Steve's Slaughterhouse

We spent Saturday at Steve's Slaughterhouse for the bi-monthly LAN Party. It was a good turn out (about 16 nerds) including a few old favourites that I hadn't seen for a while. Steve kindly put on a BBQ for lunch and had even built his own trestle tables. I forgot to take my camera (as usual).

UT2k4 is a neat game - especially the Onslaught and Bombing Run game-types. I also like the Shoryuken style Adrenalin Combos. Unfortunately I had no idea how and when to use them. Team Multiplayer would be a lot of fun once you understood the game well enough. It's a nice change from the more serious shooters that have cornered our attention of late.

Far Cry is OK but it seemed to run poorly on everyone's machines. It doesn't add much that hasn't been done before, but the graphics are really nice.

Heath offered a weekend session at his beach-house in the near future. That sounds like a lot of fun and it'll give us an chance to get some serious gaming in. Sadly I think interest may be waning amongst a few of the players. I'm not sure if we'll be able to draw a big enough crowd.

Best Rush style stage pyrotechnics : Tom's PSU (the moment he plugged it in!).

What is it with PSU's these days?

Guitar Heroes

Upon hitting one's distortion pedal during a stage performance, one should give the appearance that the guitar has suddenly and unexpectedly become difficult to control (not unlike a bucking bronco). One should appear suprised by the sudden increase in gain and in the best case, one's hair would stand on end.

The best example of this is Jack White during the Fell in Love with a Girl / Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground medley at the 2002 MTV Movie Awards.

Additionally, one can feign suprise anytime one hits an artificial harmonic.
See : Multiple guitar heroes.

...as Good as a Holiday

I've had a couple of problems with my SATA RAID 0 array. The controller failed to detect the disk (containing my Windows system partition) which led me to think I might have a dead HDD. It turns out that a new PSU fixed the fault.

While I was at Scorpion Technologies I picked up a couple of other items - MouseSkatez (They work well, but they're expensive and I doubt their longevity), an Everglide Game Mat, the aforementioned Bluetooth adapter and a Xaserbag. The Xaserbag was unnecessary, but it's neat.

After noticing the state of my keyboard at the LAN Party yesterday, I took it apart this morning and gave it a good wipe. It feels like brand new. I also recalibrated my monitor and did some optimising. Feels like a new machine...

...unfortunately it looks like my mouse didn't make it though yesterday's warfare. I wonder if I'm the only one using that Right Mouse Button Key on the Microsoft keyboards?

My RAID array problems reminded me of a little Windows quirk that caused me some grief last time I rebuilt my XP Home install. I don't have a floppy drive in this machine (CDRs are so cheap these days) so when I F6'ed to install the RAID controller driver I was stuck. I ended up borrowing my housemate's floppy drive, but I can't see any technical reason why you can't insert a CDR with the drivers on. A search on Google showed plenty of others with the same dilemna but no answer (apart from making an Unattended Install CD).

In the words of Steve Stifler - "I dunno man, that sounds like a lot of work."

Teeth

I grabbed a Bluetooth adapter to let my PC talk to my Ipaq. After a few minor technical difficulties I'm all hooked up. So far I've setup Activesync, Internet (Web and ICQ) and streaming MP3s. There's some good PDA friendly content around, including my favourite gaming news site.

I haven't setup any access controls yet so hopefully the neighbours won't start Bluejackin' me.
I see that Michael has posted a report on yesterday's LAN Party over at Scattered Thought. I'll post a few words myself later on.
It's an odd sensation sitting on the back porch using ICQ...