Nat Arem's Blog

Today is my parents’ 32nd wedding anniversary. I’m not sure exactly how long they dated prior to being married but I think it was in the 1.5 to 2 year range. I should probably ask. Either way, they’ve been together for close to 35 years which is incredibly impressive. So I want to publicly congratulate them on that.

But the real point of my blog entry is parent appreciation. And, frankly, it’s something that has only happened gradually over the last 10 years or so. In my teenage years, I was actually often frustrated with my parents. They wouldn’t let me watch much TV (we only had one in the house and I never had one in my room obviously), they didn’t give me various material possessions that I wanted even though they could have afforded them, they didn’t keep junk food in the house, they made me read books/study/etc, I never had a video game console, etc. More often than not as a teenager, I thought my parents were less cool than other parents. And, if you define cool by looking for the things in the list above, I was right. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that my parents are actually incredibly awesome. The old adage “Parents Know Best” was most definitely right. What I didn’t realize at the time was that my parents were preparing me to live a successful, independent and happy life.

The first time I really started to put the pieces together was when I was in college and I realized how many people had been babied beyond belief as kids. I knew people who actually had no idea how to cook pasta. And a close friend of mine actually put dryer sheets into his lint trap when he was doing laundry in college because he didn’t know how to use them (although, I think he has great parents — they just didn’t prepare him to do laundry). But more so than knowing random isolated skills, I really noticed a very defined divide amongst people who knew how to be independent and those who struggled greatly with being on their own. The people without the ability to handle independence went from being often highly successful (from a GPA and SAT perspective) high school students to total college failures. And no, I don’t define college success strictly by GPA, it’s much more than that. But someone with a 1.8 GPA after the first year is a college failure unless they’re about to be an NBA lottery pick. Frankly, I found the whole transition to college to be really easy. It was actually easier than being in high school because I had tons of free time and if I just sat down and did some work here and there, doing academically well in college was never hard at all except for a few random stressful periods for finals and such. For the most part, tests were spread out, reading wasn’t too tough, classes were enjoyable, etc. And I think that’s because my parents (and my high school) had taught me to value academic performance as well as to know how to be self-motivated to achieve that performance. And that really doesn’t even touch the non-academic value of college which is a whole other issue that lots of people had no idea how to handle.

Another thing that started in college was meeting other people and, with some, getting into discussions about parents. Obviously this isn’t the sort of thing that you discuss with everyone but usually it eventually comes up with close friends, people you date, etc. And the more I talked to people, the more I realized that I pretty much have not come across a better set of parents overall — although obviously it can be difficult/impossible to objectively “rank” parents in many cases, due to a lot of factors. And you might think that I was biased but pretty much every time, other people told me that my parents were/are about as good as it gets.

What made them so awesome? Well, for one, virtually zero disagreements. Lots of people have told me that their parents ranged the spectrum from bickering to even physical confrontation. I’ve never seen that. Ever. I never even heard it from another room or anything. No raised voices, no bickering, etc. For the most part, no disagreements. And this isn’t because my parents are perfect people or because they don’t care. They are high educated, motivated and smart people who have strong opinions and so on. But what I realize from talking to people is that my parents are incredibly good at meeting each other in the middle on things and they do it so effortlessly. I don’t even see the slightest bit of resentment or complaint from either one when they bend to meet the other. And I mean this in the best possible way, but they both “know their place” and they do a great job of not getting out of line. Now, I’m sure they’ve had issues and such but the kids never saw it. And while arguing every once in awhile is obviously natural, the lack of arguing was mainly a symptom. And by that I mean it was reflective of a very low-stress, carefree and easy-to-live-in household. I think that’s invaluable because I’ve noticed that people who grew up in stressful households usually have lasting scars that are painful and cause a number of problems.

Another thing that made my parents awesome was that they cared strongly but they weren’t at micromanaging levels of controlling. My parents were there every day asking me about school, making sure that I ate well, helping me with homework, getting me involved in sports, etc. But they didn’t overly pressure me to get straight As, be the best athlete possible, etc. And while I actually do believe that high pressure environments can be effective for select kids, for most it really isn’t. I was never scared to come home with a non-A on my report card. It was never a big deal if I was or was not the star player on a sports team. As long as my parents saw me trying, they were okay with it. Finding that middle balance is rare. It seems like I always hear about parents on one end of the spectrum. Even if the person I’m talking to thinks their parents were in the middle, usually after talking with them for a bit I realize the parents really did a bunch of stuff that skewed them one direction. And I’m not saying that being a bit controlling or not makes for a “bad” parent — not at all. It’s a matter of degree and a large portion of this “caring” scale can easily fit under the “good” parent umbrella. I just think that my parents struck such a perfect balance in everything from their words, actions, etc and it’s really hard to describe.

