Monday, November 01, 2004

Report of the Second Annual Wilcox Halloween LAN Party

Or WHaLaP II. Up for vote: Should next year's be called WHaLaP III, or WHaLaP IIV?

Attendees:

Jake
Jeff
Leon
Eric
Stan (Last minute...Sorry, Stan, and thanks for coming!)
Krys

First order of business:

I will never again have Baja Fresh cater a LAN party. The food was 1.5 hours late, and the girl had to call for directions TWICE, even though I had left detailed directions at the store the day before.

I'm not even sure that I'll go back there for lunch. Oh, wait, I've got points on my card. I'll spend those and then I may not go back.

Next:

The movie. I'm sorry, guys, I really thought that more of you would enjoy This Is Spinal Tap more than you did. Maybe you were just too hungry. Next year, the movie will be planned in advance and hopefully more people will laugh.

Those were the two major drawbacks of the evening. As you'll no doubt notice, neither of them has anything to do with LAN battle. And the battle went well.

The matches were relatively even, there was much carnage, and we used a frag limit this time that seemed to have the effect of keeping the game a little more fresh.

Krys is a Counter Strike junkie, and wasn't used to dealing with the sort of alliances that are formed at WHaLaP. He made his concerns known, and was summarily dismissed. He was probably just hungry.

Yes, Leon and I teamed up when convenient. And yes, we did pretty well. We didn't totally r00l, though except in SubTrasit, which is my map. When in SubTransit, bow down, because you're in for a severe ass kicking. Verily, it was so.

So. That's about it. We did set up computers in the great room, but Krys moved downstairs until more people showed up, because he didn't want to be all alone in there.

My Dad decided not to play. He had worked all day, and was tired, and HL is new to him. Maybe Jeff and I can play with him some later and get him more comfortable in the game.

Sorry again for the food, guys. I know it wasn't worth it. But now we know, and next year, we'll try something different.

Hmm, speaking of next year...looks like we need to plan on Friday, Oct. 28, 2005. Halloween is a Monday next year, so I'll have to take the kids out that Saturday night. So it's Friday.

On second thought, I don’t know. Will the trick-or-treating take place on a Monday?

Also, I'm thinking of a change of venue. Leon's basement may be the best place to do this thing, and he plans on building up his network infrastructure in the short term. Let's talk, Leon.

One last thing before I post...I'm at peace with Acronis now.

I finally asked if they were going to offer me a refund or not, and they offered to replace the software that I bought for any of their other titles (Except TrueImage 8.0 Server).

I replied in email that I'd like TrueImage 8.0, but since it won't run on my server, and they weren't offering me the Server version, I'd take a copy of Acronis Power Utilities.

So they sent me a key and a link for TrueImage 8.0. I replied again, pointing out that TrueImage wasn't what I asked for, and then they sent me a key and link for Power Utilities.

My conclusion is this: Typical. Yeah, their customer support was only so-so, but Norton probably wouldn't have been any better. Norton just wouldn't have crashed my server in the first place. Maybe.

So it's all good.

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