NINJA BUMP

After 6 months of being really busy (and a bit lazy) I've decided to resurrect this blog. Hooray. So... what have I been up to? In short:

Dissertation

Had to do a project for my MSc around July-September (at least I think that's when it was, seems like ages ago now) which involved writing a rather neat-looking program in Java and OpenGL. My project was called "Edge-Preserving Mesh Smoothing" which is basically noise removal in 3D... tbh a lot of it was pretty mundane but I ended up doing a good amount of original research and designed a pretty solid algorithm so hopefully that'll go down well. I wasn't so happy about all the jumping through hoops (e.g. "reflection of skills learned" etc) which I thought was way too wishy-washy to add any value to it, but c'est la vie.

Apparently I don't get my results until January, by which time it'll be a distant memory...

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Job

I started working full-time as a graduate web developer about 6 weeks ago... it's a smallish (about 30 people) company based near Bristol and so far it's been awesome. The first couple of weeks were training, then we were thrown in at the deep end, working on big websites like Sophos and easyJet. Kinda cool knowing you're working on something that will be used by millions of people.

We have a lot of other big clients although I'm not sure which ones I can name. Lately we've been doing a really slick-looking website for a big health company's new product - rounded corners, drop shadows, AJAX popups, overlays and custom dropdowns all over the place... spent about half my time stamping out ridiculous IE7 bugs >_<

I'm just thankful we don't support IE6

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Poker

If you play 50NL 6max you may have seen me back at the tables the past couple of days. I spent most of September grinding FPP satellites and spinning up a bankroll from that, then had no internet until a few days ago, which SUCKED. As of this weekend I've been back on the grind, which has gone pretty well so far. I would post a graph but because I run Linux I play on a virtual machine and can't really be bothered to boot it up just to get a screenshot. [Edit: just finished a session and figured I might as well...]

This weekend, all 50NL

It's refreshing to play 4-6 tables instead of 18, and it's been good experience starting lots of tables and sitting HU vs regs to get tables going. I just hope I can convince myself to move up more aggressively this time. I always thought I had a lot of discipline when it came to bankroll management but it works both ways: if you're rolled for a higher stake you really ought to take shots and push yourself rather than stagnating at the same limit for ages.

Anyways, the plan is to keep playing a lot until the end of the year, then set some goals for next year. It's a shame everything went tits up with Black Friday and FTP etc earlier this year, 2011 was looking promising but hopefully I get a decent shot at my goals in 2012.

On another note, I might be completely re-doing this site some time over the next few months if I can be bothered, stay tuned!

- HappyPixel