One of the things we unfortunately missed out on in our move to Ireland was the Edmonton Fringe Festival — an event that we’ve faithfully attended at least a couple of shows every year for the past couple of years. We’ve had some good memories of watching shows like the One Man Star Wars Trilogy, The Great Pretenors, and Rainer Hersch’s Victor Borge.

So we were rather enthused to find that Dublin had its very own fringe festival soon after our arrival. On Saturday, we checked out a show called All in the Timing which was playing in the theatre in Bewleys. This restaurant was the first place we ate on our first night in Dublin. We shared that meal with Darse, Xan, Mike and Marja.

All in the Timing was a fun show. They did about five short-ish sketches of varying amusement. The first of which was probably my favourite where they did a sketch similar in style to the improv game “new choice”. The scene started with a woman sitting at a table in a restaurant reading a book and is approached by a man who asks if the seat is taken. He makes several missteps and gets several bad responses before finally getting to sit in the seat across from the woman. After each misstep, a bell rings and they go back in time to redo some part of the scene. It was quite humorous throughout the sketch.

The did a couple other neat sketches including one where a woman comes in to be taught a new universal language. The man she sees talks in a weirdly bastardized version of English, using other english or nonsense words in place of other english words. As the scene progressed the woman becomes fluent in this new language and the two spout several joyous sentences of this new language that sounded remarkably like ridiculous lyrics to some well known musicals. It was quite a fun scene.

In another scene, the actors did a very short skit involving people meeting by random chance at a bakery. They then did a several song musical using just the words used in that skit repeated in a musical way. It made a weird sort of sense, and I think was quite a bit more enjoyable in experience but a bit hard to explain.

So that was our first Dublin fringe show. Tonight we saw our second show which was a circus/burlesque show called La Clique. It was a bit on the racy side, but definitely a thoroughly enjoyable show.

Highlights from the show included:

• Two British men in suits who did several feats of strength including holding each other up. One man stood on the other’s head, one man used the other’s legs like they were gymnastic rings, you know, simple stuff like that.
• A woman gets four hula hoops going around her body at once in various forms.
• A double-jointed rubber man calling himself “Captain Frodo” contorts himself through 2 tennis racquets: a 12 inch one and a 10 inch one.
• A man in a bathtub full of water whirls himself in the air using two long straps suspended from the ceiling. This was probably my favourite — the guy did the whole thing choreographed to music, and included a jaw dropping manoeuver where he spun the straps around his arms and legs to ascend to near the ceiling, but stopping at intervals to flash a pose timed perfectly with the music. The manoeuver was incredible for strength and flashiness to begin with, but timed with the music it was absolutely amazing.
• Ursula Martinez performed this little magic trick (warning: nudity, NSFW).
• The rubber man returned after the intermission to stack a series of buckets on top of a piano while balancing on top of them. Each bucket was smaller than the previous one until he was down to a small coffee can which he proceeded to sit on and then tuck his feet behind his head. I don’t want to know how many times he’s attempted this trick in practice and fallen.

In between these, there were several fun bits in between. A guy calling himself the Queen of the show (because he’s a big Queen fan) juggled and rode a unicycle to some Queen songs and provided a bunch of entertaining banter. “Captain Frodo” used a saw as a musical instrument in a song that also involved a piano, an accordian and some little bells.

All in all, an enjoyable show! The fringe continues for the next few days, but we might not make it out again since the upcoming weekend looks a bit busy.

One last thing before I head for bed here. I finally caught up with photos from our recent treks. Have a look if you are so inclined!

Morgan

Lately, Diane and I have been following a series of videos called the Crash Course. Be warned — the future that Chris paints in these videos is more than a little disturbing. While primarily focused on the United States, many of the things he talks about also apply to most of the world’s economic systems. One of the things it has done is challenge my base assumption that the world will continue to get better as we live our lives. Now that’s a pretty general statement, but I think a lot of us can say that our standard of living has gotten better over the last several years. But the crash course brings up some facts that disturb this rosy picture, and make me wonder just how bad the future could get.

