Gee, it’s been a little while since our last post. Time has been moving right along for us, and it’s hard to believe we really have been here for four months already! The big news this week was our friend JR was over in England for a work trip and managed to get a few days off to come visit us in Dublin! So we had our first houseguest here. Unfortunately it was in the middle of the week and I felt too guilty to ask for both days off so I just got the Wednesday off.

JR arrived Monday afternoon and Diane met him at the airport so he didn’t have to worry about finding his way to our place. On Tuesday, Diane and JR wandered through downtown Dublin catching several of the attractions down there including Trinity College, Dublin Castle, and the like. They really did a lot of walking and sightseeing! On Wednesday, we took JR to a museum, the Guinness storehouse tour, and the Jameson distillery tour. We got to the distillery for the last tour of the day and it was pretty neat. There was only a handful of people there for it and as a result we all got to do the taste testing of Jameson whiskey next to Jack Daniels and a scottish whiskey. Add to the taste test our free glass of Jameson, and we had a pretty good buzz going after those tours!

We just saw JR off to the airport this morning. I hope he enjoyed himself :) It was pretty surreal to see him here!

Outside of that, we’re getting excited about the Christmas party. It’s just a couple days away, and it really does sound like fun. We’re going to go down on Friday evening and stay that extra night so we can see a bit of the town before the party starts in the evening on Saturday. It should be a good chance to get some more photos.

The past few weeks have been pretty busy for us, but we have managed to get out to do a few things too. Diane and I went and saw the Book of Kells the previous weekend. The book was pretty neat, but the real attractions for me were the information on how much work went into making the book (and books in general back then), and the view down the Long Room which is the library on the upper floor of the building that the Book of Kells is in. Today, it’s easy to take for granted the availability of books, but back then the amount of work that went into copying and binding each book guaranteed that there really wasn’t enough for everyone.

This last Saturday, we joined in with a very large group of people to help wish Aaron a happy 30th birthday. It’s a good thing that their apartment is HUGE, or there’s no way we could’ve crammed us all in there. For this party there was a team event where teams of four competed against each other at various gaming events: Rock Band on the Wii, NHL 2009 on the XBOX, and Foosball. I got conscripted onto a very strong team (including the birthday boy himself), and we eventually went on to win the competition. It was pretty fun!

So that’s a taste of what we’ve been into. Hopefully I’ll get a blog entry in soon after the Christmas party so you can hear about that!

Morgan

It’s a little crazy to think that we’re fast approaching three months in Ireland! It’s been a big move, and we totally miss seeing the people we’re used to seeing all the time. Thankfully, with this being the internet age, we’re able to video chat with people. If you’d like to hook up with us on the video chat, we’re on skype and AIM. Give us a shout and we’ll organize a time to meet up. It’s been pretty nice to be able to chat with both Diane and my families back home.

Anyways, back to point form updates (since I’m tired and it’s time for bed):

• Last weekend Darse and Xan got us out of our house to go check out Kildare. The main attraction there is the Irish National Stud which is a thoroughbred horse breeding operation of apparently some fame. (I don’t exactly know much about horse breeding, but I learned some). We did a guided tour of the grounds, and saw some of their stallions. The most expensive one’s stud fee comands €75,000! The grounds there are actually quite lovely, and we got a chance to check out a couple of gardens — a Japanese garden, and Saint Fiachra’s Garden. I got quite a few photos that I’m actually quite happy with, and it was fun to get out of the city!
• Work has started to get busy. Lots of projects are under way now and I’m starting to get into the thick of things. There’s still a few moments where I don’t feel particularly useful, but on the whole it’s starting to feel like I’m settling in okay. Lots of stuff to learn though, that’s for sure! This week, we released a new version of the software which introduced matrix tournaments. They’re a new format of poker sit and go tournaments, but you play 4 tables at once. Not only do you compete for individual prize pools on each table, but how you do at each table contributes to how you rank for the matrix tournament as a whole. I haven’t had a chance to try playing one yet, but it’s a pretty cool new feature.
• There’s been quite a few nights spent late at the office playing games. In addition to playing poker with Chris Ferguson, he’s stuck around a bit longer to play some geeky board games with us. So there’s been a few late nights of Ticket to Ride, Blokus, Medici, Aquaretto, Carcassonne, and other fun board games. Chris really liked quite a few of them, so hopefully he’ll be back soon to play more of them with us.
• Thanksgiving isn’t really celebrated here, so we were a bit envious of the food our families were going to be enjoying this past weekend. It’s a bit weird not spending thanksgiving with the folks. It was nice to be able to chat with family over the weekend though!
• The desk that we ordered from Argos came this week, so our place is getting a little bit better organized. We also got blinds several weeks ago, so our home is starting to feel a lot more like home.
• The weather here has actually been quite good for the past couple weeks. There’s been some rain, but not as much as we might’ve been led to believe. As a result, we’ve had a chance to take in some rather pretty sunsets, and some beautiful weather for walking around a bit.

