Archive for February, 2011
Congrats to Adam & Lilly!
Yesterday I attended the wedding of my friend and business partner, Adam Small. The wedding was a bit west of San Jose, Costa Rica and he married an awesome Costa Rican girl named Lilly. Blog readers probably know Adam as one of the founders and admins on PocketFives. He now works as our company CEO but he is still pretty active on P5s even with his other duties.
The wedding was a great time even though I was staying sober because I had to drive afterwards. There were a few setbacks though. There was a 3 PM cocktail party to be followed by a 4 PM ceremony. When I got there at 3 PM, the sky was pretty clear. While we’re used to unpredictable weather in the US, in Costa Rica the weather is a lot more predictable — usually. February is dry season and it very rarely rains. I can only think of a few times that I can remember seeing more than a light drizzle during any Costa Rica dry season period. On the other hand, it rains 95%+ of days during the Costa Rica rainy season. So Adam and Lilly obviously picked a date right smack in the middle of dry season on purpose. Unfortunately that didn’t end up paying off.
By the time the ceremony was supposed to start, the weather was headed downhill fast. I walked outside with pokertrip (aka Jon Friedberg) and his girlfriend and we took our seats but the clouds overhead looked pretty angry. Jon actually minored in meteorology in college and he mentioned that swirling storm clouds overhead were a very bad sign. While obvious statement is obvious, at that point I realized that the outdoor wedding was not happening. I’d only been seated for a few minutes before the rain really started coming down and we headed back inside. A few minutes later it looked like this:
At that point I think they were already setting up the wedding indoors. So the ceremony happened a bit late and so on but it was actually a nice intimate setting indoors. I’m not sure how the outdoor wedding would have been since everyone was going to be spread around a rather large pool.
Anyway, after the ceremony we headed down the hill to the reception which was a great time. Like I said I didn’t drink but it was still nice to talk to a few people who I don’t get to see all that often. In this video you might be able to recognize a few P5s admins (Dan, Cal, Sandy):
I headed home around maybe 11:30 or so. The party was still going but it was probably past the point that I was really enjoying it while sober so, yea, called it a night.
Today Adam and Lilly are on their way to Kauai, Hawaii for a week for their honeymoon. And I am going to be flying back to Las Vegas tomorrow morning for a brief pitstop before heading east for a trip. Congrats again to Adam and Lilly!
Sobering
In the last few weeks, three 20-something year old people I’m tangentially connected to have been killed in collision related accidents. I’ve only even met one of these people and I only met him for about 30 minutes at his birthday party. But still, it’s sobering when someone is a healthy 20-something one minute and dead the next. No warning, no early indication signs, etc.
One of the deaths was a young woman who was teaching in Arizona and had dabbled in the poker world. I didn’t know her but I knew of her. I’m pretty certain I never met her but I may have at a live event at some point. I only learned about her death via some facebook posts but she was evidently close to some people in the poker world and, from everything I’ve read, she was really loved in her community. She was a passenger in a one car accident and I don’t think there was alcohol involved but I don’t really know.
The second death was the guy who I met a few weeks ago at his birthday party here in Las Vegas. It was a very random meeting as I wasn’t even really supposed to be at the birthday party and I was only brought there because I happened to be in the car with the person who was invited. But I met the guy, talked with him briefly, he was turning something like 24 and he seemed like a very polite individual. A few weeks later, he died when a car ignored right-of-way and forced him to crash his motorcycle. He died from his injuries.
So now that’s two young people who died from, apparently, no fault whatsoever of their own. The third was not all that connected to me but the story really stuck with me. My cousin and her husband live in San Diego and one of her friends there recently had a very close friend killed after being struck by a vehicle. When my cousin was explaining why her friend wasn’t around when I went out them in Pacific Beach a week or two ago when I was visiting California, I was really shocked to hear the story. This was a healthy young guy with no apparent problems and just like that a vehicle hits him and he’s gone.
Anyway, maybe it’s because of my upbringing, but it’s incredibly rare for me to hear about people connected to me in some way dying at a young age. I was very lucky to grow up in a privileged manner and almost everyone had their shit together. So pretty much the only deaths were things like teenage cancer and clearly those are few and far between and a lot less sudden. For me to hear about three incidents like this is really a lot. I just can’t imagine this sort of thing ever happening to someone close to me. I mean, I always know it’s possible but I just can’t imagine it actually happening. I don’t believe in jinxes so I feel comfortable saying that I’ve been incredibly lucky thus far in life to be largely unaffected directly by tragedy. But since these recent tragedies remind me that anything can happen at any time to anyone, this makes me more convinced than ever that I should move to Philadelphia and not assume that everything will be peachy indefinitely. While I like Vegas for the most part and I may well end up here at least part-time in the long run (winters here ftw), I like Philadelphia more. I should just live where I want to live.
Awesome LAX landing video
I know most readers aren’t aviation geeks like I am but this video is just awesome regardless:
It’s a video of a United flight landing at LAX. The lighting, approach path, low altitude approach, song (the song is Los Angeles by Sugarcult, great song), speed of the video, etc just combine to make it awesome. As you can tell, the video is sped up. According to the video description it’s roughly Mach 1 to Mach 2 — meaning it’s faster than you would go at even cruise altitude. And at landing it’s roughly 8x actual speed. I love it though.
In other news, the pullup thing is back on track now that I’m back in Vegas. I did 100 yesterday and it was no problem at all. I am going to bump it up soon.