Spaz.ca

It’s been an interesting week on the Poker Academy front. Yesterday there was an article about the UofA Poker Research group on the front page of the Edmonton Journal. We’re also expecting a write-up about the group and Poker Academy in this week’s Maclean’s Magazine.

Then, this morning we saw the new flash-based site for Expekt Poker Academy, which is a re-branded version of Poker Academy marketed for retail in Scandinavian countries. The coolest part is their tv ad [quicktime] which totally surprised me — it looks like it had a pretty stellar budget. Kick-ass!

Yup. Muffins = Blog Post. The two are so highly correlated now that the simple act of baking muffins triggers my natural blogging reflex. I had a fairly productive day. I blasted through a fair bit of coding at work, and then at home made dinner, muffins, installed a fire alarm, and a bunch of other housey things.

Today was a huge day for my charity of choice, the MPrize. An anonymous donor added a sweet $1,000,000 to the prize pool. That should help get the bunsen burner going under some reasearcher’s bottoms. It’s atrocious that so little scientific study has been done on trying to figure out why the human body steadily falls apart as we age past young adulthood. Not only is it a degenerative disease that every single human suffers, but it is the root cause of a majority of other age-related diseases that kill 100,000 people per day. Modern medicine has poured huge effort into patching these diseases, instead of working at understanding and fixing the underlying cause of the diseases. From a purely mathematical perspective, it’s a far better benefit per dollar spent on researching the aging process, then on researching specific byproducts of aging like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, alzheimers, and so on… Hoorah! Hopefully this is only the first of many donations from people from the planet of hefty wallets.

I must now humbly end this post so that I may dive back into Call of Duty 2, which my poor computer can barely handle. I just swapped in a newer graphics cards, but the game still crawls when there is a lot of smoke or dust on the screen. I suspect this is all calculated by the CPU, which could use an upgrade.

We’ve nearly finished the move (ok, in some ways NOT EVEN CLOSE) but all of our stuff is moved to the house, and we need to finish cleaning the apartment this weekend. It will be weeks to finish unpacking, I’m sure. I took some photos of the house, but I have no clue where my USB cable got packed so I can’t get the pictures off for the time being. I can share with you the real estate photo of the front of the house as I have that on my ‘pewter:

It’s great to get out of the apartment and have so much more space for the junk I’m too packrattish to throw away. Anyhoo, back to unpacking and scrubbing and the like…

No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. I am sitting amongst a pile of boxes and one hell of a mess. We’re in the lengthy process of packing up the apartment in preparation for next week’s move into the house we’re purchasing in North Edmonton. This means slowly scraping through the sedimentary layers of life-detritus that has accumulated over the years of living in this apartment.

I’ll leave you for now with my lower calorie & higher nutrition take on a favorite italian dish of mine. It simply substitutes the classic riggatoni for vegetables. It tastes great and I actually prefer the base of veggies to the traditional bland pasta. I bring you Aaron’s Veggie con Salsiccia:

In non-stick pan saute diced garlic and onions in a tiny bit of canola oil. Add chopped broccoli, cauliflower, and zuchinni. Add one can of stewed tomatoes, and sliced italian sausage to pan. Spice with crushed chili peppers, basil, oregano, and parsely. Simmer on medium for at least 20 minutes, stirring often. Serve with parmesan or cheddar sprinkled on top. For calorie concious, substitute italian sausage for turkey or tofu sausage.

It seems the days I have spare time to blog are also the same days I make muffins. Today is no exception.

As usual, during my excursion to round up mega muffin ingredients, I was sucked by nerd-gravity into the awesome book store next to the Organic Market. I was then forced to buy yet another book, Ray Kurzweil’sThe Singularity is Near.

Last night Christine and I went to see Audioslave at the collesium. What a freaking kick-ass show! For the uninitiated, Audioslave is a relatively new band comprised of the musicians from Rage Against the Machine and fronted by Soundgarden‘s Chris Cornell. I don’t like Audioslave’s mix nearly as much as the two original bands, but they are still darned good. Rage & Soundgarden helped get me through my high-scool years. What abso-fluting-lutely rocked about the concert was that they covered old songs from both original bands. So even though I never got to see those bands live before they broke apart, it was the next best thing. On the Soundgarden side, they did Rusty Cage, Spoonman, and Cornell did a solo-acoustical of Black-Hole Sun. On the Rage side, we had Bulls on the Parade, Sleep now in the Fire, Testify, and in the encore, Killing in the Name. OMFG, wonderful. We had a shitty extreme stage-left angle but we were nice and close. Tom Morello (guitar) had a blue jumpsuit on and put it to good use by jumping a lot. Very fun to watch.

We were at the collesium a few weeks ago, to see System of a Down. It was a great show too, but we had nose-bleeder seats so mostly I had to imagine it was a great show.

I ate pretty light today, but haven’t felt hungry. I’m planning to have a little wine tonight during Family Guy and American Dad anyhow. Not that that shit needs booze to be funnier.

Peace.

We just wrapped up Poker Academy 2.0 Standard development this friday. We have two versions, the Pro and Standard. The standard is stripped down and not as powerful or feature complete. But it’s also a whole lot cheaper. You can even find it in Walmart now! We’re hoping PA 2.0 will be a big hit for Christmas. We were under a tight deadline to get it done because the big retail distributors are putting in their orders for Christmas now. If we were a few weeks later, the whole darned ship could have set sail without us. Phew!

