Nat Arem's Blog

As I alluded to in my previous entry, I am giving serious thought to moving back to the east coast — maybe sooner rather than later. I do like a lot of things about Vegas: no state tax, no traffic, cheap, tons of good restaurants, nice weather (for me), close to Cali, lots of people visiting all the time, Lotus of Siam, etc. But I am thinking more and more that I might belong more on the east coast than in Vegas. For me, the biggest drawback by far to living in a place like Philadelphia is the weather. I can’t stand the weather at this time of year. But I love the weather for about eight months of the year so I guess I can deal with it.

Right now I’m still not sure about the move. My lease in Vegas is up in about six months. But if I’m going to move I might as well do it soon and enjoy the majority of the nice part of the year. I have a trip to Costa Rica coming up in late February so after that I might swing by Philadelphia to look for places in the Center City West (ie, near Rittenhouse) area. If I find a good place and I’m still feeling like moving by that point, I’m reasonably certain that I’ll do it. I do want to give it more time to think about it since there are some decent reasons for me to be in Vegas as well. But the move is a strong possibility for now.

In other news, I’m continuing my search for a new theme for my blog. I tried to install one earlier today and it was a disaster because the theme is kind of “idiot proofed” and it uses a lot of drag-and-drop options that don’t work for me. I need to be able to actually edit the raw code to do a couple of things and this theme was basically impeding my ability to do that. It’s a shame because I really liked it. I found it on my business partner Mike’s new site WordPress Themes which is a directory of a few hundred premium WordPress themes — in other words, themes that you pay money for and come with a lot of extras and options. Mike is also the former CEO (and currently Chairman) of the company that owns PocketFives, among others. So he’s kind of branching out into other businesses.

Anyway, the theme just won’t work for me. I think I need to stick with a raw custom theme but I just don’t like the one that I’ve come up with so far. It’s super frustrating because I really dislike the theme/layout that I have right now based on the things I’d like to do with the site. Oh well, I will work on it more this week.

I’m currently visiting San Diego. I went on a hike today with a decent view.

Sorry to all those back home on the east coast dealing with a crap ton of snow. I might be joining you all for next winter…

This is something I’m dealing with right now. As I stated in my previous entry, I’m doing a bit of a pullup challenge right now. While doing 100 yesterday wasn’t all that difficult, my body is telling me otherwise today. I’m only about one third through my 100 for today and some of the reps have been a real struggle. But, no pain no gain. So I fight through it.

The common misconception is that the muscle soreness (also known as Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, or DOMS) that you feel is due to lactic acid buildup in the muscle. That’s not true. Lactic acid leaves the muscle within one hour of exercise and DOMS typically is strongest 24-72 hours after doing the exercise. In addition, you will typical only get DOMS with a new workout which impacts normally unused muscles. You can also get DOMS just from extremely strenuous activity but, in general, the more a muscle is worked, the harder it is to develop DOMS.

Whether or not you get DOMS after a workout doesn’t say a ton about the quality of your workout. Even though a lot of people like to say that it wasn’t a good workout unless they’re sore, it isn’t really true. You can get a perfectly good workout and not be sore (well, depending on your goals). But being sore does indicate that you were doing something with your body that you haven’t previously or recently done.

So what is DOMS (ie, what causes soreness)? No one really knows for sure. The current leading theory is that muscle soreness is caused by inflammation and healing of microtears in the muscle resulting from a new sort of strain. Supposedly, these microtears are caused by eccentric motion which pulls the muscle fibers apart. Therefore, if you were doing, say, bench press, you could push the weight up and not be nearly as sore as from lowering the weight down.

DOMS shouldn’t stop you from exercising. Once you get warmed up, the impact of the microtears won’t be significant enough to impact you in any huge way. Obviously you won’t be at your 100% best but just simple soreness is a poor excuse to not exercise. And getting a massage while sore might feel good but it won’t help you to recover any faster (despite the popular myth that “working the lactic acid out” might help — lactic acid isn’t the issue).

Already! I’ve been amazingly productive today. The trip to Toronto really took the wind out of my productiveness sail so I’m glad I got it back today. I have two main things to post about: pullups and man caves.

