Nat Arem's Blog

Yesterday I participated in something awesome. It’s known as the “CrossFit Total” and it’s a strength workout that CrossFit gyms do on occasion. The gym that I attend is called CrossFit Center City and they do the CrossFit Total every six months. The workout itself is very simple. You get three attempts at squat, deadlift and press to set your maximum successful lift in each discipline. Of course you also get to warm up and figure out what sort of attempts you’d like to make. I will list out my attempts in pounds because the workout was recorded in pounds — I usually lift in kilos though as they are the standard measurement in the lifting world as a whole.

We started off with squats. I did a few easy warmups with 0 (ie, air squat), bar, 135 and 185. By this point my motion felt good and I felt warmed up so I wanted to keep things low in volume from that point forward to not wear myself out at all. I did one rep at 245 then another rep at 275. Both felt pretty good. I decided to open at 298 (the weights were in kilos so it was 135kg with a 45lb bar). It felt pretty good but not easy. I then jumped to 307 (139kg with a 45lb bar) and made it but it required a fair bit of hyping myself up. This lift was just over my PR but I usually train in a slightly fatigued state because I lift every weekday. So my true PR is obviously higher than my training PR. Therefore I ended up going with 315 for my final attempt and it was a pretty epic struggle. It was very slow. But I ended up making it for a new PR. I was really happy with this result.

The next lift was the deadlift. I never really test my deadlift PR because it isn’t something that you can recover from as easily as squats. A few weeks ago (in December) I tried doing some pulls with lifting shoes on (ie, they have a heel so they make it harder to pick a bar up off of the ground) and I had no real trouble doing 165kg (363lb) outside of some grip issues. But I decided to deadlift in socks at the CrossFit Total to make it easier. I did three warmups with 185 then maybe a few more at like 205 or something. I can’t remember if I did a second set of warmups at a light weight. Then I did one rep at 255 and it was ridiculously easy. Like I didn’t even notice the bar. I knew it was going to be a good day. I did another easy warmup at 305 and then another one at 345. 345 started to feel like there was some weight on the bar but I knew I could open at 375 without much trouble. I ended up having to open at 365 because there was a long wait (like 15 minutes) to get to the area where we could actually take “official” attempts plus the right weight denominations weren’t available and we were running out of space on the bar because of the size of some of the bumper plates. 365 was easy. I did 385 next and it wasn’t bad at all. I decided to go for 405 for my third and I made it as well. It’s hard to say how a rep like that was because I was so focused that I wasn’t really paying attention to anything except for pulling. It’s hard to describe but on a near-max or max attempt, the lift itself is kind of a blur in your memory. Either way, 405 was a new PR and I was really happy with it. I can do more though so I’m excited to put at least 50lbs on that number by the next CrossFit Total in six months. Maybe 100lbs.

One factor is that I deadlift with “double overhand” which means that both of my palms are facing me. Most people pull their max deadlifts with a mixed grip where one palm faces away. The reason is that it’s easier to grip the bar with a mixed grip. For me, pulling 405 with a double overhand grip isn’t a problem at all. I never felt like I was in jeopardy of losing my grip because I was using a “hook” grip (ie, putting my thumb under my fingers). But it may become an issue once I get into the 450 or 500 area. We shall see.

Anyway, it was pretty forgettable, but I did a 130lb shoulder press (ie, a strict standing barbell overhead press) for my last lift. I don’t ever train this lift so I didn’t have particularly high hopes for it. It ended pretty much as I expected. I do want to train it more though so hopefully I can do a good amount more at the next CrossFit Total. Something to improve on. Here’s an image of the final scoreboard with a few of the other participants (click to enlarge):

In other news, I have some travel coming up. A few days ago I happened to be browsing the website of The Daily Show and I noticed they had two tickets for Feb 2nd. Easiest decision ever. I grabbed them without a plan for who to go with. Within about 5 minutes of posting on Facebook I’d found someone to go with. I’m going with my poker friend Roman Yitzhaki (aka Empire2000). I have no idea who the guest is going to be but I’m excited to go. I’ve actually been to a Daily Show taping before. It was back in September 2004 shortly after graduating college and just before I started my job with Deloitte & Touche. A lot has happened since then! It should be a great time although I’m hoping that waiting outside won’t be too cold. I’ll dress warm.

