Ben Folds is a Genius

This is awesome. If you don’t like this you don’t like music.

Ben Folds does Doctor Dre

Yeh, I’m Agnostic

I’ve started reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I have only read the first two chapters. Already I have found a lot of arguments (especially against fundamentalist religion) that I have thought of myself in my own reasoning when thinking about this subject.

However, I think that (so far), Dawkins has written in too much of an aggressive tone. On the other hand, its refreshing to see an atheist who will back their believes as hard as most religious people do. He encourages readers of the book to not be ashamed of their believes. I think that a lot more of the population are atheists (or at least Agnostic) then what census figures might indicate. They are too afraid (or lazy) to admit it.

The first thing that I was impressed with was how he has gone about his arguments. Treating every one as if it was a science experiment. Giving all the background evidence (of both sides) and looking at it with skeptics eyes. I believe everything must be looked at through skeptics eyes, including normal science. Unfortunately the side effect of his great writing (and the fact he is a great scientist), is the fact he uses really big fucking words. Needless to say, English wasn’t my strongest subject in school. So Wikipedia / Dictionary.com has been a good help for me.

I think the reason I was drawn to reading this book was the fact the Dawkins is an evolutionist. This is one of the most interesting subjects to me, because I (like a lot of the people this book angers) too would like to know how and why we are all here. Just because that question can be easily answered using religion, doesn’t mean that I am going to jump on that bandwagon just because it might put my mind at ease. “Someone else has figured this out and believed it for 2000 years. I’ll just run with that”. I hate that people can be happy with other people’s believes without having looked into alternate answers (or questions) for themselves. “If I was born into Christian family then thats what I have to be because A. Its all I know and B. It will disappoint my parents if I choose to think freely”. This is disgusting in my opinion.

Another thing that is mentioned at the start of the book is the different variations of believes. So for example, I considered myself to be an atheist before I started reading this book. However, I learned that I’m actually Agnostic. I’m not ready to rule a God out 100%. As you can’t rule out the existence of something absolutely. While this might seem that I’m sitting on the fence on the subject, its not. Just as I’m not ruling out the existence of aliens. I think its highly unlikely that they are visiting us every day. But if a UFO landed right in front of me now and aliens walked out, I would go “Wow there really was aliens.” The fact that religious people will say “Its the 100% truth that my version of God is correct” is so far fetched that it annoys me consistently.

Hopefully there will be more subjects to blog about as I continue through the book.

Marathon Des Sables

I have created a new category in my blog called “Things to do before I die”. Basically its just a wish list for (mostly) extreme things that I think would be cool to do before I cark it.

This isn’t really a list for other people to view. I’m just using my blog as a place to list these things so I don’t forget them.

The first addition to the list is Marathon Des Sable.

I realise this is a pretty hardcore race. I also have never ran a marathon. I do consider myself a good long distance runner though. I’m not the fastest runner. But I seem to be able to hold a steady pace for basically as long as I want.

So for this to be achievable I will have to first run a half marathon and then a full one.

I heart Rugby League

Well finally the NRL season is upon us. My Broncos have the premiership for another year so as long as we make the finals this year I will be happy. Getting another grand final win will be a very tough assignment this year as the talent in the NRL is really spread evenly. No one else has done it since the Broncos in the 90’s.

After my shithouse effort last year in the tipping comp I thought I’d go one better and start a fantasy team on www.dreamteam.com.au. This isn’t the best structured fantasy league out there. However its easy to use and the way they have structured the points system is good for watching a game and knowing how your players are going as it happens. Here is my team for the first week.

Forwards
Parker, C
Tongue, A
Fitzgibbon, C
Ross, B
Smith, C
Marshall, B

Halves
Johns, A
Thurston, J

Centres
Tahu, T
Tonga, W

Backs
El Masri, H
Minichiello, A
Rogers, M

Bench
Hindmarsh, N
Hodgson, B
Hunt, K
Lyon, J

The points system is heavily tilted towards tacklers and goal kicking. So I tried to cram as many goal kicking forwards into my side as possible. The bench players don’t get you any points. However they can be swapped into your side whenever you like for free. You only get to trade one player per round (from outside your squad) without penalty. I had Hindmarsh on the bench ready for when he comes back from injury.

