Nat Arem's Blog

So earlier this week, Eric, Steve and I went out to eat at a steakhouse with another friend of mine who I’m not supposed to name on this blog. This friend bought a new car in April and only put a few thousand miles on it, but somehow was forced to pay for a huge repair by Volkswagen when the engine died. The day we went to the steakhouse happened to be the first day this friend had the car after about 6 weeks at the dealership. After dinner we headed back to my apt while my friend was going somewhere else. About 30 minutes later, I got a call… the car had broken down AGAIN. WTF?!?

Eric and I jumped in my car and went over to the spot where my friend broke down. It was JUST off of the I-15 exit ramp onto Spring Mountain headed west. If you’re familiar with the area, you know that’s a really busy spot. After a few minutes of standing around and calling roadside assistance, we decided to try to push. Here’s a map:

Eric and I successfully pushed the car up the street and around the corner while my friend steered the car. It was hard. While you can’t see it on the overhead view, that’s a slight incline and there’s an even sharper incline as you go around the corner.

Eventually the tow truck showed up and brought the car over to the dealership on W Sahara. The car has since died two or three more times, both times with my friend driving it. It basically breaks down once a day. Right now the car is back at the dealership supposedly being fixed. I feel like the right move at this point is a lawsuit. Each time the car dies, the power steering also dies. My friend has been caught in multiple situations where the car broke down in a very busy spot and it’s only a matter of time before a horrible accident occurs due to this lemon. VW refuses to give my friend a new car and insists on making ineffective repairs to this piece of crap (although it’s brand new and looks good, the thing is incapable of running consistently).

Please never buy a VW. My friend has been jerked around and screwed by VW over and over with regards to this car. Not only that — my friend has been stuck with rental car bills that VW is supposed to be paying for … a rental car for 6 weeks isn’t cheap! No one deserves that type of treatment. The service is truly awful, deceptive and ineffective. Tell your friends about this please — I want this situation to adversely affect VW as much as possible. I’d appreciate a link to this post if you have a good spot to put it where it will be seen by many eyes.

I recently found this on my computer and after posting the stuff about the rides that I went on yesterday, I decided to upload this one as well. This video was taken at Six Flags in LA in December 2005. I was sitting in the front row of the ride and I took this with a small point-and-shoot digital camera. I wish I could have gotten videos like this on the top of the Stratosphere, but it was too hard to sneak a camera out there without the operator noticing that you were holding it (and asking me to put it away).

At about the 14 second mark you can hear ZeeJustin saying “jesus” right before we went down the initial fall.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, my good friend Eric Strauss and my business partner Paul were coming out this past week. Eric just flew out about an hour ago.

Eric got here very early on Tuesday (ie, like 1 am late Monday night) and we pretty much just went to sleep the first night. The next day we picked up Paul around noon and went to see “Knocked Up” with stevesbets at the Palms movie theater. The movie was okay I guess — lots of funny moments for sure, but I think they tried to make it a little too serious at points. Ahh, screw this, a full trip report is too much work… I give up.

Anyway, I don’t even remember a lot of the stuff that we did, but Paul and I got some work done on the site that we’re starting. I think most of it should be pretty easy to get done — the hard part right now is the name. I really have no idea what to call it.

Other things we did included three trips to the In-N-Out on Sahara just east of Valley View. It’s a good spot to get a burger if you’re ever in the area.

Today was fun though. We went down to the Stratosphere. That place is a shithole. The whole thing is in disrepair and smells like crap. That being said, the prospect of the rides at the top of the tower was enough to draw us down there. I have a bunch of pictures.

Looking west. Sahara is the main road running away from the pic. I-15 is in the foreground running across the pic.

Looking down at the Stratosphere pool.

Looking down the strip. The Wynn golf course is on the left and you can see the airport in the far distance on the left.

Me on the top of the tower just before getting on one of the rides.

Looking up the tower that is at the top of the Stratosphere. The ride basically shoots you up the tower and then you freefall down. It’s the tallest thrill ride in the world. The other rides were called “Insanity” and “X-Scream”. I got a video of Insanity while we were waiting in line to get on it. Here it is…

X-Scream is basically like a track that sends you towards the edge then stops at the last second. It also tilts downwards. I got a pretty bad picture of it here…

I’m not sure which one I liked the best. “Big Shot” (the tower ride) was pretty cool, but I’d done a ride like that before, albeit starting much lower on the ground. It was pretty cool to do that ride at 1000+ feet in the air. X-Scream and Insanity were both new rides for me. I’d never done anything like it. X-Scream was cool, but I never really felt the thrill of being thrown over the edge and dangled. Insanity was pretty tame also, but at least I felt a real thrill while I was on it. So I’d probably say Insanity was my favorite of all three rides up there. This is what wikipedia has to say about the rides…

* The Big Shot at 1,081 feet (329 m) is the highest thrill ride in the world;
* Insanity the Ride, opened in 2005, at 900 feet (274 m) is the second highest thrill ride in the world, it dangles riders over the edge of the tower and then spins in a circular pattern at approximately forty miles per hour. Since its public opening, the ride has stopped twice with passengers onboard (upwards of an hour each time), due to high winds that trigger a “safety mechanism” which shuts down the machine immediately without bringing the passengers back to the loading dock. The hotel is currently being sued by the first set of passengers who were trapped on the ride dangling over the edge.
* XSCREAM at 866 feet (264 m) is the third highest thrill ride in the world. This ride also “drops” people over the edge, and has also stopped while people were on it, though it is not clear what triggered this ride’s failure.

Anyway, the rides were fun, the week was fun, etc. Saturday I don’t have much planned, but I’ll be back at the Rio on Sunday taking pictures. Good luck to everyone over these last few weeks.

“How badly can you be dominated with AQ unless he has an A or a Q in his hand” -Brian Wilson

Yes, he really did say that today on the WSOP broadcast of the $1500 NL Event 38 at the WSOP. He’s BLUFF/WSOP’s professional poker commentator. Yeah….

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f90221.pdf

I wrote about this in my old blog before I took it down. Since I haven’t posted the archives yet, that entry isn’t available anymore to the viewing public. But if you had $10K in NETELLER at any point in 2006 (even if it was for about 30 seconds) and you’re a US citizen, you need to get this form in and you need to get it in before June 30th. The penalties for not filing are extremely severe (think prison and/or six figure fines), so be smart — fill it out and send it in. The US Gov’t could easily have copies of NETELLER records after this whole investigation thing and you don’t want to get caught not reporting your foreign accounts.

I was there for most of the sequestered $1500 NL FT today — Ryan “youngluck” Young and Dustin eventually got HU. Ryan won the event for $615K and Dustin took second for $380K. In addition, Nam Le took third. It was pretty cool to be back at the Rio after being away for weeks. Even though everyone else there seems to be sick of it, when you’re away for weeks you have a completely different viewpoint.

In other news, I saw Spiderman 3 on the IMAX at the Palms. The IMAX was cool. I thought the movie was retarded. Some of the fights and effects were cool though, as you would expect from a big-budget movie like that.

I’m trying to think of other cool things to do with my blog and I think that posting cool things on the web might be a good addition, so whenever I run across something that I really like, I’ll throw it into my next blog entry. For this one, I’ll recommend that everyone visit netvibes.com. It’s like a personalized homepage with incredible options and features — and it’s incredibly smooth and well-written. I can check 8 different email addresses at a time without having to login to each one to see if there’s new mail all while seeing which blogs have been updated and seeing what’s going on in the various news headlines. It’s an amazing piece of javascript coding and I highly recommend it.