. The museum is *huge*! When we quickly realized just how big it was after spending an hour in the first corner of the museum, we split up and agreed to meet up at 1pm for lunch so that we could all move just a little faster in small groups. Mike S and I wandered around from the top floor down while Nolan and the other Mike worked their way up from the bottom (this wasn't really planned, it just sorta happened that way). There was some really cool exhibits including many many rooms full of animal displays, information overload and interactive booths.

Our break for lunch was at a small place a few blocks away that was pretty tasty, though I think I'm getting a little tired of spending so much money eating out every day. It'll be nice to get home where the food is cheaper!

Ken and company had to leave after lunch so they did, but we wandered back to the museum to finish looking at the parts of the museum we had missed for about an hour and a half. There sure was some pretty cool things to see (though I don't really have time to look into it)!

After meeting up again, we decided to head over to the Intrepid which is an old aircraft carrier which has been converted into a museum. We were pretty late in their operating hours, but we had about an hour to explore which was actually about right for me. If I had to spend much more time there, I would probably be a little more annoyed at the military propaganda that was everywhere in the carrier. It was still pretty neat to look at everything, and some of the views of the carrier both into the bay and into Manhattan were pretty nice!

When the museum closed, we decided to walk down to Times Square to take a look at this famous area. Crazy! The place was packed with people and this was only a random Sunday evening. What really struck me was the garish-ness of the ads placed *everywhere*. I realize that the area is prime ad-space for companies, but the combination of all the ads with scrolling lights, video, movies added with all the people left me a little dazed at the whole scene. It helped that I had my camera to take a picture once in awhile so I could zone into just parts of the scene so that I didn't have to take it all in at once. Ugh.

We wandered down and saw the outside of Madison Square Garden, which was not all that exciting, but we can say we did it. From there we caught a subway over to Little India to go have some Indian food. Yay for good Indian food! After eating some really good food we returned back to our Hostel. Now its after midnight and I need to get to bed so that I can be up tomorrow morning at 8 again. We're gonna push to try and hit several big things to see including the statue of liberty, the WTC site, and several other things over on that side of Manhattan ... should be fun!

Heraldk

Foxwoods Casino

Mike and I met in the lobby on Friday morning all set to take a bus to Foxwoods casino. This was to be my first live poker ring game experience, and I was pretty excited. The bus ride was about 2 hours long from Boston, and we arrived at Foxwoods sometime in the early afternoon. Foxwoods is an amazing sight - it is absolutely *huge*, with three buildings of hotel rooms, slot machines, poker tables, and other casino table games. Instead of heading to our hotel right away, Mike and I checked our bags and headed straight for the poker room. I sat down at a 2/4 limit table, and Mike joined a 1/2 no limit game. My first impression? These players were *terrible*. I got frustrated though because I couldn't get cards to take advantage of it! After about 4 hours of play, I was down about $60 or so.

Mike was really hungry, and I my stomach was fast to agree, so we left to get some food at the Hard Rock Cafe. We seriously had the best service at a restaurant so far this trip there, which was pretty cool so we left a pretty good tip. It helped that Mike was up almost $200 at that point!

Before returning to the poker room, we wandered around for a few minutes to take in some of the atmosphere. Really, it felt like any other casino I've ever been in ... just that it was ginormous. We stopped at a craps table and played a few rounds where I won about $25 ... not too shabby. Craps is one of the only casino games that I find fascinating because at a full table, there's so much going on. People placing bets like crazy, and yelling and cheering as the dice are rolled - there really isn't a game more fun that craps in a casino environment. Plus its a low house edge game if you know how to bet, so that's another advantage!

Anyways, after our brief break we returned to the poker room. This time, I got a rush of cards and pulled up about $50 at one point ... only to hit 3 bad hands for me in a row including twice running into pocket aces with a big pair of my own. I swung up and down quite a bit, but ended up only down $30 when Mike and I decided to head back around 3 in the morning.

