A Lively Weekend

It's been busy, so I haven't had a chance to work on heraldk.ca anymore since I launched it. Don't worry, it'll be updated! This weekend I got to be part of a real special weekend for my friend and colleague, Darse Billings. He got married this weekend, and I was proud to be one of the select people he chose to include in part of his special day. He decided to essentially elope, and the only reason I was included was I was the photographer for the event. So at the ceremony, there was just 6 people. The happy couple: Darse and Alexandra, the marriage commissioner: June, the witnesses: Dr and Dr Buro, and the photographer: yours truly. The ceremony was quick, although that was partially due to the weather which didn't entirely cooperate. Darse was pretty happy though -- he loves the rain. The ceremony went off with no problems and the happy couple shared their kiss and then we all dashed off to June's car to finish the paperwork.

By the time the paperwork was over the rain had already quieted down, so we drove down to the museum grounds hoping that the rain would subside for us to get some photos in. It turned out we were in luck, and we joined the FIVE other weddings in a competition to find good scenic spots to get photos. I think we did alright, and you'll probably be seeing quite a few of my photos get posted to Flickr (that is, if Darse and Alexandra are okay with that). There were quite a few rather good photos, in my humble opinion.

After the photo shoot, I picked up Diane and we met up with the rest of the wedding crowd at the Blue Pear. The six of us enjoyed an incredible 5 course meal. Each course was amazing. I felt kinda funny taking pictures of my food, but it was good enough that I'm gonna want those photos to remember. I just justify it by saying that Darse and Alexandra will also want to remember their food... right? I took several more photos of the couple and the rest of the guests throughout dinner. All the while, really really enjoying my 50mm f/1.4 canon lens that can take some pretty fantastic low light photos. Just about any other lens would've had issues, but this one had no problems with the ISO set to just 800 for most of the photos. Hooray!

After dinner, our next stop was a games party at my supervisor, Jonathan Schaeffer's house. By the time Diane and I got there, Darse had already broken the news that he had decided to go to Ireland ... and that he happened to have gotten married earlier in the day. He brought four magnums of champagne to celebrate - and when Diane and I came in the door we were passed glasses and quickly had them filled. As usual, the games party was lots of fun, but because we got there late I didn't get a chance to play many games. I did play a new game called Ingenious, which Darse had found. It was pretty fun. I might have to pick up a copy of that (even though I already have too many games that I don't play).

So it was a pretty fun, and eventful day. Congratulations to Darse and Alexandra again! It was an honour to be part of your special day.

Heraldk

Camping Weekend

This weekend a group of us went out to Elk Island National Park to get some camping in before the summer came to a close. It was a rather enjoyable weekend that included a short excursion back to the city to attend a BBQ at my Uncle's place. We got in a quick hike on Saturday morning, but mostly we kind of sat around for awhile and relaxed in front of the campfire. We played some cards and some boggle, but other than that we mostly just enjoyed the wonderful outdoors. There was a bit of an adventure though with my car. You see, on Sunday morning, Marc discovered that my tire was looking a little flat. A couple of hours later, it was starting to sag down to the rim. Oops! Turns out I had run over a bit of metal, likely at one of the many construction sites that I passed through. Doh. Well, instead of fiddling with putting on the spare tire and limping back to Edmonton, Diane had a handy AMA membership that we used to get a tow back into Edmonton.

It was a rather full weekend! After getting back, I was super tired so I went to bed super early: like 9:30, and didn't get up this morning until eight in the morning. Yay uber sleep! All in all, a good weekend and a good chance to get into the outdoors again and enjoy some camping.

Heraldk

Victor Borge

Last night, Diane and I saw the best fringe show that I think I've ever seen. It was Rainer Hersch's Victor Borge. The show had received a 5 star rating in the Edmonton Journal, and they were totally not kidding. For those who don't know (I was among you before I saw the show), Victor Borge was a famous piano comedian for something like 50 years. His most famous sketch was one where he gives sounds to every punctuation mark which results in a rather humorous reading of a story.

So what happens in the show? Rainer Hersch jumps in and out of the Victor Borge character with ease. He probably spends about half the show as Victor, and half as himself as he talks about Victor's life story and how he rose to fame. The show was incredibly fun to watch. The jokes are hilarious, the acting was superb (I later was talking to my first piano teacher whom I ran into at the show, and she said that Rainer had his Victor impression almost perfect), and I really think that most everyone should enjoy this show.

Unfortunately, I'm sure it is all sold out for all the shows that remain during fringe week. However, if they decide to hold-over this show, or you see Rainer Hersch's name back in Edmonton, you should check him out!

Heraldk

Fringing

I've have had the pleasure again this year of checking out Edmonton's famous Fringe Festival. The festival is only half over, so if you haven't checked it out yet, then ... go check it out! Diane and I have seen three shows so far. The first two were really good, but the third wasn't quit as amazing. Here are my reviews: The Fugue Code This was an excellent play. It involved a solo performer taking the roles of four very different personalities as they frantically tried to crack the Fugue code. The plot roughly parallels the plots in Dan Brown's books "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Demons". Overall, the play was extremely well done. The actor was admirably capable of being able to portray each of the 4 different main characters uniquely enough that we were able to identify which character was speaking at any given point. Perhaps it was because he would assume a different physical stance for each of his characters. At any rate, the play is fast-paced and humorous, and you should check it out!

