Nat Arem's Blog

Is google trying to appear neutral and not rank themselves for terms like “search engine”? Despite the fact that they obviously deserve to be #1?

They don’t have any problem ranking themselves/their subsidiaries #1 for terms like blog, images, maps, finance, etc.

The whole thing is a little bizarre to me. Anyone know why they do that?

I’m not really like a music classics type of guy for the most part. I mostly listen to stuff from “my generation” — which basically means like the 1993 range until current. I didn’t listen to a ton of music when I was like 5 or 6 years old. Someone like Johnny Cash had, largely, exited the popular music culture by the time I rolled around and while I obviously knew the name, I really didn’t know much about him. Then, a few days ago, I watched Walk The Line with P5s Adam. It was a pretty incredible movie and I’ve since read a lot about Johnny Cash’s life.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, I highly recommend it. You won’t be disappointed.

Also, I am embedding his last music video – “Hurt”, which is a cover of Nine Inch Nails.

Just to clarify, I write that statement after being a DreamHost customer for all of about 10 minutes. I just signed up for a web hosting account there for a new site that a friend of mine is making and I’m helping him get it started. I happen to manage my own DNS (if that doesn’t make sense to you, just forget it), so I went to write a support ticket asking DreamHost which IP I should point the DNS records to.

Lo and behold, I see the following drop-down options in the support ticket options:

That’s just cool. I really appreciate when companies aren’t extremely uptight and business-like. I love that they know the web community really well and it tells me with a high degree of certainty that they’re a well-run company overall. Of course, I might have a blog reader or two who’s had a negative experience with them, but how can you argue with the use of internet acronyms in the support system? I half expected to see an LOLcat on the next page saying “i can has your message?” or something like that.

Overall it’s just brilliant marketing in my opinion. The enterprise is the enterprise and the shared web host community is the shared web host community. I’d be really impressed with them if they automatically have different/more serious options in the support tickets for the people with $800/month dedicated servers. Companies that think outside the box like this are the ones who tend to set themselves apart in a large commoditized industry (that is, except when things go wrong — that’s when the good hosts set themselves apart from the bad ones usually).

Kudos DreamHost.

That’s what happens if you search for me and click on me.com. Oddly enough, if you hit refresh, it works fine. I’m actually not sure what’s going wrong technically here.

Also, I wonder what Apple paid for me.com. Off the top of my head, I would think a domain like that has to be worth eight figures. They apparently bought it from snappville relatively recently.

Whatever the answer is, I can’t wait for MobileMe. That’s some pretty cool stuff and the best part is that I don’t have to use Outlook, which I completely despise and I refuse to use ever again in my life.

Some people are asking me about the 60 Minutes stuff, so I might as well make a blog post to update everyone all at once. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, take a look at this post.

I’ll just make this whole thing point by point…

First, I am not going to appear on 60 Minutes. They wanted me to and I did go as far as meeting with an assistant producer in Atlanta for lunch, but I ultimately decided that I did not want to be a part of something that I felt would portray online poker in an unfair manner. I would have gone on 60 Minutes if I felt like the show was going to show a clear overall picture of the good and the bad, but I get the feeling that it may end up ripping apart online poker. In my opinion, that is unfair and potentially devastating to our livelihood. Not only do I have a financial interest in the continuation of online poker, I also have a huge emotional/mental commitment to this industry. I love being involved in it and I don’t want to see that come to an end. If it did, I would land on my feet job-wise because I have an okay cushion and I could definitely get into top business schools — but that being said, I don’t want to do that right now (maybe in a few years, we’ll see). On top of all of the financial reasons, I absolutely 100% believe that online poker is a safe, educational and fun recreational activity that millions of people enjoy and I think it’s completely unfair for people to tell other people how to spend their time and money. So that’s why I don’t want to see a bash job on the online poker industry.

Second, I should point out that I do not think that 60 Minutes is saying to themselves: “Let’s see how we can completely rip these people apart and draw as much negative attention as possible.” I think 60 Minutes will probably do a pretty good job (they’re good at what they do) and show a fair representation of what happened at AP and UB. The problem is, the public who watches the show and any politicians who see it will sit there and be like “well then, I knew it was dangerous to Americans, online poker is bad” — they won’t be able to differentiate between the PokerStars/Full Tilt Pokers of the world and the sites that are not being run correctly. And, of course, it’s hard for me to come up with a good response when someone says “well, you said for years that major online poker sites would never do anything like this because of the risks of losing their customers” — so it’s even hard to deny that there’s risk in playing at PS or FTP because all of the conspiracy theorists have a lot of ammunition to come up with their theories about other sites being rigged/unfair.

Third, I have made sure to clarify with 60 Minutes my side of the story. So while I don’t plan on being on camera (I don’t think, unless they have some footage I’m unaware of), I didn’t want to take the chance of being portrayed inaccurately if they happen to mention my involvement at any point during the show. However, I doubt they’ll be talking much (or at all) about someone who won’t be on camera, so I don’t think there’s much of a risk there.