That’s all I can think about from this update. Be sure to check out the photos from our visit to the Irish National Stud!

Morgan

This past week has been a insanely busy. It’s been a week filled with parties and late nights which has made it a bit hard to keep posting to the blog. There was even a party tonight that Diane and I passed on just to spend a quiet night relaxing a bit for the first time in over a week.

One of the noteworthy events of the week has been that Chris “Jesus” Ferguson has been in town. He played in the WSOPE and had another big tournament in London last Saturday. So he stopped by the office and I got a chance to add another poker pro to a list that’s getting pretty long.

Anyways fast forward to last night which was a scheduled company tournament: a €50 deep stack buyin tournament. Since Chris was in town, he was happy to play, which meant the tournament drew a good crowd. In all, 36 players registered which was a really good turnout. Warning: lots of poker lingo coming your way from this point on.

The tournament started out real slow for me. Apart from picking up one pot a few rotations in, I basically sat and folded a lot of hands while several players at the table spewed chips at each other. After the first break I was starting to get pretty short stacked. I picked up A6o on the button and raised, but the small blind pushed. I didn’t have many chips left so I called and didn’t like seeing my opponent flip over AQ. Luckily for me, I hit a 6 along with an Ace on the flop to double up. Not too much later, The 2nd table broke, and guess who got seated on my left? Chris Ferguson.

The next big hand in my memory happened after we had got down to the final table of 9 players. I picked up KK on the button and make a decent raise. The small blind reraises me and I pushed allin and got called by AJ of diamonds. The flop was rather exciting when two diamonds landed, but thankfully I dodged another diamond and won a monster pot — which made me chip leader by quite a bit.

The tournament got down to three players — Chris, me, and another guy that I didn’t know but who played very well. The stack sizes started to get pretty close to even, although I still had a small chip lead. Chris had a €50 bounty on his head, but unfortunately I was not going to be the one to earn that. The other guy at the table would do that when he flopped trip queens and busted Chris out in 3rd place. I guess that means I can say I beat him!

On the first hand of headsup play, the other guy limps on the button and I check with J4 of diamonds. The flop is 578 with two diamonds. I bet out, get raised, and I decided to push. I get instantly called, and get shown 78 for top two pair. I miss my flush and gutshot outs to lose the hand. So I finished a respectable 2nd place for a payday of €440. Not too bad for a couple hours of play!

So that’s how it went down. It was an honour to play with Chris, and it’s pretty cool to be able to say I beat him. I’m under no illusions that it was anything more than luck that made that the case, but I feel pretty good about most of my plays during the tournament. I probably missed a couple of plays and didn’t play all that well when we got to three handed play, but all in all I can’t feel too bad with my showing.

It’s been a really cool week, but in a way I’m glad it’s over. I’ve been out every night this week until at least midnight and it’s starting to take a toll on my ability to stay sharp.

Oh yeah, there’s new photos up on flickr too if you want to go check them out!

Morgan

One of the things that I never really expected coming out here was how much it would be in a living-the-life style. Let me see if I can give you an example of what I mean.

A couple weeks ago, one of the co-presidents of the company was leaving the company to focus on other things in his life, so we had a huge farewell party for him. The entire company was invited out to a Cuban-themed bar called Floridita which the company had booked entirely. In addition to the canapés that were distributed to us throughout the evening, the event was open-bar to a dazzling array of some pretty fancy cocktails. It was a pretty fun night, filled with many mojitos. We found our way home via taxi cab at 4 in the morning, and slept in for a little while, but not for too long …

The very next night, we were invited to the other company president’s house for a bit of a smaller party. I’m not entirely sure why I got an invite actually, but I was happy to go. There we were treated to some appetizers prepared by the company’s chef, Allan, as well as a fridge full of beer and other drinks. The appetizers were something else … they were visually stunning, and amazingly tasty. The highlight though was the mini-burgers. These were the most incredible things I have tasted in quite some time. They were freshly prepared burgers with freshly ground beef — which meant they could be cooked rare, which they were. These were the juiciest, tastiest burgers I think I’ve ever had.

