I don't have a lot of time, but I wanted to get something put up here about our first day here. Yesterday was a hectic day, which surprised me a litte. I kind of expected it to be a bit more relaxed. After I left that last arrival post, we headed out to get some food at a pretty late hour. We only found one restaurant tha was open called Sau Paulo, and since we were tired and hungry we decided to stop looking for any other options. The food was not too bad, but not incredible. It was cheap though. After dinner we retired to our respective rooms to collapse around 2:00am.

The next morning we got up around 8:00 to have some breakfast at the same restaurant as the previous night. We had walked by the buffet, but ruled that it was too expensive for just breakfast. Funnily enough, several of the people ordered orange juice when they were prompted by the waitress, only to later find out that the orange juice was a hefty $5 a glass!

After breakfast we returned to our rooms to setup a full test of all the software and pieces we needed to run the man-machine match. This was our big testing day, so we needed to make sure everything worked as expected. The testing took us all day. It took way longer than it maybe should've to set up the two sides of the duplicate match. We then had Duane and I play through a duplicate match and we got slaughtered by our own bot. Hmm.

After the test was over we went through a list of all the things that needed doing. The list was long, but we're lucky in that we have a lot of people to assign tasks too. We could never do all the things we're trying to do last year when we had 5 less people. During the test match, Mike B had spent some time setting up the stoxpoker booth and testing our client with the TVs to make sure that it displayed properly. The team then moved down to the expo floor to run a quick 30-hand test match on the expo floor. It seemed to work okay, although that too took longer than I thought it might.

After finally getting everything wrapped up, we went to dinner at Rub BBQ which was a pretty awesome place to eat. There was a great deal of food. I probably shouldn't have eaten quite as much as I did, but it was incredibly tasty. Mmm, pulled pork and beef brisket.

Dinner took a little while, but after we were done we returned to our rooms to work out some of the last remaining details we needed to for the next day. Our room was up until around 2:00am and I think the other room had a similar sleep schedule.

So we're up fairly early this morning to tidy our room a bit since our room will be the site of the hotel room side of the duplicate match. Then we go down to setup the hardware for the match so we can be ready to go at 11:00 am when the expo opens!

Wish us luck! Match 1 of 4 live matches begins today! Polaris is already tied 1-1 with humans so far.

Morgan