One of the things that’s driven home to me about the watching Chris’ videos is that the nature of exponential growth is very difficult for the human mind to get its head around in an intuitive fashion. You’ve got to spend some time figuring out good examples to help show you how difficult it is to deal with problems that are escalating exponentially. There’s an excellent series of youtube videos that a professor at the University of Colorado did concerning the problems of exponential growth here. It’s long, but worth watching.

In those videos, the professor presents an extremely interesting example. Suppose you have a test tube full of food and put one bacteria in it at 11:00. The bacteria doubles every minute, and the life cycle of the system is one hour so when the clock strikes 12:00, there is no food left. So at 11:01 there are 2 bacteria, and at 11:02 there are 4 bacteria, and so on. One question to ask is: when is the bottle half full? The answer is 11:59, because in that last step there needs to be enough room for the bacteria to double to make the bottle full. To drive the point home further — when is the bottle 1/4 or 1/8 full? Well just 11:58 and 11:57 respectively!

You can add on one additional piece to that. Suppose that the bacteria somehow are able to find 3 more test tubes full of food. This represents a HUGE discovery of resources – fully 3 times the initial supply! If the bacteria move into the new test tubes, how much time has this bought them? Just two minutes. The first to use one new test tube, and the second to use the remaining two test tubes. Wow. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make the connection that the earth is kind of like a test tube — a finite area with finite resources, and human kind is growing in numbers … exponentially.

I remember being taught in elementary school that population growth was one of the humankind’s biggest challenges. How did this get lost from the public eye?

Humankind has made a habit of ignoring problems until they become annoying enough to solve. The problem with this approach is the problems we’re going to be facing are of the exponential nature — and when we notice it enough to be annoying, it’ll probably be too late. I might even be too late now … I don’t know if anyone can say for sure. But it sure seems like a good idea to try and do something about it!

After watching these videos, I’ve started to get a real urge to go buy some gold and keep it close for the years to come. I wonder how far humankind will fall when we run out of easily exploitable fossil fuels? It’s a little scary to think about just how much of our daily lives is dependent on energy. Oh it’s not just hot water in taps and power for our lights and all that. It’s the energy required to get us the food we need and to build the many things that make our lives easier so we have time to do more than just survive. Every time I see or read about earlier times, my most common recurring thought is “wow, people worked hard then”.

I’m not saying we’re headed back in time necessarily. Humans have progressed to be able to do some pretty amazing things — and some of the things we’ve learned to do may help us adapt to the difficult time ahead. But one thing is pretty sure: the next couple decades are going to be … interesting.

Morgan

Morgan and I have always had it comparatively easy, and this move is no exception.

It turns out that Irish summers are lovely – it’s been rainy and cool and cloudy and sunny without going much above a comfortable “room” temperature. All this temperate goodness while the folks at home have been cooking in those bouts of +30-35C we’ve been getting in sunny Alberta these last few years.

The winters here are supposed to be windy and rainy and generally grey and miserable so I’ve heard, which means that the middle of summer is probably the best time to begin/end a year lease (the norm here nowadays) so you can move your stuff in comfort if you so choose. It’s certainly the best time to move stuff in Canada anyway.

Once we took up tenancy in our rented suite, we had to figure out how to turn the thermostat high enough to heat up our boiler and get hot water (we actually thought there had been an oversight at the gas company for a little while before our neighbours told us the secret), and we were without the convenience of readily heated water for a day or two. Nothing that can’t be satisfactorily overcome with an electric kettle of course, but say it were the power instead of the gas, or both. (And don’t even talk to me about the crash course.) I am much better equipped to deal with that sort of thing in the summer, when natural heat and light abound (though here in Ireland they only abound so much) and I’m in a happier state because of it.

Not only in the smaller details has the timing been right but on a bigger scale as well. Both Morgan and I were able to get up and move very easily: we have no children, our parents are in good health, our siblings are doing well. In fact, Morgan’s sister was able to move into Morgan’s apartment and their parents were willing to store stuff for us, making moving even easier. Morgan had finished his contract with the U of A and managed to stay until the Second Man v. Machine match, which was certainly a defining moment in the history of the U of A CPRG (Computer Poker Research Group), and a high note on which to leave… at least officially. For my part I feel I could have contributed long term at the U of A (my team was the Canola Research Group), but I think it was good to leave while I was more replaceable. `Cause really, who can argue with seeing the world while one has the life and health to do it!