We caught a cab back to our hotel which was just a few minutes away, and checked in. I got to sleep a little after 4:30 in the morning which is officially the latest I've been up all trip. I woke up around 10:20 to the alarm clock so we could catch the shuttle in after a bit of breakfast. The hotel had free breakfast before 11am, including these awesome belgian waffle makers that were all set up for the perfect one every time. So I rather enjoyed breakfast!

Mike and I caught the 11am shuttle back to the casino. We had about an hour and a half to kill before we caught the bus (so we thought) ... so we returned to the poker room for a little bit of play. I started up fast - with 3 hands in a row which I raised preflop (ATs, JJ and JJ again). I won the first two and lost the third, but was up for a decent amount of time. Not too much later though, I had a terrible beat. I had A6 of hearts and limped in. The guy in the blinds raised so 4 players and I all called. I flopped a flush draw with a Jh 4h 2s, so I check and called with lots of odds. The turn was a 2c, which looked a lot like a blank. Again I check and called with one lady also staying in. The river was the queen of hearts giving me the nut flush. Unfortunately, the preflop raiser had just made queens full. Ouch!

So I took another $25 hit, but all in all I don't think I played terribly. I should probably have laid down my Jacks to the Aces last night, but besides that, I felt really comfortable and the amount I lost was totally within reasonable statistical variance. Still, it would've been nice to come out of foxwoods ahead!

Mike is up about $100, which is nice for him. It pretty much pays for the sidetrip to foxwoods for him with a little on the side. Apparently I should've been playing no limit.

I typed up this post when I was waiting for the bus to show up at the bus terminal. Turns out that the bus was almost a full two hours late! So we waited for a long time for the bus to arrive and then were late arriving in new york to meet up with Mike and Nolan.

Up next? Adventures in New York! Our first visit is apparently the Museum of Natural History.

Heraldk

Last Conference Day

Well today was the last day of the conference, so tonight is the last night in Boston. Man, time goes by quickly, particularly when you're being kept crazy busy! Tonight's post is only one day of coverage so shouldn't be quite so long. This morning was another 8am wakeup. The night before we had Brad and Chris stay the night in our room since they hadn't had a place for the night. Apparently the hotel hadn't managed to find them a room in the hotel for them that night despite them being on the waiting list for a room over a month ago. Plus a couple people we personally know booked rooms since and got in. Weird.

Anyways, we got up and proceeded to get breakfast again before heading to the first paper talks of the day. The hilight of the day were the talks by Mike Smith and the other speakers at the "Hall of Champions". The first speaker was from Austin, Texas and he talked about their general game playing program (they had the 2nd annual competition this year at AAAI). The 2nd speaker was from the DARPA grand challenge winning team from Stanford. It wasn't the same guy as the last talk from the same group - instead it was the lead programmer. Not a long talk since it was for a paper, but it was still very interesting to hear them talk about the sort of challenges they had to deal with. Mike did well at his talk, considering he had to follow up such a crazy intelligent presenter. The pool stuff is actually really cool, so I don't think there was much trouble having people pay attention to his stuff.

After the talk, we wandered over to a session that was pretty much a UofA hilight session. Michael Bowling gave a talk, his student gave a talk, and Doug (another UofA grad student) gave a talk as well! All told, Michael Bowling had his name on SIX AAAI papers this year, which is pretty insane. That's a whole lot of work he's got his fingers into.

Lunch was the next thing on the plate, so we organized and went out for lunch again at the LTK. It was okay, though they weren't quite so snappy with the service that we've seen in the previous visits, so I wasn't as impressed. Still, I was happy.

The last talk we attended was the results for the three competitions that were run. In particular, these were the general games playing competition, some sort of robot interaction/integration competition, and of course our poker competition. Yay for the UofA!

We had the afternoon/evening free from the conference as this pretty much wrapped up the events. So we got up and headed out to find an ice cream place Nolan claimed was supposed to be really good. It was called Toscanini's, and it was actually not bad but I'm not too sure it was worth the long trip and the cost of the ice cream itself. It wasn't the marble slab! Still, one cannot argue with ice cream!

