Parental Political Poker

I made a deal with my parents. I promised not to give Barack Obama any more money if they didn't give John McCain any more money. Unfortunately, I think I got the worse end of the deal because they weren't going to give him that much, while I might be willing to give the limit to Barack. My dad mentioned that we could do mutual abstaining, but that doesn't really matter because both our states are solidly decided already. Maybe I can have Tracy give to Barack instead.

Judith Tierney

On Saturday Tracy's mother passed away. She had been fighting cancer for about a year and in the past couple of month she had gotten very weak. She was always kind to everyone and never said a bad word about anyone. She was an elementary school teacher for over twenty years in Three Rivers, Michigan. I'll remember her as someone who was always warm and welcoming to me, someone who cared deeply for her family, and someone who was loved by everyone.

Tracy and Lauren will be going home this weekend for the service next Wednesday. I'll be staying home to take care of Lucas.

The Future of Programming Languages

A co-worker and I got into a discussion about the new features of C++0x and I got to thinking about where we are going with programming languages. I think there's only so much farther that standard procedural or object oriented languages are going to go. The next thing is going to be a new wave of distributed computing programming languages, something that will have language features to support MapReduce and a new kind of parallel programming. Maybe it'll be Sawzall. I read the paper, but I have a hard time thinking in terms of how to write code with it. Hopefully whatever comes along won't require that much of a change in how we think of programming. I never really got the whole Lisp thing. I'll re-read up on Sawzall and see if I can better understand it the second time around.

Going to Aruba

I'm going to be headed to Aruba in late September. I won a poker tournament online at Ultimate Bet which will give me an entry to a $5,000+500 buyin event and $3,000 in travel money. I have been playing a lot of poker this year, so as a reward Ultimate Bet gave me a free seat to a poker tournament for this morning.

Tournament 1 was a satellite which if I placed in the top 20%, I'd get a seat into another tournament. About 1/3 of the people didn't show up for that tournament, so getting to the top %20 wasn't that hard. That won me a seat into another satellite.

Tournament 2 was another no limit hold'em satellite with a prize of 50 $8500 packages, so anyone placing in the top 50 gets to go to Aruba. I played a very good tournament, didn't get great cards, but picked my spots and all my hands held up and I did get some good cards when I needed them. It was a bit nerve racking near the end, because I was very close to the bubble. I played some of the tightest poker of my life, including folding AK to no bet, AK to one raise, QQ to a raise, reraise preflop. I'd never do some of those things if the payout structure was more like a standard tournament, but with the "all places pay the same" there's no need to try to accumulate chips beyond what you need to make the money, so you can play super conservative.

I'm excited to go. This will actually be my second time. About 5 years ago I had a similar experience, won a seat and went to aruba. I didn't get anywhere then, but it was still fun.

This year they are guaranteeing $4,000,000 in total prize pool and $1m to first place. So that means they are expecting at least 800 players at a $5,000 buyin. Wish me luck in September.

Facebook/Blog integration

I'm testing Simplaris Blogcast which will automatically update my facebook mini-feed when I post to my web site. Hopefully this works.