Archived News starting from 11-12-2005 and earlier
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My
November LAN party was today with 15 people in attendance and up to 12 playing at one time. By far the largest one yet. The
Gnome Cam was directed inside @ 1:30pm to catch the action. We started off with some Quake IV which turned into a comedic bloodbath due to the small maps and high number of players. We then moved on to FarCry for a brief period followed by the classic Quake III CTF walking eyeball frenzy. A short game of StarCraft gave us a break from first person shooter which turned into a trip to the garage for more "stand in my engine bay" photo opportunities. We wrapped up with some serious FarCry CTF involving shouts of compass directions for incoming enemies and blatent camping by everyone except me (Everyone knows I'm not a camper). The sponsorship got us glow stuff, stickers and magazines which made for great mousepads and centercaps. The traditional blown circuit breaker happened early, and prompted a 4-breaker distribution
network of power cords that
held up well for the remainder of the event. I'm already looking forward to the upcoming Jan LAN where I can finally take out that @##$% sniper.
Tonight, after hearing what sounded like an elephant tripping over my lawn furniture, the morlocks checked the
weather station and found that a new high-wind record was set. I'm sure the ex-Floridian will point out that 33.8 MPH is just a gentle breeze in the great hurricane state but for us northern unfortunates it's significant. It also resulted in a touching interpretive dance number by the leaves trapped behind my barn.
| 33.8 MPH, 291° at 22:45 on 09 November |
Power was lost at 10:28am today. The server UPS was exhausted only 9 minutes later at 10:37am which I'm taking as a sign it's time for a new UPS battery. Power was restored at 3:24pm so the outage occured for approximately 5 hours. Not surprisingly, today was the
windiest of the year, with a 28.4 MPH gust recorded shortly before the outage. The morlocks reported seeing an electrical repair truck by the house confirming the wind was the most likely culprit.
Tonight was 80's movie night featuring
Explorers. While there were no talking monkeys like the famous
Nukie movie what it lacked in talking monkeys it made up for with
huge assed aliens. My youth in the 80's was spent as a sponge to mass media so I'm surprised I never saw this movie before. The Josephs moved up from Florida just to see this movie that the Kelleys found and proposed for viewing. Both also enjoyed the huge assed aliens (as we all do, deep down). The lessons I took away from this movie is Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix are not at all recognizable when playing nerds as 15 year olds. I also learned that television is bad since it warps large-assed aliens knowledge about our culture, and that if you do something your parents don't know about, you get yelled at whether you're River Phoenix or a large assed alien kid. I hope that's enough of a taste to make you run out and rent it.
Tonight I installed a
block heater on my
Ranger with the help of my new basement renters John and Marcus, henceforth referred to as "The Morlocks". The instructions had a happy face next to a service technician disconnecting the battery, raising the truck on a lift, then draining the coolant through the radiator drain before removing the freeze plug. I went the sad face route and just punched the plug out, resulting in a bath of warm coolant which I frolicked around in looking for the piece I punched out. Unable to find it, I decided it was either lodged in the frame somewhere, or stuck inside the engine at a position most suited to jam the intake of the water pump. Since I don't have an optical camera wire to check for option #2, I decided to just hope for the best and stick the block heater inside the hole. The Morlocks and I then spent another 30 minutes deciphering the wire routing diagram to determine where to route the wires to the battery heater and block heater from the AC plug. I'm definitely planning on posting these directions, they are worth the read. After everything was reassembled, I filled the coolant overflow with a gallon of coolant and watched it go nowhere. Figuring the thermostat needed to heat up and open, I ran it past the "normal" range and into "hot" at which point I assumed the plug had plugged the water intake and was slowly destroying my water pump. Fortunately the Morlocks convinced me it was vapor lock before I got the engine out and sure enough after it cooled down the reservoir went empty and the happy face light came back on in my dash. The end result is a pre-warmed truck and a new appreciation for language-neutral instructions. The celebration of my block heater install at box bar was cut short when the
Morlock vehicle wouldn't start due to the lights being left on. Fortunately
Joseph arrived from Florida to give us a jump and send us on our way. Holy crap this is a long read!
UPDATE:
scan of the crazy instructionsI just got the email today that NVIDIA will be sending some swag for my Nov 12th LAN party. In return I'm displaying the permanent banner in the upper right of my website along with posting the banners/materials they send along at the event. I'm not expecting alot, but it's nice to have some free stuff to pass around. Thanks to
Stavos Excelcier for the idea to apply for sponsorship. My memory sucks horribly, it was indeed Excelcier who proposed the idea. Stavos is a big fat loser.
While
Duane was on vacation I molested his cats and violated his fish.
For these tasks I was given the moon goddess from the Dominican Republic as an addition to my Gnome collection.
If you look at the backside you can see why the title is fitting. My most exotic gnome yet, a close second to
the most disturbing gnome ever.
A year ago today was
moving day when all
Saturday and most of
Sunday my friends helped me move all my crap from Redford to Farmington Hills. Moving always reminds me how many great friends I have that are willing to move my underwear drawer. The transition to Farmington Hills was tough, requiring cutbacks to shirtless time and bigger investments in lawn maintenance, but now that a year has passed I've been properly assimilated into the local culture. The history (what was then the future) of my old house turned out to be much more interesting than I would have ever anticipated, with a complete failure to sell and some very interesting
renter events included. And yes, it's
still for sale but don't everyone go offering to buy it at once.
Shortly after 11:00pm lastnight an
exploit script was run against my
phpBB forums. Having laxed on my upgrade schedule, I was only at version 2.0.6 which was vulnerable to the exploit.
Stavos alerted me that anyone attempting to login to the forums was greeted with a database error. The hack created a bogus user theme and then set all users to that theme. I'm not quite sure what it was supposed to do after that, but I noticed a few user accounts on the DB I didn't recognize and quickly deleted them, then upgraded the forums to the latest version. All this was finished by 11:00am today. I'm still sorting through the logs to find the IP that ran the exploit, but I'm guessing it was a random bot that got lucky. If I'm wrong, hopefully we'll see some interesting changes on the server in the next few days.
Tonight was the first of a two bonfire weekend. The
Gnome Cam was switched to the back porch at 6:40pm for the event and shows the gradual progression of fire and intoxication. A security training book, Ypsilanti yellow pages, cell phone, motor oil and hard drive were
sacrificed to the bonfire gods. Probably not the best for the environment, but no worse than what goes up in smoke during a typical house fire. More importantly, the hot dogs weren't glowing from any of it. I was unsuccessful in cooking Keith over the fire, but there's always tomorrows bonfire at Senator Kelly's.
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