After a relatively quiet week or so, the server team went out for a dinner last night. We started at a Tapas restaurant where we proceeded to order one of everything off of the extensive menu. Loads of tasty food were delivered to our table which we enjoyed immensely with a couple of bottles of wine. After the meal we proceeded over to a bar where we met up with some coworkers and proceeded to have even more drinks.

This has all been fun, but I understand the company Christmas party is supposed to be something else. We just got the news of what will be going on there, and it looks sweet! The entire company (some 300+ employees) and their spouses will be taking over an Irish town for a night. Since the company is so large, we’ll be scattered across the town’s several hotels, and be shuttled in to the main event where we have a black-tie affair with fine food, drink, and prizes. It sounds like an amazing time.

I knew that the company was generous, and concentrated on making the employees enjoy their time, but I never quite expected the treatment we’re getting. Frankly, we’re getting really spoiled — and it’s pretty incredible.

Morgan

It’s a little hard to believe it’s Friday already. At the moment, I’m awaiting the next shuttle so I can head home for the first weekend after my first “real” week of work.

Last weekend, Diane and I spent a lot of time relaxing, but we also hit up the Guinness Storehouse, and the Powerscourt Gardens. The Guinness Storehouse is a pretty neat experience. Your ticket gets you in for some interesting information presented in a museum kind of style, plus a complimentary pint of Guinness that you can either just receive, or pour yourself. So after spending a bunch of time looking at stuff, and then having lunch, Diane and I each learned how to pour our own pint of Guinness. Good stuff.

On the holiday Monday (it was a long weekend here too), Diane and I hooked up with Darse and Xan and we hopped in their car to go to the Powerscourt gardens. We spent a bunch of time there wandering around taking pictures and admiring the various areas of the garden. It was really neat, and I’ll be putting up pictures when I finally get to them (I’ve got quite a backlog of pictures!).

This week was my first real work week (since I only had one day before the long weekend). It’s been pretty cool — I’ve had a lot of information to absorb, but so far I think I’ve been following along pretty good. Today was the first day I wrote code, and I’m pretty happy to be at that point already. The code is large and complex to understand, so to be making any changes is pretty gratifying (even if the changes are simple).

Diane and received our PPS numbers which means that we can now apply for a bank account. Hopefully we’ll be able to successfully apply for one tomorrow morning so that we can get the remainder of the other paperwork and beaurecratic stuff out of the way. We move into our new apartment right away too since we’ve signed the lease on Wednesday.

I gotta run to my shuttle now, but you should go check out my pictures on my flickr page! All the cruise photos are now up!

Morgan

Yesterday came and went in a big crazy-fun blur. I’m still trying to settle myself down and let the fact that I’ve been married to the most wonderful woman I can imagine sink in. I don’t really have time at this moment to talk my way through the whole day, but before I forget them, I just want to jot down some quick highlights from the big day from my perspective, and also thank the people who volunteeered for various tasks and who all did a fantastic job.

Highlights from the weekend:

• There was a lot of people at the rehearsal dinner that Diane’s parents put on for us. It was very welcoming.
• Food at the rehearsal dinner was beef or chicken burgers, with all the fixings. Salads and beans were also available in plenty. Dessert was a full out sundae and banana split bar. I was reminded of Marble Slab’s selection.
• In the middle of the rehearsal, my Grandpa says the line where anyone who might object to the marriage say something. A couple seconds later a huge crack of thunder goes over our heads. I look up at the ceiling and say… “Oh really?”.
• Several of the groomsmen stayed over at my place the night before the wedding. It was a whole lot better to spend it with some good friends. I think I would’ve had a whole lot more trouble getting to sleep if I was on my own all night building up the next day in my head. They helped keep me calm and relaxed (as much as possible anyways).
• Waiting in the church for the Bride and her bridesmaids to arrive was pretty fun. The guys hung out in a side room and it was a little surreal to be getting so many sneaky waves as the many people I knew passed by the room’s door.
• I’m not used to being the centre of attention.
• When the warning came in that the bride was there, I had to leave the groomsmen and wait by myself in the choir room. That wait was a bit more awkward since I didn’t really have anyone to talk to.
• Kepi fell over partway through the ceremony. Many jokes were made at his expense throughout the evening, but he was really good natured about it. I had no forewarning of it happening, but people later mentioned that he had gone pretty pale.
• My Grandpa, who performed the service for us, forgot to let me kiss my bride. In my confusion, I asked a little louder than I might’ve, and the whole congregation had a chuckle. Hey, that’s what I signed up for! ;-) We got our kiss in after the signing of the register.
• Despite our note at the bottom of the bulletin asking for a moment to reflect with each other in private immediately after the service, Rebecca (one of the bridesmaids) barged in to our room. We learned later that she hadn’t seen a bulletin. Whoops! It was okay though.
• The ceremony took roughly 35-40 minutes.
• The congregation exited the church, and hung around to see us leave the church and enter the limo. That was another surreal moment – once again I’m not used to all the attention.
• I’ve never been in a limo before. It was a bit tight for 10 people. It was fun, but I probably wouldn’t sign up for it again. It was nice to be able to see all the wedding party members between photoshoot locations.
• Jason Kasumovic, our photographer, was fantastic.
• Family formal photos were taken next to the St Albert Public Library.
• The weather couldn’t be better (thank you for not raining on us!).
• Other shooting locations included the Muttart Conservatory grounds and the Royal Alberta Museum grounds.
• Lunch was picked up from the Upper Crust Cafe. Absolutely wonderful sandwhiches. Two words: cheese bread.
• Good turnout at the reception. It was good to see so many friends/family there.
• The head table was a very tight fit.
• The food was excellent.
• First course: spinach salad with feta cheese, held in place by a long cucumber slice around it all.
• Main course: salmon and roast beef. The salmon was a bit overcooked I thought, but the beef was very tender and delicious.  We heard the salmon at the buffet was pretty good though, and we hope that was the case.
• Dessert: A wonderful strawberry shortcake in several layers. Absolutely delicious.
• Speeches: Short and sweet. Some touching words from everyone.
• Note to other people planning their wedding: don’t wing the bride/groom speech. Also, I actually wanted to say that we had planned big-O(wedding) — that’s a computer science joke.
• Second note: have someone organize the details of the reception and come up with a schedule. It’s very hard to organize and not be frantic at the same time when things don’t quite go smoothly. Let someone else trustworthy handle the details and sit back and enjoy.
• First dance: Diane and I were a bit rusty with our waltzing, and we had to avoid tripping on her dress. But eventually we got going.
• Rickroll: Yup, we pulled off a rickroll. I didn’t hear many comments about it though, so I wonder if people actually liked it. Obviously a bunch of people were very confused.
• Slideshow: Absolutely wonderful job by my sister who I kind of threw the job at her at way too late notice.
• Dancing: I’m glad people got some serious dancing in. It was good that it got some use.
• DJs: Dan was absolutely fantastic at the DJ booth. Props to Ryan and Brad too for helping, and Ryan for his adventures getting the equipment there and returned.
• It was a lot of fun to visit with a lot of the guests. I’m sorry if we didn’t get a chance to talk to you before you had to leave — I’m sure there’s a lot of you that didn’t get a chance to talk to us.
• Last dance: Danced to Norah Jones, Come Away with Me. There was less than 20 people left at that point, and we helped close out the joint. Not too bad I think.

I just want to say that it was an amazing day, and this is just a sampling of what I was thinking about throughout the day. I want to also make sure to thank some of the important people who made the evening possible:

• The Parents. Thanks to both sets of parents, who took care of more details than I can imagine. They were extremely supportive of our desire to run the show our way for the most part, but they were also very helpful in making sure we had details we hadn’t thought of figured out. I don’t really want to know what all went in to making everything look so wonderful.
• My Grandparents. I am extremely fortunate to still have my wonderful grandparents around to not only see my wedding, but also play an important role. My Grandfather got a one day licence to wed us (he no longer has an active licence since he retired from ministry), and was very supportive in helping us find the right choices for the ceremony we eventually performed. My Grandmother is simply awesome :)
• The wedding party (and as a subset, both Diane’s and my siblings): They put up with our lengthy photoshoot, as well as the huge number of tasks that we put on them with little to no notice. Thank you so very much!
• Many thanks to our Ushers: Rhianne and Brendan.
• Thanks to Simone who arranged the beautiful cello quartet that played at the ceremony!
• Nolan played a couple of key roles: he videotaped the ceremony for us, and he provided the projector to play the slideshow on. Thank you very much for your help!
• A huge thank you goes to Ryan Falkenbe(rg), who endured quite a saga to get the audio equipment to the venue on time. Thankfully, his jeep didn’t lose a window! Ryan put up with a bunch of harrassment from me to get the audio equipment booked, and transported.
• Thank you to Paul Myroon who did a very good job displaying his MC talents.
• Thank you to Dan, Brad, and Ryan who were in and around the DJ booth for most of the night playing some great tunes. I understand Dan took over the show, so he deserves a great deal of the credit. But thanks to the other guys for stepping in as well!
• A big thank you the the group of people who helped setup the hall. Pam and Madeleine were two people who helped our mothers setup the hall. I sure hope I’m not missing people here, but we weren’t there to see that setup.
• Thanks to Jodie for pouring out the tea for our tea ceremony.
• Thanks to An, Jasmine and Crystal for watching the guestbook and the gift table.
• Thanks to Anita for setting up the key prank.
• Megan did a fantastic job with the slideshow too. We kind of threw it at her last minute and she did a fantastic job. She even managed to figure out a way to pace through the slides so that the end of Diane’s pictures happened at the end of the first song, and the slideshow ended right at the end of the 3rd song. She was at the laptop hitting the right arrow key to show the next slide.
• Jason, our photographer, spent 12 hours of his day following us around and posing us for some excellent shots. We’re really looking forward to seeing the results of his work!
• Our very pretty wedding cake was designed and created by Claudia Kalogirou, who brought the cake herself and arranged it and everything!
• Diane’s mom’s friend Marilyn drove up from Red Deer to help decorate and serve the rehearsal feast, Diane’s neighbour Jane-Anne made us a potato salad with radishes carved into flowers, and Diane’s Aunt Janet pitched in too despite feeling a little under the weather.
• And a very big thankyou to everyone that came to enjoy the ceremony and/or the reception. It was so good to see so many faces — some that I hadn’t seen in far too long. We are so happy that so many people were able and willing to come out and see us get married and to enjoy some food and dance with us. Thank you so very much.

I sincereley hope I haven’t forgetten anyone. At this point in time I’m pretty tired, but I wanted to make sure that this got out soon. There are just two last things I wanted to say before I ran off to go collapse.

1) Since you got this far, you deserve a reward. Jason has posted a sampling of the photos he took at the wedding. They are posted at his blog. Go there and enjoy! We’re incredibly happy with the results.

2) I just want to say that this blog will be sticking around for the long haul. We’re going to use it as a way to communicate how we’re doing while we’re in Ireland. Our experiences, our photos, and our thoughts will all be shared here for you to read. I hope that at least some people find this a useful way to learn about how we’re doing overseas. Feel free to comment liberally on the posts we make!

Thank you everyone! It was a wonderful day.

Morgan

It is, in my opinion, a perfectly good time to panic. As teh bridezilla in this particular partnership, I believe it is my prerogative, non? There would, however, be more pure terror in my heart if Morgan wasn’t such a sweetie with such a nice family, or if so many of our friends hadn’t stepped up to help us out and support us. So I just wanted to say, in case I don’t see people in the mad dash to catch good weather and precious photographer time, thanks for helping! Thanks for all those little reply cards, emails, faceplant messages, etc. and a special thank you to all those who were able to fill the spots we needed filled. Whether you volunteered or were volunteered or voluntold, I’m so happy and relieved to have your assistance. So, from Morgan and myself, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Diane

The wedding is coming up very quickly now! We’re now a month and a few days away from the big date, and there’s still lots of little details to nail down. One of the things that we need is volunteers to do setup and takedown of the hall. If you’re interested in helping out, please let one of us know soon so we can give you a task.

// Diane’s comments follow

Also, does anyone want to usher or possibly babysit a video camera?  I have made a list of tasks and descriptions that you can look through and decide from the available jobs what you would prefer if you decide to give the gift of helping our big day run smoothly, kind of like a little registry for volunteering.  This would make a very good gift!!

// Aaand back to Morgan

We’ve been asked by a few people what we’d like for gifts. We’re just starting to send the word out that I’ve been hired by a company in Dublin to start working over there starting August 1st. That means that we’re not going to need a lot of “stuff” since we’re going to have to be pretty choosy about what we bring with us to Europe.

For those that would like to get us physical things, we’ve setup small registries at The Bay, and Linens-n-Things. However, the traditional wedding gift for Chinese weddings is cash. If you would like to go along with this, then that’s a perfectly good solution too.

