Justin Shronk

So, I guess in the blogging community they call this a "trip report." Basically, I'm on the plane from Barcelona to London and too much happened while in Barcelona to not write anything about it.

To start: I hate traveling. I am big on comfort, familiarity, routine, and lack of uncertainty - traveling to foreign countries for the first time is the polar opposite of all those things. I had been to Australia for PokerNews and also Monte Carlo, but none of them were as challenging to me mentally as this trip for some reason.

It started with me once again ruining a PokerNews multimedia computer by spilling Crystal Light on it two nights before I was scheduled to leave for Barcelona. This wouldn't have been a problem except for the fact that the one remaining multimedia computer was in Manila shooting the APPT for us. So, PokerNews Multimedia Department was without a computer that was capable of capturing and editing video. I spent the next day trying EVERY SINGLE THING I could think of to procure a computer that I could use for video. Our one computer that I had spilled liquid on a month earlier (I'm seriously a bull in a computer shop when it comes to clumsiness around electronics) was functional, but the keyboard no longer worked and it seemed to be running very slow (so slow, in fact, that it could not capture video when I last tried at the WSOP). I finally decided after multiple phonecalls to my mom, multiple phone calls to my boss, and multiple half-doses of Xanax, that I should just use the little money I had remaining in my bank account and go buy a laptop.

So after visiting about fourty thousand stores, I finally found a cheap laptop at Radio Shack (back to school season just happened to coincide with the exact day I needed to find a computer in a hurry - nice luck sir). I then went to my friend Rob's house to download a cracked copy of Adobe Premiere (after calling him all day with no answer and freaking out that he forgot he was my last resort to get another copy of the software). Problem solved. I went home and for the first time (with about 18 hours left before I had to leave for the airport) had the computer problem solved and was ready to focus on actually getting ready for my intercontinental trip.

Then I looked more closely at the laptop I bought.

No firewire port.

Fuck.

Firewire is how you connect digital video cameras to computers to capture the video into the computer. Without this port, there was no way of getting the video into the computer. I will, for the readers' sake, compress the next 8 hours into the next paragraph (which will have interesting punctuation and phrasing, brace yourself.)

Call mom. Fuck Fuck Fuck. Call boss, no ideas, call techy friends, no ideas, call radio shack, no ideas, call Freys electronic store, no help. Pace around my apartment for 10 minutes ... ... ... Call mom. Call other PokerNews blogger and ask him to trade computers since he has a Dell with firewire port - he is reluctant. Half working computer might have some life; delete all unneeded stuff off of half-working computer; go buy external keyboard for it; freak out when external keyboard doesn't work; keyboard all of a sudden works; run ScanDisk; Defragment; test out small video; captures ok; exports ok; decide to roll the dice on the half-working computer. Pack clothes while totally out of my mind so much that I could very well be packing twenty t-shirts and a bannana and I wouldn't realize it. Pack the equipment including TWO computers (the new one and the half working one). T-minus 10 hours 'til I have to leave for the airport.

And I haven't even figured out how I'm getting to the airport yet.

END TRIP REPORT PART ONE.