Nat Arem's Blog

Okay so he made up that term. But I think this is a particularly good article for those of you who want to make money online.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/08/the-secret-of-the-roush-effect.html

What it kind of reminds me of is thepokerdb. Basically it’s about identifying a niche that isn’t being fulfilled and coving that niche better than anyone else. Obviously that sort of thing has changed given the other sites that have popped up and arguably done a better job than Bluff in certain ways but, at the time, that was my goal. With pretty similar results to the Roush thing (not that big though). Obviously people like CardRunners and others have done it on an ever bigger scale.

If you want to make money online, find something you’re really passionate about and do something similar. Find something in that niche that would be really useful to you and then do it.

I finally got around to getting LASIK done. I’ve been wearing contacts for like 10+ years and, while they didn’t bother me all that much, I just think it’s a higher quality of life to be able to see all the time. Without dealing with a contact falling out, getting dry, etc. So I picked Dr Pham in San Diego and I went with the “custom wavefront” LASIK. Whatever that means. It’s supposedly the most advanced form of lasik being done. I was glad to hear that there was no blade involved in the cutting of the flap, just another laser. The whole procedure went pretty smoothly and I wasn’t nervous at any point. That might have been partially due to the Xanax they gave me when I got there but I wasn’t nervous before that either. There was zero pain involved. The whole thing was a little weird (you can’t see anything really when they lift up the flap) but definitely no pain.

If there was anything that was stressful about it, for me, it was that you couldn’t move at all during some periods. Like when the laser is cutting the flap, the technician is counting down from like 25 and the surgeon was just repeating “don’t move” over and over. It is harder than you think to stay perfectly still when you know you need to stay still or else something could get messed up. So that wasn’t fun. But that whole period was pretty brief so it was over fast and luckily I didn’t move.

Walking out of the LASIK center, I probably had like 20/40 vision. I could read things like street signs but they were a little blurry. The surgeon told me to keep my eyes closed as much as possible for the first 6-7 hours and to go home and go to sleep. So that’s what I did. They gave me a valium to take home but I was still pretty tired/relaxed from the Xanax so I just climbed into bed at like 2 PM. I wouldn’t say I had any pain but my eyes didn’t feel quite right. Imagine the feeling of irritated/watery eyes when you’re sneezy and that’s how I would describe the feeling in my eyes. They were basically just watering a lot. When I woke up at 8 PM, the watery feeling was gone and I was seeing 20/20 like nothing had happened (well, except for the fact that I would see nowhere near 20/20 just after waking up normally). Amazingly fast recovery.

I went in for my followup appointment today and he confirmed the 20/20 vision. He said that my eyes were dry (instantly fixed by some drops he gave me) and that there’s a good chance I would improve to 20/15 once my eyes finish healing (they feel fine to me but obviously they aren’t healed yet, it’s only 36 hours later). The only side effect I’ve noticed so far is some slight halos around bright white lights at night. I haven’t tried driving at night yet so I will see soon if that bothers me.

Overall, highly recommended!

Maybe awaited isn’t the right word. Just delayed.

I’ve been pretty busy with PocketFives lately. Most of my non-P5s time has been taken up by working out, various life errands (looking for a place to live) and just generally trying to get enough rest. My inclination when I get really into work stuff is to work all night and I usually end up on a horrible schedule. I’m back on a good schedule right now so I’m trying to maintain it.

Getting back to the P5s WSOP Party, it was on July 3rd in Vegas (obv). The “main” party was at the Gold Coast bowling alley. I say main because it was free for all P5ers but it is really only a pre-party compared to the “OT” party afterwards (for the non P5ers out there, OT stands for the “Off Topic” section of the forum). So anyway, it was a pretty basic but fun time. We bowled a bunch of games, drank some beer, ate random crap food, etc. I think everyone enjoyed it a lot — like 60 or 70 people showed up over the course of the few hours and probably 30 were there most of the time. Nothing huge but… it is the Gold Coast. Here are some pics, with captions under them.

This is a picture of the people who work on P5s and a description of what they do. From left to right:

Michele – she doesn’t really work on P5s, she’s married to one of our company’s execs
Mario – Our CTO, very good programmer and overall technical resource. He lives in Costa Rica.
Adam – One of the founders of P5s and is one of the key people in our company.
Dan – Poker journalist who writes a lot of articles for Poker News Daily and PocketFives.
Sandy – P5s administrator. Works on things like the rankings and some other things.
myself – If you don’t know who I am, wtf are you doing on my blog.
Mike – Michele’s husband, founded PokerSourceOnline and lives near me in Vegas.
Ryan – PocketFives programmer and vBulletin expert. Great guy to have working for us, he is relatively new compared to everyone else in the pic.
Sergio – Senior programmer for us, lives in Costa Rica as well. Extremely smart guy.

So, yea, that is the team. It’s missing a few people like David Huber (head moderator on P5s) but that group is mostly who is behind PocketFives these days. Good group of people to work with.

This is Michele, Mike, my cousin Zach, myself and my sister. Mike and I were holding Zach up off the floor. I don’t remember why but I wasn’t really drunk at this point but it’s been six weeks since the party so that’s probably why I forgot.

