Become.com has put up a few bits of news on our search results when they are relevant. Try it out, it’s pretty good. The relevance is good, the coverage could be better. We’ve got some other exciting stuff coming up, so stay tuned.

Speaking of news. Here’s a bit that someone posted on irc the other day about Zombie Dogs, which are as bizarre as you might expect. I wonder how the right to life movement feels about these things.

And here’s a crazy huge fish that’s just amazing.

This weekend I went down to my cousins wedding reception in Philly. It was a very nice wedding except for the fact that we were two hours late. I had flown into NYC to visit my brother and we didn’t anticipate the traffic headed down so a 3 hour ride turned into 4+. But it was nice when we got there. It was a reception only because they’ve been married a few months, but they wanted to celebrate because the bride’s parents hadn’t seen her in 4 years because they live in the Czech Republic. All in all quite a fun event.

In an odd bit of small world coincidence, one of my cousin’s friends brought a date that I used to work with about 10 years ago. Rosaline Le and I worked together back in my days at Citibank, we were both in the same training program. She said she was now at IBM and we reminisced for a bit about where the other people were. I told her I kept in touch with a couple of them.

I glanced at the Espy nominations and here’s some of my quick thoughts while I’m in NYC for a wedding.

Best male athlete: Lance Armstrong, duh. No offense to Michael Phelps, Vijay Singh or Peyton Manning.

Best Championship performance: has to go to Curt Schilling.

Best record breaking performance: this one is tough. I like the Mariners of course so Ichiro gets solid marks, but I made money in fantasy football off of Peyton Manning so he gets my final vote. I could easily see the arguments for voting for the Pats or Pat Summit though. Pat Summit probably gets the best career award.

Best breakthrough performance: Sharapova has done well, but I think this is a slam dunk for Dwayne Wade.

We need some heavy yardwork done, so Tracy called a few companies for an estimate. The job was the same, yet the prices varied widely. Some were nearly 4x as much, for what I would guess is a 50 hours of work. It doesn’t take an economic genius to figure out that we’re going to hire the lowest priced company. And it almost certainly follows that they are going to hire undocumented workers(ie illegal immigrants) to do the work for them because I can’t imagine they would make money paying a full wage and benefits. On the one hand, I feel guilty about this but on the other hand the libertarian in me sees no problem with what I am doing. It’s what any capitalist would do, thus proving once again that it’s impossible to stop the force of free markets.

Which brings me to the corollary. Education is the best job protector. Thanks to my parents I was able to go to college without worrying about the costs. I wish everyone could be so lucky.

Dave is going to the world series fo poker next month with someone staking his full $10k buyin. After seeing this, Patri offered up some of his winnings. They are both are paying out the same rate of %50 of their returns.

Here’s a couple of interesting things.

All this swapping and buying and selling of players is a great idea for a determining value for poker players. If patri and dave do a normal swap for %10 of the $10k buyin($1k), if dave wins $100k, then patri would get $10k, and vice versa. It is a good way to lower variance. However, it assumes that both have an equal expected return. Patri made things much more interesting by offering to make non-par swaps with other players playing in the main event. So he might only offer %10 of his winnings for %5 of dave’s or some other agreed upon rate. This means you can figure out what someone else thinks of your play. If Patri offered his own %10 for Dave’s %5, then you could deduce that Patri thinks he is 1/2 as good as Dave. Makes things very interesting.

Dave told me that he’s bought a piece of of Bill Chen(and some other guy who he doesn’t know, but trusts Bill to know). Bill said that he was selling some of his winnings, but after a large amount of interest from people who wanted to invest in him, he decided to limit the amount he sold. This is a perfect opportunity for another secondary market in a limited supply of player shares. Dave thinks he could already resell the share he owns of Bill for a profit.

Someone want to create a derivatives market for individual players?

I forgot to mention that I saw Revenge of the Sith and was unimpressed. It wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t great either, and early reviews had gotten my hopes up about how good it would be. Dave pointed out that the most important part of the whole Star Wars series is the conversion of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader and it was glossed over in a very disappointing way. The special effects were good and the plot itself wasn’t bad, but overall I was just hoping for more.

Before my vacation we put up dynamic search suggestions on become.com and they have been getting very positive reviews. Try them out and tell me what you think. Just type a part of a query into the search box and see what happens. When we put them out, I was kind of worried about the amount of traffic it would generate, because they make an HTTP request for each character you type. But it isn’t as bad as I thought. The hard part of my job for this project was designing for scalability and redundancy while still maintaining simple interfaces. Other people did the extensive UI and algorithms work.

Breaking news in the computer world is that Apple is going to offer Macs on Intel based chips after a long exclusive relationship with IBM’s PowerPC based architecture. For those with a short memory, back when Steve Jobs was the CEO of NeXT, they offered a version of NeXT on intel machines. There will be some sort of emulation so that both older and newer machines can run the same software, this will be similar to the transition from Motorola 68000 architecture to PowerPC. I’m not sure how I feel about this, it’s a good thing I guess. I’m hoping there will be better support and interoperability between other Intel devices and peripherals. Given Jobs’ history of interoperability, I doubt it’ll happen. I’m sure it’ll be another closed architecture that will appeal only to the Mac faithful. On the plus side, if it’s as closed as I expect, linux will still look good because it will have better openness and device support.

To get to Utah, we flew into Las Vegas because flying into St. George was significantly more expensive, and Tracy was kind enough to allocate some time on the last day for me to play poker in Vegas. So while she walked around in the Vegas heat, I sat down for a few hours at the brand new Wynn hotel. The poker room is very nice, as nice as the Bellagio, which is the gold standard for poker rooms. They have an excellent waiting list system. There’s a large plasma display with all the games and players, tables and lists. They had probably 30 tables or so, and they were spreading a good variety of games. No Limit holdem at 1/2, 2/5, 5/10, and 10/20. Then in limit holdem they had 4/8, 8/16, 15/30, and 40/80. I sat down in a tougher than average 1/2 nlhe game for about 4-5 hours and played a little too loose and lost $122. The celebrity table had Daniel Negreanu and Barry Greenstein playing 500/1000 limit holdem. Apparently Daniel has an open challenge where he will play anyone any game heads up for $100k winner take all and Barry had taken him up on it. That’s an impressive display of self confidence if nothing else. It makes me wonder how big his bankroll is.

We just got back from a great vacation in Utah. We spent 2 days at Zion National Park, then 3 days at Bryce, and then 2 days back at St. George. Both Zion and Bryce are really beautiful and the weather was great for hiking. Not too sunny, but warm and pleasant. The last two days we relaxed at a very nice luxury spa resort place in St. George. I’ll put up a link to pictures when Tracy gets them up. But expect a lot of pictures of rocks unless she filters them.