Spaz.ca

On Tuesday us Poker Academy fellows are off to Las Vegas. Most of us will be there for 5 days (5th to the 10th) for our WSOP trade-show booth. Myself and a skeleton crew will stay an additional 5 days to help host the WSOPR (World Series of Poker Robots). We are gushing with anticipation over this trip. It’s going to be very exciting.

On Friday we had the official 2.0 release and launched sales on our website. So far the feedback from customers has been super-great. You can’t imagine how good that feels. After working on something so hard for 6 months, you lose focus and start to have trouble objectively evaluating your work. Pre-release we were sitting on pins and needles. It sounds like we have a hit! And we can’t wait to show it off in L.V.

I have no idea how hard it’s gonna be keeping my diet in check on this trip. I’m gone for 10 days so it’s not like I can pack my lunches in advance. I’m going to have to ad-lib it and eat out for every meal. I plan to hunt for salad bars and eat light, whilst bringing a good solid arsenal of supplements to pick up the nutritional slack. I do have a freezer bag full of mega muffins, but I know first-hand how sticky border guards can be about bringing strange-looking muffins into the US.

The last time I crossed the border they confiscated all of my beef jerky (I was going on a week long backpacking trip in Montana). Because of the mad-cow scare, no beef products were allowed to cross the border from Canada into the US. The server irony is that the beef jerky was ALL packaged in the USA and imported into Canada. I was not allowed to walk across the border with US beef jerky. I pointed this fun-fact out the the guards. They were humorless. Here’s where it got even better. With our beef jerky gone, we needed a good protein source for our week long hike, so we stopped at a store in Montana and purchased some new jerky and sausages. Our hike went from Glacier National Park in Montana, back across the border into Canada. When we reached the end of our hike in Canada, we had to catch a shuttle bus back into Montana to get back to our car. Well, you guessed it. We had some left-over beef jerky in our packs again. Again, we had to surrender the beef jerky which we had purchased just dasy before IN MONTANA. Oh lordy, that was rich. Bureaucracy.

The next time you’re groaning about Mondays, mad at the asshat that just cut you off in traffic, bored, watching the evening news, or doing just about anything we humans do 99% of the time, please please please take a moment to wake up and smell the big picture. Yes, the BIG picture. Why do we so easily forget about it? It’s like the whole world is sleepwalking, so caught up in day-to-day life. Caught up in life, in general. There’s a whole lot of samsara going on. Very few of us take a moment (or enough moments) to stop the madness and wonder…. ‘…so, uh, like what the hell is going on here? Anyone? No? Oh well, back to eating my cheeseburger…’.

What the hell is going on? What the hell are we doing here? Isn’t that COOL people? Why are most of us discussing the dating habits of movie stars when we could be cogitating on this wondrousness? Luckily, I don’t suffer from any kind of existential angst. I don’t care if there’s a meaning to it all or if it’s a big cosmic accident (and I actually believe it probably is meaningless and just a big cosmic accident, but that since I’m a conscious being I get to give it whatever damned meaning I want). This kind of stuff really keeps me up at night. It’s just so darned COOL! And also profound and important. But I’m a geek, so it’s primarily cool.

My dad tells me that when I was very young I asked him some questions like ‘Why are there different kinds of birds?’, and ‘Why do all things grow?’, and to both questions he replied with quite possibly the best answer I can yet imagine: ‘I don’t know. It was like that when I got here’. I still feel like I just got here.

I started on the CR diet for numerous reasons. I really want to live a long healthy life. The world is so frigging fascinating that I just can’t wait to see what happens next. I wake up every day and while sipping my breakfast smoothy I read my e-mail and then check my daily science news sites. Just about every morning there is some brilliant or mind blowing breakthrough technology, discovery, or study. To me, the world is like a page-turning thriller. I just can’t put the book down, and I can’t wait to see what happens next. Personally, I figure there’s an extremely low probability of there being any sort of afterlife (that’s my politically correct way of saying it). But if there is, it’ll still be there whether I live 10² years, 10³ years, or even 10ⁿ.

Another motivation to do caloric restriction is that I am generally attracted to the ideal of overcoming primal urges. After all, that is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We have the same primal urges that all animals do; those powerful drives to eat, fuck, and sleep in ever more luxurious dens. Only humans can override these urges with higher-level urges generated by reasoning about the big picture. Every moment we spend eating and sleeping and humping and carrying on shallow lives shopping and watching Fear Factor, is a moment spent being an animal. Every moment spent meditating on the big picture, reasoning, and overriding primal urges, is a moment spent being human.