Bald Ego This is a British standup comedy routine performed in the intimate Yardbird setting. This was an ideal venue for the act, and the comedy was top-notch. Diane and I were still giggling when we left the venue. It is pretty clear though that if you go check him out later in the week, you'll get a different show that we saw. He has some prepared material, but a lot of our laughs involved some interaction with the audience. If you get this, then you'll get a different show than we saw. I highly recommend seeing this guy.

Copyright Infringement Well our string of good luck with fringe shows had to end sooner or later. When I look at show descriptions, my eyes usually light up at the word "Improv". Perhaps it is because my past improv experiences have been most excellent thanks to the excellent local improv people, Improvaganza. This show, however, which was half improv and half prepared skits, was more silly than funny. Lots of physical comedy, but not much in the way of earned laughs. Oh well, you can't win them all.

We'll be hitting the fringe for at least 2 more shows. Maybe more, but we'll see how it goes!

Heraldk

Recovery

It seems that after any big event, my work habits need a couple weeks to return to form. This has been the case after coming back from Vancouver -- for some reason I just have trouble ramping up to get things done again. Thankfully, today has seen some sign that these problems are starting to pass. I've started cleaning up the DIVAT code base, and have plans to make it a) more efficient, b) more correct, and c) implement a service for people to run the DIVAT analysis on their own matches. Another thing I've been trying to do is get some of the raw video files from the matches, and make a few highlight reels of quotes and good hands. The quote highlight reels I should be able to do now ... it's just going to take some time. I didn't realize just how long it takes to watch video to find good clips. I'm not really sure how people do this in real video editing, but my methods are extremely slow and time consuming. Ugh. So expect a highlight reel, but don't expect it soon.

What else? Things are going well in general. I've been playing super mario strikers on the Wii lately. It's a pretty fun game, but it's also frustrating. I can't seem to pass the "Crystal Cup" difficulty level. The game (which is soccer, mario style btw) format involves playing a 6 team double round robin tournament to seed a single elimination tournament amongst the top four places. When you win the two matches in the single elimination tournament, you get to play against a new team which you unlock if you win. The problem I'm having is that before each kickoff (at the start of the game and after a team scores), the level knocks out some number of players from each team for the entire time between kick offs. This seems to be entirely random ... but it seems to screw my team over every time. You see, each player on a team has his own unique traits. Some are slower, but have a better shot, some have a poor shot, but are fast and can pass really well. If you get stuck with just your slow scoring players, then the opposing team has the freedom to run circles around you ... and you give up a goal or two that way which so far has cost me the game more often than not. I've only managed to eke out one victory in this format in 7 games. So frustrating.

My roommate, Mike, has an interesting carrot-on-a-stick approach to writing his thesis. He's already bought an xbox 360, which sits under his desk until he finishes his first draft of his thesis. Incredibly, he's less than two weeks in and he's already got one chapter left to write. I can't really imagine how hard it is not to crack that box open and play some of the coolest next-gen games. Speaking of consoles, I'm pretty impressed with the xbox actually. I haven't played much of it, but it looks like it has certainly helped kill of the PS3. Of course, the jury is still out, but between the Wii and the 360, I really don't see the PS3 finding room to compete.

Diane and I have finally begun planning out our wedding. There's a pretty long list of things we've got to arrange. I don't suppose anyone has any suggestions on who we should go with for a photographer? It's really hard for me to tell how one person's photography style will suit Diane and I. I suppose the correct way to go about this is to meet with several photographers and see what they have to say for themselves and talk them through a typical wedding shoot. So that's the next thing we need to do. It's a little surreal, thinking about getting married. It doesn't seem like all that long ago when I was a socially awkward little kid running around. Now I'm a socially awkward person that's somehow getting married in a few months. Huh. Who would've thunk it?

It's been awhile since I last updated. Part of the reason for that is my shiny new Macbook pro which has had me spending time tweaking it and playing with my photo collection in Aperture. It's amazing how much time you can fill up just installing different programs and fiddling with settings. That might also be part of the reason I haven't been all that productive over the last couple of weeks. Fortunately, my productivity should increase now that I have my laptop all setup!

Anyways, I'm off to a games party tonight. Hope everyone is having a good summer and is planning on checking out the fringe this year. Should be fun!

Heraldk

Cleaning

I had a rather exciting long weekend. I cleaned! Yeah, I was being sarcastic. After getting back from holidays and the man-machine match before that, my condo desperately needed a good cleaning. My room had stacks of junk piled everywhere and my storeroom was even worse. So I took it upon myself to start cleaning stuff up. On Sunday, I cleaned out my room and boy does it look a whole lot nicer now! There's still a pile of papers I need to file and a desktop full of odds and ends that need to find places, but on the whole, the room is incredibly clean compared to what it was like in the past few months. Similarly, yesterday I cleaned out the storage room. You can now see the floor in there which isn't something you could say last week. There's something about a good cleaning that makes me feel clean as well. I'm not too sure what it is, but it feels a lot nicer.

There's still lots to cleanup, but none of the remaining projects are nearly as large -- just kind of the normal chores that have needed doing for a bit too long.

It feels good to see clean things around me! Heraldk

Final Vacation Day

Well Diane and I head back to Edmonton tomorrow. It's been a good trip! Before I get in to today's activities, let me first say that I missed a highlight from yesterday. When we hopped on a bus to take us to robson street to have dinner yesterday, we were on the bus and were standing by the back door ready to get off at our stop. But something different happened this time than normal -- the doors opened presenting us with a problem in dismounting the bus: a row of three newspaper boxes were perfectly lined up to block our exit. One enterprising individual hopped over the mailboxes, but he was the only one to move fast enough. His buddy waited yelled to have the bus driver move up a bit, but evidently the bus driver didn't hear. So we were carted up further. To make matters worse for us, no one pulled the wire to say they wanted to get off at the next stop, so we went 4 blocks past our stop before we were let off. Diane and I and 3 or 4 more people got off the bus giggling a little at what had just transpired. Okay, so I thought it was funny.

