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Aug 13 / Aaron

Chow Down

I’m currently chowing down on a massive monster salad. This one is about 6 cups in size consisting of baby greens, cabbage, asparagus, raddishes, green peppers, carrots, grape tomatoes, onion, cucumber, mixed beans, and of course my patented dressing.

For lunch today I tried a dish I think I got from April: Egg whites scrambled with Salsa. It smelled nasty while frying and looked just like vomit with blood in it. But then I tried it and it was fantastic.

I also just popped a big ol’ batch of Mega Muffins in the oven. The apartment is smelling yeasty. Mmmmm.

Tonight Christine & I are getting all dressed up and going out to the local Industrial-goth-dance club. We first met in one of those clubs about 8 years ago. We rarely go out to clubs now being all adult and lame and stuff. But it is nice to revisit the angst-ridden days of our late teens / early twenties. I was never that angstful or goth or anything. I even enjoyed making fun of all the misanthropic ‘non-conformists’ all dressed alike, an army of dark moping soldiers. I was there for the music. I’d often show up dressed in a spam shirt and yellow pants or some such silly outfit. I think my statement was lost on them, but it was fun nonetheless.

Aug 10 / Aaron

Undies

As I mentioned, this week I’m staying home and chilling out. This means sleeping in every day, then hanging out around the apartment in just my undies for most of the day. I’m wearing a watch and undies right now, and thats the way I like it. I’m tempted to take a picture but I’ll spare you. Perhaps forcing you to imagine it will be far worse. Muhwahaha.

My brother Samuel has been blogging now as well. This is great. We siblings now actually know what’s going on in each other’s lives. We are all too lazy to phone each other, so it’s a very new experience.

Currently reading: Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card.

Aug 10 / Aaron

CRON-O-Meter Update

Because of the buggered kneecap, I didn’t end up going hiking this week. I took the week off anyways, since I worked my ass off the last few months and it’s nice to have a little down-time. Of course, downtime for me just means working on other things! So I’ve spent a fair bit of time this week working on the cron-o-meter.

As you can see, it’s getting prettier looking. It’s still full of rough edges and huge swaths of missing functionality. I finally got XML import/export working which has made it a lot more usable for me. It’s a lot of work to enter custom foods (all the values for each vitamin and mineral need to be typed in) and since during development I’m constantly blowing away and rebuilding the database backend I was reluctant to enter custom foods over and over again. Now that I can save those custom foods and import them, I can start using the program for my daily tracking. Looks like my problem areas some days are in Zinc and Vitam B-12, which I don’t seem to hit the RDI on. I’m not sure if the standard RDIs are the same as RDAs though, so perhaps I’m ok there. I still have to figure out all that nonsense — there are SO many different ‘standards’.

Aug 6 / Aaron

My Kingdom for a Working Knee




Christine hiking




Christine & Aaron at camp




Pasty Beached Aaron




An insult to cowboys, everywhere

Well, we got back from the Rockies on wednesday night and had a wonderful vacation. But things certainly didn’t transpire as planned! On day one we hiking into Banff National Park, from a trail head in the Kananaskis park area south of Canmore, AB. It was only a touch over nine kilometers of fairly easy terrain. By the end of it I was experiencing some discomfort in my left kneecap. I was probably carrying too much weight on it (my pack weighed in at 47 pounds). I lost so much weight over the last 5 months, I had probably lost some muscle in the legs, which probably lead to the injury. Christine started having bad menstrual cramps that night as well, and so we decided to abort the hike and the next morning we hiked back out to the car. It’s a good thing too because the hike back was excrutiating on my knee. It just killed to walk downhill. I could hike flat trail with some discomfort and anything uphill didn’t hurt at all. However, I could barely put any weight on my leg in a downstep. I’m just happy that I got the injury on the first day when it was still only 9km to hike out, and not three days into the mountains.

We made it back to the car in about three hours. The weather was absolutely perfect 30 degrees celcius with a gentle breeze and a few fluffly clouds here and there. We drove to the town of Banff which is just crammed with tourists this time of year. We found a ‘cheap’ (for Banff) hotel to stay the night. Then we went to a local beach and just chilled in the sun and took it easy. We had some beers out on the roof-top patio of a local pub and spent the day relaxing.

We decided to hang around in the Banff area and do things that wouldn’t require too much knee work. The next day we went for a horse-back ride down the Bow River Valley. The ride went for about three hours. One hour out to a small bush camp where they fed us a steak dinner, then a loop back up around some hills for a good view of the valley and back down the to stables. On the first leg we had a Mama Grizzly and three cubs run right between the horses. Our long line of horses advancing along the river valley had spooked the bear making it feel trapped next to the river. So she lead her cubs quickly between a gap in the horses in a mad dash for the forest. The three cubs all followed mama in single file intot he forest. Mama bear immediately sent the cubs up the nearest tree and then turned to face us all as we went by. The horses remained surprisingly unspooked.

