Spaz.ca

Went and got my blood test this morning. I has to fast 12 hours before the test, so by the time I was done I was ready to gnaw my arm off I was so hungry. Luckily I brought along a mega muffin for a late breakfast. I should have the results later next week. Christine cooked a marvelous dinner tonight; Sole fillets with a steamed asparagus, a side of dahl, and an excellent red wine. 1790 Calories for the day. I hope to plow through some more CRONoMeter work tomorrow.

Today marks my 1 year CRONiversary (1 year calorically restricted). I must remember to schedule some bloodwork soon to see how thngs have changed. I’ll finally have two points … enough to plot a line! 1 year ago today I was 184 pounds. Today I am 147 pounds. My blood pressure was in 150/90, and today it is 118/72. I feel far better than I did a year ago, and and sleep better. It’s been fun and exciting learning new ways to cook and eat that are more considerate to one’s body. Here’s to year two. Cheers!

This last week set some new records for Poker Academy. We had a surge up the charts at Amazon.com, where Poker Academy was briefly the 78th best selling software product on Amazon. This was the first week we cracked the Top 100.

Also, on Friday evening I logged into Poker Academy Online and we had 85 people playing at once. That’s the highest I’ve seen so far. It just keeps getting busier, day after day. Pretty soon we’ll have to start worrying about scalability issues. Of course, that’s one of those ‘problems I’d like to have’, since it only means you’re coping with overwhelming success :-).

I’ve been playing a lot of online SnGs. What the hell is that, you may ask? An SnG stands for Sit & Go, which is a type of short, 10-player poker tournament (in this case, Texas Hold’em), typically played in online poker rooms. There is a buy-in fee and a house-fee. Each player’s buy-in goes into a prize-pool, and the poker room collects an additional house fee (usually 10% of the buy-in) for providing the service. The players then all get a fixed amount of chips and then play until one player has them all. The typical prizes are 20% of the prize-pool for finishing in 3rd place, 30% for finishing in 2nd place, and 50% for finishing in 1st. To ensure the tournament is quick, and to force an ending if the players are evenly matched, the blinds (like antes) go up every 10 hands.

I practiced extensively on Poker Academy Pro‘s free online server. There, we host play-money tournaments where the ‘pretend’ buy-in is $5, and the house fee is of course $0. I logged 77 tournaments there so far, and have accumulated a bankroll of $243. That works out to an average profit of $3.15 per tournament. In business terms that is a 63% return on investment (ROI). That currently ranks me at 6th place out of 257 ranked players in the PA Online. This of course gave me some experience in the game and some added confidence in my abilities. But would results like this carry to real poker? It’s hard to trust results from play-money where nothing but pride is at stake. And in real games you have to pay the house-fee as well, which puts a significant dent in your ROI.

So I’ve been playing on Party Poker (the world’s largest online poker room) lately to put my strategy to the test. I deposited $100 into the account and have stuck exclusively to playing $10+$1 tournaments. That’s $10 to the prize pool and $1 to the house. A single tournament typically lasts 45 minutes. I usually play four at a time — a single SnG doesn’t keep my ADHD reigned in. While four simultaneous tournaments is intense, it doesn’t seem to matter much. I’ve now logged 62 tournaments in total. I’ve earned a net profit of $168, which works out to $2.71 per tournament. This is a return on investment of 25%. Since I can play about 5 tournaments per hour, this would equate to a wage of $13.50/hour. It’s not exactly time to quit my day job 🙂

My general strategy has been to play very boring poker for the first while. By boring I mean uncreative and tight. I play a very risk-averse style. I play only premium hands, but will limp with anything if I can see the flop without getting raised. The general idea is to not take any risks, but if I can manage to flop a monster hand, I should use the opportunity to build up my stack. The main idea, otherwise is to just wait and survive. This stage is relatively easy, especially since I’m playing four tables at once, there’s not much time to think hard about things.

When the really bad players start to drop out and it gets down to five or six players I start to pay a little more attention. By now, the blinds are starting to get larger as well and it is no longer cheap to see a flop, nor is it bad to steal the blinds outright. I start to pay a little more attention to the styles of the remaining players. If any of these players have been paying attention to me, they will have observed me playing very conservatively up to this point and may be taken by surprise when I start to get much more aggressive. Still, the overriding goal is to make the money. this means surviving to at least 3rd place. The prize for finishing third is $20, so just making it there is a $9 profit.

The really critical part comes when it gets down to just four players. This is called being on the bubble. No one wants to be the guy that finishes just out of the money. Most players get very risk averse and conservative at this stage. One of my biggest advantages, besides knowing how to survive to the bubble, is that a huge number of players play very badly on the bubble. It amazes me how many times I’ve been the smallest stack on the bubble and the following occurs. The blinds get pushed around and steadily erode my stack. All the other three players have to do is wait a few hands for the blinds to force me all-in and out of the game. But invariably, two geniuses get in a battle and one of the bigger stacks ends up busting out. I sneak by into third place with a small chance of getting lucky and making second or first.