Fourth, I’ve been told that Michael Josem and Todd Witteles both went on camera in Las Vegas (I think) recently. I was also told that 60 Minutes is out in Las Vegas using the WSOP backdrop for a lot of their coverage. I don’t know how they’ll tie it all in, but I guess I can see why that would make sense to them. I also expect them to come down to Costa Rica at some point, but I don’t know when as I have not been communicating with them at all over the last two months-ish. I don’t know if Marco is going on camera, but last I heard, he said that he wasn’t planning on it because he didn’t want the attention. I’m pretty sure that Mark Seif and Adanthar are going to be on the show too, but outside of those four main guys, I don’t know of any other major people that will be on the show.

Anyway, that concludes this update. I’ll be posting more on my blog in the next few weeks as I have a lot of stuff to blog about and I’m kind of bothered that I keep having to put off blogging for other projects. I’ve decided I have to make blogging a top priority because I really enjoy doing it and it’s important to me to have a place to get my thoughts out on a regular basis.

Congrats to all of the people pulling in big WSOP scores, I look forward to the rest of the WSOP and reading about all of the sick things people are doing out there.

In keeping with my recent tradition of posting old emails, I’ll put a few more out there. I feel really stupid looking back on these, but when I was just getting started, I was just trying to make things happen and this is the kind of stuff that you’ve gotta do.

So way back in the summer of 2004 I thought that online poker video training sites would be a terrific idea. Little did I know how big the idea would get, but I was convinced I could make a decent amount from the whole thing if I got the right pros to get involved. So, somehow, I came to the conclusion that ZeeJustin and GambleAB would be good people to approach. This is an email that I sent to Justin on Jan 6th, 2005.

Justin,

I saw your name mentioned in this article http://www.onlineshark.com/pokerarticles.html and I thought I should approach you with an idea that I have. First, a bit about myself. [snip UBER boring part about myself ... I was really dumb]

On to the idea… I think poker teaching tools are a bit limited. Books are good for an introduction and watching tournaments on TV can offer a few clues, but I don’t know of any instructional material dealing with making real decisions in the world of online poker. So I think the poker world needs to see how a good player plays with the hole cards being shown… — I think you’re a good candidate to be
that player.

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the rest of my ideas for fear of wasting both of our time, but if you’re interested, write back and we can discuss further. I think it could be a great business opportunity and a way to revolutionize poker teaching tools.

Thanks,
Nat Arem
Philadelphia, PA

So yea, I was just reaching out to a few players. I didn’t get a response, but I sent a followup on Jan 12, 2005:

Justin,

Congrats on your finish at the PCA… I followed the tourney through the blog.

Anyway, I am in discussions with GambleAB (you may know him from Stars or RGP) to try out this idea. In addition, NotACmptr and ItsButta (both of whom played in the Bahamas) may be getting involved in this project. Essentially, it revolves around recording tournaments/cash games with screen capture software (from your point of view — if you are worried about people learning how you specifically play, it is easy to edit your identity out), editing the tournament/cash games, adding your audio commentary track and putting the final result on a DVD. We would then sell the DVDs through a website. The technology has been tested and I think it would produce a compelling product for the masses who are interested in learning how to win at poker.

If you are not interested, please let me know so I can stop contacting you.

Nat Arem

BTW, my AIM is mallwyd if you want to contact me there.

Just FYI, that is not my AIM address anymore. I haven’t used that for years. I’m actually not even sure why I wrote that stuff about the DVD thing. I am almost certain that I was planning on making a CardRunners-like video website with the footage and possibly offering DVDs in addition (FWIW, I still think good poker DVDs are a monster market waiting to be tapped — the current selection is really crappy). I do specifically remember making a test DVD and thinking that it worked pretty well, but that it was hard to decipher the hole cards without an HDTV. I didn’t want something that wouldn’t work well on a low-res TV. So I’m actually not sure why I said it was tested successfully when I specifically remember it looking terrible on a low-res TV. Maybe this was when I was in the stage when I wanted to do DVD-ROMs (which did work very well)? I’m really not sure.

Anyway, I didn’t get a response from Justin. But, luckily enough for me, I was also talking to GambleAB about the same idea and he’d won a seat to the first-ever WSOP Circuit event in Atlantic City, which ran from Jan 16th to Jan 18th in 2005. He lived in North Carolina at the time and I lived in Philadelphia, so him being in Atlantic City was a good opportunity for us to meet up and talk about it. I drove out to AC on Saturday January 15th with a few friends from high school (we were going down to play poker anyway) and I met up with Aaron and attempted to demonstrate the idea. I think he agreed it was a good idea and he was interested, but he was having technical problems doing the videos. Eventually the idea kind of died out because PSCrew.com was launched about a month after this whole thing and I didn’t have time to focus on the video site. But then Aaron ended up making the final table (see results here) and I went down to AC to see the FT on Jan 18th. You can actually see me in the background on a picture on this page. Here’s the pic if you don’t feel like clicking through:

I’m on the right in the gray shirt. Erick Lindgren (the 2nd place finisher) is on the left in the black hat. The whole experience really got me hooked on poker permanently. While there, I met the guy who has come to be known as FTPDoug and even though I haven’t seen him since, we still communicate regularly via AIM/email and he’s been a big help to me many times during my time in the poker industry.

I also no longer hold a grudge against Justin for not responding to my emails. (Just kidding, I never cared much… you can’t when you’re reaching out to other people and, realistically, they don’t have any obligation to respond or help you out).