Anyways, to today! Diane and I got up, and had to furiously pack our things in order for them to be moved. Apparently the B&B we were staying at needed our room for some incoming guests so they were upgrading us to a new room (which is pretty nice, I have to say!). Anyways, after our packing we hurried over for breakfast with minutes to spare (they stop serving breakfast at 9:30am, so we needed to hurry). After yet another lovely breakfast, we waited around and got the keys for our new room but were told we needed to wait for the people to leave before going in. So instead we decided to leave after they offered to install our bags in our room. Our first stop today was the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen classical Chinese garden. Not knowing what we were doing, we walked right in -- but apparently the part we entered was the free portion. We wandered for awhile and enjoyed the calm quiet that the garden offered. We met a guy at the entrance that was using a lens to burn designs in some wood. I got a couple of pictures of this feat -- it was really rather cool! I was quite impressed with his craft.

Anyways, after wandering around for awhile and taking a look at a nearby giftshop, we discovered the actual entrance to the garden. Hmmm ... well Diane figured we'd had a chance to see some of the garden anyways, so we decided to wander off to another destination. *shrug*. We weren't in a big hurry, but we got some value for no cost so we couldn't really complain!

So after that, we headed back to Granville Island since the first time we were down there everything was closed. The market is a pretty lively place when it's open. We walked along admiring the fruit and some of the various merchandise people had to offer. We got some bubble tea from one place, and sat down by the harbour to enjoy the scenery and people/bird watch for awhile. It was strangely calming, despite the frantic movement of people. It felt kind of cool to relax and just observe people moving fast around you.

After awhile, we got up and wandered some more. There's a lot of neat shops around, but there really wasn't anything interesting enough for me to actually buy. We did discover a couple of neat things. The first was a guy selling fold out 3d cards. He was making them by hand, and I asked him how long it took him to make each one. His answer was about an hour each, except for rare ones which take up to 3 hours, and he pointed to one of some wisteria. The cards were amazing, and I almost bought one of some staircases that roughly resembled some of Escher's work. I refrained though because I wasn't really sure what I'd do with it ... It'd probably sit on my shelf for awhile and collect dust. It was really cool though!

The other cool person we saw was a violinist who was playing some cool classical music ... the music attracted me over and her sign said that she had just graduated from Juilliard and had been offered a job as a concertmaster somewhere, but that she was raising money for a car for commuting. I don't know if her story was true ... but I was far more inclined to believe her than a guy we met in the Chinese park earlier that day with a story of how he got robbed and needed money to stay at a hostel. Huh. Yeah the girl's story was far more believable since she obviously had some talent. :P

Anyways, we wandered around for awhile more before deciding to have an early dinner at Bridges which is a restaurant right beside the water on the island. The food was pretty good, though pricier than the meals we'd had earlier in the week. That being said, I've been kind of shocked at how cheap the meals have been here, so one more expensive meal certainly wasn't going to break the bank.

After dinner Diane and I caught a bus back to our fancy B&B room. It's got a private entrance to a bathroom (shared with one other room), and a fridge, and it is rather big and comfy. I'm quite happy with our upgraded room for the last night of our stay!

Anyways, that's where we're at. We're gonna have to get up a little early to catch some transportation to the airport in the morning (and make sure that we've got enough time to eat some wonderful breakfast!), so I think I should head off now! This time tomorrow, I'll be back in E-town wishing I could still eat fresh seafood. *sigh*.

Heraldk

More Vacation Blogging

I got to the end of Saturday's activities, so I'll start off where I left off. On Sunday, our plan was to wander over the UBC campus to take a look around and see what was to be seen over there. It's interesting wandering about a campus and seeing what's similar and what's different from one's "home campus". One thing was for sure -- the bus route that took us down to UBC was pretty awesomely fast. After we got there, we wandered around the campus and invaded their version of SUB which looked older and not quite as nice as ours. It isn't really a fair comparison though -- our SUB was renovated not all that long ago. After some wandering, we decided to try and find the coast to go walk to. After all, one of the big UBC campus perks was that it was on the ocean. Well, on our way, we got sidetracked by some totem polls and the rather pretty looking museum of anthropology they have there. So we went in taking advantage of the super awesome $7 student entry fee. We even got a guided tour which was awesome. I learned a whole bunch of interesting things about the coastal native peoples that I wouldn't have even thought of before. One of the super neat things was an example of how powerful technology can be at uncovering things. They had an example of a beam from a house that was painted using mineral based red, black and white paint but had unfortunately faded away to be not visible anymore. Thanks to the wonders of infrared imaging, however, they were able to recreate the beautiful painting that was on the beam. Sweet, and awesome. So yeah -- that museum? Best $7 bucks (student price) I've spent on a museum!

After exploring the museum, Diane and I stopped by the gift shop where I found a rather nice collection of prints of fairly recent artistic work by native artists. I was so satisfied with the museum visit that I took a serious look at the prints and ended up choosing one. (with Diane's help). You'll have to come see it once we've got it framed and up on the wall (assuming it makes the trip home safely). It wasn't extremely expensive, but it wasn't a trivial amount of money either -- it is a limited edition print after all.