We returned to the hotel to meet some people after wandering around Harvard with our ice cream. Then we headed out for dinner - and got lucky. We tried the "Barking Crab" which looks like a popular place. Unfortunately, so popular that we had no chance of getting in in time to sooth our hungry stomachs. So we left and headed downtown - and caught the kitchen still open with about 10 minutes to spare at a bar called Coogans or something of that flavour. The food was alright, but nothing incredible. Still, it was good to get some food. This being the last night, several people drank heavily but I didn't really feel like having too much. I did join them for a drink called the "Dirty Girl Scout" which turned out to be a drink with Baileys, Creme de Cacao, Creme de Menthe and Kahlua. It was *really* good - so you should try it sometime!

We stayed for awhile until the bad bar music got on our nerves and several of us left. I had brought my tripod and got some neat shots of the tower that was close to the quincy market. There was a fog over the city almost all day and this made for some interesting pictures.

And now we're back in the hotel room. I'm gonna try and pack up most of my stuff so I just have to shower and meet up with Mike - we're off to foxwoods tomorrow morning! w00t! Wish me luck!

Heraldk

Poker Competition Results!

I'm up fairly early this morning and the first person to shower so now I can wait for everyone else to shower and spend some more time catching up on me blog!So last night four of us got back soaking wet from a night out at another bar. You know, I'm not a big drinker or anything but it seems I'm out a whole lot more often than I am in Edmonton. I guess its kind of fun to explore the city and hang out with newly met peers.Anyways, I got to bed around 1am last night and we got up around 8 in an attempt to get to the conference. After looking at the program we decided to skip the invited talk and get breakfast before the first paper talk. The set of games talks were on, which really was the stuff I was particularly interested in at this conference. I would attend several more talks than the previous day - one of the talks was the paper my name appears on. The official title of the paper was "Optimal Unbiased Estimators".

At 2:50pm, the announcement of who won the tournament occurred. The only people who knew who won were Marty and Christian with everyone else being kept in the dark until the announcement. Turns out, we won! We won by all metrics and it appears we got statistical significance in most areas which was pretty nice. I'm looking forward to getting the logs from the match so I can run the DIVAT analysis on them.

I attended another talk after the announcement and before Darse did his analysis of some hands in the match. Turns out one of the biggest things we took advantage of was CMU called down a lot on the river even if it had a bad hand due to some technical reasons. This is a terrible error, and I suspect this is a big reaosn we won.

A group of us headed out afterwards to go see Tomb which is an interactive puzzle sort of adventure. It was really pretty pricey ($16) but a pretty cool concept. Unfortunately, with our group being computer science people, the puzzles were a tad too simple to solve. I would really like to see them have multiple difficulty settings so that we would've had more of a challenge with it.

We had dinner at a steakhouse across from Tomb while we were waiting for our appointment. While being a steakhouse, everyone except Brad avoided the steak, which he said was a good decision. It's kinda funny how Albertans are so used to good beef which means we're pretty judgemental about other beef (particularly worse beef).

We decided to walk back through an area of town we hadn't been in before and passed Fenway park on the way to the Boston common. Fenway is where the Boston Red Sox play. We didn't get to see much besides the outside of the park but that was neat in itself. We walked back to the end of the Boston Common and got on the train back to the Hotel ... where we met up with Nolan, the girls from the previous night, and a couple of guys from Austin, Texas. After a quick shower, I joined them at a restaurant not far from our hotel called LTK (Legal Test Kitchen) which is a pretty neat restaraunt. They had super cheap guiness beer which was pretty awesome ($4.75!) ... though they didn't really know how to pour it properly.

Anyways, we stayed out until after midnight when the restaurant looked like they really wanted to kick us out so we vanished off to our hotel room where I stayed up for awhile catching up with yesterday's blog post.Any now I'm all caught up with my blog posts!

Heraldk

Boston Conference Begins!

I haven't had a large amount of time to actually sit down and keep up my journal, and I'm falling rapidly behind as a result, so I think I'm going to try and very quickly summarize what I've been up to. After exploring the MIT and Harvard campuses, we returned to the hotel via transit and joined several others for an excursion to find dinner. So ... apparently Bostonians don't eat dinner on Sunday nights. There were very few restaurants that were actually open, and it took us a couple hours to find a restaurant suitable for all of us. Finally we did though, and enjoyed a dinner at an Irish pub called Ned Devine's where I got myself some fish & chips.