The last reason (okay, next-to-last) this transition has been so smooth is that scores of folks have done this before us. Many through the ages have traveled and settled in leaner circumstances than this, and of course there are the friendly, accessible ones who very recently made the exact same trip. There is one couple in our building, newlywed like us, another couple down the road, who’ve been so encouraging, and, in particular, Darse and Alexandra have been there for us every step of the way. We probably wouldn’t be here now if not for them.

And the last reason (I promise) is that we’ve got each other. We may disagree and do a little squabbling and squawking, but in the end it’s nice to have a partner with whom to share and recall the experiences. It’s nice to have Morgan to point things out to and share the stories of the day with and have him show me stuff and help me… and cuddle me when the day is done.

Diane

Sorry for the lack of updates, folks. Diane and I have been pretty busy the last week as we get settled and acclimatized. It’s late here, but I’m wired and still wide awake so I think I’ll try and catch you up with what we’ve been up to this week.

I forgot to mention in my last post that not only did we go to the Powerscourt gardens with Darse and Xan, we also climbed up Killiney hill. I hope to get photos of both the gardens and the hill soon, but that probably won’t be for a day or two at least. Thankfully, that’s all I’ve got for a backlog of photos now so I’m almost caught up!

So what’s happened since then? Well we got a bank account open, and it looks like it was in time to get paid into, which is nice. We’re awfully grateful for Darse and Xan’s help and advice. It’s helped smooth our transition into the country waaay more than we expected. It’s almost been too easy on us.

We’re now mostly settled in our new place, although there’s been some hiccups. We had to go without hot water for a few days until we figured out the system. Apparently if the thermostat is turned off, the boiler doesn’t turn on. It took us a week to figure that out. I don’t know why it’s done that way, but my conclusion is that the Irish don’t like hot showers in the summer (when the heat isn’t on in the house). Weird.

The other couple of things we’re waiting for is our laundry machine doesn’t appear to work, and we could really use some curtains. Our place has some pretty nice big windows, but they aren’t exactly good for privacy when we want it. Other than that, we’ve got internet, and pretty soon we’ll have a bank account with my first month’s pay in it which we’ll use as a time to start picking up things that our place is missing.

The week pretty much flew by. At work, I’ve been tossed in to start working on some features already. The codebase is huge and a little confusing, but I can tell that this job will be pretty rewarding. I feel like I’m learning at a pretty good pace, and hopefully they’re satisfied with how I’m doing so far.

On Wednesday evening, there was a party at a bar one station away from our place. I left work late and met Diane there, and we hung out with a bunch of pocket kings employees, had dinner and a few drinks. It was a pretty fun night. It was trivia night, but the guy asking the questions was from the company. So that was a bit neat. As usual, I was pretty useless for any trivia knowledge, but it was fun to be a part of it.

Thursday night there was an office poker game and geeky-games night. I played in the poker tournament, but got knocked out before the money. I felt I played alright, although I think I made a few errors in a couple places. Diane came by too and played a couple of board games with Darse and some of the other pocket kings guys.

So I think that about catches you up with the activities from my point of view. At some point soon, hopefully Diane gets a chance to share her little adventures.

Before I finish off here, I just wanted to jot down some general notes about our experiences here so far:

• The weather here has been pretty good in general, although there’s been a lot of rain. In fact, record amounts of rain. There was a day where we ventured out of our place and on our way to the mall we got absolutely dumped on. The streets were flooding and people were drenched through.
• The Irish are much more dependent on street markings that Canadians. It’s something I never really thought of, but because of the large amount of snow in Edmonton, the street markings can’t be the sole markings for major roads. But here, where snow is rare and doesn’t stick around, they can afford to put the markings right on the road.
• Also, the roads here all seem in amazingly good repair. What I realized is that Dublin must not suffer from the same pothole problem that Edmonton has to deal with. Since the temperature here is so temperate, and there are days that the temperature drops below freezing, the freeze-thaw cycle that causes pot holes isn’t an issue.
• The LUAS is an amazing transportation system. It is fast, reliable, and they’ve built a tremendous amount in a short time. It opened in 2004, and in just 5 years, it’ll have networked an amazing number of stations. By this time next year or so, they’ll have added another 10 or so stations — which should take me straight to work.
• Speaking of work, I love my job. The work is good, and they treat us very well. The daily lunches are fantastic. Gourmet quality food, and tons of choice and variety every day. Lunches cost all of €0.10, and breakfasts are free. For breakfast, the kitchen bakes fresh croissants that are absolutely amazing.
• My spot in the office is a “cubicle” in the server team area, and I have a very nice view of a small duck pond, and some distant mountain. On the downside, there’s a children’s daycare right underneath my window, so for most of the day I can hear the screams of some very powerful little voices. It is a bit annoying, although I’m told that you stop noticing them after awhile.
• When it rains here, not only do worms wriggle out onto the sidewalks like in Edmonton, but they are joined by snails and slugs — both of which are quite sizable in some cases. It’s a bit weird!
• Everything here is done to a smaller degree it seems. When Diane and I went to the supermarket, it was a bit weird not being able to bulk-buy kleenex, and shampoo, and those sorts of things in the quantity we’re used to. It’s rather interesting to me. Another example is the pop cans here are 330ml instead of 355ml like in north america. Not too sure why the differenece.

That’s enough for now. There’ll be lots more to come as we experience new things. We’re not too sure what’s on for this weekend, but I’m sure we’ll be up to a little bit of fun stuff.

Oh a note about pictures. The gallery link at the top of the page and on the right side of the blog are a link to a cached copy of my flickr photos. If you don’t see new photos that I mention, it’s because I forgot to go click the refresh cache button. You will be able to see photos I mention on my flickr photostream (also linked on the right). There’s probably a better solution that that, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

Morgan

Today was an exciting day!

But first, let me talk a bit about yesterday. Our goals for yesterday were to go into the office and pick up some paperwork that I needed to prove that I was indeed an employee, and some information on where to go for some important government paperwork. After chatting with the HR lady for awhile and dropping in to say hi to Darse and Aaron, we took our new papers and went to look at a couple of places in the neighbourhood called Cabinteely. They were actually really nice — I really liked the layouts of both the places. The problem for us was that while they were really quite close to work for me, they weren’t all that well connected to the rest of the city. It would probably mean a 45 minute bus ride into downtown, which means if Diane found a job in downtown or somewhere where she had to transfer through downtown, that wouldn’t be too pleasant for her. Plus there was limited shopping options for us carless folk.

It kind of tore at us a little though knowing how nice the places were. They were totally valid options and maybe in a year we will have to reevaluate if there are still apartments there available. Maybe by then we’ll get a car (not sure how likely that is).

We had another apartment to see in the afternoon, but couldn’t find it due to the map on the website being wrong. It was a little unfortunate, but we didn’t mind the chance to return to the apartment early and relax for a little while. Having now seen two very valid options for apartments (the first one we saw the previous day at Hazelbrook and the one we saw in Cabinteely) we figured we had a bunch of good information. The other good piece of information we got was we met someone who was living in the hazelbrook building we saw who works for FT too, and got a pretty good review of the building from him. So we debated for awhile about the options and eventually decided that the apartment at Hazelbrook suited our options better by a fair margin.

So today was a big day for us. We got up early and headed to the An Garda Síochána — the Irish Police, to get out GNIB (Garda National Immigration Bureau) cards. This lets us stay in the country for a year at a time, since our passports were only stamped for 3 months when we entered the country at the airport. With this, we needed to pay a €100 fee which I had trouble paying with my credit card. Apparently having a smartcard chip in it causes it to not be swipeable, and since I don’t have a PIN for it, I couldn’t use it. Argh. Fortunately, Diane brought her non-chip-enabled credit card so we used that to pay for my fee. We left the office with our shiny new GNIB cards. Woohoo!

The next thing on our list was to go get PPS numbers, which are the Irish equivalent of the Canadian SIN numbers. This involved going to a different building to stand in line for and fill out some more paperwork — which we did. This time no fee was involved. After Diane and I both applied for our numbers, we continued on to the rental agency and met with the agent we met on the first day. We payed our €500 deposit to apply and he faxed off my employer letter to the landlord and that was that! We had applied for a place to stay.