And while I could keep going, you probably get my point. My parents were/are awesome and I’m super lucky to have them. Skipping past the long shot odds of life existing, being born, etc, I often think about how lucky I am to have been born into this circumstance. I mean, there are several billion possible sets of parents in the world and I’ve been born into the upper level of the top 1% of those combinations. Of course, part of that is that my parents are relatively well-off. But like I’ve said through this blog entry, I’ve talked to lot of other people about this (many of whom have parents who are as well or better off than mine) and I still think that I got luckier. That’s just absurd luck.

So, here’s to parent appreciation. Happy anniversary Mom and Dad!

PS – I’m sure lots of you have great parents too! I’m not saying any of this to put down someone else’s parents. All responsible parents deserve a lot of respect for doing what they do. In many ways I will be happy if I even come remotely close to being the parent that my parents have been.

Last night I went to go see Rammstein at the Wells Fargo Center. That’s the same arena that the Sixers and Flyers use so it’s the biggest indoor venue available in Philadelphia. I have to admit that I was surprised that Rammstein was playing such a big venue but, as it turns out, they’re more popular than I thought and their show also requires a very large space.

Also, I should probably mention that I don’t listen to Rammstein. I actually only knew one song (Du Hast) before going to the show. But a friend of mine had an extra ticket so I tagged along for the experience. I’m really glad that I went. If nothing else, the production itself was worth seeing. The props, fire, stage itself, etc were all extremely impressive. They implemented fire and explosions into pretty much every song with tons of theatrics. They had gigantic custom industrial-style props like huge lights and fans. Even though these pictures really don’t do the show justice, here are the best of the pictures that I managed to snap with my iPhone:

A few days ago, I booked my trip to London for the Summer Olympics! I’m extremely excited about the trip for a bunch of reasons.

First of all, I love to travel. I’ve been to London before but I’ve never spent more than a day or two there and I’ve always been quite busy when I’m there. The last time I was there was on a work trip in May 2010 and it was just a few days. And before that it was way back in the summer of 2002 — 10 years ago! Anyway, I look forward to spending a week or so there right in the height of the Olympics. I’m sure it’ll be a zoo but it’ll be an incredible experience. I remember going to the 1996 Atlanta Games and thinking how cool it was to be in the spot at the center of the world’s attention.

Second, I am going to get to see some amazing weightlifting. Right now I have great tickets to a whole bunch of weightlifting events but I may pick up some other tickets if I come across anything good. Since the weightlifting is at most a few hours per day (none at all on one day), I will have plenty of time to explore the rest of the city and atmosphere. But obviously going to see some epic weightlifting battles is a very exciting part of the whole thing and it’s a central reason for my trip.

Third, I managed to find frequent flier seats in business class. But these seats are a lot more like international first class than international business class. I’ve flown international business class before and, while it was awesome, it does not compare to these seats.

The seats are amazing! I’m just lucky that I had enough miles to book these seats because there’s no way I would ever pay cash for seats like this. I think the cash purchase price of my plane tickets was something absurd like $9000. That seems pretty crazy to me. But, for miles, it was a good deal. While I definitely look forward to actually being in London, I have to admit that I am super pumped about the flights also. Mainly because the flights are usually the worst part about traveling but it doesn’t seem like it’ll be the case here.

Fourth, this is a really good business opportunity for hookgrip.com (a forthcoming site of mine). I have a lot of cool pictures from the World Weightlifting Championships, US National Championships, etc but very little compares to Olympic pictures. The Olympics are where lifter careers are made/broken and it’s where everyone aims to set new world records. If there’s any competition that promises a number of incredible pictures, this is it. Having the opportunity to get some great shots of those moments could prove to be invaluable for hookgrip down the line. I will be there with my Nikon D700 and zoom lens in hand to hopefully get some awesome pictures. I’ll also take a ton of pictures of the Olympic atmosphere in general.

Frankly, the only part of the trip that somewhat worries me is the security threat of being in and around such a high profile event. The Olympics are a huge target. I’ll just do my best to be smart and hope for the best. I’m sure they’ll have very intense security citywide.

