Nat Arem's Blog

That is 130,000.50. And a plant.

I put up some more pictures here: http://www.pokerjpg.com/v/2008pca/

I still have more pics to put up, but those are all of my Day 1a and 1b pics from the poker tournament itself.

One thing that people may be interested in is that the online tournament legend teecoy reappeared at the 2008 PCA. I noticed his name on the seating chart and was as shocked to see it there as anyone else. I don’t know much about his absence except some secondhand info that I don’t really feel comfortable posting. Here he is playing Day 1:

I’ll start with the bad news…

1. One of the hard drives in my laptop died. I have two hard drives in there set up in a RAID, but, unfortunately, I picked the RAID option that gave me one big 200 GB drive… Bad choice. One dying basically meant both died.

2. The Bahamas are annoying for all of the same reasons as the last two years. Shoddy internet, no phones, poor service, forced tips, expensive stuff, huge walks, lots of 18 y/os who have never had a drink in their life but get blackout drunk 6 nights in a row, etc.

Here is the good news:

1. I’ve gotten a lot of good footage, including pictures of the illustrious teecoy. I gave the scoop to the P5s guys so they could post it and get the word out. People love talking about teecoy and where he’s gone, so it seemed like some might be excited to know that he is alive, playing poker and here in the Bahamas. I’ve also gotten a bunch of good videos, poker pictures and non-poker pictures. I will post them all as soon as I get back to a computer of mine … I didn’t lose much in the HD crash because I either had it backed up or I hadn’t unloaded it yet.

2. I get to leave here sooner because of the HD crash. I’m going to get in touch with Delta ASAP and try to get my flight changed to leave here ASAP. As sad as it is, I really can’t function without a computer. It isn’t like an addition thing or whatever, I’d be fine with it if I had someone set up to check everything that I run (I’ve done that before on family trips when I don’t bring my computer). But I get too stressed thinking about everything that could be going wrong with data collection, other business stuff, etc if I don’t have regular access to a computer, so it’s best that I leave and get home to Atlanta.

3. I get to buy a new laptop. I’m thinking either a MacBook Pro with Windows or some other standard machine from Best Buy or whatever. I normally go with what I really want (the MacBook Pro), but I do kinda want to wait for the SSD hard drive version or whatever the new MacBook Pro is going to be over the next few months. I’d hate to spend premium dollars on a machine that is going to be outdated in a week when Jobs makes his keynote at MacWorld. So I might go with a so-so laptop for ~1K for now and then go premium mid-year 2008. I’m not sure, I guess I need to see how it goes when I’m looking around at options.

4. Despite the terrible setting (I know that doesn’t make sense to you, but this place really isn’t very nice or a good value all things considering), I still love it here. It’s great to be around tons of people who I barely see most of the year. Lots of them are friends going back three years almost. I’ve seen lots of them go from low stakes grinders to high stakes pros. It’s very cool to talk to them all, meet new people and just generally interact with the community. Obviously the poker community has its fair share of lying sleezeball idiots, but there are tons and tons of really nice, genuine and fun people who I hope to be friends with for the rest of my life… and it’s always tons of fun to basically be at a convention full of them.

I guess that’s it for now, good luck to everyone who made it to Day 2. And good luck to mkind0516 who, as I type, is 4 out of 6 in the Sunday Million and he’s playing the Coral Tower lobby here at Atlantis. I guess someone does it every year (last year it was AK87).

Good night.

Obviously I am here… but a lot of people have been asking me where I’m going to put up pictures.

You can spread this link around: http://www.pokerjpg.com/

At least for now, I’ll be putting up pictures there. I just installed the Gallery2 software there today, so I’m still playing around with it. I’m sure it will get much better as time goes on and I learn how to use the Gallery2 software.

In the long-term, I plan on moving all of my poker pictures there.

If you’re ever wondering what credit card roulette is like, I took a video of last night’s festivities at Carmine’s here at Atlantis.

This was only a $600 bill, but you get the idea.

One of my most precious domains (gifafi.com obv) gave me a little scare today. My friend Eric AIMed me a few minutes ago asking what had happened to gifafi.com, so I looked at it and it goes to some Global Media Ministries page or something. My first reaction was, wtf, was I hacked? Did I let the domain expire?

I didn’t think either one would happen. First, I knew I hadn’t set up the domain so I didn’t really see how it could be hacked. Either someone took it or they didn’t. And since all of my domains are locked, someone would have to hack my domain registration account to get any of them. And if they did that, why would they take gifafi.com and not some of the ones that might actually have value? So right off the bat I didn’t think I was hacked. And I didn’t think it could expire because I have all domains that I care about on auto-renew.

Anyway, I investigated and I realized it traces back to all of those problems that I had a few weeks ago. See this post for more: http://www.natarem.com/2007/12/20/sorry-about-the-downtime-today/. Basically in the process of trying to figure some things out related to IP address assignments to servers, I managed to leave some domains unclaimed. I can still control them, but other people at my hosting facility might be getting the benefit of them for a period of time.

Whew, long story short, gifafi.com is safe. For now I’ll let it keep going to the Global Media Ministries page.