So now we’re hanging out in the apartment. We just got a call from the agent and the landlord has okayed us so we’ll be signing the lease on Tuesday, probably in the afternoon. (Monday is a holiday here apparently). So with a little luck, we’ll be ready to move into our new place sometime in the middle of next week and will have a bank account setup for sometime near the end of next week! I’m pretty sure this is record time for someone moving as far as we had, and not having setup anything prior to arriving. We couldn’t have done this without the help of Darse and Alexandra who have been an amazing amount of help. We’ll definitely try to be as helpful to the people that follow us ;-)

Morgan

Sorry about not getting up a blog entry yesterday. Yesterday morning we had to move hotels so we were busy with that, and blogging about the previous day kind of got pushed to the wayside.

Alright, so where to start? Sunday morning felt very similar the past 3 days. We got up around 8, and headed down to the expo for around 9. This morning we had a decision to make. Was there any reason for us to try and modify the bot in any way before the 4th and final live match went down? We argued for awhile about it, but eventually came down to a consensus. The bot wasn’t going to chance much. We got the booth setup, and got to chat with a couple of media people who were shooting video for the discovery channel. They would do several interviews throughout the day, including the players IJay Palansky and Matt Hawrilenko. So before the match started, IJay went through a pre-game interview and then got sent up to the hotel room to start his half of the match around 11am.

At around 1pm, Matt arrived and he went through the same pre-game interviews before sitting down to take on the bot. It’s interesting watching only half of a duplicate match — there is so much luck to the cards that you really have to try and think about how the other player would have played against the bot on the other side of the cards to see whether you’re getting more money or not.

To make a long story short, we won. We won by a large margin which is probably statistically significant. Our analysis tools say that Matt broke even with the bot and that IJay got crushed — which wasn’t so surprising to us since IJay said he was going to try and change his style. There are a limited number of poker players who can change their styles and still not be exploitable, and this was a case where the player couldn’t do that.

So this was the year that Man fell to the machine in heads-up limit texas hold’em. No doubt there will be many who will want to challenge the bot now to see if they can beat it. But I guess I won’t be with the group anymore to see those first hand.

The group of us packed up our stuff and got ready to celebrate. We had already purchased tickets to the Cirque Du Soleil show called O, but we had some time to kill before the 10:30 showing we had tickets for. We wandered over to the Bellagio with the aim of finding some dinner before the show and eventually found ourselves at a pretty fancy restaurant there called Senshi. The place was quite nice, and I was a bit amazed at how deep the restaurant went back. The place was quite a bit more pricey than places I’m used to, but it was a celebratory dinner! I had a glass of red wine with my meal of a huge hunk of new york style steak. The thing was massive … like nearly 2 inches thick, and it was probably the best steak I’ve ever had.

After dinner, we went back to enter the Cirque theatre, and spread ourselves out across the theatre. We ordered tickets pretty late, so none of the 12 people in our party could sit together, but we still all got tickets! For those that don’t know, the O Cirque show is their water one. The stage is a big pool of water, but the stage was *very* dynamic. They could raise the depth of the pool to very shallow or even make a floor overtop of the water. There was parts where only parts of the stage were a pool, but not others. It was fascinating just watching the stage change configurations throughout the show.

The Cirque performers were pretty incredible too. There were all manner of different tricks and feats of strength and flexibility they did throughout the show. There was probably too much going on for me to remember everything, but here’s some highlights I found cool. To start the show, the curtains in front of the stage were whisked away in an incredibly entertaining fashion. I can’t even really describe it except that it was awesome. Two trapeze artists shared the same trapeze for some pretty incredible moves (included one holding the other with just one arm). The three people-launching dive platforms that they used to send the Cirque divers high into the air and with little-to-no splash at the end. I wonder if this might be one place olympic divers go. A set of 4 creepily flexible women dressed in red formed all kinds of human pyramid type formations. Two people dressed in red were whisked around the stage by what looked like long strands of red fabric. They were flown up in the air and around the stage — it was really fun to watch!

All in all, the show was pretty incredible. There sure is a lot to see though, and I’m pretty sure I missed some cool things. Between being pretty tired from the last 4 days of competition and lack of sleep, I found it a bit hard to follow everything at the late showing. Still, I think it was a fitting way to hang out. After the show was over we returned to the hotel where we ended up playing poker until something silly like 5 in the morning. This was just a fun game in one of the hotel rooms, but it ended up going pretty late.