After leaving the museum, it was time to find the coast to say that we'd done it. Not far down the path we found the long set of stairs down to the beach. There were 390 steps, I ... didn't count, there was a number on the top step. The beach was rather nice and I got a few really good photos of Diane, and she got a few of me. It was a little weird though since there were a few people who were out walking around in the nude. They didn't seem to mind, though I made sure to keep my camera pointed away from them.

After a few minutes on the beach and some running around taking photos, Diane and I trundled back up the stairs which took a whole lot longer than descending them. We returned to the bus stop to catch a bus back towards our B&B, but first we had to stop off at a restaurant on Shayna's friend's recommendation list: the Memphis Blues BBQ house. Boy was this place awesome. If you're in the mood for a plate full of meat, you should check this place out. Diane and I ordered the Memphis platter, which apparently is their special. They fill a huge platter full of various kinds of meat including pork, chicken, and beef. They add some token other things like some french fries, coleslaw, and potato salad, but that's the minority item on the platter. So, not only is it a large plate of meat, but the meat is also cooked to perfection. The beef was so tender it could be cut with a fork and melted in your mouth. The meat on the ribs fell off the bone ... you get the idea. Everything was tasty, good and I was very glad we went. By the way, the platter we had could easily have fed 3 people. We took a doggy bag home with the leftovers!

After dinner we decided that it was a good idea to walk off some of our food, so we walked down to granville island from the restaurant. When we got there, we discovered that everything was all closed up. Apparently the place closes down at 7:00. Whoops. Guess we'll have to go back. We sat down to rest on a bench that overlooked the water. It was a beautiful day, with a few people walking around and the water fairly calm. I got a lot of photos, and spent awhile just relaxing and enjoying Diane's company.

When we got bored, we hiked back up and caught a bus back to the B&B with the intention of going to bed early. Unfortunately that didn't really happen after I got my photos uploaded to my laptop and the blog post written. Oh wells.

This morning we got up early enough to take advantage of breakfast. After all, when staying at a B&B, ya gotta have breakfast! It was really yummy -- they make some really good food here. We're staying in the manor guest house (http://www.manorguesthouse.com). It's really nice, and the people are super friendly. Definitely check them out if you're staying in Vancouver someday.

After breakfast, we got packed up and headed back to Stanley Park to take in the aquarium. This place is awesome. There's so much cool stuff to see! The highlights for me were: The otters, the dolphins, the multitude of colourful tropical fish, the butterflies and the bright pinkish red birds, and the jellyfish. Oh man were the jellyfish incredibly beautiful to look at. I've got a large number of photos -- hopefully some turned out well.

After awhile though, Diane and I got tired of the throng of people that were there (and we almost entered on a Saturday! Boy am I glad we decided against that!). So we left and went to check out the caricature artists that were all around the aquarium. Diane was interested in getting one done of us so we checked out the different artist's work. We discovered a chinese guy that was doing an amazing job of 6 people -- fitting them all on one sheet of paper. After admiring how well he was doing with these people, we waited patiently for him to finish them so we could be next. It took awhile, but finally we got done and I think both of us are incredibly happy with the result. It cost us $45, which considering how good the result was, I was more than happy to pay. After all, he just did a personal portrait of both of us and the likeness was pretty close. I was rather impressed. I think his name was Liam.

Anyways, after the caricatures were done, Diane and I hopped on a bus on our way to dinner. We took awhile to figure out what we wanted to eat, but ended up at a place called tsunami sushi -- which is an awesome restaurant. The main attraction is a bar where little boats carry little plates of sushi around. If you see something you want, you grab the little plate, and the style of the plate tells you how much it costs. When you're all done, they count up your plates and tell you how much you owe. It's an awesome system, and it is incredibly fun just watching the plates of sushi float down on the little boats. We loved it, and I would totally go back there to try it again!

After dinner we took a ride on the skytrain to come back. One of the odd things about this train is that it appears to not have a driver. Does anyone know if they're controlled in some way by a driver? Or are they remotely controlled? Or are they automatic? Whatever the case, it was pretty neat. Now I can say that I took the skytrain, the seabus, and the regular bus in Vancouver. Woohoo! Transit hat trick!

So now we're settling in to go to bed and I'm not done my blog post. So I'm gonna go read a little harry potter and get some sleep before we head out again for our last full day in Vancouver. Wow, time flies when you fill the days up with fun things to do!

Heraldk

Holidays!

Thursday was the last day of the conference. I went to a couple talks, but other than that sat around and caught up on updating the man-machine web page. If you see anything that's missing on the page, let me know because I really should fix it up. I'm on holidays right now, but will be able to get to it later this week after I return. Anyways. On Thursday night, Diane's plane arrived in Vancouver. She took the airporter to join Darse, Alexandra and I at the Hyatt where we walked her bags back to the condo. Then we wandered back to the Hyatt to play some games with Johnny, Jeff, Andrew, and Alborz. It was pretty fun. Of course, that meant that Diane and I didn't return to the condo until 2:00am, where we promptly went to bed.

When we got up that morning, slightly groggy from the lack of sleep, we enjoyed some rather yummy coleslaw that Alexandra made -- it had feta cheese in it! I need to remember to do that the next time I make coleslaw. This was the first day of our holiday and we had decided to spend it with Darse and Alexandra on their last day in Vancouver before they headed off to Victoria. So when we were all ready to go, we walked down to the seabus and took it across to north Vancouver towards the Capilano suspension bridge. The seabus is rather cool -- I'm glad I got a chance to ride it. It's pretty speedy, and certainly a distinctive way to travel (coming from a boy growing up in land-locked Alberta).

