Hacked: The Pokerati Morlock’s lung troubles really take the fun out of smoking for the rest of us.

Scott Chaffin is dying. Now now, before you say WTF? know that I am, too. And so are you, and you, and you. In fact, I challenge you to find one living person on the planet who isn’t “dying” … you can’t do it. Fact of life.

But some of us have to fight a little harder to stave off the grim reaper. And Scott, at age 54, got called into life-battle recently upon learning his nagging smoker’s cough was actually full-blown lung cancer.

Scott is one of the original poker bloggers (c. 2002) — and one of the original bloggers for that matter — who has been a big part of Pokerati since the near-beginning. Horrified by an all-flash direction I was headed with version 2, he took over the controls for all things techy in Pokeratiland more than five years ago. Since then, The Fat Guy has overseen three redesigns, bailed me out on multiple occasions after I broke something big, and has written tens of thousands of lines of code for 146 half-baked Pokerati projects since abandoned. All for no pay, mind you … and added bummer as I learn now that our small-business health plan here at Pokerati may not cover actual sickness.

So if you like Scott and like this site and/or just hate cancer … help keep The Fat Guy around a while longer — he’s still got work to do, dammit! — by donating to his cause via PayPal. (Link takes you to TFG.com, w donate button on top right.) And if you have any complaints about how things run on this site, well dude, c’mon … you know, [hush] cancer.

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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