Afterwards, we went and got a drink at another bar near by and then wandered back to the hotel to play some poker before bed.

The next day (Monday), I had a volunteer shift at the conference so I got up early to head over to the conference location. My task was to take tickets for the first two hours of one of the tutorials which was a little boring, but not something I was too concerned with.

After my shift was over, I snuck into a workshop session on heuristic search since this is something I'm actually interested in. I stayed for a few talks before I had to sign in for my last volunteer shift. Oddly enough, they had moved the stuff out of the booth I was supposed to be working, and the work there was simple enough that the registration desk could handle it so I was out of some work. I got the assignment of "help out at the pre-registration desk". Huh. Well I got leave to run over and join some people for lunch, and then come back and finish my shift later since I really had no set task.

After lunch, I came back and sat at the pre-registration desk which was actually pretty fun. I chatted with a couple of grad students for awhile about research and several other things. One guy had the same digital rebel camera I had and we talked about flickr and our photography experience together. If you're interested, he's one of my flickr contacts.

My laptop battery ran out, and I took this as a signal to finish the shift that was long since over so I left to go chat with the poker people about setting up our booth. We decided how we wanted the room setup and agreed to meet at 7:30 the next morning (and before the first keynote) so we could setup and get organized.

Monday was an empty-ish day for the conference as people were still arriving for the first day. The evening was the only all-conference people event which was a *very large*. There was snack food of many types, and there was even waiters carrying around more fancy hot food from the kitchen including some chicken satay skewers that were awesome. We were there for awhile, but then a large group decided to head out for some real dinner. A ... very large group.

After dinner, Darse and I headed back to the hotel (rather than joining a group staying out a bit later) because we needed to work on some slides for the next day. We decided we wanted to set up a DIVAT poster so we could use it to discuss our research to people who were interested in it. It took us awhile to get some stuff done, but we did get a couple done before our brains were fried and Mike returned to play some more dealer's choice style poker. Once Nolan and Mike got back we turned it in for bed around 1:00am.

Yesterday was the first full day of main conference talks. I got up early to go to the poker booth and help setup. Darse and I found some time to finish up our DIVAT slides/poster which we printed via our hotels awesome complimentary colour printing. After finishing those, we helped setup everything else and got a display setup for showing matches. We had a fair number of people come in and talk to us which was pretty cool. I have the feeling we're going to see some news articles in the next week or so on the poker competition at AAAI since there was at least two or three press people there.

The first keynote talk was one on the semantic web which I didn't really understand and I was pretty hungry so it was hard to concentrate on it. After the keynote I returned to the poker room to make sure everything was all setup and eat the sandwhich Darse bought for me. I spent a fair amount of time during the day answering questions in the poker display room despite the various talks that were going on during the week. Mostly, I wasn't all that interested in the talks that were being presented. I did attend a talk by the professor who lead the DARPA grand challenge winning team. For those who don't know, the DARPA grand challenge was a race for robot vehicle drivers. Each team was supposed to build a robot to race a vehicle through the desert somewhere in the US. It was a really impressive talk, with a lot of video that was really enjoyable to watch.

Afterwards, I returned to the poker room where we answered questions for awhile. A large group of people planned on heading out for dinner so I joined them. This time there was a significant non-ualberta contingent including a couple of girls from the University of Massachusetts and some people from the university of Maryland, and a few others I can't remember at the moment. We went to an 'asian fusion' place that I think was mostly americanized Chinese food place. It was actually not bad, but I assumed it was more americanized than it actually was and ordered expecting kind of a personal meal. Instead I had a plate of chicken much more like what you'd get at a real Chinese food place in Edmonton. It wasn't bad, but I didn't have much in the way of veggies!

Some of the people who were less fun (kidding) left to go back to the hotel and the rest of us decided to stay out a little longer and go to a bar for drinks and conversation. It sure was good to spend some time chatting with people from not the UofA. Not that UofA people aren't fun to chat with, its just that it seems odd to be at a conference where you're supposed to be meeting some new people.