The first round of NRL had so many good games, that I actually had an erection about how good this season is going to be. So many close games. Plus, Andrew Johns got smashed which any Queenslander worth anything would be smiling about. It pained me to have him in my fantasy side. But he does kick a lot of goals.

Well everything that could go wrong with my side, has. My expensive goal kicking Corey Parker dislocated a wrist at the start of the game. Thurston missed a few more goals then I would have liked. Johns got knocked out 3 minutes in. Tahu did fuck all in his game along with Tonga. For some fucked up reason Matt Rogers (one of my best buys) isn’t even kicking for the Titans. Benji Marshall was surprisingly quiet as well. Now you might say, “Well Tongue, El Masri, Ross and Smith played well”. And you’d be right. What you didn’t know before you said such a stupid thing was the fucktard I’m competing against in this little comp has all those players as well. On top of that, my centre Lyon who I put on the bench had an awesome game getting 2 tries, 3 goals and 15 tackles.

After this round is finished I will have 3 injured players in my side and only 1 trade to fix it. I will have to get rid of Parker and get Lance Thompson. I will have to leave fucken dipshit Johns in the side even though he is injured and try to trade him next week.

Hopefully Fitzgibbon has a great game tonight in the first Monday Night Football match. I have him as my captain so I get double points for him. Easts are playing Souths so hopefully they smash them and get lots of tries so he can convert them.

It was dissapointing that the Titans lost their first match as a club. They have a really good side and they seemed to have come together well. I’ll be supporting them this year behind the Broncos.

I’m sad that people like David Icke make money

I have been downloading a lot of documentrys off of mininova.org lately.  There have been some really good ones like “This Film is not yet Rated“, “No Limit” and “The Root of All Evil“. I then got the first avi from this torrent. Its quite big so I didn’t want to download all of it just in case it was crap.  Thank god I think these things through.  Basically its this British guy David Icke, that goes around the world giving lectures about his “research”.  He claims (and has done for 20 or so years) that the world is controlled by an elite group of people.  These people have blood lines going back 4000 years.

He talks about Golbalisation and politics all being controlled by these group of people.  He says that all religion has been made by this group to fight against each other to keep the world under control.

He cleverly uses conspirisy theories like 9/11 and the war in Iraq, to gain support from people who like to question the social norm.  At the start of the talk he shows a slideshow of common photoshop images of Bush and other US presidants.  All of this gaining support and basically doing a comedy routine to get people to like him.

Then the really weird theories start comming out.  Like how 90% of the American presidants come from the same blood line.  Or how the education system in all delevoped countries it trying to teach kids not to express themselves through art.  Or the Christofer Colombus actually knew where he was going.  Another good one is the the CIA rigs up its employees that make the person dependant on some secret chemical.  Also he said that someone from the CIA told him that we have a cure for cancer and some sort of technology that creates “abundant growth of plants in deserts without water”. He goes on to say how banks lend us money that doesn’t exist.  He bases this on the fact that the money is not “taken out of their vault” but transferred electronically.

All the while pausing for claps from the audience.

Now I can see how some people might be inclined to believe some of this stuff.  Especially people that agree with his political views and anti-American views.  You don’t have to look much further to find some of his other views which he tries to slide into his talks towards the end.

The best one is a reptilian race of people, control the world from underground.

If you watch this guy doing a talk you can actually tell just from his body language that he knows his lying.  He knows what his doing and he knows that the 201 books his written are going to make him a lot of money.  It annoys me that people pay to see this tard and that he can make money off of people trying to be different and believing in stupid ideas.