Now, I’m not saying we should all run off to Tibet and become monks (as much as I admire them — those Tibetan monks are really in to being human), but it is just such a damned shame if we all waste our short lives running around sniffing each other’s asses and drinking out of the toilet. Yes, my lovely readers, do yourselves a favor and please do not forget the big picture. And in case you missed it: Check out my exciting article below, where I took a picture of my big salad and wrote about it.

I came home today and had roughly 600 calories left to fill. I made one of my staple dinners — the monster salad. This is a 450 Calorie meal that takes a good 20 minutes to pack away.

Beneath that colorful mix of beans, tomatoes, and peppers is a cruciferous extravaganza of kale, broccoli, & cauliflower piled on a huge bed of baby spinach. There’s also some asparagus and onions somewhere in there as well. The dressing is a homemade brew consisting of 1 tbsp olive oil, 1 tsp flax oil, 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar, 1 tsp minced garlic, and plenty of basil, oregano, parsley, and crushed chili peppers). Yum.

Ahh, my sister is too funny. I’ve had more than one friend tell me already they are switching from readingmy blog to reading hers, unless I funny mine up more. Unfortuantely, I’m more into goofy faces and other physical humor that doesn’t translate well to text. I’m making a hilarious face right now. It’s a riot, trust me.

We’re gearing up to release Poker Academy Pro 2.0 at the WSOP in Las Vegas. We’re all going down there for the world series. We’ll have a booth at the Rio July 5th-10th, demoing the product. The whole company is going, and we’ve got custom Poker Academy shirts made up for the occasion. It should turn out to be a lot of fun. We’re all super excited about the trip, and the release of 2.0, which we’ve been working on for the last 5 months.

We’re also trying to figure out if we are going to compete or sponsor (or be involved somehow) in a big World Series of Poker Robots competition scheduled July 12th-15th in Vegas, at Binions. It’s looking to be a high publicity event (the $100,000 prize doesn’t hurt), and has already made the front page of the LA Times.

I checked my blood pressure while grocery shopping last night and it was a respectable 120/80. Hoorah!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got about half a kilogram of vegetables to eat for lunch.

Today I found time to get in several hours on the CRON-o-Meter, mainly work on the new user creation wizard. This little wizard walks through setting up a new user, getting the user’s age, gender, height, weight, and then suggesting some default nutritional targets based on those factors. There’s still lots to be done there, but I banged out some of the basic UI in a couple of hours.

I also managed to get about 2 hours of walking in with J, whilst we discussed the merits of various potential backpacking locales for an upcoming hike. It’s hard to find a good trail that meets all our criteria. It has to offer about seven days worth of hiking. It has to be accessible by a single car (i.e a loop or terminus near public transport back to car). It needs to be close enough to get to (ex: Canadian Rockies), and of course it shouldn’t be a hike we’ve already done (West Coast Trail, Sawback Trail, etc…). Its surprisingly tough to meet all these constraints.

I baked up a big batch of Mega Muffins tonight. The apartment smells delicious, if not a bit yeasty.

And of great excitement to me, and soon to the world, I have cajoled my sister into trying out blogging. She’s a great writer and damned funny (no pressure Leah!). I introduce Wander Wuman.

I’m surfacing breifly this evening to update the blog. Did more house-buying arrangements today, and yet more scheduled for tomorrow. We’re all working hard o’er at BioTools this week. We really want to get our next version done and ready to sell at this year’s WSOP in Las Vegas. We’ve all been putting in some pretty long hours to make it so. I had to claw Terry away from his computer this evening arounf 9pm, and make him go home. We’re a dedicated crew 😀 I think it will be worth it. I know as soon as this puppy ships I’m heading for the mountains for som RnR.

I’ve had little chance to work on the CRON-O-Meter, but I did manage to squeeze in a bit and hang out with my cohort a bit this weekend for some dev planning. Chris has set up a nifty project management tool called Maven, which generated the project website above.

….Still eagerly awaiting my sister Leah to start blogging….

I’m currently chowing down on some late din-din consisting of my latest CR staple that I make when I need some good food fast. A bowl full of microwaved frozen veggies (a huge mix: brussels sprouts, broccoli, carrots, peas, corn, geen beans, onions, and peppers). I mix in about 75 cals of cheddar and some chilli peppers to spice, and if I feel I need some Omega-3’s, I dribble on a little flax oil. Takes about 3 minutes and it’s damned good (for it’s class).