We stayed out pretty late, and actually ended up getting caught in a pretty good rain storm. So the 4 of us walking back to the hotel were soaked - but we had fun!

It's pretty late and I still need to do email here, but I'll try and get today's and tomorrow's events up sometime tomorrow, but we'll see if that actually happens or not, but I'll try. Turns out that these posts take a long time to write!

Heraldk

Boston’s MIT and Harvard Campuses

I continue to experience great internet connectivity in Boston from our fancy hotel room so this is a wonderful opportunity to post more of my travel journal *while* its happening! So here it is, my second full day of adventures while in Boston! After my post yesterday, I napped for a short while and then managed to get a hold of Mike to organize heading out for dinner. As far as I knew it was just the two of us. We browsed some restaurants for awhile on google local curious what sorts of restaurants were around us. We found a few, but we really weren't sure where we should go and the information we got was a little self-conflicting. So we decided to wander and find a place on our wanderings.

When we got down to the lobby to leave a key for Nolan and Mike (the other one - this will be confusing I can see) after their fancy UAI banquet. Lo and behold, we find a group of UofA people just figuring out *their* dinner options. Naturally, we joined the fray and ended up at a restaurant called "Seaport" which I believe has no relation to the seaport hotel which we are staying at. I had a dish called the Regatta which was a three sea food dish including the biggest scallops I have ever seen, some king crab, and probably the best shrimp I have ever tasted. If you know me, I never really got excited about shrimp before because ... well I just never really thought it tasted like anything special. This shrimp, however, was *amazing*!

After dinner, we decided to wander around night-time Boston for awhile so we wandered around downtown for a couple hours. We found a place called the Quincy Market which was pretty alive with people even at 10:00pm. The Quincy Market itself was a long building teeming with fast food restaurants, candy stores, cookie places, and ice cream stalls. It's sort of setup like HUB mall - a big long narrow building with lots of shops along the sides but nowhere really to sit down.

After wandering down there with several people buying cookies and ice cream for myself, we left and then stopped at a little bar for a drink before returning to the hotel to crash. I had been up for almost a solid 2-day period with the 2 hours of attempted sleep on the plane between Edmonton and Toronto.

The next morning, Nolan and Mike had commitments at the conference - Nolan had a volunteer shift and Mike had decided to attend a workshop. I needed sleeping time so I tried to sleep in a bit which half-worked. I probably got about 6 hours and then another hour and a half after they left. It would have to do!

Once I got up, I putzed around until 11:00 when I had arranged to meet up with Maria, Mike and Brad to go exploring in Boston for the day. We hopped on a the silver line bus (the transit here is colour-coded for the various main sections of the city - so there's the blue, green, red, orange and silver lines to choose from) which took us to an interchange where we could catch a the red-line train. Our destination? MIT.

MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a very well known campus that is for sure. The first order of business though was not to check out the campus but to find food since most of us hadn't eaten yet. It took us a long time - many restaurants seemed to be closed on Sunday! Finally we found a little place where we were treated to a pretty affordable but tasty lunch.

After lunch we finally started to explore the MIT area with interest. The first place we found was the MIT museum which we decided to check out. Fortunately for us, it was not only open, it was free admission day! Apparently the 3rd Sunday of every month is free admission day, and we had coincidentally come at the right time ... sweet deal!

It took us awhile to go through the museum. They had some fascinating displays, including a really cool hologram room, some sculptures/devices which were amazing engineering demos, and some pieces of computer history including the first hardware LISP implementation. All in all, it was a pretty good use of some time in the day!

Back outside, the weather had cranked it up a notch. It had started out hot, but it was getting quite a bit hotter - breaking 34 or 35 degrees I am sure. For us Alberta dwellers, the humidity is a lot more difficult to get used to than I figured it would. It kind of swallows you up and makes it a little tougher to move, breathe, and all that. Its not major - just something different to experience.

Despite that, we wandered around MIT for awhile. Nothing was really open that we could tell, but we got a chance to check out the main building with the dome that I hear engineers have used as the source of many pranks. After a few pictures we started walking in the general direction of Harvard to check out the other famous campus in Boston. It took us quite awhile to walk there, especially in the heat. We stopped at a place not too far away from campus that was advertising air conditioning and cold drinks. Sign me up!