The next day we drove out to kicking horse river about 20 minutes past Field, BC. We did some white-water rafting. That turned out to be good fun, although I was TERRIFIED beforehand. Once I got on the water, I was fine. No one fell out, but we did get darned wet. We had the stereotypical mountain-man ski-bum for a guide, which was great.

I finshed Cat’s Cradle on the trip. I liked it muchly.

I had been planning to go on a big week-long hiking trip with J this week as well. Now I’m not so sure if I’ll be able to because of this stupid knee issue. I’m going to do about 50 flights of stairs (up and down my apartment building) today, and see how it holds up. If it seems healed and not prone to further injury I think I’ll risk it and we’ll leave Monday. We’ll probably attempt the same trail Christine and I were going to do, but extend it.

Jul 29 / Aaron

Going Wild

Tomorrow morning Christine and I are hopping in the car and driving to Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park (south west of Banff) to go backpacking for four or five days. We’ll be back Wednesday night. We’re very exciting — it’s the first hike of the year for us. The Mount Assiniboine region looks gorgeous:

While there, I’m bringing along two short Kurt Vonnegut novels (Cat’s Cradle, and Slaughterhouse-Five) to read in the tent at night. Catch y’all on the flip side!

Jul 21 / Aaron

Book Fest

It’s been a while since I’ve book-blogged. I’ve devoured several books recently.

Canadians: A Battalion At War: Canadians in the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, 1940 to 1945
A collection of short articles and memoirs as told by survivors in the Queen’s Own Rifles Battalion during WWII. My grandfather was in the QOR for WWII so this was of particular personal interest. These memoirs really drill home what an absolute nightmare it was. It’s traumatic just reading it. I can’t imagine living it.
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
An irreverent classic that I finally got around to reading. Impossible to describe.
Godplayers by Damien Broderick
A surreal sci-fi melding a pile of old sci-fi themes with lots of new transhuman themes and speculative physics. More of a narrative than a proper novel. I found the plot and characters very unbelievable. I suspect it was intentional, but I didn’t like it anyways. Skippable.
The Longevity Diet by Brian M. Delaney & Lisa Walford
A light and gentle introduction to the Caloric Restriction (CR) Diet. This book is aimed more at the general diet-book audience and is much lighter on the heavy science in other books on the topic. It is a great book to pick up if you are curious about the CR diet, but if you decide to try CR, I highly recommend doing more in-depth research and going through some of the more dense reading materials.
The Guns of Victory by George C. Blackburn
The followup to Blackburn’s first book The Guns of Normandy which is by far the best book I’ve ever read on WWII. In The Guns of Normandy we follow Blackburn’s artillery regiment through the Normandy campaign. The Guns of Victory picks up where the first book left off, following the the Canadians into Belgium, the Netherlands, and into Germany. We see the horrors of battling through the Scheldt Estuary, fighting through flooded farmlands polder to polder with no cover and muck up to the ears. Canadians suffered over 6000 casualties during the bitter fighting for the port of Antwerp and Walcheren Island. Later, we follow the battle of the Rhineland and the push into Germany where even the civilians could turn deadly.
Again, this book is of great personal interest to me as it traces much of the path my grandfather took through Europe. It’s an incredible series for anyone who wants to know the unromantic, unsanitized, hollywood-free, god-awful truth of WWII infantry life.
Jul 21 / Aaron

Blog Update

Oh yeah, and you probably noticed I have a brand new look to the blog. Pretty, eh? I just switched to a new ISP as I was perpetually running out of disk space at my old ISP and this new one gives me 400 mb for the same price! w00t! Also blogworthy, my brother Sam just started a blog as well (I haven’t linked to it because I’m not sure he wants it known yet) so now the blogosphere has a complete Davidson-Sibling representation. Huzzah!

Jul 21 / Aaron

Las Vegas Part III: The Aftermath

Well, I got back from Sin City late on Saturday night and have finally caught back up on my sleep. The World Poker Robot Championship went well overall. It didn’t go to well for the UofA exhibition matches. Unfortunately, the WPRC event was optimized for entertainment and not for meaningful results. Luck played a dominant role in the outcome. UofA entered Poki-X in an exhibition against the WPRC winner. Poki-X was leading through most of the match, but once the blinds got really big it basically became a random coin-toss to decide the winner.

Afterwards Phil Laak played both pokerprobot (the WPRC champ) and Poki-X in some short heads-up matches. Phill was GREAT. He was very animated and talked through each decision aloud giving the audience a great show of what goes through a top-notch player’s mind. Given the small number of hands played and the rapidly escalating blinds, luck played a dominant role in both matches. Phill easily won both of them. Ahh well, there’s always next time.