I’m also going to Florida for a few days in February. I’ll be staying at this place called Canyon Ranch which is some sort of yuppie-ish wellness hotel/spa/resort/etc. It isn’t exactly my choice. They claim to have free weights in the gym so I’m just really hoping for some sort of barbell that isn’t attached to a Smith press. If nothing else I’ll just relax like I did at the Grand Hyatt on my last day in Hawaii. I’m also currently contemplating adding on a trip to Grand Cayman at the end of my Florida trip. It’s really close to just fly down to Cayman from Miami and I also have some American Airlines miles that I can burn to get a first class trip home. So we’ll see.

Lastly, I wanted to give a plug to a great designer in case anyone out there is looking for some web design, branding, whatever. His name is Joseph Sorensen and he’s a Chicago-based creative. I’ve worked with him on a bunch of projects at this point and I can say with a high degree of certainty that he’s the best designer I’ve ever worked with. I don’t say that just because he’s got a great eye for design. I also say that because he’s available at all sorts of strange hours (he doesn’t sign off at 5pm local time and not show up until the next day), he is more than willing to get on Skype calls whenever, he has a great understanding of user friendliness, he’s got a great attitude about making changes, he doesn’t charge anything astronomical, etc. Joe is shockingly good at taking a vague idea with nonspecific descriptions and turning it into a great design with amazingly good details fleshed out in full. Anyway, I couldn’t recommend the guy higher and I told him I’d be more than happy to recommend him here. Although I am a little worried that he’ll have some trouble doing work for me if he gets too busy so hopefully not too many people contact him. You can get in contact with him via his website. One example of a site that he’s designed for us is IRA.com in case you’re looking for an example of his portfolio.

I got back a few days ago from a great ~11 day trip to Hawaii. I went with my family and we spent the first six days on the big island (also called Hawaii, hence the nickname) doing a biking trip with a company called Backroads. I’ve done a few of these “active” trips with my family before. One in the Canadian Rockies back in August 06. Then another one (with a company called VBT) in June 2007 in western Ireland. Then the most recent one was with Backroads in June 2010 to Zion National Park, the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon National Park. The trips are always a lot of fun so I was looking forward to the Hawaii trip and it didn’t disappoint. I think it was actually my favorite active trip so far. Despite getting sick the first day, I really enjoyed it.

The trip was great for a few reasons. One, while it was a six day trip, we only stayed in three places. It’s really nice to not have to pack up every night like you have to with some of these types of tours. Second, the hotels that we stayed at were mostly really enjoyable. Pools, hot tubs, fun bar areas, nice rooms, etc. I remember in Canada and Ireland we were in some very “simple” hotels. And the reason is that you’re often out in the countryside when you’re biking and there simply aren’t high end hotels in the vicinity and it doesn’t make sense to shuttle an hour each way out of your way simply to have faster internet and better beds. But in the case of Hawaii, the hotels were pretty damn good. Third, the scenery was spectacular. Even the big island is quite small but it’s so diverse. You can go from being in a desert-like climate to a dense fog to a downpour to a jungle to whatever. In the span of a few miles. Apparently the island has something like 11 “climate zones”. Fourth, the people on the trip were great. It’s a group trip so you’re basically around 20-something other people for several days in a row. If some people are annoying, that can make the trip less pleasant. While we haven’t had unpleasant people on any of our trips, I’ve never enjoyed being around the rest of the group like I did in Hawaii. Pretty much every day we were hanging out in hot tubs, eating meals together (ones that weren’t group meals), chatting by the bar, etc. Everyone got along really really well and I’m Facebook friends with a good portion of the people on the trip so that’ll make it easy to keep in touch. That really put the trip over the top. So despite being sick and needing to sit out for a day of biking, I really loved it and I’m already looking forward to my next Backroads trip.