We thought about trying to setup a travel registry for our honeymoon, but we heard that many travel registries take a percentage cut of that which didn’t really seem fair.

The wedding is in just over a month. If you haven’t returned your RSVP cards yet, please do that soon! We’ll start bugging people about that soon so that we know if we have enough space to invite a few more people.

Happy spring everyone!

Morgan

Diane and I left Edmonton Tuesday night for a quick trip to Dublin, Ireland where I visited Pocket Kings for an interview. If successful, we’ll most likely move over there later in the year. Here’s how the trip went.

Our flight left Edmonton at 7:45 on Tuesday night. Our friend JR was kind enough to take us to the airport, so we arrived with more than the pre-requisite two hours to get through airport security. Having not eaten anything yet, we sat down at the Montana’s in the waiting area and had a lazy dinner while keeping an eye on the hockey playoffs. It took almost an hour for the food to be cooked, I’m not too sure why they were so behind, but we had two hours to kill before hopping on the plane, so we didn’t mind.

The schedule involved a roughly 8-hour flight to Heathrow airport in London, followed by a 2-hour layover there and a 1-hour flight to Dublin, Ireland. Surprisingly, the flight over wasn’t too bad. Diane and I got the middle three seats of the Boeing 767-300. So we raised the armrests and had a chance to have each of us sprawled across two seats to sleep for a little while. I think I got about two hours of sleep on the flight, which wasn’t too bad considering I don’t tend to sleep well on planes. Diane did a little better than I did I think. As part of the entertainment, we saw the movie Enchanted which was kinda fun. It’s not a terribly indepth movie or anything (being Disney), but it was cute.

We landed in Heathrow in around 1:30pm local time, and followed the appropriate paths out to terminal one where we had to catch our next flight. Heathrow differs from other airports I’ve been at in that they don’t announce what gate you will be leaving at until a certain set period of time before your flight departs. So you wait in the large common waiting area for the magic board of numbers to show you what gate you go to, and then you run off to that gate because your flight is probably boarding already.

The flight from London to Dublin was pretty boring. In fact, it was the hardest part of the trip out there for me. We were trying to stay awake so that we could hit the time change running, and that proved awfully difficult on the less than one-hour flight over. But we arrived safe and sound in Dublin, a little dazed from the long travel, but not in too bad shape. We got into the hotel and made a couple phone calls to Darse and Mike who we planned to meet up with to see a little of Dublin and stay awake long enough to make sure we were going to bed at night.

So about an hour after settling into our hotel, Darse and Alexandra arrived at the hotel to show us around the hotel vicinity a bit and then we hopped aboard the Luas green light rail train headed to downtown to meet up with Mike. We took it all the way to the end of the line to St Stephen’s Green station which lets you out next to St Stephen’s Green (a relatively large public park with well-maintained flower beds and grass), and Grafton Street (a busy all-pedestrian shopping and pub area in central Dublin). Darse took us to a place he and Xan really like called Bewley’s. They were heartily recommending the salads there so I ordered a goat cheese spinach salad that was very tasty and very filling. It had large bacon bits on it (bacon in dublin is a bit meatier and less fatty than north american bacon. It resembles back-bacon a lot more). In fact everyone at the table had a salad and they seemed to be enjoyed by all. I also got the opportunity to try out a Guinness competitor called Murphy’s. I rather enjoyed.

By the time dinner was over, it was getting late since we sat and chatted for quite awhile. Before heading back to the hotel though, we tried to pull out some euros from a bank machine. Unfortunately, both Diane and I had trouble pulling money out – Diane even made the machine go out of service! Oops.

So failing that we hopped back on the green Luas and headed back to the hotel more than ready for bed. I tried to get a good night’s sleep, but probably didn’t get any more than 5-6 hours. I was to have a big day the next day, after all and I just couldn’t get my mind settled down enough to sleep. Even after I got to sleep I still woke up at something like 3 in the morning – probably due to the jet lag as well as my nervous excitement about the interviewing the next day. Diane fared a lot better than I did and managed to sleep most of the night.

The next morning we ventured down to the hotel lobby to feast on the included continental breakfast. It was a decent spread, although it wouldn’t change at all while we were there. There was some very tasty croissants, a decent selection of breads to toast, a large fruit tray, a cheese platter, some cold cut selections, as well as cereal, yoghurt, juice and even some fruit smoothies.