I gotta run now to hang out with people, but I’ll get myself caught up here soon!

Morgan

I don’t have a lot of time, but I wanted to get something put up here about our first day here. Yesterday was a hectic day, which surprised me a litte. I kind of expected it to be a bit more relaxed.

After I left that last arrival post, we headed out to get some food at a pretty late hour. We only found one restaurant tha was open called Sau Paulo, and since we were tired and hungry we decided to stop looking for any other options. The food was not too bad, but not incredible. It was cheap though. After dinner we retired to our respective rooms to collapse around 2:00am.

The next morning we got up around 8:00 to have some breakfast at the same restaurant as the previous night. We had walked by the buffet, but ruled that it was too expensive for just breakfast. Funnily enough, several of the people ordered orange juice when they were prompted by the waitress, only to later find out that the orange juice was a hefty $5 a glass!

After breakfast we returned to our rooms to setup a full test of all the software and pieces we needed to run the man-machine match. This was our big testing day, so we needed to make sure everything worked as expected. The testing took us all day. It took way longer than it maybe should’ve to set up the two sides of the duplicate match. We then had Duane and I play through a duplicate match and we got slaughtered by our own bot. Hmm.

After the test was over we went through a list of all the things that needed doing. The list was long, but we’re lucky in that we have a lot of people to assign tasks too. We could never do all the things we’re trying to do last year when we had 5 less people. During the test match, Mike B had spent some time setting up the stoxpoker booth and testing our client with the TVs to make sure that it displayed properly. The team then moved down to the expo floor to run a quick 30-hand test match on the expo floor. It seemed to work okay, although that too took longer than I thought it might.

After finally getting everything wrapped up, we went to dinner at Rub BBQ which was a pretty awesome place to eat. There was a great deal of food. I probably shouldn’t have eaten quite as much as I did, but it was incredibly tasty. Mmm, pulled pork and beef brisket.

Dinner took a little while, but after we were done we returned to our rooms to work out some of the last remaining details we needed to for the next day. Our room was up until around 2:00am and I think the other room had a similar sleep schedule.

So we’re up fairly early this morning to tidy our room a bit since our room will be the site of the hotel room side of the duplicate match. Then we go down to setup the hardware for the match so we can be ready to go at 11:00 am when the expo opens!

Wish us luck! Match 1 of 4 live matches begins today! Polaris is already tied 1-1 with humans so far.

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

We’re going to have to visit Morgan’s grandparents more often, even though they have moved to far away Rimbey. Morgan and I took a sunny drive out there on a Saturday several weeks ago and had a very pleasant time. We’ve been back since for Morgan’s grandpa’s 80^th birthday (!!!) and to help celebrate 55 long years of wedded bliss for him and Morgan’s grandma, but perhaps we ought to make that a special post all its own. This one’s from sometime in February…

We arrived at lunchtime and Morgan’s grandparents took us to a local restaurant called Monterey Jack’s. The owner/chef (whose name really is Jack) did his time at NAIT and has built a menu that is fairly extensive by small town standards and very reasonably priced. Not only did he serve us himself, but he offered various off-the-menu options, like grapefruit-and-something dressing for my salad (I don’t know what was in it, but it was great). The experience was as refreshing as the salad – with the small number of potential customers in his area, I guess Jack has to impress everybody to get repeat business and word-of-mouth advertising. Apparently it’s working. You’ll have to try the crème brulee cheesecake if you are ever in Rimbey!

You’ve got to love grandparents – it seemed that no sooner had we made it back to the house full of chicken cordon sandwiches than Morgan’s grandma sat us down for some of her uber-healthy bran+orange+raisin+cranberry+flax muffins, all pre-cut too. Food was kind of a theme for the day. There were certainly more colours on my plate at dinner than I’ve seen in my days of cooking for one – pot roast, spuds, gravy, corn, spinach salad with all the fixings, fresh grandma-made buns… and ice cream for dessert! Morgan and I are pretty sure we weigh about five pounds more that we did at the beginning of that weekend. We came home with freshly baked cookies and muffins, and if we had stayed the night, a hot batch of cinnamon buns could have found its way into our happily stretched tummies.

