Sunday, February 11, 2007

Church Bells, Al Green, and Sunday Mornings

A large percentage of my life is mundane. It's just the other 10% that's overly interesting and about half of that is actually weird and wild stuff. Which means 95% of the time... you'd be pretty bored with the way of Pauly. And that's why it puzzles me that people stop by (some of them everyday or several times a day).

I'm not fit to raise children. I was about to write "breed" but Mother Nature has already messed with my head on at least two instances and luckily I don't have any little ones running rampant. My reasoning on the raising children issue can be explained by the single example of what I did within 10 minutes of waking up.
1. Rubbed one out.
2. Ripped a bonghit.
3. Ate a slice of chocolate cake.
4. Took a dump while reading Fleshbot. (Thank God for Wifi!)
5. Listened to Al Green's Greatest Hits while smoking more pot.
Any of my friends with kids tell me that undertaking four out of those five things without any interruptions are impossible in an entire day, let along the first ten minutes of waking up on a Sunday of all days. And yes, I heard morning church bells ringing in the distance as I climaxed wondering if I was indeed the father of Anna Nicole's baby.

Al Green is now blasting on my laptop courtesy of GMoney. He gave me a couple of CDs burned with a ton of MP3s when we hung out in Vegas in December. The problem was that I never had the chance to upload any of those to my laptop or iPod. The 60 gig hard drive on my laptop was reaching full capacity as the discs collected dust in my laptop bag.

One week into the Australia trip, I encountered my first issue with lack of space. I had to run CCleaner which deleted a slew of temp files. I then went in and started erasing tons of unwanted photos that I had taken in the last two years. Poker photography took up about 2/3 of my actual photos and I was wasting an hour everyday trashing various files. I made it through Oz without any more problems.

Sometime in LA last weekend, I encountered the same issue. The laptop was full with various multimedia items like videos, music, and pics. I started erasing music files and trashing more photos. I had less than 1 gig of writing content. Which makes sense because before I left for Oz, I was able to transfer and backup every novel and screenplay I had ever written along with almost a hundred Truckin' short stories onto a 1 gig flash drive. Flash drives are my latest obsession. I own three and carry around two at all times. The third is left in a safe place just in case I die and includes the complete works of yours truly and my pen name Tenzin McGrupp.

When I got back to NYC, I wanted to transfer some of the older pics from the 2005 WSOP onto my iBook. Here's when I go off on a geek-induced flashback. I'm a Mac person but didn't start that way. My first computer in 1983 was a Commodore 64. In 1984, my Catholic grammar school bought TRS-80s, which where these ugly computers from Radio Shack and the Tandy corporation. When I started high school in 1986, I was introduced to an Apple IIe for the first time. In college, my freshman roommate Skippy (aka Dave from The Daily Dave 2.0) had a Macintosh SE. I also worked on Macs in the computer lab and that was the computer of choice in my fraternity house.

When I bought my first post-college computer in 1995, I went for a Mac. My buddy Bruce who I worked with helped me pick one out. I had that for six years before I acquired my first laptop... a white iBook. My grandmother bought it for me for Christmas one year. She thought I was a bum because I didn't have a real job and she died not knowing about my limited success. I wrote four novels and two screenplays on that iBook. I also started writing my first blogs on there. I have a ton of history together with that iBook even though I was old school running OS IX for several years.

When I was hired to cover the World Series of Poker in the Spring of 2005, I had just started a steady freelance career covering poker. I didn't want to get my laptop stolen in Vegas especially with so much sensitive material on the hard drive and the fact that I'd end up living at the Redneck Riviera. That's when I saw a sweet deal for a Dell laptop. I knew that Dell's were disposable computers and I'd toss it within a few years. I liked about what I bought because the laptop was small and lightweight and if it got lost or stolen, I didn't care.

I had been shopping around for computers for about two weeks just around the same time Full Tilt Poker started up operations in early 2005. I had an amazing run on their site and cleared a bonus worth $500 and went on a rush. In a few weeks, I won a few grand in the Spring of 2005. I proudly used those winnings to purchase a new laptop. Now it's two years later and I still have the computer that I won thanks to the fish and donkeys on Full Tilt.