My overall impressions of Las Vegas are mixed. On the one side, it was a grand spectacle. On the flip side it was a monstrosity; a grandiose display of the vast amounts of disposable income Americans have dumped into the middle of the desert. It’s kind of ridiculous to have such a huge city in a place that is 110 degrees outside and constantly pumped up with AC indoors. Of course you cna also say it’s pretty loony to have a city like Edmonton where it’s well below zero for half the year and we have our furnaces going full blast the whole time…

As I suspected it was difficult to eat well while down there. After 11 days trapped in one of three different monster casinos (The Orleans, The Rio, and Binion’s) with limited culinary options, I was glad to be back home to my vegetables. I was relieved to learn I only gained 2 pounds while down there. I was expecting it to be a lot worse after all the buffets and monster portions of everything, free booze, and so on. The portion sizes were amazing. I would order a harmless looking ‘Cobb Salad’ for dinner and I’d be given a salad the size of my torso. It would come piled high with cheese, turkey, bacon, and egg bits. I’m glad I asked for the dressing on the side — it came in a gravy boat. It seemed like 90% of everyone down there was overweight, and not just a little overweight. Obesity was the norm. Given the food choices I had available, I am not surprised. I ordered a salmon dish one night. I pretty much got an entire salmon. What you eat in Las Vegas does not stay in Las Vegas.

Jul 13 / Aaron

Las Vegas Part II: The World Computer Poker Championship

It’s day two of the World Computer Poker Championships which Poker Academy is hosting (on the technical side). It’s been busy running the event. Got up yesterday at 9am, and got to Binion’s to set up and troubleshoot things at 10am. We didn’t have the tournament underway until 2pm, and finished the day around 1:30am. Two of the six players were eliminated and the remaining four faced off this afternoon. A fourth was eliminated after three hours of play. At 6:30, the remaining three players play until another is eliminated. The two surviving players will be at the final event tomorrow evening to win the $100,000 prize. The four ‘eliminated’ players get to play a last chance tournament tomorrow and the winner also gets a seat at the final table.

There hasn’t been too much media coverage yet, but I imagine when we get to the main table or Friday’s man vs machine match, as well as the WSOP moving to play the final tables at Binion’s Horseshoe, there will be a lot more interest and coverage. We have our tournament table displayed on a gorgeous widescreen plasma screen TV next to the poker room, and it’s very cool to watch all the bots play with all the cards face up. You can really see how they play and when they make big mistakes or smart reads.

Anyhoo, I’ve barely had a moment to spare since my last post. The glitz and spectacle of Las Vegas wore off after the second day, and now I can’t wait to get back to Edmonton, and maybe take some time off. Ahh, yes that would be sweet.

Jul 10 / Aaron

Las Vegas Part I: All Hustle, no Bustle

“All Hustle, no Bustle” is my new motto for Vegas. Wow is this place a spectacle. And an oven. It’s been 105 degrees and it feels like you’re sitting in an oven when you’re outside.

We finished the WSOP trade show yesterday. It was a huge event in the enormous Rio Convention Center. All the major poker sites and companies had booths. Our stuff was very well received. It will probably take us several months to follow up on all the deals and relationships forged during the event. We were approached by numerous vendors and sales people looking to sell our software. We also got to give the product to several celebrities — mainly poker celebrities but we give a copy to James Woods who apparently thought it was great and may even endorse our software down the road. We also got it out to Johny Chan, Daniel Negraneau, Phil Laak, Thomas ‘Thunder’ Keller, Robert Varkonyi, and a bunch more I can’t remember. The four days have already blurred into one foggy memory.

Phil Laak actually came by to seek us out — apparently he’s a huge fan of our Poker Research Group and he knew me and the other group member by name as he’d read all of our academic papers on poker AI. He was very excited to meet me — it threw me off a little. I also met his girlfriend, Jennifer Tilley (the actress), who has a little poker fame now as well as she just won the 2005 WSOP Women’s Tournament. I guess Phil Laak’s been a pretty good tutor.

Working the booth was pretty exhausting. Each day we had to get there and work from 9:30 to 6pm. Once the doors opened at 10am, the showroom was instantly flooded with people and there was a constant flow of insterested people talking to us about our product. We had eight to nine of us working the booth most of the time, with four laptops set up to give walkthroughs to interested customers. Let me tell you, by 6pm we were all pretty exhausted from explaining the software over and over again, being on our feet the whole day, throats sore from constantly talking. At the same time, it was a lot of fun being there and meeting so many people. Some pre-existing customers stopped by the booth just to say how much they loved the software. The vast majority of people that stopped by had never heard of our software, which shows how much we have yet to penetrate the market that is out there. I think our presense there and all the relationships made into the heart of the industry will really build our brand awareness. A lot of people seemed thrilled that most of us demoing the product were the actual developers (and poker players) and not just trained sales-people.

Today I finally have the day off. The trade-show is finished and most of our crew are flying back to Edmonton as I write this. Scott and I are staying, along with our CEO and VP of Marketing, to run the WSOP-Robots competition next week. It starts on Tuesday and runs until Friday.

Kurt, our CEO played in the WSOP Main event ($10,000 buy-in, 5600 players, 1st prize of $7.5 million) yesterday. He lasted most of the day and then, unfortunately had his Ace-King busted by Ace-Five. No-Limit poker is a cruel game.

I’m going to spend the rest of the day relaxing by the pool and preparing our computer systems for the WSOPR contest.

Peace-out.