Poker Goals 2007

1. Win a seat/flights etc into a WPT/EPT/WSOP event ( > $5000 buy in)

This is the most important goal for this year. Even though my bankroll isn’t really big enough for this, I’m sick of grinding out small wins online. So I have to super-dooper satellite in like the rest of the suckers. I think I’m a much better live player then online. I tend to get bored online. Playing live, I can sit and study people for tells the entire time. As this is one of the reasons I like poker so much, its not hard to see why I’d prefer playing like this. I also like playing against people who are better then me. The big live tournys have such better players (well at least some). Although I love being able to make money in poker, I also like the challenge of things which aren’t easy. Cashing in one of these tournys would not be easy.

2. Win more then $2000 AU in a tourny online

I’ve had some significant cashes online of late. Although none of them were real show stoppers. Just enough to help the continued growth of my bankroll. There have been a few times I have got top 8 in large tournys and got around the $250 mark with first paying $1000 – $2000. I really want one of these big pay days as I think I’ve some what paid my dues on the final table of these games. So many people can’t play final table poker. There have been several occasions where people bet into no side pots to push me off a hand when another guy is all in. I would have won the hand but instead the all in person won. Stupid shit like that really pisses me off.

3. Get to 2-3BB/100 in $1-$2 limit on PokerTracker for > 50,000 hands

I have around 2900 hands logged in PT for the year so far (at $1-$2 HE). Currently I am running at 1.3BB/100. This is after a sick 60BB downswing not to long ago. I’m happy with my play at this level and would like to consolidate this for 50,000 hands before I move up in limits. Getting above 2BB/100h for that period would really validate my efforts in poker and give me a lot more confidence that I’m not just an upswinging loser.

4. Keep a > 10% ROI for PokerStars SitnGo’s

Currently I am sitting at 128% ROI (Return on Investment) on Sit’n'Go’s on PokerStars. I get this info from SharkScope. I know I can’t keep this awesome figure up over the long run. It has only logged 20 games (most of which are the 180 player MTT’s). I make good money off these games (buy in limits around $10 – $20). There are a lot of people that don’t have any strategy for tournments at all. The mind boggles as to what some of these people think they are doing. Thats where I have been making my money and until some real sick beats knock me down I’ll continue to run good against these players.

So hopefully I can at least achieve 2/4 this year. I just won a seat into the PokerStars Sunday Million which unfortunely starts at about 9am on a Monday morning where I live. I can’t play in it as I have to go to work (oh how I’d rather be playing poker). When first prize is pushing the $200,000 AU mark its hard to pass up.

I refunded the ticket for $215 in PS “T$” which is basically money that can only be used to buy into other tournments. Who knows I might buy back into the Sunday Million while I’m over in Perth on holidays in Febuary. If not that, I will use the money to buy into lots of EPT satellites.

Multi-tabling Madness

Tonight I thought I’d try out multi-tabling some Holdem on PokerStars. I started out on the waiting lists for 6 tables. Four were $1-$2 Limit Holdem. The other two were .25c-.50c NL Holdem. I had a shocking 100BB losing streak earlier this week playing 50c-$1 NL. So I was keen to grind out some money to get me at least some of the way back to where my bankroll was.

As I started to join more and more tables I was getting more and more frantic with making it to the Fold, Check and Raise buttons for each table. The most I had multi-tabled before was 3 tables. Even worse, all the tables I was playing were high speed tables (dealing and blinds and decision time are really quick). At one stage I considered maybe knocking 1 or 2 tables off to be more comfortable. However I started to realise that because I had less time to make a decision, I found myself playing a lot better poker! I think when I play poker, I seem to want to outplay everyone on every hand. When playing limit this makes my problem even worse. My pre-flop standards went up very quickly (even more so when I had a good hand on another table). I think I’m way to loose preflop in limit poker. Hopefully this session has improved my game just from this one realisation.

I played all 6 tables for about 2.5 hours. I was up for the session (only about 20BB). I don’t know if playing limit and no limit at the same time is a good idea. I’d like to know if other people do this. I can’t see how people multi table more then 6 or 7 tables. At one point I had pocket 10’s, pocket Jacks, and pocket Kings all at the same time. I only won the Kings. I made most of the money on the two no limit tables. I think I will stick to 25c – 50c NL now. It seems like I can beat this level pretty easily so until I make up for the huge loss at .50-1, I will stick to that level.