I’m starting to feel downright skinny — I’m now at 156 pounds (started the diet in late January at 184 pounds). As MR said, a lot of my weight loss wasn’t from obvious fat deposits, but from fatty layers wrapping my internal organs. I didn’t have much of a belly, but what was there is now gone and I’m a lot leaner looking and smaller. I’ve been hitting the gym a few times a week to build some muscle back.

Sorry for the ramble. Like i said, just coming up for air. Back to swim with the fishies!

It’s been a rather packed week and a half. Last week Christine and I started preparing an offer on a house we found — which turns out to be a fair bit of work, especially when you go sans agent (we used ComFree). Between calling lawyers, seeing banks, approving financing, and talking to the seller, it ate up most of my spare time through the week. Then we hopped in the car Thursday night and drove to BC and chilled at Christine’s gradparent’s cabin at the Shuswap lakes for the long weekend. I’m still reeling a bit from the gak I ate while on the road. It’s good to be back home with my rabbit food. 1650 Cals today.

It seems that whilst I was at the cabin, a little drama hit my blog comments in the post below:

Marcus Butler writes:

While I am utterly sympathetic to both the sufferers of Spastic Paraplegia, and understand the sensitivity those afflicted and those close to those afflicted may be to certain triggers and terminology, no apology will be offered.

As several commentors pointed out, there is obviously no intent to insult or ‘mock people who have such an afliction’. Note the website is called spaz.ca, and not lets.all.mock.people.with.spastic.paraplegia.com. If you think spaz.ca is insulting, you should see my other websites leppers-suck.com, and kids-with-progeria-look-funny.net.

The word spaz, slang for the adjective spastic is not synonymous with the condition spastic paraplegia. A spasm is any kind of sudden, involuntary muscle contraction. Why is my site called spaz.ca? I am clumsy, and occasionally a little spastic. I also have occasional trouble with fine motor control and my hands sometimes shake with a light tremor. Thus observed, friends have bestowed the nickname of ‘spaz’ upon me. If any mockery is intended by the name of this website, it is directed soley at its owner.

I will grant you the right to hyper-sensitivty, as I can completely sympathize with you having strong feelings about the use of such slang. However, labelling this site a mockery of an unfortunate minority is just plain silly.

Oddly I am reminded of an event that occurred about 5 years ago, when I was doing [poker] research at the AI lab one summer, and I was keeping very odd working hours. One evening, at three AM, I was biking through campus, on the way into the lab. I came to dead intersection with not a soul in sight in either direction, and perfect visibility. Seeing as it was 3AM and perfectly safe, I biked through the red light. Instantly, two police officers sprang out of some nearby bushes, and then proceeded to give me hell. They wouldn’t listen to reason. They then started to give me hell for not having a light mounted on my handlebars (city bylaw). I had to point out politely that it had been stolen from my bike the previous day, while it was parked on campus and that it would sure be nice if they could spend their time tracking down real criminals rather than harrassing people who bike through dead intersections in the middle of the night.

Your energies would be more effective if directed at the assholes out there that actually do mock people with disabilities.

If you like moves that make you think, that don’t hold your hand, and force multiple viewings just to undestand, then do yourself a favor and go rent Primer. This low-budget ($7000) indy movie turned a lot of heads at the last Sundance, and for good reason. It’s one of the smartest science fiction movies I’ve seen. The script is superb and the acting and dialog is incredibly natural and realistic, capturing the personality and dynamics of engineers perfectly. It’s also a total mindfuck. This movie actually has multiple penises enabling it to simultaneously mindfuck you through any of the available orifices that lead to your brain.

Let it be known to all on this day, that one Maion Davidson of Victoria BC, aka ‘mama’ is hereby fully loved and admired by this very blogger, her son. Thanks for making me Mama. I really do appreciate that I got born and got to be here, and you’ve made my stay so far so very welcome.

Oh yeah, saw my doctor again yesterday. We now think, while my blood pressure is a little on the high side, some of my really high readings (> 150/90), which was what had him really worried, are hopefully just due to me having hyper-sensitive blood pressure. Any kind of excitement or anxiety or adrenaline gets my little ticker thumping (my friends are all familiar with my bulging superorbital veins that can appear on my forehead when I get worked up). Anyhoo, he’s told me to start some serious cardio-training (3 times a week) and I’ll go visit him again in three months to see how it has helped. I dusted off my mountain bike this morning and biked to work, which is only about a 15 minute ride.