So anyway, after our bike trip ended and we said our sad goodbyes with the Backroads group, the family headed off to the airport to fly to Kauai (the oldest Hawaiian island, at the other end of the chain from the big island). We had to fly through Honolulu because there aren’t direct flights from every island to every island. Either way it was two easy/short flights and soon enough we were in Kauai for another five days or so. I stayed one extra day because I wanted to redeem miles for my flight so I could sit in first class for the long flights (12 hours in coach sounded pretty rough to me) — and the only available seats were one day after the rest of my family.

Anyway, Kauai was great. We did a helicopter tour the first day which consisted of 60 minutes of airtime basically flying around the island. It was an amazing experience. The headsets were playing music while the pilot gave us various facts about what we were looking at. As my sister said, it was like we were in an IMAX theater. But better obviously.

I did have a bit of a dilemma the last day. Everyone else flew out on an 11pm redeye last Saturday night. And I had to check out of our rented condo by 10am on Sunday and my flight didn’t leave until something like 9:40pm. That’s a lot of time to kill when most of the tours on the island don’t operate on Sundays. I could have sat on the beach but then I wouldn’t have been able to shower and clean up before the flights. Plus that was a lot of time on the beach for a (purposefully) pale guy like me. Luckily my dad had used the spa facilities at the nearby Grand Hyatt and he mentioned that I could probably spend all day there. It was a fantastic idea. I ended up going over there around 10:15, booking a massage for 3pm, going to the golf clubhouse bar for a few hours to watch NFL (the Atlanta-NYG game was on due to the time difference) then heading back to the spa around 12:30 or 1. Then I worked out in the gym for a few hours and watched the Tebow show as well. I attempted to do deadlifts but, as you can see in the picture below, it was a goofy setup. It felt pretty unsafe for my wrists to do them with a curl bar but I still managed to do 320+bar (which I’m assuming is 25 lbs so I guess 345 lbs) before I couldn’t hold onto it properly anymore. So I ended up doing a lot of singles and then headed to my massage at 3pm. The massage was fantastic. I killed the last few hours by rotating between the jacuzzi, steam room, sauna and pool. I walked out of there feeling amazingly relaxed. I should probably go do those sorts of things more often. That can be my NY resolution.

Here’s a very small selection of the pics that I took:

In other news, I think it’s really interesting what’s going on with the online poker stuff in the USA. I cracked up when I saw the DOJ wire act decision that was released the day after the NGC information. It’s pretty predictable how this whole thing is playing out. It does seem like at least some people will be able to play real money poker in the US sometimes in the next 12-18 months. That being said, I’m thinking that overall this is going to be a good thing for poker as a whole in the long run. Obviously it will hurt certain people. Like the 2+2 FPP grinder crowd that is currently up in arms over the rake calculation method change at Stars has probably seen the last of their style of moneymaking. I don’t see the US poker rooms making a dumb decision like using the dealt method. It’s obviously way better for the rooms to use contribution-based rake calculation models and it’s not close. And another group that will be hurt will be the people who want to play super high stakes. I’ve said for years that I don’t believe that regulated US poker rooms will be allowed to have things like player-to-player transfers, games like 200/400 NL, etc. I think it’s going to be a much more controlled and “reasonable” environment with a crap ton (well, if the casinos are smart about marketing…) of $20 to $300 tournaments. Or whatever the regulatory structure and political environment will allow. Which I don’t think will be what we’re used to seeing.

As I said back in late July, I won’t be working at a poker-related day job until the legal environment changes in the US. That being said, with the changes we’re seeing recently there could be some interesting possibilities. I could end up back at a poker forum like PocketFives. I could end up working in the online group at a casino company out in Vegas. I could get involved with a group applying for a license in some state or states. It’s really hard to say. But at the end of the day I really enjoy the online poker world, I feel like I have a lot to contribute and I’d love to get re-involved with the right situation. It doesn’t seem like the time is here quite yet but it could creep up really soon. So we’ll see if that situation comes up in the next year or two. It should be a really interesting time for online poker if things keep progressing in this direction.

I’m sitting here in the Newark airport waiting for my flight to LAX. From there I will continue onward to Kona, Hawaii. This will be the first time that I’ll be in Hawaii so I’m pretty excited. Everyone says great things about it. I’ll also be visiting Kauai after Kona and I’m probably even more excited about that part of the trip. I’ll definitely take a lot of pics and videos as I’m sure the scenery will be spectacular.

