Long time no see

I haven't posted in a while, which is strange, as a lots of things have happened.

Christmas came and went, and as I'm sure all of you already know, my big item was a 30Gb black iPod. I love it. It's changed the way I listen to and organize my music. It makes school so much more tolerable. It almost never leaves my ears while I'm out of the house. I loves it.

lanFOUR went down at Jerry's house, and what a LAN it was. The setup was so good that we could have just set everything up and stared at it all night. Jerry's shop is the best place for LAN gaming from now on. Any LAN that happens somewhere else is just going to be a bunch of people sitting in a room, lazily playing games as we await the next weekend Jerry's shop is available. Jerry says we can't throw down every weekend, but once or twice a month should be okay. He says we should be good to go for weekend after next. That's fine with me. I'm willing to wait for quality. Speaking of lanFOUR, we had a great time. I took a fair deal of pictures and posted them to my Flickr photostream. You know how to check them out. Bottom right, clicky-clicky.

Vacate

Christmas break is practically here. It’s still a little under a week before the vacation proper actually begins, but from now until then will likely be a lethargic time where nothing gets done. Tomorrow is Friday, a day when students never want to do anything anyways, and next week is just Monday and Tuesday before a half-day on Wednesday. Nobody at school is going to want to do anything during those two and a half days, so I think it’s safe to assume that it’s all smooth sailing ahead.

It’s just ten days until Christmas anyway, so even if we were to be given assignments at school, I would be able to struggle through them with the thought that a nice sized vacation and holiday are fast approaching. Ten days isn’t very long when you think about it. By the time vacation happens, it’ll only be three days, four if you count the day we get out, until the holiday of holidays. I call it iPod day.

My brother and I have this tradition of playing all the way through the PSone game Incredible Crisis every Christmas Eve. Call me childish, but I can’t contain myself on Christmas Eve. I’m elated. It’s fucking Christmas tomorrow! I just lose it thinking that in less than 24 hours I’ll wake up and walk out into a room full of free loot, all hand-picked and tailored to my liking by various family and friends. Playing through Incredible Crisis the night before has become our crutch, so to speak. Those that haven’t played the game don’t know what I’m talking about, but those that do know where I’m coming from. The game is so fun, frantic, and challenging. We burn up all our energy, and a great deal of time, playing through the game’s story. It doesn’t finish off the entire night of waiting, but the last few times we played through we did burn through a good three hours. That’s sufficient to get you tired enough to fall asleep, at least in theory. I usually end up drink a good deal of Nyquil to give myself a little extra incentive to fall asleep.

lanFOUR happens tomorrow. I won’t go into details of when and where, because we’re already booked up, and throwing extra information out there is just going to get people asking more questions, whom we would have to let down. As with every LAN, I promise to take tons of pictures and throw them in my Flickr PhotoStream.

Smooth sailing

Everything worked out great, as I knew it would. Just as usually we hit some snags, such as the “we don’t have a table” fiasco, and then the “we have too many tables” counter-fiasco. We ended up having just enough room for everyone, and just enough table space for everyone to have a comfortable place to game. We played Quake3 and UT, mostly. We did a fair bit of Halo; Slayer and CTF both. We didn’t run into any other problems throughout the night. Luther drove to go get pizza, and I tagged along to keep him on track. We got five Domino’s pizzas, and as per the norm, we ate them all. They were good.

I took about twenty pictures, and they’re all on my Flickr PhotoStream. You can see them by clicking the Flickr button at the bottom right. I added a cool Flash badge that shows some of my most recent photos. If you see something you like in the badge, click it to go directly to that photo’s entry in my PhotoStream. Cool, huh? You can still click the button to go to the main listing.

I also added a del.icio.us roll to the bottom right. Del.icio.us is a bookmarking site that lets you share your favorite sites with everyone else. You can lose hours just clicking around on del.icio.us, I’m telling you. You find some cool stuff. The roll will display my last five tagged sites. Check them out if you see a title that interests you.

Reverse

The school bus never showed up at my street this morning. I know I didn’t “miss” it. I was there the same time I am everyday, and I waited for at least thirty minutes. I wasn’t even averse to going to school today. I found out that I’m passing everything, and had no work lined up for the rest of the week. I had some fun ASP coding to in Mrs. Hamilton’s, and class, and I was watching a movie in Mrs. Green’s. I skipped out on programming and a movie. You can see I didn’t avoid school on purpose. My grandma was taking my siblings to the bus stop, and, noticing I was still standing there when I’m usually long gone, asked me what the deal was. I said that I had no idea, and got in her car. I told her to throw it in reverse so I could go home and go back to sleep. She doesn’t enforce the whole school thing very much, so long as I have absent days left. A few minutes later, I was sleeping. I woke up and played some WoW, but not too much. I managed to finally cash-in some long-complete quests, grabbing half a level worth of XP. I know, I know. I’m talking about World of Warcraft. Get over it.

lanTHREE is set to happen tomorrow. Everything is ready, in a theoretical sense. We have everything planned correctly, but that doesn’t mean things will go smoothly. We’ve never had any problems in the past, least not ones from which we didn’t recover. We’ve always managed to get things going just right and have a great time; no matter how wrong things seem to turn out. I’m confident things will work out this time too. The only loose cannon our lack of a table. I need a lunchroom-style table for my room my guests can setup their computers on it. At current the only free surface I have is my dresser’s small desk. It’s just barely big enough to set one computer on, and that’s after using a monitor stand to clear up keyboard room. It isn’t comfortable in the least, and I really, really hope that none of my guests have to use it. I’m going to see about getting a table or two from somewhere tomorrow. Maybe I could get one from the Otway fire department? We borrowed at least ten tables for our cookout; why not borrow one or two for a LAN party? Some foldout chairs would be nice too, all I have here is rickety dining room chairs, and I’m telling you right now, they suck to sit on. I’m sure things will pan out. lanTHREE is going to be great.

I’m about to kill my Linux installation and just free up the space. I just can’t commit to using it for any length of time. I love Linux to the core, but I just can’t stick with it. For the first few weeks I have it installed I almost never use Windows, then I gradually going back to Windows over the next week or so, and then I’m back to using Windows full-time. I know what the problem is. I’m a gamer, and gamers and Linux don’t mix well. There are many ways to get Windows games running on Linux, but most of them are hard to correctly setup and they don’t run your games well enough for you to forget about Windows. I end up booting into Windows to play my games, and gradually fade back into doing other things in Windows too. Oh, well. It’s a fun project for me to do ever few months, which is about how long I spend in Windows before I give Linux another shot.

I’m done with this entry. I promise to take many pictures at lanTHREE and upload them to my Flickr PhotoStream. It’s a new month, and that means I have lots of Flickr bandwidth to burn. See you later.