After relaxing a bit at breakfast, we ventured from the hotel to the pocketkings office. Diane was meeting Xan there to spend some time exploring Dublin while I got grilled and roasted in interviews all day. I’ll let Diane tell you about her time exploring.

Okay, so it wasn’t really a grilling session. Actually it was quite pleasant. Darse gave me a fast paced tour of the office — which is spread over two floors in a building the Cherrywood science and technology park. The building is actually right across the street from Dell’s Dublin office.

After getting a quick tour and a guest pass to give me access to the many, many security doors scattered throughout the office, I was sat down in a room to meet up with members of various teams within the company. The first person I met with was Aaron Davidson — a former member of the UofA CPRG (although we never worked on the project at the same time). Aaron gave me a pretty good overview of what the structure of the company was. For those interested, there is a *lot* of breadth across the computer field at the company. Everything from low-level server programming, to hardware, to QA, to internal tool building, to website design maintenance and content, to … well there’s a lot there.

After Aaron, I met with a guy named Diarmuid who is one of the server guys. He drew me a very nice diagram of how the server powering full tilt actually works. It was a little overwhelming, but it was also pretty neat. It’s a big event-driven architecture which impressively handles over 10,000 simultaneous users. It’s pretty neat, but it also sounds like it’ll have some pretty intense growing pains over the next few years. Working there seems like quite a challenge!

I had very short meeting with another member of the server team named Deoni (no idea how to spell that, so I apologize to him). The reason wasn’t anything to do with us, but rather that it was lunch time. So we went up to the kitchen where pocketkings has a set of full gourmet chefs cooking up a storm for lunches. Through some sort of legal loophole they charge 0.10 euros for each lunch (just to avoid counting the meals as benefits). The lunch consists of your choice of any or all of 3 main courses, a choice of salads and sides and dessert. And it changes every day. Sounds like if I end up there I’m gonna have to watch how much I eat!

After lunch I spent some time with Darse chatting about bot detection techniques, and then I had meetings with Chuck and Brendan who are both leaders of various teams. The meeting with Chuck felt a lot more like an interview since he was asking me some of the typical interview questions. He was quick to explain what he was trying to do though — he was trying to figure out how I would fit into the company, along with several other things like whether hiring me would be a good investment for the company since each employee requires a fair amount of training. I’m not too sure how well that conversation went, but it ended abruptly since I had to go talk to Brendan. That was a nice conversation — we talked about several things including what direction the company is going and what challenges they are going to face over the next little while.

I was a bit overwhelmed at this point having met so many people and having had some fairly intense discussions, but Darse had two more people for me to meet: Henry and Shawm who are members of the Biz-Int (business intellgence) team. This team is the one that makes decisions about what games to run, what the policy of the site should be, the marketing, game fairness, and all that sort of thing. So that conversation was pretty interesting since both Henry and Shawm play poker and we got a chance to talk about things like the man-machine poker match and stuff that is near and dear to my heart lately.

After that meeting, I relaxed for a bit before we headed out to dinner with several of the Biz-Int team to a high-falutin (yup, I used your term, Darse) restaurant called Divas. I felt a bit underdressed since I hadn’t dressed up for the interviews (if I had it would’ve been a bad move since the company isn’t like that). The staff at the restaurant asked to take our coats when we entered, the food was fancy, expensive and small-portioned, and they didn’t even serve beer! Still, it was a pleasant evening with lots of wine and we had more than enough food which admittedly was pretty tasty.

After dinner a bunch of us went down the block to an Irish pub to meet up with some of the server guys who were out having dinner to say goodbye to one of their members. So we sat down and I enjoyed my first pint of real Irish Guinness. It was pretty tasty, although to be honest I didn’t really know how to tell the difference from home. I guess I hadn’t had enough guinness in Edmonton to compare to it.

After dinner Diane and I caught a cab back to the hotel and fell into bed. It had been long day for both of us, although Diane got considerably more exercise than I did sitting around the office. I did decently for sleep that night although I was up and awake around 7am still wired and excited about the next day. I was considerably calmer than the previous night though since the first day of meetings went so well.

So we got up and grabbed our continental breakfast again and then I cabbed it into the office by myself this time. Diane had plans to meet up with Xan again to explore more of Dublin (I’m so glad that Xan did this for Diane so she didn’t have to be all lonely for two of the three full days there!).

The second day at the office was much less demanding than the first one. It seemed that most of the meetings with new people were over, so I sat down with Darse for a good chunk of the morning talking about bot-detection. I think I’ve even contributed something to his efforts … but we’ll see how that goes.

