Around 1998 and 1999 I made a big pile of amateur experimental electronic music. Typical to my INTP personality type, I was obsessed for a brief while as it consumed my free time as a primary hobby. Also typical to my personality, I dropped it like a hot potato at some point when some other hobby captured my attention. I have always been busy with creative hobbies or work, and while the subject changes, the energy I pour into things has never waned.
Recently I was farting around with GarageBand, which comes with any new Macintosh. It’s an amateur digital music studio. I tried importing some of my old midi projects to play with it. I found one project that I never did complete — it was dropped on the cusp of hobby transitions. I worked a lot on this track, but never got it to a state I was satisfied with. My original intention was to put the Robert Service poem The Cremation of Sam McGee to music. I liked the tune and tried laying down the vocal track many times. Some parts worked well, but I just couldn’t get it right (that poem has a lot of words to cram into a little song), and also I can’t sing worth shit so I scrapped it all. I remember struggling with this song a lot. I just never could figure out how to bring it together. If not vocals….maybe something else?
Well I spent about 30 minutes messing with it in GarageBand and then exported it sans vocals or any form of polished mix-down. I guess it’s better to have it released than just collecting binary dust on my hard drive.
Today we had our largest tournament yet on Poker Academy Onlin — 60 players. It was an 8-PAX buy-in, so it was the largest prize pool we’ve had yet, I think. The game ran fine without any hiccups, so I’m happy to see it pass that mild stress test. Next week, I imagine we’ll probably have a tournament with over 100 players.
I’ve finally put up a user-friendly info and download page for CRON-O-Meter. If I can claw myself away from PA Online, I just might post v0.1.9 sometime soon….
Today we finally upgraded our old 20″ TV with a 42″ Plasma. Muhahahaha. It is sick. I hooked up my laptop to it through s-video and we watched last night’s episode of Battlestar Galactica. It was ordeal to hook up though. The entertainment setup is inlaid right into the wall, so there’s no getting around behind it for wires. Instead there are a few shelf holes and a narrow PVC tube to thread wires through. Shopping around for the TV and accessories (and do they ever ass-rape you on the cables! Don’t get me started…) took about 4 hours, and then wiring it all up took another good 4 or 5 hours.
I’ll be going to Las Vegas in mid-march for a few days. This is so cool — a group of Poker Academy Online regulars took it upon themselves to organize a Las Vegas rendevous to met each other and play in a bunch of tournaments together. I’m the lucky representative that gets sent down to greet them. I’m tickled pink that it was a spontaneous grass-roots event, and not something we organized. Of course, I’d be thrilled if it is a success and next year we take on a larger role. I can’t wait to go, especially to meet these folks as I’ve played many a hand of poker with them over the last eight months or so.
Well, on Wednesday we finally released Poker Academy 2.5. With 2.5 we launched a new system for our online play. Previously, you could log into our server and have an infinite supply of play money to burn through. This lead to some people playing very stupidly, constantly pushing their chips into the pot regardless of their hand. With nothing to risk with play money, the game was just not realistic. Poker has to be played with chips that have value.
So in 2.5 we decided to make our chips valuable. We introduced a new in-game currency called PAX. Every new account starts with $0 PAX. The only way to get PAX is to earn them painstakingly in our round-the-clock PAX Freeroll tournaments. Each tournament can last over an hour and you have to beat out a feild of 20 or more people to take a share of a $50 PAX prize pool. It’s not unusual to play for an hour and end up in 7th place with a measly $1 PAX win. This has a few nice effects. For starters, we call these freerolls Boot Camps because thats what they are for new players. We’re making all of our users take a crash course in Multi-Table Tournament strategy. By they time a new user gets through ten of these bad-boys, they will be cured of their jammy ways.
Once a player has PAX they can go play at the ‘real’ tables. Because of the investment in time and traumatic memories of earning their PAX in boot camp, PAX have true value. It’s a little scary how well this has worked. People really like their PAX. Listening to our users talk about their PAX, you’d think it’s some kind of new street drug.
Before, if there were server troubles, I could just pull the plug in mid-game and no one would care. Now, if a player looses a single precious fraction of a PAX, they are hysterical. This makes things a little harder… Especially this launch week as with such an ambitious and rushed release, there are of course still some bugs shaking out of the system, especially with the heavy user load that we couldn’t experience during the beta phase. I’ve been basically working stright since release day keeping things running and making emergency patches to the server as we discover problems. Heavy duty fire-fighting. I’m getting a little exhausted. But I do think it’s worth the effort. I think we’ve created something in our online system that works amazingly well and our users.
We slept in until noon today, got up and watched some olympic downhill and then went for a long walk in the nearby suburbs. It was a gorgeous day, sunny but a very windy. It’s freaky how mild this winter has been, in that it is almost impossible to call it a winter. Barely a scrap of snow on the ground all year, and it was close to +10 degrees celcius today. I remeber Edmonton winters of my early childhood, or even back in the late 90’s being bitterly cold, and solidly so from December through February.
I was inspired by Willie’s scrumptious CR salad and meal photographs and so I attempted a salad for lunch that was fabulous. But it didn’t have the aesthetic appeal of Willie’s cullinary perfection, so I’ll spare you a photograph. I made on a large bed of baby greens and diced onion, blood orange, tomatoe, and avocado, with a light sprinkle of olive oil on top. It was damned tasty.
