Not sure if you noticed, but Pokerati was down for the past 24 hours. Oh, sure, it didn’t appear down — which kinda made matters worse — but none of us had the ability to write a post, edit anything, leave a comment, etc. Very frustrating/scary … at a time when all sorts of good things were going on.

These situations usually spring up once or twice a year, at which point I call The Fat Guy in an absolute panic, and he stops whatever he’s doing and tells me not to cry. Then, usually, he calls me a few hours later and everything’s fixed. But this time was different. With the site totally paralyzed, he was telling me he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what was wrong. (Gulp.) He even had one of his uber-tech-geek buddies take a look, but he too couldn’t solve the problem, let alone identify it. And to make matters ironically worse, this was all going down on the 172nd anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto. Probably serves us right for temporarily forgetting the Alamo.

Anyhow, blah blah blah, now Pokerati is back in action and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. Turned out to be my bad, as you can see below.

Note to advertisers: Oops, sorry we deleted your stuff. We’ll have it back up within 36 hours before week’s end, and of course be crediting you with extra days, paying back the down time at 2:1 3:2.

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From: Scott Chaffin
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2008 10:42 AM
To: Dan Michalski
Subject: Re: OK, Big Daddy

You owe me eight hours of my life back…and removal of this dent in my forehead from pounding it.

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 12:18 PM, Dan Michalski wrote:

crap. i did that. i thought i was changing the time zone.

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From: Scott Chaffin
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2008 9:22 AM
To: Dan
Subject: OK, Big Daddy

I found the problem. The encoding had been changed from UTF-8 to UTF-7, which pretty much blows up everything. I can’t believe I missed that all this time.

I know I didn’t do that. It look suspiciously close to UTC-7, the clock time you have set. Might you have done that by accident?

Anyway, as a result of my troubleshooting, 8 hours worth of pounding my head on my keyboard, I deleted all the plugins and the widgets. Most importantly, though, I lost all of that advertising on the left sidebar. I have a copy of the page source that I can remanufacture it from. It will take a while though, and I’m going to have to do it tonight. If you have a copy of it, by all means get it uploaded.

Sorry for the delay, but I’m about ready to start lopping off fingers somewhere for messing with that.