The suspension bridge is kind of cool, but I'm not sure it's worth the price of admission. Diane and I got in as students though, so that reduced the hit of the admission. At the ticket booth, we found out that our credit card suddenly didn't work anymore. Odd ... so worried, I called the credit card company on my cell phone and found out that when the credit card charge Diane made on her card when she caught the shuttle bus in Edmonton, the credit card company thought it was suspicious. Never mind that we had two separate cards and one was used to take a shuttle to the airport ... and it was used again in Vancouver for the airporter. Hmm... I think they need to work on their security check. I'm all happy for good security on my credit card, but please make sure that the activity on the card is actually suspicious!

Anyways, we wandered around the suspension bridge park for awhile. It was rather nice, though there were a few too many people around for my liking. Still, it was nice to see some rather tall trees, and the bridge itself was an experience. It'd probably be better to just take one of the many hikes throughout the rockies though.

Afterwards, we went back to the seabus terminal, but stopped off at the market to buy some yummy fresh fruit before we headed back to the condo. Diane and I picked up some nectarines, raspberries, cherries and grapefruit. Mmmm ... fresh fruit. Alexandra added some blackberries and fresh figs to that (I'd never had fresh figs before -- they were pretty interesting). After our shopping, we returned to the condo via seabus and a brisk walk. Then we walked to Bin 941 which I wanted to return to and try some of the other stuff on their menu ... plus it was good to use the excuse that I needed to introduce Darse and Alexandra to it! We ordered several items, all of which tasted wonderful. I highly recommend checking out this restaurant if you're in Vancouver -- it's pretty fantastic.

Anyways, we wandered back to the condo and this time I got a little more sleep. First night in several that I'd get some sleep. The next morning, the group of of us packed up and headed out. We said our goodbyes to Darse and Alexandra as they headed off to take the ferry to Victoria. For our part, Diane and I needed to get to our B&B. Our attempt to take a bus failed ... we waited at a bus stop and the bus came -- but passed our stop! The bus driver waved at us, but we misunderstood and started walking down the street to chase after us. A moment later, a second bus that was completely empty followed along after it! We missed that one since we weren't at a stop, and it didn't really occur to me to wave it down. So instead, Diane and I walked to the B&B. It was a pretty long walk, but I'm kind of glad we did. It's nice to walk around in a foreign city ... it helps get you oriented, and lets you see some of the stuff you might not ordinarily see. Still, I'm not too sure my feet agree with that assessment.

After plopping our stuff in our fancy B&B room, we set out for a trip to Stanley Park and the aquarium. Of course, I forgot it was Saturday and when we arrived, the aquarium lineup was probably 50 people deep. Whoops. We quickly reverted our decision to visit the aquarium, vowing instead to come back on Monday when there would presumably be a few less people there. Instead, we spent the afternoon wandering around Stanley Park taking photos and admiring the flowers and wildlife. In one amusing encounter, we stopped to look at some paintings in the painters circle where the lady there was clearly crazy. She was quite willing to explain all the names of her child-like paintings and after each name she would giggle in a high pitched voice. I was a little creeped out, but wasn't really sure what to say. Diane and I got ourselves away halfway through the paintings she was naming. Whew!

Stanley Park is beautiful. Lots of wonderfully magnificent trees, and many photo opportunities. I filled up one 2GB flash card, and started on a second one (that I had picked up at best buy on the way to the B&B).

Around 5:00, hunger started to set in so we consulted a list of restaurant recommendations Shayna was kind enough to forward to us, and found a nearby restaurant called Musashi (Japanese sushi restaurant). The food there was fantastic. Diane and I ate some lovely salmon rolls along with some tempura and even tried some scallop rolls, octopus, and sweet shrimp sushi. All of it was extremely good and we left there with full stomachs and only down $25 for the two of us, including tax and tip. Wow, I'm still surprised at how cheap that was!

After dinner we wandered down the the beach where we staked out an area to sit and wait for the fireworks. It took three hours, but by then we really needed to sit down and relax. So sitting down to wait for the fireworks suited us just fine. When we got there, the beach was already crawling with people and it was tough to find a spot, but we did. 3 hours of watching people and taking photos of the various things was pretty fun, but I kind of wished I had brought my book. Oh wells.

The fireworks were awesome. They were all done to a variety of jazz tunes, which was pretty cool. I liked seeing the fireworks drumrolls, for instance. Fun times! Unfortunately, I had forgotten my tripod at the B&B, which meant that I was doing handheld shots. It didn't work very well, but still surprisingly well. Being that close to the fireworks certainly helped since you didn't need to hold the shutter open too long.

After the fireworks, Diane and I walked back to the bus stop we had waited at earlier that morning. This time we caught the bus and jumped on it to get close to the B&B. We walked the rest of the way and fell into bed rather satisfied with a rather full day.

I'll have to cover today's activities later. I'm pretty tired and need to collapse and get some sleep so I have some energy tomorrow! G'nite all!

Heraldk

Match Aftermath

So the match is over, and I had a mere four and a half hours of sleep. Ouch. Still, it was a lot of fun. I got up and got some coffee and breakfast at Tim Hortons before heading up to the poker round table. I think people's tempers were short which meant that there was a bit of unhappiness amongst some of the team members. I hope things sorted themselves out, but it wasn't too pretty for awhile. Anyways, it was cool to meet up with some people who've started to gather and research computers playing poker. It should be cool to see what these guys come up with as they come up to speed. After the round table, I hung around to see the general games playing man-machine match. From what I'd heard, the generic game playing competition was poorly run this year, and it even ran with some controversy. The games that were selected for the playoffs were all very similar and were from a class of games that the best preliminary round player had trouble with. Ugh. Plus, the man-machine match they had was a little pathetic. The played a game that if the humans figured out how the rules work, it was trivial for them to win. So ... that's not a good thing to have in a "fair" match. Oh well. My friend Yngvi won the title, but that was partly due to an error by the other program. Yngvi himself knows the system for the games competition needs fixing, so hopefully changes are made soon.