After a couple drinks we walked the rest of the way to the Harvard campus. We were pretty tired, but the campus was beautiful. We wandered for awhile and then we felt the hotel calle us back so we finally hopped back on the redline back to the hotel.

I'm gonna have to continue the story later - everyone's starting to arrive. I think we're playing poker for a little while before bed. Yay!

Heraldk

Arriving in Boston

I think with the lengthy time that I spent between webposts on my Torino journal, I'm going to attempt to stay up to date with my blog *while* I'm here in Boston. It certainly will be easier for this stage of the trip since our hotel has a convenient LAN ethernet port which I can just plug my laptop into. So here goes for the first part of my trip. My relatives from Austria are in Edmonton, so last night Diane and I joined my mom and my dad at my Uncle's place for a hotpot. For those who haven't been at one of these, its quite an experience. You put a pot of soup stock in the center of a table on a hot plate and surround it with an array of sauces, vegetables and raw meat (including beef, shrimp, fish, squid, and really most anything). You grab a bowl, throw some sauces in there and throw some meat and veggies into the soup stock and cook it. Chaos ensues as people grab cooked bits of meat and veggies from the pot. It really is a tasty treat, particularly when my Aunt makes the yummy satay sauce!

We visited for a little while and then Diane and I headed out and picked up Mike on our way to the airport. After saying my farewells, we went and checked our baggage. When passing through security, my bag got stopped. I totally forgot that I had packed my toiletries bag, and inside I had a pair of cuticle scissors. Woops! Well, they confiscated those, which is okay - they were a cheap pair at any rate and I didn't really need them anyways.

We waited for our flight for about half an hour and then boarded. This was a red-eye flight leaving at 1:00 am (mountain time) and arriving in Toronto at 6:30 am (eastern time). The flight was uneventful - I found it really hard to sleep on the plane this go-around, so I'm gonna be pretty tired tonight though at the moment I'm pretty wired.

The wait in Toronto ended up being about half an hour after we finally switched terminals, cleared US customs and security, and had some breakfast. We got on the little plane taking us to Boston - it was a brand new and had little screens in the back of every seat. Unfortunately, they weren't working yet! It was neat to ride a smaller aircraft, but at the same time the plane was still new that it had a plastic-y smell that really kind of irritated me.

Finally we got in to Boston where Mike and I got our luggage and moved over to the Seaport hotel. The lady checked us in despite it being earlier than check-in time (hooray!), so Mike and I stowed our bags and went out to do some errands. We needed to book some bus seats to foxwoods and then from there to new york. The tickets ended up costing us $35 each which was pretty reasonable I thought.

After that we found some lunch at a fast food mexican place. Not too shabby actually - I got a chicken quesadilla which was pretty tasty. We then stopped at a radio shack for Mike to get a replacement power cord he needed because he forgot to bring the one from his laptop. Whoops. Easily done though.

We wandered around a bit more - we found a book Mike's been looking for. It happens to be the new Sklansky no limit poker book (which I should get from amazon soon I hope). I hear its a pretty good book.

Now I'm back at the hotel. Mike is checked into his hotel and taking a breather before we head out for supper. Hopefully I sleep well enough tonight so that I have enough energy for some exploring tomorrow!

Heraldk

Ready, Set, Go!

Well tonight (technically tomorrow morning), I leave for Boston where I'll be attending AAAI - one of the biggest conferences on artificial intelligence research. Once the conference is over on the 20th, a couple of my friends and I are going to spend a week in new york with a short stopover at Foxwoods casino. I'm pretty excited. It is pretty fun to travel, and it is also interesting to attend a conference where we can see what sort of research people are doing in other universities around the world. Plus I can't wait to see what sort of pictures I can get as we checkout the various attractions we see.

I will try and keep my blog updated while I'm gone, but that will depend on both time constraints and availability of internet.

Hope everyone has a good couple of weeks while I'm gone!

Heraldk

Poker Rush

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

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

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

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

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

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

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