First, pullups. Like many other males, I have a doorway pullup bar. I use it kinda whenever I walk by. Just walk by, rep out 5 or so, go on my way. I probably do… 20-25 pullups a day. Usually pretty spread out. It isn’t particularly challenging (although when I got the bar, doing 2 was challenging — it gets easier as you do them). If I max out in a set these days I can do about 12. I think my former PR is 13 (when I was CrossFitting and I had more pullup training on a regular basis) in a set but I probably could do have done 14 or 15 because I didn’t push myself to the edge.

Anyway, long story short, I want to set some real pullup goals. No real reason other than I like setting goals and reaching them. For that reason, I will start off by doing 100 pullups per day for the first week. It’s challenging but it won’t be impossible. Starting tomorrow — or later today for many people — Sunday Jan 23rd. I’ll do that for a week, through Saturday. The only way I might not do it is if I head out to California this week, which I very well may do. If that’s the case, I’ll do 100/day through the day I leave and pick up when I get back. I may just do pushups in California but I’d need to up the number or do “special” pushups because 100 normal pushups won’t challenge me if broken up into sets. I don’t think I could do 100 pushups in a row and the idea of maxing out my ability to do unbroken pushups doesn’t sound appealing because it would really hurt my ability to do much the following days.

After Saturday or seven full days of doing this, I will probably up the number. Also, I’ll probably do my pullups in smallish sets — nothing more than seven for sure. I’ll generally hang around the bar in between sets and maybe just do some things online while recovering for the next group. I expect, especially for the first few days, I’ll be doing just singles as I near 100. I’m excited to do this and see what I’m capable of doing! Maybe I’ll even take some before/after pics to see if it has any effect on looks, although I’m not doing it for that except in the indirect sense that working out helps with looks — I’m just not doing this particular goal for any specific look-related reason. But if it happens, great! Keep in mind that I’m still going to be doing my Olympic lifting workouts, particularly squats.

The second thing is related to man caves. I was chatting for awhile tonight with my longtime friend ahh_snap (aka Nick Van Newkirk). Nick is getting married in May and he’s thinking about building out a man cave once he moves into a house in a year or two. I’m talking about an elaborate man cave. Many TVs, desk, pool table, net for driving golf balls, putting area, big seating area, etc. We’ve already discussed things like lowered flooring, TVs that move on the walls, etc. Obviously sound systems, quality of furniture, etc are all big considerations. This sort of thing is something that I will eventually do once I settle down and buy a place. Nick is going to act as a bit of a test run with this so I’m counting on his man cave to provide a lot of insight and ideas. I’m wondering if anyone out there who reads my blog has a good idea, pictures (we’ve looked at Haralabos’ man cave, it’s cool), etc. Feel free to post a comment or, like many of you do, just email me directly via the contact form. Thanks!

I really try to not go two weeks without a blog update. I know most bloggers say they don’t want to do that and then they do — every time. Hopefully I have some credibility regarding the fact that I actually want to avoid doing that. While I don’t think I should commit to something like 2x blogs per week or else I give some huge amount to charity (a la Tom Dwan), I will blog more.

I haven’t done a whole lot recently but I did go on a brief trip to Toronto from Wednesday to Friday of this week. It was a pretty packed trip so I didn’t get a chance to do a ton in the city but we did make it up to the observation deck of the CN Tower. It’s a huge structure, very impressive. I was in Toronto, originally, for a Home Games related party. But that was cancelled so it was a more informal trip to meet with some people from Stars about things we can do on P5s and such. I think some good ideas came out of the trip so, if Stars is willing, we’ll be doing some really cool things in the future. The things we were discussing would be a win for P5s, Stars and the players so you really can’t beat that.

In other news, we’ve had a few new launches on P5s. One was a new page frame (ie, nav bars, header, footer) with a new homepage. That one went over without much fanfare. The second new launch was a new post page layout which we rolled out yesterday. The reaction was, to say the least, negative. Some of it was expected. For instance, we moved the poster information back over the top of the post as opposed to being on the side. I knew it was going to be unpopular but we didn’t have much of a choice because we decided that we needed a sidebar in the post area and, to have the sidebar, we needed enough width for the post area itself. So the things I predicted to be unpopular were, in fact, unpopular. Not a big deal, not everything can be perfect.

