1. a random, steady, unvarying, electronically produced sound
2. nerdy notes from suburbia
Some numbers:
It’s been fun to see pictures of my case make their way online following the event. Glad to see people found it photo worthy. Here are some taken without my knowledge:
Filed under Lanwar
And so we come to the final day. We got a fair amount of sleep this morning, from 5am to 9, so that was a nice rest before driving back later today. All the BYOCers gradually made their exit, mostly from noon and on.
All the pro tourneys wrapped up today. Fatal1ty finished in 4th place in the Quake 4 tourney, but his teammate (and understudy in a sense), Stermy, avenged him by beating LoSt-CaUsE in the finals. I didn’t stay to watch the final matches but I saw his matches against socrates_ (who finished third) and he really tore him up. Stermy’s aim and anticipation is awesome making him deadly with Quake’s rail gun.
Earlier in the day, I ran into Stermy in the hall and congratulated on a great tourney thus far. Young kid at only 19 or 20. He said after this weekend, he’d be following the rest of the WSVG tour – Dallas, then Brazil, China, the UK, etc. Last year, between the CPL tour and some other events he said he made about $150k. Amazing.
Got a little more UT2k4 in this morning along my last couple GB of downloads.
Also, the staff recoginized all the “fun event” winners in the BYOC area. Team Boom Tape got many props from Francopoli on our winning Duct Tape War device. He said it was one of the most impressive Duct Tape creations he’d seen through all the past events. For our trouble we each recieved a nice Creative Labs headset.
There was also a raffle for a BOOM gaming chair among all the BYOC event winners, which somehow I managed to win! It’s pretty sweet with four built-in speakers and a ‘kicker’ for vibration. Too bad the basement’s not done.
We packed up around 3 or 4 and headed home. It was an awesome four days without a doubt. Look for another wrap up post next.
Filed under Lanwar
Things only got more hectic as the weekend went on, so I have to finish my blogging post-event.
Going into Saturday I got another 2 hours of sleep (6-8am). There was just too much going on today to get much sleep. The second round of the BF2 tourney started at 4pm and matched us up against the tough Lazy Ops Squad. Despite some tough fighting we dropped two rounds in a row to them, eliminating us from the bracket. In the first round we failed to control the chopper checkpoints and they capalized on their airpower. The second match was much closer, we generally were even on armor and airpower, but we just couldn’t hold a majority of the checkpoints throughout the match. I was leading scorer on our team in both rounds. Lazy Ops continued to roll through their next round and eventually lost in the finals. See a wrap up article here: http://www.ampedesports.com/news/2442.
In other news, MinionX, Gratch, JBoom, Keeperman, and I formed a team (Boom Tape) and competed in the traditional Lanwar competition, Duct Tape Wars. The gist of the event is for each team to construct some device (which varies every event) from only a single roll of duct tape. (Technically you can also use the ink from a pen and saliva, but that’s it). The contraption that performs best wins. This event’s challenge was to contruct a device to shroud an egg to allow it to survive drops of increasing heights. A particularly hard requirement was that upon landing, the egg had to be in plain sight and removed without touching any duct tape. JBoom and I went back and forth in a typical engineering debate, refining our concept, while apparently annoying everyone else (particularly Joe). A few sketches later and we were off and building.
After the alotted 2 hours, we had constructed a landing cone, with a padded egg box inside. After drops from increasing heights (up to 27′), ours and one other were the only ones not to break the egg. As a tie breaker they decided to throw each device to the ground rather than a simple drop. Our design was unphased and actually slowed during the decent leaving us the clear winner. Lanwar head-honcho Burden wanted no egg left unbroken and was convinced that our cone would fail if it were thrown hard enough. No luck. Finally, the crowd talked him into throwing it from 27′ horizontally like a fresbie. The cone coasted, settled softly, and the egg came loose and slowly rolled out. That one gave us a tiny crack, but the crowd was amazed.
Also on Satudrday they held the Miss WSVG contest…a truly silly beauty pagent. But at least the interview questions were themed around gaming and weeded out the non-gamer models. After that was the less formal, and scary, Mr WSVG contest – something the female clans (Frag dolls and PMS) threw together to give some balance.
More hours of UT2k4, Serious Sam 2, and Trackmania Nations. In the wee hours of the morning we fired up a Armagetron game to which more and more people joined. It was 3 or 4 am when we had around 10 players in. MinionX kept rotating the server settings to keep everyone on their toes. Gratch had never seen the game before, but slaughtered us! Great fun!
Filed under Lanwar
Got about 2 hours of shut eye last night, and I’m up even later tonight (5:30am now). I competed in two tournaments today: the first was a silly ~100-person version of rock-paper-scissors. I made it into the top twelve, but then my luck turned. Congrats to Rob for making top six and landing a free PC game.
