Nat Arem's Blog

I am going to post the whole story of what happened here…

On Saturday afternoon, I was watching our scraping machines via an interface that we have that tells us how they’re running. I noticed a problem and I tried to load the bluffmagazine.com website. It timed out. Then I checked another interface that we have to actually remotely look at the desktop of our data gathering machines. All 7 were offline and inaccessible. I’d never seen that before — sometimes one is offline or something due to some issue, but never more than that.

So I called the head developer at Bluff and asked wtf was going on. He obviously didn’t know, so he said he’d investigate and call me back. We talked again after about an hour and he said he didn’t know what the hell was going on. No one was answering his calls and the host itself’s website was down. He later talked to another person who hosts websites at the same facility and he was told that a fiber optic cable was cut leading to an internet outage at the host. We went to bed on Saturday thinking that the cable repair was being done and that the internet would be back up at any moment.

We woke up on Sunday and found out that the fiber optic cable story was BS. I’m not sure where it came from, but it was like 7th hand by the time it came to me. As it turns out, there was a massive router failure in the facility. There were people on-hand bringing cages/shelves in the server farm back online one-by-one. By Sunday, most were back online. For whatever reason, our servers’ connections weren’t fixed when they should have been. We decided at that point to find a new host. By Sunday night, we found one. On Monday, three of us went down there to pick up all of our machines. Today, we installed them at the new facility.

At this point, everything should be back up and running as soon as the servers are configured at the new facility. I expect that to happen tonight. Sometime tomorrow, we should be able to put in all of the data that hasn’t been inserted since the systems were down — just because we kept collecting data doesn’t mean that it has been inserted yet. But pretty soon, it should look like this whole nightmare never happened.

Thanks for your patience.

Tuesday, Mar 27th:

I got into Monaco at around 2 PM, checked into the hotel, got some food with colson10, ActionJeff and Ansky. shaniac flew over from Nice with us, but he decided to sleep.

After food (which took foreverrrrr), we walked over to the tournament area just to look around. There wasn’t too much going on, so we went back to the hotel room to shower and what not.

The PokerStars party started at around 7:00, so we went to that. There were free drinks and I got to meet a bunch of people, which was fun. I also saw a bunch of people who I hadn’t seen for awhile. But I had been up for 30+ straight hours, so I crashed at like 9 PM.

Wednesday, Mar 28th:

I woke up at around 7 AM because I passed out so early. This was Day 1a of the tournament, so I went and got breakfast with Jeff, then kinda did nothing for awhile until it was time to head down and get my press pass and stuff. Play doesn’t start until 2 PM here, so I had plenty of time to get settled in the media room. I met Pauly from the Tao of Poker blog — he’s working for PokerNews doing some blogging for their site here.

I went over to the tournament room and took pictures for a few hours… you can view that set of pics here: http://www.natarem.com/ept/thumbnails.php?album=1. Eventually, I ended up at dinner with gobboboy, ajunglen, yuv and a few others. We ate at the buffet, which was freaking terrible. I refuse to go back to that. I don’t even have any idea what I was eating.

Thursday, Mar 29th:

Day 1b was pretty similar. Wake up, go to breakfast, take pictures, etc. See this gallery here: http://www.natarem.com/ept/thumbnails.php?album=2. The only difference is that after I took pictures, I found yellowsub, Mark Vos, JP Kelly and a few others sitting out at a table by the pool. I dropped my stuff in my room and went down to hang out with them. They were doing some high stakes coin flipping, although I didn’t have my camera, so I don’t have any pictures.

After awhile, we decided to go up to our rooms to get changed for dinner. We went out to this place called “Zebra Square” down the street from the hotel. It was me, ActionJeff, JP Kelly, Mark Vos, yellowsub86 and Ansky. I have a few pictures here:

The group of us on the walk over. Me, Mark, Ansky, yellowsub, JP, Jeff.

yellowsub after winning some gamble with Mark Vos. They were doing odds-evens with unseen license plates.

Counting out whether letters in the alphabet were odd or even.

Balla Ferraris that were the subject of some wagering.

Coin flipping on the table.

The other 5 people at dinner.

They were coin flipping in groups of 7. Each coin was worth incrementally more in each series… and Mark managed to sweep this series. yellowsub wasn’t too pleased.

Mark after winning quite a large sum of money during dinner.

yellowsub’s reaction after dinner (it was good, but gamboling didn’t go great). ActionJeff was kind enough to hold him back.

Friday, Mar 30th:

This was Day 2 of the tournament. Even though I knew a lot of people who made it to Day 2, not too many people lasted long this day. I did get a lot of pictures though — (up at http://www.natarem.com/ept/thumbnails.php?album=3) — the only person I missed was colson10, who busted really fast with Ah Qh on a Kh Jx 9h board against Kx Jx. I didn’t see the hand, but isuck123 was at his table and he told me about it.

I went into downtown Monte Carlo after taking some pictures with westmenloAA, richie_menlo, EmpireMaker2, ActionJeff, Ansky and wuddacooler (I think). We just kinda got some food, hung out in the casino lobby, etc. Nothing too exciting. I did get some pictures though…

[to be continued in Part 2]