On another quick note, lifting is still going great. I’ve had a great two months of training (although two cumulative weeks had zero training due to trips) and I’m pretty excited about it. I’m still not at the point that I feel like I can declare myself to be “strong” but I’m definitely well on my way. Obviously I’m strong compared to the average untrained person but, for me, I consider someone of my weight to be “strong” when they have about a 400lb full squat and a 500lb deadlift (or 182.5kg and 227.5kg). I can definitely get to those numbers in 2012 as long as I’m able to continue to train. Until then I’m an intermediate level lifter. The trip to Hawaii might set me back a little but I’m going to make sure to work on my mobility (ie, the ability to get into a full squat easily) everyday to make the return easier.

Okay, so, on to the main reason I wanted to write this post. Something has been bugging me about twitter for awhile. I haven’t written about it yet because I was waiting to see if twitter would add it as a feature with their new interface. They haven’t really. I also need to preface this by saying that while the new twitter interface is worlds ahead of the old one, it’s still a completely horrific interface from a consumption standpoint. To me it’s amazing that twitter has grown the way it has given the interface. I suppose it shows just how popular it is to have an easy and simple online publishing option.

With that out of the way, I think the main problem with twitter is the lack of ability to aggregate tweets around a topic. I think the cause of this problem is multi-fold. For one, any sort of reliance on hashtags is really retarded. Lots of people don’t use them, they spell them wrong, people use them when they shouldn’t, etc. Right now, looking at “top” tweets for a given hashtag is just about as nonsensical as it gets. And keyword searches often bring up a lot of tweets that aren’t relevant. Put another way, hashtags return too narrow of a result set and keyword searches return too wide of a result set. Second, the twitter interface still looks at tweets in a “tree branch” sort of way (and really it only makes it easy to go down one path as opposed to jumping from branch to branch). That’s just incorrect. In reality, tweets end up looking much more web-like if you actually map them out. A web-like browsing option (think something like the old Pandora interface, but with more connectivity — or like the Rdio circle interface but with lines between tweets and replies). A single tweet can result in tons of replies. And those replies can result in more and more replies — lots of them other repliers in addition to their reply to the original tweet. Twitter makes it so incredibly difficult to follow these conversations without a huge amount of clicking, new tabs, using the back button, scrolling, etc. It’s a slow and inefficient process at best. Third, twitter doesn’t have good quality ratings at all. “Dumb” numbers like number of followers, number of retweets (only up to 100) and so on really don’t tell the story of a twitterer or tweet. The system needs to be way more advanced in terms of it’s ability to filter out the spammers and bots. Twitter needs to be able to figure out and display actual influence. While I’m sure they do some work internally to try to figure out influence when determining top tweets, they could make huge progress on this front by calculating and showing sophisticated influence ratings.

So what prompted me to think about this? Mainly, I’ve read dozens of news articles over the past several months about things like protests in arab countries, the occupy movement, certain sports stories, etc. Most articles find a way to mention how twitter was used to organize, how a story blew up on twitter, how so and so celebrity (ie, Alec Baldwin and his airplane incident) incited some huge back and forth on twitter, etc. To date, I haven’t seen a single article that actually linked to any proof of this. Sure, I’ve seen articles that link to or quote an individual tweet or two. But that’s not what I’m talking about at all. I am not questioning at all the fact that twitter was heavily used and very important — it definitely was. Instead, I am questioning the total lack of ability to actually easily SHOW examples of the tweets around a certain topic. Granted you can link to a hashtag or you can link to a search but who really knows how that sort of thing will age over time? Sure the top tweets might be kind of relevant at a certain moment in time for someone who knows how to dig into twitter but I doubt those top tweets will be relevant to the news article even one day later. And since the news article doesn’t update over time, linking to top tweets that will update over time is pretty pointless. It would be so vastly superior if Twitter had a good Google News-like algorithm to identify topics based on tweets, replies and the quality of the discussion around a topic and then provided a way to link to that topic — with a datetime parameter. If I wanted to be able to demonstrate the importance of twitter to a certain day or so within the Egyptian protests, it would simply be a matter of finding that topic within twitter (obviously this requires a new search interface for topics) and then look at various dates. Like I said above, I think this works best in a spider web-like interface. I think it’s a matter of putting the most important tweets in larger circles with lines connecting to replies to that tweet and so on. Dumb retweets and non-influential tweets wouldn’t be shown. It would be drop-dead simple to browse the important tweets about that topic from that day. News articles, bloggers and others would easily be able to actually show evidence for the things they’re saying about the usefulness of twitter.