After bowling, we went over to the big party across the street at the Palms. P5er “BigGunX” had organized a party at the Ghost Bar at the top of the Palms. We had a full section of the patio all to ourselves along with an open bar with top shelf liquor for four hours. That was a really good time. I met a lot of P5ers and I ended up getting pretty drunk. Not destroyed but definitely pretty wobbly on my feet. I didn’t have a camera but these are some pics that I grabbed off of other peoples’ facebook albums:

This is a picture of part of the patio that we had to ourselves. I don’t know who most of these people are but they’re either OTers or friends who came along.

This is a picture of the view and our bar. And our hot bartender. She was a trooper too, she was ridiculously busy for four hours straight and I never had a long wait for a drink. Very impressive.

Sandy, myself, P5er ess286, Jeff/yellowsub

This is a bunch of us down at the Palms food court after the party. We were all pretty drunk but obviously competent enough to stand there for a picture.

Anyway, we ended up eating at some crappy diner thing at the palms. I think it was called 24 or something like that. After that we took a limo back (the cab line was ridiculous) and went to sleep. Both parties were a great time and I highly recommend going next year if you’re in Vegas.

Also, on another P5s note, we’re holding the PocketFives Open on Sept 1st at 8:30 PM EDT. It’ll be a $20+$2 on PokerStars, come play!

Not a ton going on lately. Just work stuff really. It’s been a great few weeks post-WSOP to just relax, take it easy and not be running around all the time. I’ve been eating most of my meals at home and I’ve kept it extremely healthy. Obviously I’ve also being going to CrossFit Las Vegas a lot and I’m enjoying it although I do have some reservations about it (I’ll get into that down below).

First, with work stuff, we’ve had a tough week or so with PocketFives. We did a few things to make the server go faster and it obviously broke a bunch of stuff, somehow. So while hopefully most users never noticed anything, we did have a lot of problems on the site. We still have some problems lingering but most of the important ones are fixed. It has set back a really cool feature that we were about to launch so I’m a bit frustrated by that. That being said, IT work always comes with setbacks and bugs so it isn’t like it’s totally unexpected. Hopefully that new feature will be out next week.

Getting back to CrossFit, I need to explain something about how it works in order to make this point. Most of the workouts are timed and you start as a class. So the fastest people finish first and so on down to the least fit people. Now given the makeup of a CrossFit class, most of the people are super fit and they blow through a lot of these workouts pretty quickly (not easily, but quickly… they have high work capacities). But I’ve noticed a few people beating me who really should not be beating me. They’re pretty average athletes, not in any sort of special shape, etc. Not that I’m a great CrossFitter by any means but it didn’t make sense that these same few people (about five of them who I thought shouldn’t have been beating me) kept finishing workouts ahead of me.

The other day we did a workout where we did front squats, push ups (with strict form and you had to lift your hands off the ground at the bottom of each one to prove your chest was on the ground — try it sometime, it’s much harder) and a 400 meter run. We did that, I think, 3 or 4 times. So the first round I notice that one of the suspects was out the door and on his run WAAAAY too fast. I didn’t count his reps because I was too focused on my own stuff but when I saw him run out the door I was like, no way did he just finish his first round of squats and pushups. So after I got back from my run, he was finishing up his front squats (not sure if he did them all) and he got down into his pushup position. I was doing my front squats and it was easy to keep an eye on him so I counted his reps. He was supposed to do 15. He did four good ones, two poor ones, laid on the ground for a sec, then got up and sprinted out the door! What?!? That wasn’t even close to what he was supposed to do.

Anyway, over the last week or two I’ve started to keep an eye on some of the other people I suspected of not really being able to beat me. Pretty much the same thing. Not quite as bad as 6 out of 15 but a TON of stuff like doing 18 instead of 21, 10 instead of 12, etc. No wonder I pass people on the runs, they can’t shortcut that part. And no wonder they can’t deadlift much (basically impossible to really cheat on that without putting your back in harm’s way). Contrary to what you might think, this doesn’t bother me. I was happy to discover this because it makes me feel better about finishing near the bottom on a lot of workouts. I’m actually finishing in the middle and only the long-time CrossFitters are really crushing me (as they should). So this was good news. Now that I know I can throw out the times of certain people I can focus more on my own workouts which is really what I’d like to be doing … I just had to know why I wasn’t stacking up and my curiosity got the better of me.

On another note, I’ve noticed more and more people on Facebook with their photos app removed. Or at least they are hiding me (and probably others obv) from seeing photos they’re tagged in. I find this to be an uneven level of sharing. It’s the same reason why I usually turn down random friend requests from people (I get a lot of random poker people who I have never met adding me, not sure if that happens to everyone or not) if they don’t have a picture of themselves as their profile picture. After all, this is Facebook — hence it’s meant to have your real picture there. So I’ve recently decided that anyone I come across without a photos app installed is going on my list of people who won’t see my photos app either. I’m also seriously considering taking a break from Facebook and hiding my profile for a bit. I’d just like to see how much more I would get done with it gone for like a month or something. I don’t have anything against the concept of Facebook. I actually really like it. But it is a productivity drain and I wonder what I would do with my extra hour a day or whatever it adds up to.

I still need to post that P5s party report. It’s been over a month since the party so I think it’s way overdue.