Aussie Millions Schedule under way

Well the Aussie Millions has offically started in Melbourne and I’m stuck at work like a sucker.  I really feel I should be there.  It has nothing to do with the beat I took in my main satellite into the main event of the Millions.  It just seems like its my countries biggest time for poker where the world is watching. Its a time for aussies to have some pride in our poker.  I should at least be in Melbourne playing some cash games and maybe a smaller $1ooo buy in tourny.  A lot of the posters over at my poker forum site PokerNetwork.com are down there and posting about whats going on.

I’m really jealous of the action thats going on down there.  I’ve been running quite well in poker lately (both cash and tournys).  So its hard to know everything thats going on.  I’ll be watching a lot of the updates from different sites to see if any Queenslanders I know get anywhere.  Hopefully the Aussies can keep most of the money in Australia.

Good luck to anyone who is lucky enough to be there.

ROBOTS!!!

Finally I have my hands on a Lego MindStorms Kit. $380 later mind you. Luckily I had a win on poker which paid for it. The first thing I noticed when I open up the box was how much shit you get. I really didn’t expect to get as much stuff as you do.

I started by building the “Startup” robot which took about an hour. It was pretty simple and straight forward (as you’d hope for the beginners robot). I tested out some sample programs that are built into the NXT microprocessor. Basically the robot could play a sound, drive forward, turn 180 degrees and drive back again.

I plugged in all the different sensors that come with it too. I was really impressed with the sensitivity of them. However the only sensor that I think I will really be able to use for the stuff I want to do, is the Ultrasonic sensor. It basically returns a value of how far away the nearest object is that its facing.

My main goal was to build a robot that can move around a room (whilst avoiding objects of course) and when it finds something interesting it would be able to take readings on the object with all its sensors and report back.

So with the sensors it comes with it would -

• See how far away the object is (or maybe measure how far across it is)
• Take a reading in dB of how loud the object is
• Take a reading of what colour (or greyscale colour) the object is.

The touch sensor doesn’t seem to be of any use to me. It can be used to object avoidance but I like the idea of the robot figuring out how to not hit the wall in the first place.

With all this in mind I had the idea to make a spinning sensor rig of doom. All the sensors would be mounted on a spinning platform. This would allow the robot to drive up to the object and then just cycle through each of the sensors and take readings. Sounds like a bomb idea right? Well I didn’t think of it, NASA did. I started to modify the basic robot I had built so it would be able to do this.

It was here (without diagrams and instructions to guide me) that I realised that I completely suck at building things. When I did robotics in Uni, the robot was basically built for me and I had to program it. Even with the really easy connections that the Lego Technic provides, I had a lot of trouble creating good supports for things. I didn’t really know what most of the obscure connectors were for. I struggled through I came up with this.

The big problem I had was the rig was only supported by one pole in the middle. Because of its centre of gravity this meant it leaned slighty forward, looking down. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. Then when I connected the wires up to the NXT block, I realised a problem I would have. The rig wouldn’t be able to spin in the same direction for more then maybe 270 degrees. Obviously because the wires would strech and twist until they stopped the motors from turning. No problem I thought. There is only 3 sensors so it can go 90 degrees either way from the start postion and back again. How wrong I was. The “gears system” I was using to spin the rig completely failed the first time any pressure was put on it from the leads on the rig.

At this point I was “programming” the robot with the software that comes with it. Basically its for kids. You use drag and drop blocks onto a line which represents the senquence of instructions the code is executing. You can’t (without doing some crazy shit) do simple switch statements or complex if statements. Loops are a nightmare because you go across the page and when there are a lot on instructions in a loop the whole program is really hard to read.