Second tourney was BF2. It’s set up as best of 3 between two teams of 9. I’m playing with Team WONK. About four of the guys are from Chicago (three below) and play together regularly; the rest of us were drafted on the team. We played some practice rounds and discussed strategy and everyone has a clearly defined role. After losing the first round 10-0 (that’s a close game in BF terms), we went on to win the next two ~50-0. Kick ass! I held up my end – second in scoring for both wins. Next round is tommorrow (later today) at 4pm. See an article on the first round here: http://www.ampedesports.com/news/2436.
Unfortunately with eveything else going on I had to miss the 1v1 Starcraft tourney and the Texas Hold’em tourney. There is a TON going on here!
A new addition this year is the BYOX section. Gamers bring their Xbox or Xbox360 and hook up to provided TVs. The rows of big-ass TVs are pretty impressive.
Hard drive is digesting lots of yummy nuggets…getting full.
Filed under Lanwar
The first day of the mass o gaming humanity know as million man lan (aka lanwar), is in the books. We arrived about at about 11:30am (doors opened at 10). Everyone filtered in throughout the day, and more will show tomorrow. The layout this year is HUGE. Well it’s always huge, but even more so this year with all the exhibitors and games for the general public. It’s kind of like three events in one: the BYOC for the lan gamers (like me) who will be here 24×4, the pro-tourneys for the likes of Fatal1ty which kickoff tomorrow, and the vendor exhibits for all of us plus any spectators who wander in.
Speaking of Fatal1ty…the guy must have quite the ego after going to events like this. Between the Creative booth which looks to be an alter to him, the gigantic banners throughout, and the bunches of machines branded with his logo, he really is the commercial posterboy for the twitch generation.
After setting up our boxes we staked our claim on the campground. We’ve got a big 3 room tent and my Aztek/tent for the lot of us. It gives us a place to grill some burgers and catch a few Zs (probably very few – heck it’s past 4am now!)
In general the first day is a warm up of sorts with everyone getting settled. No tournaments until tomorrow (later today). None the less, I got a good share of UT2k4 and BF2 play in. And then there’s the avalanche of downloads which has begun. Be strong my SATA friends, for you will soon bear the weight of many servers.
Filed under Lanwar
A brief basement update here. We just finished taping and cornerbead tonight (well a tiny bit remains here and there, but I’m calling this phase over). Now to go back over everything with another couple coats of mud. This is taking forever! But things are shaping up.
A few pictures so you can see where the 77 sheets of drywall went…
The stairway with the very hard to find recessed lighting:
The main room. A large movie screen will sit between the built-ins…eventually. The built-in shelves are looking good – a ton of work – but they are lit on a dimmer and have a really clean look.
To one side of the main room we have the future home of the wet bar. Here I will mix many a drink as we try to forget how much work all this was.
Just adjacent to the wet bar is a hallway leading back to other rooms. Here you can catch a glipse of two features which should be filed under “you really like to make a lot of work for yourself”: three cutout “windows” (to mirror the three-shelved built-ins) and beyond that, a lighted niche.
Down the hall on the right is a furnance room and the laundry room which you can get a glipse of below. The door on the right goes to storage under the stairs (also taped and mudded).
And that brings us to the end of the hall where we have the “back” room. It’s a small bedroom/exercise room/whatever with a large (unfinshed storage closet behind it).
And lastly, I bring you back to the main room, to see the best picture I could manage of the ceiling…my Sistine Chapel…or what Donna calls “the work of a mad scientist evil genius>”.
Filed under Basement
So with Million Man Lan (MML5) fast approaching and figuring I’ll be having case window envy, I thought I’d try making a new transparent top lid to my case. My requirements were (1) it had to be cheap, (2) couldn’t involve modding any of the original case pieces, and most importantly (3) it couldn’t actually make the already sweet case look any worse.
I went to Home Depot and picked up a piece of Lexan (polycarbonate) and some aluminum angle (1″ and .5″). Total cost of materials was about $35. I debated going with something cheaper than Lexan, like arylic, but since my monitor will sit on this, I opted for strength and durabilty. Constuction took about 3 hours with the majoirty of that just for figuring out how to piece it together. A jig saw with a fine metal blade worked very good in cutting both the aluminum and the polycarbonate. I won’t go into gory details of the construction, but the Lexan slides perfectly until the top lip of the front face and it’s held in place with two thumb screws in the back (just like the stock lid).
Meanwhile I do still have the original solid aluminum top in the event I ever want to swtich back (like when it’s eventually rack mounted).
Filed under Comp hardware / mods
What better way to spend it than getting a group together to see the late show of the remake of The Omen.
Overall, not a bad flick. On any other day maybe not so much, but worth $9 (!) tonight. I thought Mia Farrow was the standout – memorable scenes include the air injection in the IV and her flying end-over-end death. Other creepy non-movie moments include Nancy’s hoodie and Finding Nemo.
Filed under Movies