I think this is only one change of many that I would make if I had any control over the twitter interface. But I think it’s one of the most important things that twitter can do to make important content easily consumable. Hopefully one day it’ll happen.

I’ve been on the outskirts of Dallas for the last week working. As you might know, I work with Mike Jackness and his business partner Jim on some affiliate marketing websites. I know that sounds kind of spammy but we do our best to run actual legitimate sites with good information that adds value to the economies that we’re getting involved in. One site of ours that Mike has been spending most of his time on is IRA.com which is actually shaping up to be a really nice site with a lot of useful information. On the other hand, I’ve been spending most of my time on our sites related to Joomla templates and WordPress themes. We’re about to relaunch our Joomla site — hopefully this upcoming week — so that’ll be exciting. I head back to Philly a week from today so I still have a decent amount of time to work down here in Dallas.

Other than work, one of my regular daily activities has been making sure I get in the gym and do squats. I usually do other exercises too (namely, pullups) but since I have limited time here both due to work and gym availability, I’m doing the most important exercise by far — squatting. Overall I’m pretty happy with my progress. As I reported about five weeks ago, I found a local Philly CrossFit gym for lifting weights. Despite being super weak when I started squatting again, I’ve made relatively quick progress getting my strength back. I also missed a week when I went to Paris and I missed the Wed-Monday period around Thanksgiving because of my Atlanta trip. So I’ve really only been training for a little bit over a month.

I didn’t want to miss another two weeks while here in Dallas so I’ve been going to the local CrossFit affiliate which is called CrossFit Heath (it’s an area east of Dallas on the other side Hubbard Lake). The owner, Cliff, is a great guy and he’s been super friendly about letting me just squat and not do the rest of the stuff that CrossFitters do (like doubleunders, my sworn enemy). He even took this video of me the other day, at my request:

That’s a full depth (for my hamstring flexibility) squat with 125kg/275lbs. It’s nothing to be all that proud of on an absolute basis as tons of 185lb people can squat that much. Although, to be fair, most people in a typical gym are doing quarter depth or half depth squats so the weights those people are doing aren’t really comparable. People doing leg press don’t even count as it’s not remotely similar. Regardless of what other trained people can do, considering that I was struggling with a pathetic 150lbs at full depth in late October, I am very very happy with my comeback progress in just over a month with a few breaks. Everything feels better when you’re stronger. My knees, quads and hips were a little achy from the initial shock early on but everything feels fantastic now. Actually, my knees used to do a completely painless pop/click a lot when under heavy loads but since I’ve gotten stronger, that has almost fully gone away and I expect it’ll go away completely as I progress.

I’m looking for a 150kg squat by the US Weightlifting Nationals (which I will be attending, although obviously not competing) in early March but if I keep progressing well, I can definitely do better. I know that progress will slow at some point but I think I still have a lot of gains in me before that point. Pretty excited to see how things go!

Is anyone out there really good with Photoshop or do you know someone who’s really good? If so, I have a relatively simple (ie, one image) job for you/them. I need to take a picture of myself and photoshop it to look both old-style (ie, 1700s) in terms of dress and awesome in terms of things that I have with me in the picture. For instance, I probably want to add a falcon, maybe a parrot, definitely a cigar or pipe, probably some sort of fine alcohol, a diamond-encrusted gold telescope in the background, etc. It basically has to be ridiculous. This is somewhat like what I’m talking about:

The differences are that mine needs to be way more badass, more classical in terms of dress, more accessories and possibly not lying down (although I am open to the idea).

