Nat Arem's Blog

Lots of stuff to talk about…

I have my 10 year high school reunion coming up pretty soon.  I’m still not totally sure if I’m going but I guess I’m leaning towards trying to make it.  Mainly because I can combine it with a few other things I need to do in the northeast but I think it’ll be interesting to go to see some people and what the school looks like now.  I don’t think I’ve been on my high school’s property since the five year reunion in 2005.  For some perspective, that was just when thepokerdb was launching in a very beta form (I think I registered the domain in May 2005), I hadn’t even started to apply to law school and I still had a real job as an accountant.  Times have changed.

This isn’t really in reference to my high school friends specifically but it’s always pretty interesting to look on Facebook and see what people who you haven’t seen in 5+ years are doing.  It really is pretty crazy how varied peoples’ lives end up.  From jobs to locations to spouses to kids.  I have to say there are a ton of surprises in store for you if you think you know what people are going to end up doing if you know them for a few years in their formative years (ie, teenage, etc).  You definitely don’t.

All of that being said, by far the most interesting thing is to see who got really fat.  I know most people don’t want to say that but it’s definitely true.  There’s nothing quite like looking up a person who used to be really skinny and seeing them blown up like a balloon.  Sadly that used to be me so I’m sure a few people thought that about me at one point.

I also have a trip to Europe tentatively planned for the end of April timeframe.  Nothing is booked yet but it’s a quick little business trip to meet with a few potential partners.  That will be my first time over to Europe since I was in Ireland in June 2007.  And shortly before that I was in Monte Carlo in March 2007.  So even though I travel a ton somehow Europe has eluded me for a little while.  I guess living Costa Rica and Cayman makes it seem like I “travel” (in the vacation/sightseeing sense) more than I do because most of my travel is in between those two countries or between where I live and the northeast.  I hope to do more personal travel in Europe over the next few years because I feel like I go on a lot of trips but I don’t go on many true vacations to new places for reasons other than work.  The last one was definitely the trip to Africa (awesome trip btw) and before that I can’t really think of anything in the last few years.

All that being said, I do have a pretty cool trip booked for late June with my family.  We’d doing an organized bike trip in some National Parks in southwest Utah.  We’ll also be seeing the Grand Canyon which is going to be a first for me unless you count looking out the window of an airplane on a clear day (somehow it’s a different effect I think).  I’m very excited for that.  I actually originally suggested it as a trip where I would just go with my mom because I knew my dad would be busy with work and might not be able to make it.  But, being the bike-obsessed nut that he is, he somehow squeezed it into his schedule and now my sister is coming along too.  She is on the bike team at Yale so I’m sure she will crush me and I’ll be unable to keep up with her.  In fact, my only hope is to keep up with my mom.  I think I can probably take my fifty-nine year old mother in a bike race (sad statement but VERY sad if I’m wrong).  Unfortunately my brother will have to miss it because he’ll be doing some sort of State Department summer internship in the Middle East.  Or something like that.  He’s ridiculously smart whatever it is that he’s doing.

I’m certainly not complaining.  One real vacation a year is pretty good.  At least I can afford to go on a trip when I do have the time to do so.  I do live in a place that most people would consider an amazing vacation spot but it somehow isn’t the same when you live somewhere.  No matter where you live no one really considers their home to be a vacation spot.  All of that being said, I’d really like to go on a ski and/or snowboard trip sometime within the next year.  I’ve NEVER skied or snowboarded except for day trips when I was younger.  And that didn’t happen many times.  So doing it once every few years for a single day means that I never really learned how to do it.  I want to go somewhere for at least five days and really try to get the hang of it.

Also, I have continued doing CrossFit and I’m having a really good time with it.  I did a workout on Monday that totally knocked me out of commission today.  The workout was doing handstand pushups (I substituted an 85 lb military press) and pullups (I used a band on the bar) in the following fashion: 1 of each exercise first minute, 2 each second minute, 3 each third minute, etc.  So the first minute is really easy and you have like a 50 second rest period after doing one rep of each — pullups go first.  The military presses were easy until round four when I finally felt it a bit.  I did round five and, I think, round six.  I definitely didn’t do round seven of the military press.  The whole time I was doing my pullups in the same minute.  But one twist to the workout is that when you fail one of the two in a minute, you keep going with the thing you didn’t fail on in latter minutes.  So I kept did pullups in round seven, failed on the military press and then did pullups in round eight and kept going.  Over and over.  By around minute eleven I was pretty tired.  Not all that gassed but I could tell my muscles were not going to respond for much longer.  I really surprised myself because I did three more full rounds going all the way up to fourteen.  I tried to do fifteen during the next minute but it was not happening for me.  Totally dead.