I had looked into other ways to program the NXT before I got the kit. RobotC and NXT#
were the two I found. I wanted to use NXT# as it would allow me to do more (multithreading etc). However for it to sent commands to the brick you have to have a bluetooth connection on your computer. So I went out and bought a Bluetooth dongle and installed it. It was the cheapest one I could get which was my downfall in the end. I found out after a full day of googling that the driver for this dongle isn’t supported by the NXT Bluetooth on the brick.

So I looked into the RobotC option. It allows you to write in C (a cut down version). You can access the motors and different sensor ports and then you can download the assembly to the brick via USB just by pressing F5.

So with this new way of programming I decided to redesign my “MidgeBot” to only be able to see. My new plan was to make the object avoidance a lot smarted buy making the ultrasonic sensor be able to be moved around to look in different directions. After a couple of iterations I came up with this.

After a day of programming I have it doing the following (with a few bugs left to go).

• When the program first runs it turns the head back and forth until an object is placed in front of it. This sets the head in a forward position.
• It then moves forward until it senses an object in its way.
• It then stops and scans the 180 degrees in front of it for a path that doesn’t have an obstruction.
• It then turns (almost on a dime, more design work is needed) to the heading that the “eyes” are reporting.
• Then the eyes return to the forward position.
• Then it goes on its merry way.

So at this point I have a few things I’d like to do. First, I’d like MidgeBot to reverse and turn 180 degrees if it can’t find a path. I’d also like to use the same gear system to rotate other sensors (as I’ve used up all 3 motors already).

When I go back to work this week I will return the Bluetooth dongle and try to get one that works.

I’m still on crappy dial up while TPG gets there fucking arse in gear so I’ll upload some videos of it in the next post hopefully.

Gutted

Tonight I played in the final of the PokerNetwork League. Nine of us started to play for an Aussie Millions seat. It was a deep stack tournment with 5000 chips to start with and 15 minute blinds. I was pretty confident that if I got got OK cards I would have a chance at winning it.

For the first 3 or 4 levels I didn’t have any cards better then K 10. No pairs, no suited connectors. I struggled along getting caught stealing blinds a few times and got down to around 3000. I got dealt aces and managed to get back up to 5000 with those. Not long after that I got KK and an got a nice flop to get up to 6000.

Another level went by and I hit a set of 6’s which I used to get to 7700. I checked a mildy scary river and won the hand. It was at that point I realised I wasn’t being aggresive enough with made hands. I was playing to scared that I would be sucked out on. I changed my play and the next time I picked up a good hand, that exact thing happened. I hit a set of Q’s and got outdrawn to a flush on the river. I still don’t think looking back I played the hand strong enough.

That put me back down to around 5000 where I stayed until the blinds got up to around 300 – 600. I had been up and down and my blind stealing had been doing very well which had enabled me to survive with no hands after the Q’s. After that the blinds rose and it was very hard to steal as people were raising a lot pre-flop. I got blinded down to aroun 3000. Then I called all in with AK to double up to 6000. From there I worked my way up to 8000 and then I got dealt 2 back aces.

Again someone went all in before me and I called. Suited J10. When I first saw the hand it made me a bit uneasy. Thats the kind of hand i’ve cracked a lot of aces with myself. I would have (obviously) much rathered him have a AK or Jack’s or something. After a really good flop I had almost switched off. Until I saw someone call for a Q in the chat box. Just as I realised he had 4 outs to make a runner runner straight on the river, it hit.

I was crippled and down to about 2000 in chips with blinds at 300-600 with a 50 ante. I pushed a couple of times and got one walk on my big blind. Then I pushed with a J high on my small blind into another short stack hoping for a fold. He called and I only had one live card.

That was the end of me finishing 8th. I was really disappointed because I could have made a good run of it if those aces held up. The Aussie Millions would have been a dream to play in and a good little holiday for me as well. I got $250US for 8th which is going to help buy some robotics stuff that I couldn’t have afforded otherwise.

Oh well. I have been on a good upswing in tournments this year so I supposed I can take pride in that. One of my goals for 2007 is to win a seat in a WPT event(or some other 10K+ tourny) so hopefully I’ll get to do some poker travelling some time in 2007.