This week has been cursed!
Oy vei! What a week so far. For fans of this MMA site and mixed martial arts as a whole, things have gone from unpleasant to worse. And then from worse things have become downright comical. At this point if I don’t laugh I don’t know what I will do.
Things started off badly the day before yesterday for everyone when it was announced that Jake Shields would not be fighting Drew Fickett at the Strikeforce: Cung Le vs. Frank Shamrock fight card this weekend due to a back injury. That’s a bummer because everyone has been looking forward to seeing Cesar Gracie’s star 170 lb fighter in action again.
So yesterday I am updating the site with the winners of WEC 33 based on the live results of my favorite MMA news site, Sherdog. Yesterday for some time on that page they had listed Richard Crunkilton’s opponent as being a Japanese fighter that I did not recognize. “Crap,” I thought. “There must have been a last minute change to the fight card. Our predictors here on MMAPredictions.com have predicted against his original opponent, Sergio Gomez. I will have to delete that fight from the card”. (I think you can guess how this turns out.)
Here’s where the bad-to-worse comes in. Yesterday morning, the team that wrote the code which powers MMAPredictions.com were under the hood making some adjustments that were meant to improve the site’s cruching of prediction data so the site would run smoother at the conclusion of a fight card. Sounds good right? Well I am not sure but I suspect that those well-intentioned efforts may have been behind an outage on MMAPredictions.com in the very middle of WEC 33! The whole site became unavailable to everyone - including myself - yesterday. This almost-worst-case-scenario lasted until this morning at 5 AM on the west coast.
Next comes news that for unknown reasons another fighter from Cesar Gracie’s camp, fan favorite Nick Diaz, will also be unable to fight on the Strikeforce card this Saturday! Wow! Things have gone from bad to worse! If I were Gilbert Melendez, who is Cesar Gracie’s last remaining fighter on the card, I would watch out in case the old saying “bad news comes in threes” is true.
And to top things off, after I am done playing a little Halo3 on XBOX Live to distract myself from the fact that MMAPredictions is offline and I have no idea what happened to all the data from WEC 33 (my XBOX Live gamertag is MMAPredictions if you want to send a friend request), I do a real quick check of my email and find that an email blast I had prepared to go out prior to this weekend’s Strikeforce show was sent out to about 1,000 MMAPredictions users prior to me actually putting the finishing touches on it. Some of the information on there was not updated, and even if someone clicked on a link in there to visit the site, it would be down when they got there!
This morning I wake up to find the site online again. That’s good news but I then learn that Rich Crunkilton did fight Sergio Gomez after all. Doh! All of our predictors’ picks on that fight were deleted from the system, so we just have data on 9 of the 10 fights from last night.
Dios mio. I am going to hide under the covers until this week is over and pray that the streak of bad luck ends. I apologize to everyone who’s a member of MMAPredictions.com and has had to put up with the technical difficulties of this week. I promise everything possible is being done to hammer out this week’s issues.
Sigh. I will get cracking on the Breakdown for this event after my dentist appointment this morning. Hopefully no bad news is revealed there, lol!
In the fetal position underneath the kitchen table,
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