Either way, can’t wait for late July/early August!

I know that, given the nature of how these things work, I will probably be quickly told about something that’s 10x better than what I’m about to show you. But, anyway, here goes. I’ve been posted a lot of pictures to the hookgrip.com facebook page, located here. Everything has been going great with it. It’s up to nearly 800 likes (from 10 a few months ago) and people in the weightlifting community seem to really appreciate and enjoy the pictures — which is what I’m going for thus far.

But here’s the problem that I’ve been dealing with. The camera that I used during my trip to the World Championships in Nov 2011 was not really all that great. I was waiting for the Nikon announcement about their new camera before I made a decision as to which body to buy. So I went to Paris with a subpar body (a D200, a dinosaur by digital photography standards) and a great 70-200 2.8 lens. The lens is close to the best thing that you can buy (as it should be when it costs over $2000) for weightlifting photography but the camera body could not keep up. A lot of my pictures came out quite grainy because I had to crank the ISO (film speed, basically how fast it can record light) really high to be able to increase the shutter speed to the point where I could stop the action (ie, not have blurry pictures). The problem with high ISO settings, especially on an older DSLR like a D200, is that it results in quite a bit of noise/grain. But at the end of the day I would much rather have a grainy picture than a blurry picture and, given that my camera was not good enough to allow me the best of both worlds, I picked to shoot grainy pictures. So I’ve been doing my best to clean up the pictures but there’s really only so much that one can do with the built-in photoshop tools.

So a few days ago I decided to actually look for a good way to reduce graininess in image files. I came across something called the Neat Image plugin. Despite their 1997-esque website, I read enough reviews of the plugin to convince me to give it a shot. I am really glad that I did (they should update their website though). The plugin is absolutely incredible. With just a few clicks, I can take a grainy image to something that looks quite presentable at Facebook-level quality. The difference is really stunning. Now, of course, Neat Image cannot produce a picture that looks as good as something from a much better camera body — ideally I would have just had a D700 (which is what I have now) with me in Paris. But given that I can’t change the past, this is just awesome. I put together a before/after example of a picture. Keep in mind that I normally do a few things to a picture to make it look better but in this case, I simply did the Neat Image filtering which took all of about 10 seconds to do. I did that just so I could isolate the noise reduction improvements.

You really need to view them as full res to get an idea. Keep in mind, also, that I purposefully cropped this picture quite a bit to make the “before” look more grainy. It’s a picture of Svetlana Tsarukaeva, the world champion in the under 63kg/138.6lb weight category. And she’s holding 138kg/303.6lbs over her head! Pretty incredible.

Anyway, I hope that the Neat Image plugin helps someone else out. It’s doing wonders for my pictures from the D200!

This blog is about a health issue of mine that I’ve never really written about before. At first I didn’t want to write about it because it wasn’t clear how the problem would resolve. And then I just never got around to writing it. But shaniac’s recent post about his ear problems made me realize that it would probably make sense to write a post about this. While the title of my blog post probably isn’t familiar to many people, for some people it’s probably a word that they really hate. I would probably mess up if I tried to reword this so I will just let the Mayo Clinic define tinnitus:

“Tinnitus (TIN-i-tus) is noise or ringing in the ears. A common problem, tinnitus affects about 1 in 5 people. Tinnitus isn’t a condition itself — it’s a symptom of an underlying condition, such as age-related hearing loss, ear injury or a circulatory system disorder.”

About three years ago, I developed tinnitus in my left ear. I can actually remember the exact moment when it happened (which is typical). I was living in Cayman at the time and, in late May of 2009, I woke up, grabbed a tissue, blew my nose (I had a bad sinus cold at the time) and felt a bunch of popping in my left ear followed by a high-pitched whine. I was already pretty tilted about the cold which I’d had for a few days so the squealing in my left ear certainly wasn’t helping things. I went to the supermarket and got some various items like ear wax removal stuff and whatever else might help to get rid of the noise. Nothing really helped.

For the first few nights it was extremely difficult to sleep. It was actually nearly impossible mainly due to the distress of not knowing what the noise was and, more importantly, not knowing how to get rid of it. In terms of actually describing the tinnitus, I would compare it to the noise that you hear from an old tube TV but louder. So, if you imagine that being in your ear all the time, you might understand how it could be quite annoying.