So basically, if you or someone you know is good at doing that sort of thing, I will get a friend to take the original picture and we can go from there. This will ultimately be used to get a portrait painted so it needs to be decent resolution but it doesn’t have to be super high res. Thanks!

Feel free to reach me via my contact page or directly via gmail at the username natarem.

In what has become somewhat of a tradition, I am concluding my annual trip to Georgia. The trip usually consists of some combination of Athens and Atlanta but this year it was just an Atlanta version. In 2006 and 2007 (the year we filmed thepokerfilm) I lived in Atlanta in the fall. In 2008 I came back from Costa Rica for the UFC. Here are some posts from that trip. Then in 2009 I came back from Cayman for Auburn at Georgia. In 2010 I flew in from Las Vegas for Vanderbilt at UGA (lol).

And that brings us to this year in which I flew in for Thanksgiving at the yellowsub86 Family Estate & Residences (trademark pending) and the Georgia Tech/UGA festivities. Thanksgiving was a big success if you’re measuring it on the “what you’re suppposed to do on TG” measuring stick. In other words, I ate an absurd amount, hung out with some fun people and then felt sick for a few hours while slumped on the couch watching NFL football. Mission accomplished. I hadn’t been that full in years. I think the multiple servings of everything probably contributed to that.

On the other hand, going to Tech/UGA was not much of a success. It was a tough ticket and even bad seats were hitting $200. Not really worth it. Instead we spent all of Saturday watching college football from the couch. Even though I’m really not that big of a college football fan these days, I still enjoy watching the games during rivalry week. Especially the games with major implications for BCS bowls. On the other hand, I get bored in about 45 seconds whenever watching random “No 21 v some unranked team on a ESPNU broadcast” games in September or whatever. We wrapped up Saturday with a visit to the area known as East Andrews in Buckhead. I didn’t really drink too much though so it wasn’t a ton of fun — for me at least. Ever since attending the Bodog WSOP Main Event party this past summer in Vegas, I haven’t had any appetite for alcohol whatsoever. I got absurdly drunk at the Bodog party and the resulting hangover was so terrible that I actually feel sick at the thought of being drunk. So my night on Saturday consisted of a few sipped beers. Which is more than enough for me these days.

Since we missed the college game on Saturday, we decided to pick up some tickets on Stubhub for the Minnesota Vikings at Atlanta Falcons game on Sunday. It was not what I would call a “premier matchup” game. Overall the game was extremely blah. A couple touchdowns, Vikings being terrible, Atlanta letting the Vikings back in the game, etc. Actually, at some point in the 3rd quarter sub and I were discussing how nondescript the game was. It eventually picked up at the end, especially if you bet on the game (the line was 9.5 or 10, depending). And we did see Percy Harvin run a kickoff back to the three yard line for the longest non-scoring play in NFL history. When he was tackled at the three with a few minutes left, it was 24-14 Atlanta so it wasn’t exactly like they were under huge threat of losing the game. The Vikings needed to punch it in and then get the ball back and score again. But, if you bet on the game, it was obviously a huge set of four downs. Somehow, the Atlanta defense managed to hold and the game ended at 24-14. This made sub quite happy as it represented a rather large swing for him to have Atlanta cover in most of his bets.

Here’s a short video of the super electrifying performance (I might be kidding) put on by Sean Kingston at halftime:

To wrap up the trip, last night (Sunday evening) we went to Restaurant Eugene which is apparently supposed to be one of the best restaurants in Atlanta. It’s a local foods sort of restaurant with a mix of veggie, meat and seafood dishes. It was a really good meal but, somehow, I managed to get stuck with the bill despite having one credit card against sub’s four credit cards (they had wine). And, speaking of CCR, after years of absolutely destroying sub in flips, I actually ran bad this trip. I paid for pretty much everything. Although, admittedly, I am still up so much on sub lifetime that it’s pretty hard to complain about losing ~$600 or whatever it was for all of the flips this weekend.

Now it’s time to find my way to the gate for my flight on wonderful US Airways. I have a short week at home before heading to Dallas for two weeks (for work) on Saturday. I’m not particularly exciting about spending most of December away from home but hopefully in January I’ll be able to get back to the mostly non-travely lifestyle that I lived for August to November (when I went to Paris).