Off line for a couple of days

The Dan Plan site was down for the last two days. Sorry about that, it’s one of the dangers of hosting through godaddy and not the first time that the site has been down for more than 24 hours. This time they said it was an issue with their servers the first time I called and that it would be fixed within 24 hours. When I called the next day they said that it could take up to 72 hours but that it was definitely a server issue on their side and nothing that could be done except wait. That guy actually had the gall to try and sell me some more service during the tech call, which I thought was a pretty bold move, although not necessarily in the right direction. I had a feeling that something else was up as I could log into wordpress so I called again this eve and the third tech guy I spoke with figured out it was just that the “web accelerator” was screwing up and as soon as he turned whatever that is off the site was back up and running.

Lesson learned: After having the site down multiple times a year over the past three years it’s time to change hosts. I hear Amazon has some great deals with web hosting in their cloud so I will be checking that out tomorrow.

In the meantime, I have been grinding away at the new swing moves that Bruce Furman has me doing and finally starting to see some of the rewards from the work. My last two rounds have been sub-80 and I shot an even par 9 during the round before those. I am heading to Langdon tomorrow for another checkup and to get the next steps in the swing and am excited to get some video of where I currently am.

This weekend I am playing in the Heron Lakes member guest tournament Saturday and Sunday and then the Portland State Viking Classic charity tournament at Langon on Monday. It’s good to get some more tourney rounds in and I feel much more confident entering these than I did when I last-minute signed up for the Camus Meadows tournament a couple of weeks ago. That one was against the advice of Bruce and in the middle of some major swing changes that had me swimming in my own head when it came to swing thoughts. Now I am just working on squaring the face at impact to get the irons flying straight, everything else seems more or less in line, but perhaps we shall know more about that tomorrow after the lesson.

There is a lot of exciting news and I have been to a lot of meetings lately, but as always I can’t talk about them quite yet. One aspect of The Dan Plan’s daily routine that is up in the air still is where my practice will be taking place for the next year. CECC will be voting on June 26 as to whether or not they will extend the courtesy membership for another year and I am excited to get their answer. That comes the day before my 34th birthday and I hope it’s good news, it would be awesome to do a bday practice session back on my old stomping grounds.

The Oregon Amateur is going on this week down at the Eugene Country Club. I wasn’t able to compete this year as you had to have under a 5 handicap to get in to the qualifiers. It’s too bad as I would have loved to gone down and thrown my name into the competition. Next year for sure. It looks like a tough course as a handful of plus handicap people I know shot between 79-87 in the first two rounds. The winner of the 36-hole stoke play competition part (it then goes to a field of 64 who play match play rounds for 3 days) was a young man who will be a freshman at the University of Oregon this coming fall, Thomas Lim. He won that section by 6 strokes shooting a total of 9 under 69-66. That’s money and I look forward to seeing what he does during his career down at U of O.

I’m Glad the website is back up. Hopefully that is the last time that this sort of thing happens. Off to bed here, have a big day tomorrow with a morning lesson and a ton of short game practice. Can’t wait for the some competitive golf this weekend!

Jose says:

June 20, 2013 at 12:29 pm

excuses have been made for past play… now lest see if the danplan can break 80 in a tournament?

Curt O'Brien says:

June 20, 2013 at 12:54 pm

Dan, all I can say is play as many tournaments as you can. When I played junior golf I used to shoot 74 or 75 in my practice rounds, then shoot 84 or 86 in the tournaments. It was very frustrating. But I discovered the more tournaments I played in, the better I shot in them. As you probably have found, when you play in a tournament, you will find your ball in places you’ve never been before (i.e.: behind trees and having to swing left handed…or in your case right handed, hitting out of a plugged bunker shot, having to hit your ball while standing in a stream or pond, etc.) The best way to prepare is to practice the wildest, most inventive shots leading up to your tournament. That way if you run into bad luck, you are not surprised. Also, you will notice another thing. The more tournaments you play in, the more you begin to embrace the feeling of “nervousness” and you begin to play well when you are nervous or excited. That’s when things start to come together. Keep up the hard work!

Peter eller says:

June 22, 2013 at 8:50 am

You should check out dreamhost for your web hosting I use thenm for all the sites I build godaddy is evil as you have already discover

And about “swing thoughts” you might want to read ” extraordinary golf” by Fred shoe maker it’s the best book I’ve found about the mental game

Cheers

Patrick Brooks says:

June 23, 2013 at 7:59 pm

dan, heroku is pretty good- i can even do your deployment, let me know

Brian Kuehn says:

June 24, 2013 at 8:41 am

First, you need to play more rounds of golf “for score” as you say. You need to discipline yourself to hit a shot poorly and not drop another practice ball or two. Instead, go to the next shot and try to get out of the mess you created. It is June 24 and you have recorded 3 scores to your handicap for the month. If you want to learn how to score lower, you need to play more rounds without turning them into practice rounds. Second, as Curt O’Brien states, play more individual stroke play tournaments. Learning to cope with the internal mental pressure of tournament play is almost as important as learning a repeatable swing.

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