AimlesslyChasingAmy

I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked to wake up in bed with zippybob.  These are the risks you take when you hang out with the boyz.  The poker boyz, my poker road trip buddies, came into Vegas toward the end of the WSOP.  It was the first time in awhile that we were going to have more than a basic quorum.  At the last minute, Bob aka zipman aka zippybob, a habitual no-show these days, had to bail on the Vegas trip.  But we made sure he still had a good time - in fact he was, as always, the life of the party.

The last boyz get together was in Tunica, where I and “the bills” (Debonair and wildbill) had to hold our own.  We had some great times, especially centered around the Gold Strike bar drinking Debonairs (malibu rum and pineapple).  One night a very large black man asked wildbill (with me just sitting there), “Is that your wife?”  To which wildbill emphatically shook his head “no.”  The man asked, “Do you mind if I try to pick her up.”  To which wilbill replied, “Please feel free to dance with our dates.”  Time spent with any of the boyz is by definition a great time.  But more boyz is more better.   So the fact that Debonair, wildbill, Idoru99, bounder, rggator, zeroth (aka the Poker Shrink) were all going to be reunited in Vegas again was a very good thing.  The boyz w/zippybob are pictured below at the Tilted Kilt.

I won’t go into to too much detail, as I think that ZippyBob will be submitting the final trip report.  But there were many final tables for the boyz.  Rggator spent a lot of the time puking, possibly from the excitement of making two final tables in one day.  In fact I think every one of the boyz final tabled except me and bounder.  It’s probably good that bounder didn’t make a big score in Vegas as his stored up luck had him driving across the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis with his two daughters less than 30 minutes before its collapse. 

Rggator was not the only puker on my horizon.  My old desk top finally licked the wiggy.  Vista is still a little too buggy for me (and all my software, including PhotoShop, is XP based) so I didn’t want to take the Vista plunge just yet.  But my laptop hard drive is too small to be my only computer storage refuge.  Even downloading my pre-WSOP photos to CDs still has me at my piddley 50 GB capacity.  I shopped around for used and refurbished desk tops, but wasn’t digging it.  Finally I settled on getting an external hard drive as a stop gap measure.  I also got an online pro Flickr account for redundancy and a way to keep my photos available to me on the road without dragging the drive along.  After tons of research (product and of course price), I settled on the LaCie 250 GB Brick.  I was going to get the 500 GB, but heard that it was a little on the noisy side.  So far, I love my big red Lego.  After I reformatted it from FAT32 to NTFS, it was basically plug and play.

I’ve been spending my time home, so far, re-editing photos and playing with my new hard drive and Flickr account. It will probably take me the better of a month to get through my WSOP photos.  I have three other missions this month 1) hire someone to move my blog onto a different hosting site 2) install cork floors in part of my house, and 3) finish the proposal for Mike Matusow’s autobiography.  The last task will probably mean I’ll be spending more time away from home and likely back in Vegas. 

Following along with Al Can’t Hang’s painful server woes convinced me to hire out my blog move to Host Monster.  Al actually knows what he’s doing and I’m solidly in the clueless camp.  You’d think hiring someone in a tech savvy town like Austin to do a basic install job would be easy.  But the web folks here are either over-employed in the tech sector or they are freelancers that will work on your project one day and take off to Brazil for an architectural dig of a tango palace the next.  I’ve recently joined the newly formed Austin WordPress Meetup Group, so I’m hoping that I can tie out with some folks in the network know.

One of the things I’ve been toying with is saddling up the green monster and heading down to the Gulf Coast Poker Championship at the Beau Rivage in Biloxi.  I’ve heard nothing but great things about the re-opened BR.  But until my plate empties a little, I’ll just have to keep that one on the back burner.