For dinner I forrayed into making a simple indian dahl dish (that’s lentils for those that don’t follow indian cuisine). It was good tasting, and quite good nutritionally, but I know there is a lot of room for improvement. Indian food is one of my favorites, and I didn’t even come close to the stuff I’ve had at restaurants, although part of that is probably that I used very little oil to kep the calories down.
Today I took my belt into the garage, got out some tools and made a new hole because even on the last hole, I could do a little wiggle and de-pants myself quite proficiently.
Saw a post on the CR Society mailing list recently about a cool little CR calculator. According to the calculator, I’m currently practicing 20% CR. This would be considered moderate CR. Severe CR is 40%, but thats only typically done with laboratory animals and the most hard-core fanatical CR’d humans. Methinks this little calculator needs to be added to the ‘o-meter 🙂
Worked from 9am to 10pm today…. straight! We’re really trying to finish Poker Academy 2.5, which is now over a month behind schedule. Our afternoon beta testing phase went smoothly. I was saying that if the Online Mutli-Table Tournament crashed one more time, I was going to be joining the pigeons out on my window ledge. Thankfully, it worked quite well today. Around 7pm I had a brief pause from coding to be interviewed for a radio station (out in Minnesota or something).
Calories were probably a little high. Close to 2000 by my estimate, but it’s hard to tell. I had a blueberry banana smoothy (270) for breakfast, Butter Chicken, Potatoes, Chic Peas, and Naan (900) for lunch, an Orange (60) in the afternoon, and a Subway sub for dinner (800). The sub I know was close to 800, but the curry meal for lunch I am only guessing. It depends how much unknown oil was in there, but I think 900 is a reasonable estimate.
This is awfully hard to write — lying in bed with the laptop and my cat has chosen to sit on my chest, making it hard to type. Time to stop and get some rest.
A few days more than a year since I started the CRON diet, I had my second blood test taken. I just picked up the results today. It was mildly annoying that I couldn’t just pick up a photo-copy of my report. They get sent to the doctor that ordered them, and they won’t let you see the results without actually seeing the doctor. Which means taking at least an hour out of today to go there and wait just to get permission to see my report. This is a downside to public healthcare…. But I digress.
Some highlights. Cholesterol of 2.82 mmol/L (9 months ago it was 2.93), which is apparently the lowest my doctor could recall seeing. Triglycerides were slightly lowered than 9 months ago. My HDL was slightly higher (1.07), and LDL slightly lower (1.42). Everything else looked very close to the previous test.
I had my homocysteine measured for the first time, which was at 9.9 umol/L. As far as we know, the ideal value for this is 0.0, but less than 12 umol/L is considered ‘healthy’. I also had a total blood protein test which my doctor suggested as he was concerned a low cal diet could be too low in protein. I knew it wouldn’t be a problem with my diet as I eat a lot of high protein foods and I’m not vegan.
The biggest dissapointment is the result listed under ‘Urine Colour/Turbidity’ : Unremarkable.
*Sniff*. I have unremarkable urine? That hurts, man. That really hurts.
Just sipping some tea this evening and playing poker online. I’m working off my deposit bonus at Absolute Poker, in order to get a free copy of Poker Tracker from PokerSourceOnline. The Absolute Poker software is Absolute shit. It’s gotta be the ugliest and worst user interface out of all the sites I’ve played. I cannot wait until I’ve worked the bonus, cuz I’m cashing out immediately after that. On the bright side I did make a Royal Flush tonight, and that means Absolute Poker will send me a t-shirt for the royal flush club, for all those who have made one on their site.
Besides that, it’s back to work tomorrow to push away at finishing up Poker Academy Pro 2.5, our next update to our flagship product. It’s looking really nice…just a few stability bugs and a thousand last minute details, and she’ll be ready to ship….
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In the spirit of testing the nutrition reporting (HTML export) feature of the CRON-o-Meter, here is today’s crunch.
For breakfast I had my breakfast smoothy (milk, banana, berries, cinnamon, flax oil). For lunch I had two mega muffins, an apple, a small rice pudding, and a large serving of plain vegetables (yams, parsnips, beets, and onions). For dinner I had three egg-whites in turkey blankets, some rice crackers with salsa, and a bowl of organic multi-grain cereal with soy milk. All those root veggies made it a fairly high carb day overall, but overall, a good low calorie day with most nutritional targets way beyond the RDA values. The only low points were Vitamin D, E and K. I take daily Vitamin D and E supplements, so that’s not a worry. Vitamin K I seem to be low on some days, but quite high on others. I also take a fish oil pill, which probably adds about 10 to 20 calories to the total. |
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Today we decided to try painting our livingroom (our first paint job attempt of the new house). I’m a painting newb, so it was an experience. It was easier than I expected. We first went to the store and got two different shades… one is a greyish blue, the other a greying green. We couldn’t decide so we painted some sections of the room both colors to test, and finally settled on the green. Then we went back and loaded up on more paint and gear. We’re about half done the room and it looks very nice (and very different!). Painting the room makes the house feel more ‘ours’. Kind of like the way I felt the time I took the first big dump in the house and had to find a plunger, only different.
Also, I posted CRON-o-Meter v0.1.8. This version fixes some bugs, improves the UI a little and adds HTML or ASCII reporting.