After witnessing that, I worked on the man-machine web site for awhile as I spent my first session in a real AAAI talk. Heh - too much stuff for me to do. The man-machine web site needs a ton of work, but I'm gonna have to get to that slowly over the next few days. Lots of press articles to link to!

In the afternoon I got the video done that you see in the post before this. I felt that it needed to get done and uploaded since people needed to see what Ali and Phil said about the bots and the outcome of the match.

After that I hung around for awhile and ended up going to the poster session. That was really cool - there was a bunch of food, and I got to talk to a few people including Brett from the University of Minnesota who started working on poker. We talked for a long time about DIVAT and variance and vexbot, and ... how to calculate celcius from fahrenheit. Fun times.

After the poster session, we had found out that there was going to be a huge fireworks display in town. Apparently they do a fireworks contest and so Spain's turn was today and Canada's turn is Saturday. So we bustled down to river front and I borrowed Neil's tripod and I got a ton of photos. I hope some of them turned out! It was hard since people kept moving into my photo :P

So now I'm just waiting for my photos to finish copying and then I'm gonna crash for the night. G'nite all!

Heraldk

Entirely Too Hot

Ugh. Well, Edmonton is sizzlingly hot. Yup, we're in the middle of a crazy hot spell. The forecast for the entire week doesn't dip below 30 degrees. As I type this at ten minutes to ten o'clock, it is *still* 30 degrees outside. Thank goodness I've got an air conditioner in my condo. It's making it relatively livable in my place. In other news, if you haven't already, you should totally check out the Shakespeare in the park show "Two Gentlemen of Verona". It's amazing! This is the first time the Shakespeare in the park people have put together a musical version of one of Shakespeare's plays. It is hilarious, and entertaining, and the actors are incredibly talented. So if you're in the city, you should go check it out. I'm tempted to go again before I leave for Vancouver, it was that good.

Stay cool! Heraldk

A Busy Canada Day Long Weekend

Oh boy. I need to get some rest so I can work towards the upcoming man-machine match. It was a fun weekend though. On Friday, Diane and I attended a Games party at Rob's place. It was a lot of fun, as usual. We're particularly fond of parties at his place. His house is ideal for these things. There's tons of room to spread out and play games, and there isn't any pressure to get up and leave quickly since Rob doesn't have kids running around that need to be put to bed. Thanks again for a great party Rob!

On Saturday I felt super lazy and didn't even get out for Soccer (though Diane did for a little bit). Instead, I lazed around home for awhile and attempted to get a little bit of work done (which I actually managed to do!).

On Sunday, I again lazed around the house for awhile. I finished off Super Paper Mario on the Wii finally. It's a pretty fun game, but I somehow got distracted away from it so I hadn't had a chance to polish it off yet. The next game I get will probably be Mario Strikers Charged. Looks like a lot of fun, and the Penny Arcade guys really seemed to like the demo they played.

Anyways, after finishing that off, I went to go meet up with Diane. We walked down to the Legislature grounds to do a quick tour of the activity going on down there and then circled back to join the party at Nolan's place. There was food, beer and good times had by all. Later on, we trotted down to the river valley to catch the fireworks, and I got a few decent shots of the fireworks! Stay tuned to my flickr stream for some of them!

Yesterday, my Mom took us to the Devonian Botanic Garden to wander around in. It's a rather pretty place to go walking around in. I took a ton of pictures, so you'll probably see a lot of those photos turn up in my flickr stream over the next few weeks as well!

I'm exhausted from the weekend, but now I've got to get some work done. So ... time to get at it! I think I'm gonna pick up some coffee on my way in this morning.

Heraldk

Update

Boy, I've been slacking with this blog. It always seems that there's something more important to do. So I don't end up posting more than the odd bit of news. So what have I been up to? Well aside from working on the technology behind our bot in the upcoming man-machine poker match, I've been trying to spend some time with Diane planning out our wedding next June, and planning stuff to do in Vancouver after AAAI is over. If anyone has any suggestions for what we should do in Vancouver, we'd appreciate it. We've got about 6 days or so after AAAI is over to spend doing various touristy things. There has also been a fair amount of social activity over the past several days. Curtis' free beer was Monday night -- it was good times! My dad's work golf tournament was on Saturday so I went with him to that. Company golf tournaments are a lot of fun. You get a golf cart to go wheeling around in and afterwards you get steak dinner (erm... lunch). After 18 holes though, I was pretty beat. Nonetheless, I ventured over to Curtis' place where we played some board games.

Last Sunday was Father's day, so I took the fam out for dinner. My dad chose a new Chinese restaurant that opened up that weekend. The name of the place was, no joke, Wok and Roll. Yup, I can hear your groans too. It sounds even funnier if you say it in a Chinese accent and turn Roll into Woll. Say it to yourself ... yup, pure gold.

So that's a little review of some of the stuff I've been up to. I'm really sorry I haven't been posting here quite so regularly -- hopefully I can do a whole lot better now. You can definitely look forward to my blog posts from Vancouver!