After a few days of no reduction in the volume of the noise, I decided to call some local Cayman doctors. They basically couldn’t see me for several months. That wasn’t acceptable to me so I decided to fly home (I was going home in a few days anyway so I just moved up my flight) and go see a Philly-area doctor. Because my mother is a physician it makes it a lot easier for me to get in to see Philly doctors because of her connections.

So I started by going to an Ear, Nose & Throat doctor. They did a hearing test and told me that I had a bit of hearing loss in my left ear. From my perspective, the tinnitus noise was actually blocking my ability to hear certain things out of that ear. But as I was told that day, tinnitus is actually the brain inventing a noise due to hearing loss at certain frequencies. However, something else interesting happened at the ENT. He also had me open and close my mouth and he instantly said “well that could be your problem right there” or something along those lines. Basically he ended up explaining that my jaw was not properly aligning (who knows how the f that happened) when I bit down and that the interaction between the jaw and ear could easily be the cause of the issue. He recommended that I go see a bite specialist. Things were beginning to make some sense.

For a bit of background, about six weeks before the tinnitus developed, I started to get kind of dizzy sometimes. Mainly while eating. In a few situations, it actually got really bad. For instance, one night at a steakhouse in Cayman (a place called Copper Falls, I highly recommend it if you ever visit) I was pretty much totally unable to eat the steak. It felt very difficult to chew and therefore nearly impossible to actually swallow the steak. This happened a few times over the course of several weeks in April and May of 2009. I also experienced some random dizzy spells here and there doing things like turning my head quickly and such. But since the problems were intermittent (every week or two) I basically ignored them figuring they would go away on their own. But once I was told by the ENT that I had a jaw issue, it made sense that I would have trouble chewing steak.

So the next order of business was to go see a jaw specialist. I found one at dental office pretty closeby — a guy named Sol Rosenberg at Main Line Dental Health. So I went in to see Dr Rosenberg a few days later and he told me that I had a case of TMJD which stands for Temporomandibular Joint Dysfunction. Which is a fancy way of saying that my jaw joint is not functioning the way that it should be functioning. According to Dr Rosenberg, my bite was causing the dysfunction in my jaw muscle which was a possible cause for the ear issues. That didn’t make total sense to me because of the onset of the ear issue but given the chewing problems, it seemed to me like I should get treated for the TMJD problem. So I opted for the treatment solution which was something called a bite splint. It looks a bit like a retainer but it only goes on the bottom of your teeth and it sits inside of the teeth so it isn’t visible to others. The bite splint essentially replaces the contact points for your upper teeth so when your teeth come together, they come together in a slightly different way. By doing this, the jaw can be repositioned to a more optimal position which eventually allows the muscles controlling the joint to return to normal.

So after taking the mold of my teeth for the bite splint, I had an unfortunate nine day wait for the bite splint to be made. I think all of the jaw manipulation at the exam and mold-taking really set off some issues because within hours of returning home, I was having some terrible headaches, pain, jaw clicking and more. It got bad enough that within a day or two I went back for a followup because I was having so much trouble. It’s hard to describe the state that I was in at this point. While I was not really all that happy about the ear issues, the jaw stuff totally had me down for the count. I could barely get out of bed because my head would start spinning and it was like a fire alarm going off in my head. In the followup appointment, Dr Rosenberg showed me a water-based bite splint called the Aqualizer. It is a temporary relief solution for those without a bite splint. It was amazing. Within about three minutes of putting the Aqualizer in, my symptoms already began to subside a good amount. It wasn’t a great permanent solution because the Aqualizer can only be used for so many hours at a time and whatnot — but it helped me tremendously to get through the next week.

Anyway, by mid June 2009 I was fitted with the bite splint and things started to get better. I still had the tinnitus in my left ear and I still had some dizziness but slowly the jaw issues went away. At first it was really hard to talk with but eventually that went away. The only annoying thing about wearing it was that you need to take it out to eat. Somehow I never lost it despite having a few close calls here and there. I started by just taking it out for a few hours here and there and eventually stopped wearing it at night. I ended up wearing the bite splint for something like eight months. By the time I stopped wearing it, the jaw issues were totally better. I still get an occasional issue but for the most part I think it’s resolved.

