Nat Arem's Blog

I’ve seen three baseball games the last three days…

Thursday: Braves at Phillies
Friday: Braves at Mets
Saturday: Braves at Mets (again)

I don’t have the time or energy to write much about them, but they were all pretty good games.

Here are the uncaptioned pictures. I will go back and edit this post in the next few days to include captions.

Philly:

Mets (Friday game):

Mets (Saturday game):

Well like I said in the last WPT-related entry, I was going to be on the WPT for two straight weeks… in the crowd. And last night, the WPT Bahamas episode was broadcast on the Travel Channel. It featured one of my best friends in online poker: Aurangzeb “Ozzy 87″ Sheikh (Ozzy 87/bigslick789) (hendonmob). As you may know, he was an extreme short-stack going into the final 6 players, he picked up AA the first hand, got all in against 77, the flop came 7T3 and he failed to re-suckout, so that was that.

However, the Ozzy section did manage to get a few seconds of glory when we celebrated his AA (too soon obv) – click the picture to see a larger version:

Roman, aka Empire2000, is in the green shirt. I am the big guy in the white shirt. thorladen is only partially visiable, but he is in the yellow shirt and sunglasses. jucifer is standing in front of him. And Bushman is half in the frame on the right side of the shot in the white shirt. MrSmokey1 was right next to us, but I guess he somehow eluded the cameras.

Anyway, Brandon Schaefer (aka schaefer/schaeferbeer/SchaefMyAss online) is at my house now… we’re going to the Phillies game this afternoon, then roadtripping up to NYC and Boston for some more baseball games.

In case you want to hear me ramble through an interview on Skype, I happen to have a link to that very thing here: N 82 50 24 Podcast recording.

Let me know via comments what you think.

Also, this is old, but I was on a radio show last November. It’s called AnteUpRadio and you can find the MP3 archives here. If you want a direct link to the MP3 with me on it, you can just right-click here and do “save target as” or “save link as”.

Enjoy!

I’ve done a lot of indoor cycling over the past year. A bunch of it was on the stationary bike going at my own pace, but I’ve done spinning also a few times over the past year. Recently, I’ve actually been doing spinning a lot (3-4 times a week) as I find it to be a great workout and very effective in helping me with my weight bet (less than three months left!). I know spinning sounds a little girly and trust me, I thought the same thing before I tried it due to numerous recommendations. It’s not girly at all, even though I’d say 2/3rds – 3/4ths of the class is made up of women. It’s actually a great workout and it doesn’t hurt that there are usually a lot of hot girls in the class.

However, there are some things I don’t like about spinning. First, it’s hard to get a spot because it’s so popular. I have to get to the gym early, wait in line, sign up, get my hand stamped, then go stand outside the room until the doors open so I get a good bike (the bad bikes are the ones that are too close to other bikes, etc). All of that is a pain in the ass. Second, I really don’t like working out to dance/techno/club music. I just don’t like it. And they turn the music way up, so I can’t use headphones to block it out. Third, some of the instructors suck and you can’t really determine your own workout breakdown (sprints, hills, etc) as well as I would like. Despite all of that, it’s still enjoyable and I plan on doing it for a long time to come.

That being said, I want to spend a lot more time cycling outdoors. The problem is, until recently, I didn’t really have a good bike to ride on. The past few seasons, I’ve used a hybrid bike made by Giant which while okay, wasn’t really great for riding on. So I decided to upgrade. Recently, I bought a Trek 5000, which is a semi-entry level, but semi-high end bike. I can’t seem to figure out exactly how good it is, but it does have a carbon frame with a lot of carbon parts (seat post, fork, etc) along with good Shimano components. It should serve my purposes very well.

This is a picture of it (bigger picture here):

Should be fun, I plan on taking it out a bunch over the next few weeks before I have to take a little bit of time off for Turning Stone and Ithaca.