Nat Arem's Blog

As early readers of my blog may recall, I made a wager back in January-ish. You can read about it here. Anyway, I’m behind schedule, although I remain confident that I can pull off the win. It’s been 3 months and I’ve dropped from 239 to 226, meaning I’ve lost less than half of the weight needed to win the bet. I have between another two to three months to get down to the required weight of 210 lbs (if you read the entry, the exact timing of the weigh-in is up to me, it just has to be during the WSOP events, with the last possible day being the start of the main event). So, it’s been more than half the time, I’ve lost less than half of the weight and the last 5-8 pounds will be the hardest. Why am I confident? A few reasons.

First, I really haven’t been trying my hardest just because of the length of this bet. I usually eat relatively healthy, but I have occasional meals where I just eat whatever… and that has definitely hurt me thus far. As I’m coming down to the wire here to lose these pounds safely, I’ll pick up the pace just due to my competitive spirit. I don’t like to lose.

Second, it has finally gotten nice here in Philadelphia the last few weeks. For the first few months, I was relegated to using a stationary bike at my local gym for my aerobic exercise as, for some reason, I can’t balance very well on a treadmill. I’ve been making a lot of progress now that I can run outdoors. Running is much better for general exercise and weight loss (for me at least), so I expect to see significantly greater gains from running as opposed to cycling. I will also continue to bike at the gym.

Finally, I have been spending a lot of time travelling to places like Turning Stone, Ithaca, Foxwoods, etc. I generally eat terrible while on the road and I don’t get much exercise, if any. In between now and the WSOP, I have one trip planned: Turning Stone in mid-late May. I will eat better there this time and I’ll make an attempt to get some exercise. Other than that, I will be holed up at the gym in Philly.

So the bottom line is that it will be close. I only have $1500 on the bet (spread out among a few people), so it’s not primarily the $ that are driving me to win. It’s more that I want to get in better shape and I’m just very competitive. If I get to 212 or something like that and lose the bet, I’ll be disappointed, but I’ll still be very happy to be down in that area. Anyway, I’m still taking update pictures to be posted at the end up the project and I’m going to give the next two-three months my best shot.

Later.

This guy etaipo is my hero: etaipo’s torrent tracker.

Comcast Cable’s channel offerings suck, so I’ve been relying on this guy to get me most of my poker-related TV fixins. And he does a damn good job of it. So whoever he is, thank you to him.

Also, I’ve had the new laptop for a few days now and it works great. I highly recommend it as a poker laptop or as a general desktop replacement. It is a little big though, so it wouldn’t be good for travelling.

According to the UPS tracking info, my laptop will be delivered tomorrow. Look down an entry or two to read about what I bought.

Also, I decided to email some law schools and find out what the deal is with the admissions decisions because it seems like it has been awhile since my apps were submitted.

Here is Vanderbilt’s response:

Dear Nat,

Rebecca Frey
Program Assistant
Vanderbilt Law School Admissions

and here is USC:

Dear Mr. Arem,

Taryn Burks
Student Services Assistant
The Law School
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California 90089-0074

Good to know, I guess it’s going to be awhile until I find out if I got into some of these schools.

I’m still waiting on email responses from a few other schools.

In other news, not much is going on.

I STILL haven’t heard from any schools since I got the waitlist notice from Cornell (see here). The last update still remains pretty accurate (see here).

However, my hand has been forced because Emory’s deposit deadline is April 15th. Therefore, I just put down a $250 deposit that secures my spot in the Emory Law Class of 2009. The deposit isn’t binding because I am allowed to give up my spot and attend another school, but I would lose the deposit if I don’t attend Emory. If I do go, then it gets put towards my tuition. The next deadline is June 1st (I think $500 deposit due at that point), so I’ll hopefully know more about my status at the other schools when that deadline rolls around.

So I ordered a new laptop from Dell today. I don’t really need a new laptop as I bought my current one about 6 months ago and I have a tricked out desktop setup, but I found a pretty good deal and decided that I’d be able to get a lot out of the new laptop.

Here are the specs:

1. Inspiron E1705 – Intel® Core™ Duo Processor T2300 (1.66GHz/667MHz FSB)
2. 17 inch UltraSharp™ Wide Screen UXGA Display with TrueLife™ (1920×1200 resolution)
3. 2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz
4. 60GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive

I also got a few other extras, like an upgraded wireless card and an extended life battery. The whole thing only cost $1300 because I used one of those sick Dell coupons (they always have them running, you just need to search around for them). I went a little bit cheap on the processor because my purposes don’t require a lot of processing power. I’ll probably be upgrading to a newer laptop in a year anyway, so it doesn’t matter that much.

Some people prefer to get the best particular product at any given time. In this case, it would probably cost me around $4K and it would probably last for two to three years. I prefer to spend around $1300 now, upgrade in a year and use the old one for something random. In the end, I can always have the newest technology (like my laptop comes with an ExpressCard slot, as opposed to PC card) and the newest operating system (waiting for Vista/Longhorn, the next operating system). It just seems like a preferable way to buy computing equipment as you get a better overall experience IMO.

Anyway, my laptop is being built and should be here within a week or two.

Well I’ve been back at home for a few days now, without all that much going on other than website work.

We did, however, launch thepartydb, which is obviously a Party Poker tournament database. It’s been a long road to get to this point, so I’m happy to get it off the ground. We’ve worked out almost all of the major bugs in the collection software and our display software. If you already have an account at thepokerdb, you should be able to login with the same information.

One of the major bugs so far is the occasional missing of tournaments. I know this bothers our users and trust me, it bothers me as well. Completeness is probably my number one goal for both thepokerdb and thepartydb. Therefore, I’ve put a bunch of effort into trying to work out the best way to make sure we collect as close to 100% of the tournaments as possible. I think we should be very close to 100% from this point on as the software developer has made some key changes to our collection software. We’re also running redundant collections, so if one machine goes down or fails for whatever reason, we are still collecting on the other machine(s).

In other news, we’re also coming up on the launch of theubdb (that link won’t work yet, the site isn’t live for the public right now). Obviously, it will cover Ultimate Bet tournaments. I’ve been collecting them for a little while as of now, so we should have a month or so already in the theubdb when we open the site to the public.

That’s it for now.