On the other hand, the tinnitus is still there. It’s still unclear to me if it was caused by the jaw issue, the sinus cold or who knows what. It does seem to be quieter than it used to be before the jaw issues were fixed but that could be my perception. I also think that I’ve noticed a difference after some trap/neck development from the weightlifting stuff — I think things have gotten better from the lifting. Either way, my current level of tinnitus doesn’t really bother me. I go for weeks at a time without even thinking about it. But if anyone were to ask me if I can still hear the whine in my left ear, the answer is a most definite yes. By all accounts, it is likely that it will never go away. I am okay with that though. While my onset was much earlier than most (when I was 26), a lot of people eventually get some form of age-related tinnitus. So a lot of you will eventually catch up.

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That concludes the health portion of the blog. But I wanted to point you to this interesting article about stinger on huffpost. First, it’s cool that he’s focusing on some non-poker things like draftday. I think a lot of players are still just sitting around instead of taking advantage of services like Poker Refugees or moving to an area with good live poker. Second, I’m shocked that he’s able to earn $600+/hour in Florida. Do they even have big games there? For some reason I thought the stakes were severely limited in Florida casinos. Third, he is still playing on one of the existing online poker sites in the US. Are sites like www.carbonpoker.ag offering decent games? I really just don’t even follow this stuff anymore so I have no idea what payouts, game selection and so on even looks like anymore.

On the other hand, even during the typing of the health portion of this blog entry, one of my industry contacts was pinging me on AIM with some of the details of the new regulations and rules that are going to be in place in Nevada whenever those regulated online poker sites get off of the ground. So maybe there is some hope after all.

Sometime on Saturday morning I started to feel really sick to my stomach. It felt like food poisoning of some kind and I figured it would be like the 5-10 times that has happened to me in my life. In other words, I would feel pretty sick for about a day and then I’d start to feel better. Not this time. I’m over four days into this and still having some major stomach problems. I won’t get into the actual details because they probably aren’t fit for public consumption but suffice to say that it has been less than pleasant. I have a doctor appointment scheduled for this afternoon just to be safe but, frankly, it doesn’t seem like most of these issues can be fixed by modern science. I’m pretty sure that I will be told to stay hydrated and wait it out. And, speaking of staying hydrated, I’ve probably drank four or five times my normal fluid consumption over the past three days or so (the first day I wasn’t as focused on it). And I’ve been getting plenty of electrolytes. At this point, I’m hoping that it’s something like salmonella poisoning because that means that this should go away pretty soon. It’ll be awesome to be able to sleep through the night without like four trips to the bathroom.

Regarding the lifting stuff, somehow I made it into the gym on Monday and lifted surprisingly well. But yesterday I just couldn’t make it in to the gym and I don’t think I’m going today either. Maybe tomorrow if things go okay later on today. This is actually the first thing since October that has made me voluntarily miss a day of lifting — including some knee pain that I was having at one point and also a fever.

Despite being sick, I made it to dinner last night to celebrate my friend Eric Strauss‘ 30th birthday. It’s kind of strange getting older. And by no means am I saying that 30 is old because I know that when we’re 40, 50, 60, etc, we will look back on being 30 as a being a baby. But we’re definitely leaving the “young adult” stage and getting into full-fledged middle age. At least we will be over the next few years. What’s weird about it for me is that I still feel like a 20 year old. And I know that isn’t unique because I have had conversations with people who are in their 50s and 60s and they say that they still feel quite young. I guess part of the issue for me is that as a teenager I always looked at 30 year olds and assumed they were super mature and such. So it’s a bit confusing to me that I still find poop jokes to be funny. So that being said, I plan on enjoying my last three months of being a 20 something!

Also, in work news things are progressing pretty well on the weightlifting-related site. And it looks like there’s a chance that I may take on some SEO consulting work. I’m also thinking about starting up some new minisites on some domains that I’ve purchased over the years. For instance, I have legaluspoker.com and licensedpokersites.com — both of which could drive some pretty solid traffic if/when online poker gets regulated in the United States. A lot of sites, such as Online Poker Real Money (run by a guy from the PAL affiliate community) are popping up these days with what essentially seems to be a plan to to eventually drive traffic to real money USA poker sites. It seems like it would behove me to get the sites launched and put some content on them. My main holdup is that I’m really not sure what the affiliate landscape is going to look like down the line. For now I will likely keep working on the weightlifting site along with the various WordPress projects that I have going. And the SEO consulting thing if it pans out.

For right now though, I would like to get this stomach problem fixed. Time to drink another Gatorade.