Heraldk

Back to XP

Well my experiment with windows vista was shortlived. After trying to fix some of the problems that kept coming up for me, I finally decided to switch back to XP until some of those problems were fixed. Among them was my ability to stream movies and music to my XBOX, which worked flawlessly in XP, but I never really got to work well in Vista. I kept having problems with permissions. The stopgap solution I had needed to be uninstalled and reinstalled every time the system rebooted ... and things just never were as stable as XP was for me. So I'm back to XP for the forseeable future. I keep thinking of buying a mac -- but that won't happen until Apple releases new towers. Then I'll have to evaluate whether it's time to buy one or not.

Heraldk

Crunch Time part one

Darse and I have been working super hard over the past few days trying to get an entry ready for the AAAI Computer Poker competition. I put in two 16 hour days the last couple days ... so I'm totally taking today off. It was kind of weird actually. I hadn't worked that much or that hard on something at the university since my first year of my masters when I spent many days like that working on Jonathan's heuristic search course. There was one late night while we were in Italy working on stuff - but apart from that, I haven't put in a huge number of late nights on projects. So in some ways it's good to know I can still put in a lot of productivity in a short period of time.

Heraldk

Insanity

This past week has been rather insane. Between the engagement and its associated activities plus getting ready for the AAAI poker competition at work, I'm tearing my hair out trying to keep myself organized and focused on one thing at a time so I can actually accomplish something.

Why am I blogging now? Well I'm waiting for a test to run so I've got a minute or two to tell you about the last few days. This past weekend was insanely busy. On Saturday Diane's Mom, Diane and I went on a tree tour around the university campus. The above photo is one of many I took that day. Several will probably hit my flickr stream over the next couple weeks. It was an interesting tour -- most interesting perhaps is that despite all the time on campus I've spent, I haven't really noticed some of the cool trees that are peacefully growing on campus!

Saturday evening was a surprise birthday for my supervisor, Jonathan Schaeffer. He turned 50 last weekend, so his wife organized a big surprise party which went off really well! So that was pretty fun.

On Sunday, Diane and I had both our families over for steak dinner to celebrate our engagement. Unfortunately, my place isn't all that well equipped to handle a large amount of people so we had people eating on TV trays. Oh wells, people seemed to enjoy our food and it looks like everybody is happy with our engagement which is nice.

Yesterday was my convocation, so I missed the poker meeting that day to spend a couple hours waiting for my chance to cross the stage and shake people's hands. After convocation we wandered campus taking a few photos (including the one above) and then my family took us out for dinner as a combined congratulations dinner for graduating and the engagement. It was a super big meal Chinese banquet style with both crab and lobster and lots of other good food. We even got some presents. I kinda like presents! My Uncle got us a couple bottles of wine.

So yes, it has been a pretty insane few days. I managed to get some work done late last night which helped me find a bug in my code this morning. Hopefully I can continue to be productive over the next few days!

Heraldk

Engaged

Well, it's happened. Diane and I are now engaged. I popped the question last night. It was Diane's birthday yesterday, so I was more than happy to take Diane out. It gave me a chance to be a little more secretive about plans for the evening. I took her for dinner at the Creperie - a place we've been to before, but only in a large group. We both said we needed to come back at some point, so I figured this was a good time to do so. Dinner was very nice. The Creperie even gave Diane a little candle in some whipped cream with a chocolate dipped strawberry next to it for her birthday. They also gave her a coupon for future use at the restaurant. We'll probably be back!

After dinner, I had it in my mind to go visit a Louise McKinney Park. We had stopped at this park a couple years ago after an event we attended, so it had some historical value to us. I kinda had in my mind the idea to pop the question there. But there was a large number of people around, and the mosquitoes made everything rather distracting, so we instead just wandered around and I took a few photographs (including the one above which I am very happy with!). It's quite a nice park actually - there's a Chinese theme setup there with a pagoda that's under construction, a bridge, and some of those Chinese lion statues. There's also a meandering path with plants lining both sides. When we were there last, there was a ton of flowers blooming, but it's still too early for them when we were there last night.

So after our walk through the park, we returned back to Diane's apartment. I knew there were some flowers awaiting her there from her family, so I wanted to make sure she got to see those. I then popped the question there, presenting her with the ring I had carefully chosen a little more than a week ago. More on the ring in a moment. She said yes! (not that it was a big surprise). We even put on some music after that and shared a waltz together (for those who don't know, we met in ballroom dance class -- waltz is kind of our thing).

The ring: I have an aversion to diamonds. In particular, an aversion to engagement diamonds. I find it rather disturbing that a company (De Beers) can manufacture a tradition that never really existed in the first place. There are a lot of other things I find disturbing about the diamond industry, and these facts all made me want to just avoid the whole diamond thing altogether. Luckily, Diane knew about this aversion and she seemed happy with an alternative gemstone. So when I went shopping, I went looking for an emerald. Diane's birthday is in May, and the emerald is the birthstone for that month. So I found it rather appropriate that I would propose to her on her birthday with her birthstone!

So that's my story. I must say that I am quite happy, and Diane is as well. We're looking at a June wedding - so the planning should probably start soon!

Heraldk

Vista + New Video Card

Ugh, I've been so busy these past few days that I haven't had the energy to post in awhile. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on right now with the poker group at the UofA ... and it's making me go slightly crazy. Still, it's exciting. Late last week, my video card (a 6600GT) died. I think it's because the fan that was on it was just a little bit too small and it was driving too many pixels on my two 24" LCD monitors. So I think it was just overworked. In any case, I needed a new video card. I ended up at memory express two days later and bought a shiny new 8800 GTS. It is certainly a fancy video card and looks far better built so I'm hoping it lasts a good long while.

