WSOP 2018 Schedule

I'm going to keep this short - part of my travel plan includes a couple of trips to Las Vegas for the WSOP 2018. My current schedule currently looks like the following:

Leg 1:
Event 13: BB Antes $1,500 NLH
Event 15: $1,500 HORSE (Maybe)
Event 19: $565 PLO
Event 21: $1,500 Millionaire Maker NLH
Event 26: $1,000 PLO (If not playing)

Leg 2:
Event 59: $1,000 Super Turbo Bounty ($300) NLH
Event 62: $888 Crazy Eights NLH (8-Handed)
Event 11: $365 PLO Giant (If not playing)
Event 65: $10,000 WSOP Main Event
Event 67: $1,500 Bounty ($500) PLO (If not playing)
Event 72: $1,500 Mixed NLH & PLO (8-Handed) (Maybe)

I plan to update the results both in new posts and in updates to this post.

Business Cards

This blog is meant to be a mixture of thoughts, ideas and my personal travel related experiences. Part of my goal from traveling this year is to meet new people and explore new business/employment opportunities. This made it (in my mind) imperative to get simple business cards that I can give to people I meet - especially since I may not always be accessible by phone/have a data connection at all times or in all locations.

I went with 2 simple designs - a personal one with my name, personal e-mail and this website, and a more professional one with my name, university e-mail and my LinkedIn page. I was able to find multiple free design websites online and created my design in less than thirty minutes. Finally, it was a matter of finding an economic way to print these. In Hong Kong, the easiest and cheapest option hands-down is Mah Wah Lane (near the Sheung Wan MTR Exit A2) - where there are a bunch of shops who just need you to send them an e-mail (or a thumb drive) with pdfs of your design and let them know how many cards you need. You can also select card thickness, but I have found that card thickness is definitely overrated. A little bargaining led to 300 copies of each of my personal and professional card designs at a sum total of HK$300 (US$38-39) at Po Wing Printing Co. (18 Man Wah Lane, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong).

I do plan to return to this post at the end of my travels and let you know if this was actually a useful investment, or if I found myself not really using them at all.

P.S. Here are the designs:

Personal:

Professional:

 Back:

Hello, World!

If you have ever learned a programming language, it is highly likely that you have come across "Hello, World!" Its ubiquity as the first program taught in any programming textbook derives from its use as an example program in the book "The C Programming Language" (without the exclamation).

To me, whenever I have come across a "standard" practice that has existed for a long time (for 40 years in this case), I always ask the following two questions:

• Why did this become the standard practice in the first place?
• Are those reasons still relevant? In other words, would it make sense for us to consider replacing the standard practice?

Why did "Hello, World" become the standard "first" program of a new language?

The general idea is clear - give the learner something tangible that can demonstrate the usability of the programming language with minimal effort - most programming languages require less than 10 lines to generate this text and it gets the learner to quickly engage with the interface/compiler etc. Here's what "Hello, World!" looks like in C:

#include <stdio.h>

void main()

{

           printf("Hello, World!\n")

} 

But there is a secondary reason why this was beneficial as a teaching tool - it has a text output. Until very recently, there were a lot of useful programs whose end result was a text output. Even when graphical user interfaces (GUIs) started taking over, the output of many programs was still a text box with text. So, learning to interact with text as a medium was a critical building block in one's programming skills. 

Needless to say, the words "Hello, World!" themselves have no special significance and were used just because they gained traction in a couple of seminal books.

Should we consider replacing "Hello, World!"?

Since I have no strong opinion on this, here are some possible questions to ponder over: Considering that text is not the only (or even the primary) way we interact with technology in this day and age, should we consider having the first program manipulate videos, images and/or sound instead of text? Is the manipulation of multimedia a more useful programming building block? Would the younger generation be more likely to relate with programs that relate to multimedia? Would the growing importance of machine learning further upend our "primary" building block?