Monday, December 06, 2010

Story behind the story

Yeah, I need a haircut thanks for noticing.

Wow, was so busy this weekend hardly noticed that we're TWO DAYS AWAY from the 2010 WPBT Winter Classic kicking off.  Yes, I may have mentioned it here sixteen sextillion times but it bears repeating because such awesome people not named me will be there and I hope you, the reader, are one of those people.

But, first life threw me a nasty curveball, or rather Comcast did.  It looked like a waist-high batting practice pitch after leaving the lanky pitcher's hand.  The day was cold even by Nordic standards but the kids still went out to pave a decent run on the sledding hill in the backyard while mother and father enjoy Vikings football after it looked grim for the home team early on.  Favre threw one pass for an INT while taking a shot that I heard from the Metrodome Mall of America Field 15 miles away.  Then T-Jack predictably jump passed his way into a pick six.  But, the defense got its angry on and treated the Bills Quarterback Fitzpatrick like toddler toy and Sidney Rice ascended many time while coming down with the ball to play like the team they were supposed to be winning 38-14.

While the game was on, I managed to finish a project for school, and turned on the poker machine.  Full Tilt was unkind to me, or specifically PLO Rush poker was lancing my bankroll $25 a time while I dinked around in a couple of MTTs, busting early in 4 of 5 of them.  Finally, sane me stopped playing PLO while I still had chips in a $5 Rebuy PLO8 MTT before taking my handle of Captain Morgan 100 proof acquired as an early birthday present down from the cabinet.  While I didn't crack the bottle, I did crack enough aces on the way to chopping up the tourney for plane ticket type money (sorry no tourney recap, you'll have to read on for one of those...).

An hour later I tried to log into the PokerStarsBlog site and get an error message as I started my preamble and wanted to set up for the night's Sunday Warm-up that I was covering.

No bueno.

Power surge?  Na.

Complete shutdown and reboot?  Three times.

TO THE CLOUD!! *cue wavy dream music*

Instead of polishing up the final table write up while wrapped in my Captain Morgan blanket and a rough Steelers/Ravens game on, I had to throw on 15 layers because Minnesota is cold in the winter (errr, autumn, yeah right) and head over to my parent's house as they are my back-up and are used to their son stumbling in at weird hours.  However, I was stone sober and rushed to my old room to set up shop and....   NO CONNECTION!  Except for PokerStars which ran just fine, however anything thru a browser was met with an error message.

But I had an out, my dad fires up his hard-lined work computer and says to just work off of there since his browser worked just fine.  Yes!!  Victory is mine internet goblins, gimme the +4 Staff of Awesomeness!

But wait, what's this?  A firewall that doesn't like poker words?  No publishing site access, No PokerStars, back to square one. 

So I text a probably sleepy Otis about the issues (I found out this morning, all of the Twin Cities metro area was down, lucky for that hard-wired account or I'd been really FUBAR'd), and get on the phone with the one person I know would be up.  Enter Bluff Magazine nominated Short Stack Shamus into the fold.  Since I couldn't publish it, and I knew he would be up doing the Sunday Million I had a plan.  Finish the wrap on my laptop since I could watch the tourney and write it out, transfer the document and screen shots to a disc, put disc in dad's computer, then email it to Short Stack to publish. 

Brilliant!

Except Yahoo mail was also behind the firewall, no likey connection.  *insert John McEnroe you can't NOT be serious*

Ok, dove around in dad's computer for an email account, hack the password (shhhhhh), and mailed off the Sunday Warm-up wrap in time for consumption for the masses!

Oh, my fuel light came on, on the way home so I had to stop and catch a handful of frostbite before returning to my snoring wife who has a bit of a sore throat and slept sparingly.  Fun night?  Youbetcha!

Please enjoy the wrap, and thanks again to Short Stack!

Two days folks.

1 comment:

Short-Stacked Shamus said...

Haha, glad to have been there, bud. Have a great time in LV.