Sometimes a little stroll through the past is a very good thing. It reminds us of where we’ve been – at times nudging us to vastly improve ourselves and lives so we don’t have to revisit the bottom – at times bringing a wistful smile or moist eyes – at times bringing an all out emotional burst of tears and painful thoughts – whatever it brings to each of us, the past is a good place to visit but then leave behind until another whisper takes us back to look again. I visited an old page today, my beginning with PokerWorks, page last updated 9/29/99:

That’s how it all started. Well, it actually started before then but this page is recorded in the Alexa Tool Bar History. The links are all there, the dates the pages were updated and recorded, and it really shows all my little tinkering meandering around trying to create and build a website. It was an incredible time of discovery for me. Domain names were so expensive they were unbelievable and could only be registered with the ‘whois’ registrar thingey at the cost of $135 a pop. I never had the time to really delve into website building or take a course on HTML so I purchased the easy out, Microsoft’s FrontPage. Regardless of the attitude that some people have about it, it’s a very huge program with a million capabilities, and knowing HTML ain’t the whole scope of website building. But all of that aside, I made my own, original images with the ‘Image Compose’ which shipped with FrontPage in the early days. I was quite proud of them. Hey…I have two sons that can airbrush/tattoo/draw anything…I draw great stick people so I am still proud of them.One of the funniest things to me in those days – it still is comical really – I put up this main page image with text on it that I wrote:

The image is by Corel, the text is by me. In case you can’t read it: “Send your champions, your kings, and those who would be…but remember when they come home defeated, no one holds the crown and sceptor for eternity”. I received more than one email from several different places that wanted to know where I found it, they were sure it was Shakespearean but didn’t know from what. And then, of course, they wanted to use it.Over the years, the site progressed little by little, becoming larger and I eventually discovered blogger.com which allowed me to get a lot more sophisticated with posting Table Tango tales and those were published into blogger but carried on my server. I had my share of server dilemmas and went through several different ones over a period of three to four years. Most of the time I had just enough knowledge to get myself out of trouble but I’ve never been big on having to dig through all the technical stuff. When I first started, the server code was all unix, that’s another reason FrontPage was so easy to work with, they install FrontPage Extensions, I hit PUBLISH. I managed to deal 40 hours a week (honestly…I dealt every shift, never calling in sick or taking extra time off) and kick around with my toy…PokerWorks.Com. I even carried my own forums for awhile and still have all the threads and posts stored on back up hard drives.

Well look at PokerWorks now. It’s an incredible poker voice. There are a great group of programmers that work on it all the time. My main man, Serge, the head of the geek staff, puts up with all my silly requests and humors me when I’m having a bad time with something on the site. He spent a lot of time chatting with me in the early days and moving everything over to the new server. And he understands my personal touch and helps reinforce my thought that that is what makes PokerWorks completely unique over most of the other poker sites. And now my scope of geeks (meant in a completely friendly, wonderful way) has broadened. I spend a lot of time pestering Sarunas, and sometimes Bilikas, and sometimes Ozryi, and sometimes Niekas, but mostly Serge and Sarunas.

Now I do not have any idea how all of PokerWorks is put together and who does what part of what, I do put up a main page article every now and then (never using FrontPage because the programmers do everything from scratch, throw in a few pieces of iron and tie it all up with rubberbands when needed) and posts to my blog. I work with all of the writers, I edit (not always grammatically correct – me that is) all of their articles and either publish them or send them to Sarunas to publish, I suppose I’m a creative manager/editor/director for the site, but I’m not even sure what I really am anymore. The majority of the ball of wax is in someone else’s hands, to a degree, I just work here. It’s a job I love, a picture I began painting a long time ago, and it will never be finished because there’s too much to explore that adds a new brush stroke or color to the canvas.

When I first started, I never thought I’d ever have a reader or a visitor. Thank you all for taking the time to stop, and more than that, for coming back. I love new friends, but I love old friends the bestest. A toast – to seven great years *glasses clink*