Derek Semmler dot com - money, motorcycles and cars (with a little bit of everything else)

Today is my first day back from Las Vegas and I miss it already, although it is good to be back home and see my wife and kids.

Unfortunately, I left the sunny warm weather in Vegas to come home to temperatures in the single digits and a car covered with a layer of ice and roughly 4 inches of snow. And wouldn’t you know that I had failed to throw a snow brush in the trunk!

Money, money, money
A trip to Vegas just wouldn’t be a trip to Vegas without a little gambling. The majority of my gambling was done at the sports book and all I have to say is thank you to the Baltimore Ravens!

The icing on the cake during the MNF game came while playing a little video poker at the bar. As we were ready to cash out and head to dinner, I hit the deal button one last time and landed four 2’s and an ace to win a few bills.

It wasn’t all good though as I was never able to hit the NBA parlay bets that I tried. I came very close to winning a 6-team parlay that would have won me roughly $400 but a missed free throw and an offensive shootout left me thinking about what could have been.

What do you mean my site is down?
While in Vegas, I had my laptop with me but I admit that I only had time to check email a few times and didn’t do much of anything online.

I had received an email from someone that indicated that my personal finance blog seemed to be having problems. I quickly checked it and everything looked good - although I failed to clear my cache on that first check and didn’t realize the site was in fact not rendering properly.

When I received the 2nd email yesterday morning, I finally took the time to really look at it and found that something happened that was causing the site not to render. The odd thing is that I haven’t changed anything on that blog in quite some time yet the pages were no longer displaying.

With a little assistance from David Pitlyuk, I was able to find the problem and test the resolution before departing for the airport. I’m still not sure why the problem occurred when the code had not been changed but it is what it is and the site is now rendering properly.

Scheduled Posting
For the duration of my time in Vegas, I had written posts ahead of time and scheduled them to be published each day. As valuable as I know this feature is to Wordpress, I still find that I enjoy posting by the seat of my pants.

But I am very happy that I decided to schedule a handful of posts for my blogs because I never would have been able to publish anything while away. As much as I thought I might have time to keep up with everything, Vegas has a funny way of consuming your time with other activities that can be a little more fun than sitting at the laptop.

Hopefully everyone enjoyed the posts that I published while away and had a chance to read my interview with Darren Rowse.

Thanks for keeping the lights on while I was away, I am glad to be back!