Nat Arem's Blog

Every once in awhile I need to tilt on my blog. So here goes, list-style.

1. It tilts me that people think a bigger car is a nicer car.  Twice in a week I’ve overheard comments in Las Vegas about people saying that a pickup truck is awesome because it’s bigger than other pickups.  I don’t get that mindset.
2. For whatever retarded reason, I can’t watch ESPN right now on DirecTV.  It’s blacking it out despite the game being an Eastern Conference game in Boston.  Why would it be blacked out in Las Vegas?  That just doesn’t make sense.  I’m about to call DirecTV and tilt a bit. (EDIT: it’s working again, for now)
3. Why do people think that a meal involving meat (particularly steak) is somehow a “better” meal than one without any meat or fish?  I see comments about this over and over.  It doesn’t really make sense to me.
4. What’s with people cutting you off and then slowing down?  I drove out to California recently and it seemed like, over and over, people would pull out in front of me (ie, I was in the left lane and they were in the right lane) when they wanted to pass someone.  I was fine with that part.  But then they would proceed to slow down and sit side-by-side with the slower driver in the right lane for a few minutes.  Either stay behind the slower car or pass the slower car and get out of the way.  Getting into the left lane and sitting there is just stupid.
5. Now that I’ve been back in the US for a few months I’ve noticed a lot of hilarity that I never really noticed before I moved out of the country.  I saw a billboard ad the other day with a slogan like “make vegetables taste less vegetably”.  There are endless weight loss ads everywhere.  I did a google maps search for “health food store” to see if there was anything out there except for Whole Foods that I should check out.  I got a bunch of stuff like GNC and similar supplement sorts of stores.  If those are really considered to be health food stores, we have no hope.  It just tilts me how uneducated the public is on diet and health.  I don’t think this obesity trend is reversible without significant government intervention.  While I normally don’t like making government bigger, I don’t see any other solution.  The free market is not working for this one.

Anyway, those are my tilts.

I decided against putting up that wisdom teeth video.  It’s a bit too ridiculous to put up for everyone out there to see.  I’ve recovered pretty well from the surgery.  I never had any pain, only a slight ache every once in awhile.  I’m back to eating pretty normal food and feeling good.  I also went to CrossFit on Thursday and Friday and I’m really excited to get back into it.  That being said, I’m ridiculously sore today.

We’re getting soooooo close with PocketFives.  It’ll be up very shortly.  The beta version is online right now at beta.pocketfives.com (beta/password to get through the first password dialog which is only there to keep out the googlebot).

Also, I’m looking forward to the WSOP.  It’ll be a great time.

I’m about four hours removed from getting my four wisdom teeth removed. I know I have a fun couple of days ahead of me but I have some pain pills to deal with it so hopefully everything goes relatively smoothly. As it turns out, I was a pretty big retard from the medicine that I was given during the surgery. I have some hilarious video where I was, apparently, taking video of myself on my phone and the nurses there were laughing at me. I will get that video up online soon but for now I leave you with a picture of me where I apparently insisted on getting a picture taken with my sunglasses on.

I have zero recollection of this happening. Nor do I remember much about anything until a few hours after getting home at which point I kind of snapped out of it and started to regain the ability to form short term memories. The last thing I remember prior to slowly coming out of the haze was that I was talking with the dentist and the assistant about whether or not I would be awake during the procedure. I remember them telling me that I would be awake but that I wouldn’t remember anything that happened. They basically sedate you so much that you don’t really care about someone pulling teeth out of your mouth but not so much that you don’t have basic reflexes like coughing up water if you swallow it the wrong way. After that, I don’t really remember anything except a few flashes here and there followed by being on the couch in my apartment with my laptop. Good stuff, we’ll see how the recovery goes. I’m hoping to be feeling decent in a few days and basically close to normal in about a week.

I can’t even begin to describe how excited I am about the next couple of months here in Las Vegas. It’s one awesome thing after one awesome thing. From P5s to PokerRoad to WSOP stuff to a bike trip in June, it just doesn’t end for like over three months. I’m not really sure what’s on the horizon beyond that but hopefully some pretty cool stuff as well.

To get back to the blogging issue that I wanted to address in the last blog, I’ve recently found blogging to be a bit more a chore than it used to be. Obviously I blog for fun so I need to have fun in the process. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of cool things I’d like to share on here but for whatever reason I usually can’t. Like I can’t get into the details about anything that we discussed over in Europe. And it really makes the blog a lot more boring. If it was just my company, I’d talk about whatever and not really care. But I can’t do that when I have business partners and it is overwhelmingly clear that it would not be beneficial for me to talk about anything that we have in the pipeline. Especially not things that are more innovative and we feel like someone could copy us. But when I can’t talk about that stuff like I used to when I was running my own stuff, I guess I feel like I have less and less to say in a wordy format. I’m debating switching to a tumblr style of blogging which is a mix of text, pics, links, quotes, etc. I need to think about it but we will see. While I wouldn’t go over to tumblr or whatever I might switch WordPress themes to a tumblr style theme and start radically changing the types of things I post on a daily basis.