What I didn’t see coming was that very few aspects of the new design were popular in any way. Of course we got the occasional positive post but it was an overwhelmingly negative response. Due to my travel day yesterday (going from Toronto to Las Vegas) I was only able to check in periodically. The first time I logged in after the change I think there was already a 100+ reply post in OT. I knew that was probably not a good sign. I expected the usual sort of feedback which is clearly an indication of hating the change, not the product. I found something else — people genuinely were having trouble following what was going on on the page. And usually complaints like those are just people who aren’t used to the page but, in this case, I realized the complaints were, in large part, quite valid.

The complaints mainly revolved around things like contrast, threads being hard to follow, too much blending together, placement of certain items not being right, focus on the wrong things, etc. A lot of very valid complaints. The problems were partly me just not recognizing the issues prior to launch and also partially me rushing the launch a bit due to my travel. I won’t make that mistake again.

So, since the launch, we’ve worked to resolve a bunch of the complaints. We still have a bunch more to fix but, luckily, they are not the most difficult things to fix. I think we’ll have it up to par by end of business on Tuesday. What kind of annoys me is that I violated a number of my own rules for running a web community in doing this launch. I know everyone who’s a poker player knows what it’s like to not do what you know you should do. Like when you make a call that you know is terrible but you can’t help yourself. That’s a bit like what happened here but I guess I can’t do much about it except learn from your mistakes and move on.

In other news, I’ve been doing my best to keep up with my Olympic lifting training. I did a very short session the other day at Average Broz Gym (I’ve written about it before, it’s a local Oly gym) and I’ve been lifting in my garage whenever I’m not traveling. I haven’t progressed nearly as well as I should have by now but a lot of that is due to all of the travel. I don’t have a trip scheduled for roughly a month so I’d like to make some good progress between now and then. I will be lifting in some capacity pretty much every day in between now and then. I also need to eat more to help get stronger so I will try to do that as well.

If you’re new to the blog or you’ve been away for a little while, here is my first post about sports cards.

I’m back with another one today because I put together a collection that is pretty hard to come by. I’m sure pretty much every American reading this blog has at some point heard of Cal Ripken Jr, the longtime Oriole shortstop who currently holds the longest active game streak in baseball history. He also surpassed 3000 hits (a major milestone in MLB and one that guarantees Hall of Fame entry as long as you don’t bet on baseball, a la Pete Rose). Either way, he is definitely considered one of the all-time greats in baseball history. One thing that is not as widely known about Cal Ripken is that he had a brother who played in the majors as well, although his brother’s career was not quite as accomplished. Bill Ripken was not, however, a bust in the majors. He ended his career with 674 hits and over 3000 plates appearances … certainly not Hall of Fame material but 12 years is 12 years.

Anyway, in 1989 Fleer released their set of baseball cards with an error (debatably, some people think Fleer did it on purpose) with the words “Fuck Face” on the bottom of Bill Ripken’s bat — and it was clearly visible on the card. Fleer took a few different measures to clean the card up. From whiting it out to scribbling it out to black boxing it and so on. There are four major versions of this card as graded by PSA (the biggest card grading service): FF Error, Whited Out Vulgarity, Black Box Over Error and Scribble Over Error. The Black Box one is super common, as is the FF error. Both of them are readily available for under $100 in a grade of Gem Mint 10. I have both of them but they are not too tough to find so, whatever. The other two are not easy to find in a grade of 10. There are only 7 (as of the last time I checked) of the Whited Out version in a grade of 10 and there are only 30-something of the Scribble Over version in a grade of 10. Given how many people tend to hold onto their cards, finding a card that is 1/7 is not an easy task. I got lucky to pick it up on eBay several months ago. And, recently, I completed the foursome by locating a Scribble Over Error version in PSA 10. Anyway, now I have all four of the major Ripken error versions in PSA 10 condition which is something I’ve been trying to do for the better part of a year now.

Here’s a picture (you can also click on it for a high res version) where I’ve circled the error spot:

I know my family and friends (well, some of them) think this is a silly hobby but I think baseball cards (and sports cards in general) are an important part of American history. I think collecting them is just as valid as the tons of other things that people tend to collect.

Now onto my next sports card quest! (I can’t say it publicly, I don’t want bidding competitors on eBay)