I’ve been pumping so much energy into PA, that I’ve been too mentally exhausted to work on my poor neglected CRONOMETER. My apologies to those of you waiting for a working version. It works well enough for me to use to track my daily intake, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be too user friendly yet to someone who doesn’t know which buttons are going to work and so on.

Ate very good so far today. Cheerios & a MegaMuffin for breakfast, and a giant salad and smoothy for lunch. I’m going to a GAMES Group party tonight, where I’ll have to avoid the temptation to snack on all the party food.

Oh and, we’re probably going to be hiring another developer for Poker Academy development soon. If you know any talented programmers in Edmonton area looking for a new job, send them my way. In particular for this position, we’re hoping to find someone with extensive experience in PC game development (VC++, GUI/Graphics, etc…). Noobz need not apply.

Currently Listening to: Psyche-Out by Meat Beat Manifesto

I apologize in advance to my readers that are not into CR. This is really only interesting for the other CR bloggers, and perhaps my parents who are either interested in everything I do, or have feigned interest extremely well all my life.

Today was a very light day. I actually just punched all my food in (it’s after midnight), and was only at ~1200 calories for the whole day. So I just grabbed a cup of cottage cheese to round out the day. I think I wasn’t very hungry today because I ate so well. For breakfast I had a huge high-protein egg-white & vegetable scramble, and all that protein must have kept me sated for the day.

For lunch I felt like one of my breakfast smoothies, but was out of most ingredients. I wandered over to the health food store about three blocks from my apartment. I grabbed the bananas and frozen fruit for my smoothies, and while browsing I found a can of AOR’s Essential Mix. It was nice to get my hands on some finally. A scoop of that now goes in the smoothy for my daily shot of extra nutrients.

I was using some other supplements, but I tend to use them sparingly and warily as I’m generally very skeptical of the quality and efficacy of dietary supplements. But I know the guy who designed Essential mix, and lets just say I’m not nearly as frightened to take MR’s magical concoction.

For dinner I had a monster salad, and then I strapped on the apron and whipped up a batch of mega muffins.

So besides food, I’ve been playing on our poker server all day trying to get myself rated in the no-limit hold’em room. You can see my rating on the list now as Aar0nic.

On Friday I opened a surprise package at work. It was from a young pro-poker player I met when I was at the WSOP in Las vegas last month. A big stuffed Meerkat! Awesome. Here’s a shot of my desk, where I’ve added the Meerkat to my hippie-hiking Sock Monkey and Duke, the stuffed Java mascot, and some Star Wars pez dispensers.

I’m naming him Meery. He’s the meeriest meerkat that ever meered. Meerkat is the project code-name for the Poker Academy software. We all have Meerkat avatars at work and for our posts on the Poker Academy forums. This is the first stuffed meerkat to join BioTools. The fellow that sent me the Meerkat was not aware of the tradition, but BioTools is crawling with stuffed animals, so it was a great fit. All project names are code-named after animals, and during the bioinformatics days projects were mainly named after various primates. We have a lot of monkeys.

Today was a farily light day for food. I ate well this weekend. Christine & I celebrated our first anniversary. We went and had dinner at the Chateau Lacombe at the top of the building (24th floor), which is circular. This is Edmonton version of the Las Vegas Stratosphere, as the retaurant rotates about once per hour, giving you a great vista of the entire city during your meal. It was a really fun time. We’ll definately go back sometime in the winter, at night to see what it looks like in the dark. We went because we had a gift certificate from Chris from our wedding last year. Thanks Chris! That was great. Here’s the really cool part though: While we were up there looking down, Christine exclaims “It’s Chris!”. Sure enough, peering down at the bus stop below, we could see a tiny figure wheeling around elegantly on roller blades, dressed all in black (except from some white logo on the front shirt) and waiting at the bus stop. We’re pretty sure it was Chris, catching the bus to the Saturday night roller-rink thingy he does. I can’t wait to find out if it really was — that would be dah bomb!

In other news the latest issue of PC Gamer (October 2005) has a new review of Poker Academy Pro 2.0. 88% baby! Again, the cross-reviewed it with two other poker games, which scored 70% and 42%. Hah! Not only did they have the review, but they also mentioned us favorably in a preview of STACKED, an upcoming blockbuster poker game that incorporated our poker AI. And they also have a contest in which they are giving away 5 copies of Poker Academy Pro 2! Also really cool is that for the last two weeks, Apple has been featuring PAPro2 as a premium download on their software pages.

I’ve been working a lot lately on trying to help build up the community of poker players on our online server. This weekend I got a player ratings system in place. Now all games played on the system run through my little analyzer and players that play well are ranked higher. This serves many purposes. It gives the players something to play for — ego. It lets a player rank themselves and learn where they truly stand in skill, relative to the other players. It also lets us control the games — we can make special tables where only highly rated players can play, thus filtering out all the poor players who don’t take the game seriously.

Christine works at a Holiday Inn Express downtown as a Banquet and Catering coordinator. It sounds like a very stressful place, the hotel industry. After hearing so many stories, I had to make her watch some Faulty Towers last night. Ahh, good times.

I have a bunch of stuff to post later. Hopefully I can get to it tonight.