Other players are the exact opposite — way too timid on the bubble. They are so scared of bubbling out you can constantly steal their blinds without a fight. Since the blinds are significant at this point you can build up a decent stack lead just by stealing the blinds. Since they are playing so tight, as soon as you feel any pressure back from them you know the have a strong hand and you can get out cheap. Even if you loose a little this way, you’ve won so much from all the steals it doesn’t make a dent. It’s all about being aggressive, but picking your spots.

In any event, I’ve found the SnG format to be the softest real-money game on the internet. Furthermore, it also has the lowest variance, by playing a high volume of low buy-in tournaments. Next I’m going to move up to higher stakes ($20 + $2). If I can sustain the same winning rate, I’ll effectively double my wage. However, as the stakes increase, the quality of the opposition tends to increase as well. Thus, my ROI may not be as high at the next level. I guess we’ll find out.

I discovered I was using RDI’s for my default CRON-o-Meter targets, not RDA’s has I had expected. The RDI’s are Reference Daily Intakes — standardized amounts of nutrients so when you see 32% DV for Vitamin C on some packaging, it means it contains 32% of the reference daily intake for vitamin C. These are static values.

The RDA’s (Recommended Daily Allowance) are lower and refer to minimum amounts needed to maintain rudimentary health in the average population. RDAs are variable depending on age, gender, and lactation, and are generally much lower than the RDIs. This means that certain things I thought I was routinely low in, like Vitamin B12, and Vitamin D, it turns out it’s not nearly as bad as I thought if I use the RDA values. For other things like Zinc, the difference in RDI vs RDA is not as large. I spent a few hours yesterday painstakingly encoding the RDA and UL (Tolerable Upper Limits, for toxicity), and I’m still nowhere near done (there are too many damned nutrients). I do feel awesome now that I know, for the most part, I’ve been nutritionally knocking the socks off of most of the RDAs from diet alone.

Christine invented a great appetizer / protein supplement today. You put an egg-white in a coffee mug and mix in some seasoning (I like crushed chili peppers, black pepper and dill or parsley) and microwave it until it’s cooked (1 to 2 minutes). Dump it on a slice of deli turkey, and let it cool. You can garnish it with a little grated cheese or salsa. Then wrap the turkey around the fluffy egg-white souffl?, and devour. It’s a great way to boost your protein if you’re low for the day. Since it’s so high in protein, it curbs the appetite as well, and without cheese, it’s only about 50 calories.

Some may have noticed a few weeks ago, I added a google-ad bar to the right side of by blog, and other select subpages of my web site. It’s a bit of an experiment. I saw google ads popping up on so many small sites, and I am constantly amazed at the volume of random traffic my website attracts, I was curious how they would do. If enough people click those ads from time-to-time, it can basically pay my web-hosting costs. I do feel like a whore tho.

About an hour ago the power in our neighborhood went out … looks like just on our block as the next block over there are lights on. Amazingly, my laptop is picking up a faint open wireless signal, probably from a few blocks thither hence I have nothing better to do than post now. My battery is at about 92% so I should have a few hours.

We really stumbled around in the dark here. It was pitch black. Thankfully I have my awesome little keychain LED light in my pocket. We found some tealights in the basement, and then we found our two tealight lanterns. And with those, we managed to dig around in my hiking gear, also in the basement, and finally found our hiking head-mounted LED flashlights (these are awesome gadgets). I know that I’m gonna have to put all this crap in an easy to find location for next time.

If this goes on much longer, I’m gonna chill with a Vonnegut book my brother gave me for Xmas (Player Piano).

Here’s a screenshot of the latest. I wrote a hot little wrapper class that wraps a UI panel into a nice looking program dialog with OK & Cancel buttons, title, subtitle, description, and program icon. I jazzed up all the little dialogs into the new setup and it looks nice. I used the same thing for reporting unexpected exeptions to the user. Hotness.

In this shot you can see one such dialog in the foreground, a tooltip hovering over the selected food in the background, the new blue target % bars in the nutrient panel, and also the relevance bars at the top of the search results.

So, it’s Saturday and I’m writing a blog entry. The observan reader already knows what’s coming next. This blog practically writes itself. Yes, today there were muffins in my oven. And veggies in my crock pot (parsnips, onion, broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots, if you were wondering). I’ve made the muffins so many times, it took me no time at all. I tend to have lots of the vast number of dry ingredients stored in tupperware — an entire shelf devoted to my muffinery. I made them for the first time in my brand new humungous stainless steel mixing bowl that I bought just for muffinating in. I also had a big new wire wisk that also eased my pain. Really the hardest part now, is cleaning the bloody muffin pans.

And of course I spat out another build for the CRON-o-Meter. Version 0.1.5 adds some extra prettiness, simpler target editing and more user-friendly error reporting if something goes wrong. It also indents nutrients that are sub-nutrients of some higher level nutrient category (for example the tocopherols are sub-classes of Vitamin E). You can now just double-click a nutrient to edit the target daily min and max values.

I’ve added a permanent download link to the latest version of the program to the sidebar on the right. Scroll down until you see the big red apple — you can’t miss it!

1755 calories today.