We did find time for a few things besides eating. We went over bits of the ceremony and vows with Morgan’s grandpa, who has agreed to marry us and who had to get a special one-day marriage conducting permit just for June seventh. We took the tour of the estate and put some holes in the walls for shelves, and then we played a game of “Murder” which is kind of like “Trouble”, but better. It was pretty tempting to stay and eat cinnamon buns and hide the measuring tapes and see the organ at the church on Sunday morning, but eventually we made our way back along the snowy roads to the familiar anonymity of the big city. We’ll definitely have to go back soon!

Diane

I had a chance to go out to Vancouver to visit my sister a few weeks ago. We rode around the city on the bus and took in the sights… and food that Van had to offer. The weather was fine, with not too many rainy periods and even a few hours of blue sky!Carrie has gotten lucky with a really nice little townhouse with good landlords and roommates who call her to find out where she is if she isn’t home on time, which is really nice of them. I also got to meet Trio, who is a very pretty grey striped cat.

We spent the mornings sleeping or reading and making porridge for breakfast – I discovered that the girls have quite a large collection of books that appeal to me between them, which they very kindly shared.

We did the most important things first – a walk on the beach and a trip to the cupcake store downtown by the harbour where they have the international fireworks competitions. Those little cupcakes are expensive, but very fun with all the different flavours they have. Carrie was also adamant that she wanted to take me to try some fancy hot chocolate at a place which is conveniently located right beside the cupcake shop. Care had some creamy milk chocolate, and I had dark “mexican” hot chocolate with some spicy cayenne or other pepper in it – very tasty!

Carrie took me to the site where she was a movie extra for a few days – she was ten feet from Keanu Reeves and some other girl. It was a pretty non-descript lot – I wonder how it was chosen.

On Friday night we all went down to Granville Island to watch some Theatresports. The improv was some of the best I’ve seen in a long time. The actors were experienced and totally on fire, and we all appreciated a chance to laugh. My favorite skit was built around a squeaky spot that one of the actors had found in the floor of the stage. It reminded me how much fun I have at improv nights – I’ll have to try and make it out again soon! Afterward, we went to a tapas place by the entrance to Granville Island called The Cat’s Meow for their sweet potato fries. I had some crab cakes that were really good too.

The next day Care and I went back again for the market. I really love it there, even though it’s crowded beyond my liking. I like to see vendors selling directly to their customers, and there are so many fresh and exciting products to be had. Carrie and I munched on some turkey sausage and rosemary bread with herbed butter and strolled from shop to shop. We visited a dive shop, a stationary store, a store that sold natural dyeing supplies…

I felt I had to show Carrie a restaurant that Morgan and I had found in the summer called Memphis Blues. There’s a couple of them in Vancouver, but the only one I’ve been to is on East Broadway. The “Memphis Feast” only comes to about $30 or $35 and you get a year’s supply of meat with bbq sauce and cornbread. Morgan’s skillet cornbread is much better, I think, but I love the pulled pork. Two times I’ve been, and two times I’ve left with a considerably large doggie bag. Ah, meat.

Carrie’s roomy lent us her car, a cute little Honda called “Josh”, to do a grocery shop on Sunday morning, and I got some split green peas and sausage so we could boil up a mess o’ comfort food. You could stand a spoon up in it – a real big spoon!

Well, there was even more to do – we tried on potential bridesmaids’ dresses and found a style Carrie liked and played with hairstyles for me. It’s been a while since I had my hair in curlers. We made some tasty cookies and Care opened birthday presents from home. Carrie’s roommate drove us out to Deep Cove and we walked around on the dock and ate some sushi in a warm little place nearby. Mmm, west coast sushi!

Eventually, it was time for Carrie to get to rehearsal and me to head back to the airport. Unfortunately, I never made it to a runthrough of Wedding of the Year, but I did have plenty of time to admire the artwork displayed in the Van International. The stone carving is lovely, and the whalebone work is actually pretty imaginative. I couldn’t do it, that’s for sure.

Anyway, it’s business as usual for me again, but I have enjoyed my excursions to the coast the last little while. That makes 3 Vancouver trips for me in the last 12 months.