In any case, I also picked up a new hard drive. When I got everything setup and installed I wondered whether I should install a clean version of windows again. I love having a clean install of an OS - it feels so much better than a clogged down version. Windows seems especially prone to this problem, so it was certainly a tempting proposition. I decided, though, to pick up a copy of Vista from the University. The UofA has this agreement with Microsoft called the MSDNAA (microsoft developer network academic alliance). With this agreement, any staff and students of the University of Alberta get to borrow discs of almost all of Microsoft's products to take home and install on their home computer. So I went in and signed out a copy of Vista Business edition. I figured - if I was going to reinstall an OS, I might as well give Vista a shot and see if it worked for me.

Let me first give out a tip for anyone considering a reformat. The easiest way to install a new OS on an existing system with little or no risk of losing existing data is to use a multiple hard drive setup. You can, in the bios, set a particular hard drive as the boot up disk. So my advice would be to purchase a new hard drive (or use an existing one you can wipe clean) and set that to the bootup disk. Install the OS on that disk, and then mount your other hard drive(s) so you can access your existing data. Not only does this let you not worry about overwriting your data, you also get the opportunity to access configuration files and other application data for switching over to your new system.

So ... I now have Vista running. What do I think? Well so far it sure beats the hell out of XP. It feels snappier, and definitely looks prettier. Vista definitely is an improvement over previous windows versions. There are still some weird ass-backwards ways of doing some things, but on the whole it isn't so bad. Of course, it's not a Mac OS ... and I'm still seriously considering buying a mac when Apple finally releases new revisions of the Mac Pros.

Heraldk

A Weekend of Fun

This was a pretty packed weekend. On Friday, a group of us went over to Mike's parent's place which Mike is house-sitting at. We played some games and pool and stayed out pretty late. On Saturday, my family got all dressed up to go do a portrait photo which my mom won at a fashion show she went to in St Albert. We were *going* to buy prints for us and my grandparents and our other relatives. However, we were shocked to see that the price was $80 for a single 5x7 print?!!!! That's highway robbery! Diane and I had thought we would try and get some photos with just the two of us, but the prices were simply not reasonable enough for us to try that. We'll have to find somewhere else to go for that. So we went and got our one free 5x7 print and we'll have to look at other options for portraits. *sigh*. On Sunday was Nolan's 1/4 century Birthday party. It was a pretty good party and I got a tad liquored up. We had fun! Today, Diane and I joined her family for an afternoon picnic at Emily Murphy Park near the university. Afterwards, Diane and I took a leisurely stroll down the river valley and across the bridge walking eventually to Corona station where we took the train back to my place to watch the season finale of Heroes.

*whew*. Busy weekend huh?

Heraldk

CPT Satellite

My friend Curtis and I played in a $105+$10 satellite tournament at the Yellowhead casino last night. The satellite was for a $1000+$50 tournament that will run on Saturday, also at the Yellowhead. The tournament started at 4:00, and it didn't take long for the action to go wild. 2 people were knocked out at my table on the very first hand of the tournament when KK and A2s lost to QQ when a queen + flush draw landed on the flop. A few hands later, I managed to double up when my turned nut flush beat the second nut flush. w00t! I managed to get myself into a little trouble after the dinner break. The guy to my left was rather clueless, but got really lucky so he built himself a huge stack. He was willing to call down in pots with 2nd pair ... and I had little respect for him being a good player. However, because he had position on me for most of the time I didn't really feel very good making raises and having him call me. When the table got broken up, I breathed a sigh of relief.

I got to my new table shortstacked... so I needed to make some moves quick. Luckily, I hit a decent selection of face-card quality hands and was able to steal some blinds (the blind structure was super fast, as I kind of expected). I lost one hand against a shortstack who pushed on me with TT when I had AT. Nevertheless, I managed to steal some more blinds with a few all-in bets and then doubled up with AJ over TT when I spiked an ace on the flop.

At this point, everyone was shortstacked, but people continued their tight play style so I was able to make more from blind steals than I paid myself. The 2nd table I was at broke up in a little while and I got moved to a 3rd table. At this point there was less than 40 people left with the top 19 places being seats in the Saturday tourney. I felt rather comfortable at this point - my stack was above average and I continued being able to add to my stack slowly, but surely.

I got moved again, this time to table 1. I think, after thinking about this a bit, that this table was rather an unfair table for a number of reasons. This table never got broken up. The only time people left was when they got knocked out. So chips never left that table. *shrug* - maybe it isn't incredibly unfair, but I'm wondering whether it makes a difference or not.

Anyways, I get to that table as a mid-sized stack. A couple of my pf-raises get called and I'm starting to hurt a little. Then I get these hands: In 2nd position, I pick up AKo. Raise and pick up the sizable blinds. UTG I pick up TT - raise and pick up the blinds again. Then, I'm in the big blind. Guy in 2nd position min-raises and everyone folds to me. I look down at AA (sweet set of 3 hands in a row huh?). I re-raise about half my stack. They guy pushes and I call. Turns out I've got him covered and my AA holds up over his AQo.

At this point, I'm golden. I held almost 90K in chips with the blinds just entering 4K/8K. There was about 23-24 people left in the tournament which meant that a few knockouts at the other tables (where there was a lot of shortstacks) gave me a seat. So I played ultra-conservatively from that point on (I don't think I actually played another hand) and waited out the last few knockouts. So I get to play in the upcoming tourney on Saturday! Woohoo!

My friend Curtis also placed so we'll both be playing for a pretty decently sized pot on Saturday. Hopefully we can repeat our performance from last night and place somewhere deep in the money!

Heraldk