Before lunch I met up with another member of the team who I can’t remember the name of (sorry!). I enjoyed our conversation immensely, but I think part of the reason was just that I wasn’t repeatedly exposed to his name … and people who know me know how bad I am at absorbing names. In fact, I’m quite happy with how I managed with names while I was there! Anyways, we talked a bit about some of the not-directly-server-related topics that he was working on. He’s building tools that can abstract important subsets of the gigantic event stream coming in into various views on those events that can be used to do useful things. Stuff like viewing “hands” is difficult on the event stream without a tool to help you do that.

We had another tasty lunch, and then I sat down with Aaron for a little while to take a look at some of the actual code in the server. It’s a pretty intimidating system — but it’s nice that it actually has a fairly intuitive underlying design. It’s just that the implementation definitely has it’s quirks that make it a bit of a headache to deal with. So was pretty cool.

After that I kind of just sat around for the rest of the afternoon catching up a bit on some reading and hanging out around the server guys who were all working. We had dinner out planned with the server team, so I had to wait until after 6 before we left for dinner. It felt a bit weird not having people to meet then, but no one else had scheduled meetings with me and I didn’t really know what else to do.

So after waiting for awhile we left for dinner. After the goodbye evening the night before though, only 4 of us ended up at the restaurant. Still, it was a good time with the conversation touching all kinds of different topics from poker to various work things to holidays and even some office gossip!

Dinner went fairly late, but Diarmuid was kind enough to give me a lift back to the hotel where I met back up with Diane and heard about her day. And then we got some sleep so we could enjoy our explore Dublin day!

After sleeping in a decent amount (and missing the continental breakfast), we got in touch with Darse who was kind enough to organize the other people we knew and we left to meet up at St Stephen’s Green and wander around Dublin for awhile. After having a quick brunch (at 2:00pm) at the Croissenterie, and finally solving the bank machine giving us euros problem, we walked by several touristy things: Trinity College, Christ Church, Dublin Castle, Temple Bar, and another garden that I can’t remember the name of that had a statue of Oscar Wilde. We also stopped in at a cafe in Mark’s and Spencer (a department store), a couple of pubs (the Bull and Castle, and the Porterhouse), and eventually ended up going to dinner at Fives. (Lots of food and drink, if you hadn’t noticed!).

Aaron wanted to go play some poker that night and I was curious to check out a european card room so Diane kindly let me go play for awhile. She hung out with Xan, and Aaron’s wife Christine at Cafe En Seine, which is a nightclub close by the casino. Meanwhile Darse, Aaron and I bought casino memberships and headed inside to play some 1/2 pot limit hold’em. We played for a couple of hours, and both Aaron and I had really good sessions. Aaron made over 200 euro and I made over 240 euro! More details from that session on my own blog.

The ladies came and grabbed us and we shared a cab back to the hotel, saying goodbye to Darse, Xan, Aaron and Christine since our flight left the next day. It was a fun day of exploring, eating, drinking, and gambling! So thanks to all of them for making that possible.

The trip home was an ordeal, but not due to anything more than boredom on the flight home. You know it’s a long flight when you watch the first movie, have dinner, and try and sleep for awhile … wake up after what seemed like several hours only to find that there’s still four and a half hours left to go! But we made it back to snowy Edmonton in alright shape. JR and Shelly were kind enough to pick us up at the airport and drive us back into town despite some terrible driving conditions. We counted TWELVE cars in the ditch on the way back in … and there were still idiots speeding by despite the terrible road conditions.

So that was our trip. I think it went really well, but we’ll have to see what happens here. It sounds to me like if an offer is coming, it’ll be here within the next week. Wish me luck!

Morgan

The wedding is getting close, so here’s a quick update. Diane and I are now starting to pass out invitations. We’re hoping to be able to invite everybody who would like to come, but there are space considerations in the hall and we’re likely to hit the max there. Everyone is of course welcome to come to the ceremony. The space considerations are only on the reception hall. As we get replies, we’ll update our status and send out invites for spots that are freed up in the hall.

If you’ve already got your invitation, you might be wondering what the symbol on the cover is. It’s a Chinese symbol which means double happiness. It is a pretty common word used on Chinese wedding invitations, although Chinese wedding invitations almost always use red. Here’s a wikipedia page on the character for double happiness.

The plans are going smoothly, but there’s still lots of little details to do!

Morgan