The Dell has been all over the world with me. It looks about ten years old with a worn out spot on the mouse and flakes of marijuana imbedded in the keyboard. I still have the iBook and it's white and shiny and looks pristine. I like the screen's quality better and I use it to watch DVDs and porn when I'm home. I also have an extensive music collection on there with several hundred hours of bootlegs from my favorite bands and jazz musicians.

When I fired up my iBook for the first time in almost six weeks, I discovered that it had less than 1 gig of space available. I erased a few items and secured another paltry 1/2 gig. I filled my portable 1 gig flashdrive with old photos from the Dell and shipped them over to the iBook. What a pain in the ass, I thought. That's when I decided to buy a portable external hard drive. I found an 80 gig Iomega drive for under $90. I had a coupon so when it was all done, I was able to get next-day delivery and 80 extra gigs for under $70. I paid $0.87 per gig. Not too shabby.

I guess that official made me a computer geek when I bought an external hard drive. I even named it... Al Green. My iBook is called Whitey. The Dell laptop is Grey. See the theme? Actually the hard drives are labeled Homer (iBook), Homer 2 (Dell), and now Homer 3.

I quickly backuped up my entire Dell including writings, pics, videos, and some music. That took a few hours. Last night, I backed up the iBook which took twice as long. I have less than 20 gigs of space left on Homer 3 aka Al Green but now I can start clearing both laptops that everything has been safely backed up. More room for poker pics, music, and porn.

The Dell has almost 4 gigs of free space and I was finally able to add new music such as a Radiohead CD that my brother got me for Christmas and GMoney's discs. GMoney hooked me up Greatest Hits from Al Green and Bill Withers in addition to a Derek and the Dominoes album, Modern Times from Bob Dylan, Sailin Shoes from Little Feat, and the biggest gem in the collection... Bruce Springsteen live in London in 1975.

When I lived in Seattle nine years ago, we used to listen to a scratchy imported bootleg of that show. It was great to hear the crisp CD version of a sizzling 17 minute version of Kitty's Back. And Rosalita is my favorite Boss tune and the anchor of that two-disc live concert. In Byron Bay, I had a heated discussion with Shecky who has 15 years in the music industry under his belt. He hates Bruce Springsteen and thinks that Velvet Underground is one of the most overrated bands of all time. I dig the Velvets but conceded the second point. I fought tooth and nail for the Boss. I wish I had that CD to play for him. He might have changed his mind.

Oh, and when Anna Nicole Smith died the other day, I could not help but smirk. I played poker in the casino part of the hotel where she died. I think she was whacked. I love a good conspiracy theory. It could be a great screenplay idea or at the least, an episode of Law & Order.

I've been sick the last few days and it's been tough to concentrate and write for extended periods of time. That did not deter me from having one of my most productive stints. Within a 24 hour period, I cranked out my column for Poker Player Newspaper and updated seven blogs. Four of them were mine... Tao of Pauly, Tao of Poker, Truckin', and Coventry, a group Phish and music blog. I also updated three of the LasVegasVegas blogs, including... Poker Prof's poker blog, the Las Vegas Business and Politics blog, and the general Las Vegas and entertainment blog. I also have been adding Oz pics to my Flickr page.

It's Sunday morning and I don't know what to do without football. I leave for LA in a few days and have a ton of crap I have to do since I'll be gone for close to two and a half weeks. I'll be home in NYC for two days in early March before I head down to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida to visit Jerry (in Miami) and attend the Langerado Music Festival with Nicky, The Joker, Sweet Sweet Pablo, and Professional Keno Player Neil Fontenot. Since Bonnaroo is held during the 2007 WSOP, I will have to skip it this year. Langerado will be my Bonnaroo. I prefer the smaller festivals.

After Florida, I'm in NYC for a few days before I head out to Vegas. The next seven weeks are going to be fun, tough, and frenetic. Of course, 10% of that time is. The other 90% is mundane and yawn inducing like me sitting around in airports answering emails and deleting seventeen different versions of the same photo of Max Pescatori playing in the 2005 WSOP.

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