Once I started walking around I noticed something kind of funny.  My arms were not straightening on their own when I let them dangle at my side.  I guess all the pullups had done something to the muscle to tighten it or whatever.  My arms felt so dead and I was totally relaxing them as much as I could but I was still walking around kind of like a monkey with my elbows bent and hands a bit in front of me.  It was a definite effort to even straighten my arms out.  Driving home was interesting because I had way less motor control in my arms and fingers than I normally do but I made it back without incident.  If it had been my feet having that sort of trouble I don’t think I would have been able to drive because braking and accelerating would have been difficult to perform with any reasonable degree of control.

But that was nothing compared to waking up this morning.  My right arm could barely move.  My left arm was extremely sort and my upper back was really sore too.  But my right arm could not straighten under its own power no matter what I did.  It just would not go.  I could attempt to push on it (with my right shoulder up against a wall) with my weakened left hand but it was still tough to get it close to straight.  I’ve spent most of today alternating ice and heat on it.  It’s definitely improved as I can straighten it now without too much difficultly.  Although there is still a ton of soreness and pain when I do that.  Either way, it forced me to skip the workout today which involved kettlebell snatches — no way I was going to be able to pull that off.  I probably couldn’t do air snatches (if that existed) today let alone anything with weight.

Tomorrow is deadlifting and jumprope.  I *might* try that out depending on how I feel tomorrow.  I hope I don’t revert a bunch overnight and get set back to not being able to straighten my arm out.  I guess I’ll find out in about eight hours.  Off to bed…

First, I have to give a mention to the hilarious How to Suck at Facebook page at The Oatmeal. That guy pretty much has it down. The people I’m about to talk about fall into the “Desperate Marketer” category.

Here’s what I don’t get though. I get a ton of really stupid “Page Suggestions”. Various people recommending that I become a fan of their company or whatever. Sometimes even a suggestion that I become a fan of them (LOL). I really wish there was a way to simply block all page suggestions. Or page suggestions from a specific person. After all, why should I become a “fan” of something stupid that I am clearly not a fan of — I mean, if I was a fan of it I would seek it out.

One guy who shall remain nameless actually invited me something like four times to become a fan of his website. I don’t have anything against the guy except for the fact that he’s a really annoying friend to have on Facebook but I just decided to remove him from my friend list. A couple days later: boom, another friend request. I mean, wtf are people thinking.

I know what you’re thinking: why do you care. I don’t really. The main thing I am curious about is how people can possibly think this is a good idea for their business or website. Maybe they just read about social networking on wikipedia or something and don’t realize that being a spammer on facebook is just as annoying as being a spammer on email. Actually, probably even more annoying because at least with email I can just filter someone out. At least facebook lets me clean up my news feed to get rid of the stupid apps that tend to populate it (and the “friends” I have on there that I don’t know at all).

Anyway, I’m back in Philadelphia for a short visit with family and to do a few other things. I’m going up to New York midweek so definitely looking forward to that.

I usually don’t go this long. Since my last blog I spent about 12 days in Costa Rica for work stuff. I didn’t really do too much non work activity there but I still had a good time. We had a company party, a company BBQ, some nice dinners with business partners, etc. Here’s a picture of me from the company party:

Fun time. We have a bunch of really good employees. A lot of stuff has been changing at our company and I think we’ve taken some positive steps to eliminate some bad investments (like when we did Swedish translation — as it turns out, everyone in Sweden speaks English so it’s a stupid thing to translate to) and increase investment in some good areas. We’re also getting more involved in some other projects in the poker world, some of which are really interesting.

We recently got more involved with the PokerRoad website and, even more recently, I got involved. You will see a ton of positive changes on PokerRoad over the next few months and I’m pretty excited about what we’re going to be able to do there. I think PokerRoad has long been a site with some great poker content but a pretty poor interface for accessing that content. That is going to change. We have some really smart people behind the project and it’s 100% focus on usability and good site structure from this point forward.

My other main project at work is still PocketFives. I never like to promise deadlines because the future is very uncertain when you’re dealing with software development but, roughly, we have about two more months of work. Around one month of continued software development and about one month of bug testing, design refining and server load testing. I’d definitely be disappointed if the new site isn’t live and working well two months from now but obviously something can always come up.

I’m about to head home for a one week visit. I’m going to be splitting my time in between NYC and Philly. I have some doctor appointments scheduled to deal with some ongoing health issues I’ve been having. Namely, my bite is kind of misaligned and I need to get some work done. It’s caused a whole host of problems. For instance, I can’t really chew any tough food (like steak) because my teeth don’t meet properly. It is pretty subtle in that you can’t see the problem unless you have a trained eye and you’re examining my bite but it is a very big problem. If I don’t remember to chew my food in certain areas of my mouth where the teeth meet better than others, it actually feels like I’m choking when I try to swallow food. This actually happens quite often and is very unpleasant. And those problems have led to other problems with my throat being irritated and so on. I basically need to get it fixed ASAP so I’m working on the situation. Hopefully it’ll get fixed over the next few months and the other problems I’ve had (I think, due to this problem) will all work themselves out.