More Olympics and Josh “Bokardo” Porter
That win over Canada’s mens hockey team was great. It felt like a total freeroll for the USA. No one in the US really cares about hockey but everyone in Canada seems to care so much about how well their team does. But winning is winning and it’s sweet.
Overall the USA is really doing tremendously well in my opinion. Between the USA Ski Team kicking ass on both the men’s and women’s side, the speedskaters doing pretty well on the men’s side and the snowboarding (both snowboard cross and halfpipe) team, the USA is making a really good showing. Which isn’t totally expected for the winter olympics. So it’s nice to see.
I am about to head down to Costa Rica for a two week trip. It’s a work trip so it won’t be all fun but I am looking forward to seeing a bunch of people down there. It is a fun place to go back to for a bit. No trip to the beach planned for this trip to Costa Rica but that could always change when I get there. The work I have planned mainly revolves around PocketFives and the new version we’re working on. If anyone out there has any good suggestions for vBulletin plugins or mods, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll check it out. Right now we’re wrapping up a lot of the core parts of the switchover and moving into a part of the development which is more of a smaller task sort of routine. That includes dealing with things like site search and other potentially tricky tasks. But none of the tasks remaining are both significant and difficult (in my opinion) so we basically just have a bunch of medium sized tasks to work on. I’m really excited about how it’s coming together and I definitely look forward to the Costa Rica trip because I’ll be working with the P5s programmers daily.
Unfortunately the trip will cut into my CrossFit routine but I will be doing a bunch of replacement workouts at the local gym. I’ve been feeling stronger and stronger with the CrossFit stuff so I hope to keep that progression going when I’m on my own. Part of the difficulty with CrossFit thus far is that I have been eating at a caloric deficit for approximately nine months. While that caloric deficit was a great help in achieving my weight loss goals (I lost 60 lbs) it causes problems on a strength training routine. I don’t recover as quickly and I don’t feel as strong when working out. So I have been trying to ramp up the calories a bit but it hasn’t been easy. I get full a lot faster than I used to. And I’m not willing to compromise on food quality and eat total junk filled with processed food and saturated fat just so I can eat more calories. So getting on a caloric surplus with healthy food has not been easy but I am trying.
On another note, I’ve been watching a lot more live TV than I normally do because of the Olympics. A bunch of times my DVR has recorded into the NBC local news. And, for some reason, I am tapped into the Chicago NBC HD feed. I’ve caught the weather part a few times and I actually have something to say about it. It’s absurd to live in Chicago and bitch about snow. If you don’t like cold weather or snow, MOVE. The routine on the Chicago news crew is actually pretty ridiculous. Whenever the weather guy is like “bad news guys, MORE snow is on the way, brace yourselves” the rest of the news team is like “oh man that sucks, I can’t believe we have to put up with more cold weather” and they generally bitch about it for a bit and then just sigh and move on. I mean, wtf is wrong with them. That’s like people in Cayman bitching about it being hot and sunny out. It comes with the territory. For whatever reason, that news crew really tilts me. I’m glad I’m not normally watching the news.
Last bit of tilt has to do with another work thing. We’ve been reaching out to a few web form consultants to try to help with our form processing on a few of our sites. For those who aren’t technically inclined, forms are the spots where you fill in info. So when you’re buying or registering for something. The guys also help with other parts of the site but the forms are their speciality. The first guy I tried was Luke Wroblewski. He was pretty reasonable and nice. He’s apparently busy with his job and consulting for a bit but at least he responded to my request to purchase some of his time. He pointed me to a guy named Josh Porter (aka Bokardo). I’d heard of Josh before and I’d read his blog so I knew he could do a decent job for us. Lo and behold he has a services section on his website (I ran that through bitly because I want to give as little Google PageRank juice to him as possible). I email him once. No response. I email him again. No response. Both emails were short, friendly and to the point. I gave him a few days to respond to each one. I give him a call and he actually picks up. He claims to have “major email problems” which, I suppose, is possible. Although that doesn’t say much for him if he can’t figure out how to get email delivered reliably (I should also mention that his website was down for the first few days I tried to look at it so I knew he was not a technical master from the start). Keep in mind that getting email is something my grandmother has figured out. So, sure, email problems. I’m not hiring him to be a server tech so I really don’t care that much. He gives me another email address over the phone. This one is a gmail address so there’s pretty much no way that those emails aren’t getting through. Once again, I send him an email. No response. Same thing with a second email. Obviously at this point I’m fed up and not going to work with him. What tilts me is not that he doesn’t want to work with us (there are tons of form consultants out there who will happily accept the many thousands of dollars we’re willing to spend on good advice). What tilts me is the total lack of respect and follow through on the part of a web consultant.
Someone who promotes a web consulting business not responding to four emails is not how business should be done. I get a ton of random emails and PMs from people with business ideas or other requests and even if I am not interested, I always respond. I really didn’t expect the level of maturity and professionalism to drop to a level even lower than that within the poker world. I don’t know why this bothered me so much because, like I said, we’ll spend a lot of money on someone else who is more responsive and helpful. So it’s probably best the whole thing got off on the wrong foot from the get go. I just had to get this rant off my chest.
Also, if someone knows a good form consultant, leave a comment with a link to their website and I’ll check it out. We’re still trying to decide who to hire.
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Comments
I feel yah man! I totally hate it when pople don’t respond to messages. Make’s me feel like I’m not worth their time. Anyway, this attitude does not only persist in the poker world, it’s everywhere!
Yes, this nonsense is everywhere. I’ve been trying to hire someone to do some insulation work in my house for 4 weeks. I wanted 3 estimates, called out 3 guys. Took over 2 weeks just to get all 3 of them out there, and I’ve only gotten 1 estimate back. From the Home Depot guy, who wrote up the estimate as he sat in my living room.
So apparently, with the economy in the shitter, everyone looking for work and money, and I’m ready to spend between 2-5K right now for work, but I can’t even get a proper estimate in a timely manner to make the decision. WTF?
Stuff like this tilts me to no end. I have money, I need work done, you do this type of work and need money… why can’t we make something happen here????
Maybe Nat’s still in Costa Rica or somewhere….
The economy is in shambles, but there are still picky people out there!
Nat, good to hear you are getting into Crossfit. You should look into utilizing the Paleo or Zone diet. Crossfit HQ prefers the Zone but many elite crossfitters are purely Paleo. Check out http://www.robbwolf.com, http://www.marksdailyapple.com and http://www.zonediet.com.
These are all great resources and may provide you some answers on how you can increase your energy levels during workouts.
Nice post, that was a big game by the USA against Canada. Hope something will happen soon in the poker section also.
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Nat, hey man. Really liked this post. You’re always spot on with your blogging. On a related note, I sent you an email about my poker idea idea a few months ago and haven’t heard back. I figured you must be busy, or whatever. So yeah, get back to me because the income potential on this thing is astronomical. I mean, tremendously tremendous.