Well PDXLAN went on AWESOMELY, no major problems at all which was a nice thing. A lot of people are saying it was the best PDXLAN ever. I personally wouldn't know cause I've only been to the last one last july which was also pretty good except for the EX seating I was in, but I had a lot of fun being on staff. Here's a quick recap plus a bonus at the end.
Friday - Got to the event around 8:00am to help setup everything. Helped to setup power for everyone by plugging in the huge extension cables and splitters to each table, put chairs near each table, helped Notoes' setup the tourney machines with mice and keyboards and mousepads, setup my computer and then just kicked it till about 5:30pm. The doors opened and all the attendies came in. My job was to mark off everyone badge for their prize bag and then hand them over to pacmain so they could get their bottles. Around 8:00 I went back up to the stage to get ready to show the intro at 10:00pm.
Showed the intro and the stupid thing wouldnt FULL SCREEN till the second alt return, stupid apple keyboard, but then it went fine. From there on until saturday we just chilled out and got the servers ready for sunday and waited for Xilace to get us internet. I got some sleep around 4:00am in Supakillas car.
Saturday - The day of contests, for me, it was mainly a chill day as well, mostly I just jumped into random public games of Ut2k4, a little bit of desert combat, some farcry and serious sam 2 coop. Contests went great, especialy the Pirates contest, congrats to suntar for winnning 2nd place and getting one of the most sought out prizes, an MX518 mouse. Carball was fun to watch on the big screen as well, it was like a professional soccer game in terms of the atmosphere of the audience. The Ut2v2 contest was awesome to watch as well. Two people on one computer, one controling the mouse and the other the keyboard while the mouse was a Pistol mouse. That I thought was fun. Around 7:00, me and deathe and some of the RG members wentout to gresham to the roadhouse steakhouse. Had a great time and kicked it. Reminder to self, never let jcline drive me anywhere..... After that came back and went to bed.
Sunday- My day to shine and try to prove myself that i'm not useless. DC and CoD tourneys started around 8:30 and 9:00am. My servers went along fine, and so did the tourney, I think I only had one of the servers play the same map twice in a row, but that was my fault because of how the servers were setup, wasnt a major problem I could manualy change the map in the console. The only real problem that people got super pissed about which not being able to spectate one of the matches being played on the big screen because the private client was set to 1 with a password that me or deathe didn't even know. But that wasn't a big problem considering it was the 5th match out of 8. I got it working in the finals easily though. The other tourneys went along fine, Blarg had a problem with some of his servers but he fixed them. But the best thing was that the tourneys went along flawlessly with no catastrophies. The 1v1 tourneys went well too, Notoes' made sure the servers would be great and in shape months before the event was to take place so props to you man. The BFME 1v1 was a good game to watch as well.
The staff also had some fun, we played a game against Danger Den in Desert combat. We made a wager. If we beat them in a Conquest and CTF map, they would give 5 people in the staff water cooling, if they beat us, we would give them MX518's. Sound like an insane wager? Guess what, we still did it!! To make the story short, they beat our silly selves, considering they were one of the teams in the finals. But we were able to get a watercooling kit for one of the staff, PAYBACK, who I think hacked in the rock paper sicssors round for the kit :P. Other then that we just chilled after tourneys were over and handed out a few prizes.
Late at night around 5:00am, me and digitalmidget got really bored so we pulled up the projector and played pictionary, if I get time I can post some of the pictures he drew out of absolute boredom. I think that was one of my highlights of the LAN
Monday - The final day, all we did was handout prizes, do the video contest, and then teardown the LAN itself. After prizes were given out, including the dream machine which Firefly won, congrats to you man, we started tearing down the LAN. Tables, posters, powercords, the works. Around 4:00am we had everything torn down and the volunteers and staff decided to headout. My ride home was with cybercrist who was driving the U-Haul, so I had to go with him to vectors to help unload it, but that was ok I didn't really mind. Before we went to vectors house, me and cybercrist, payback, notoes, vector and demented headed to redrobbin for some dinner to celebrate the LAN being over. Had some food and just relaxed. After that we went to vectors to unload all the stuff, then once we were done, well, cyber took me home!
SPECIAL BONUS
The best thing ever happened when I got home. We pulled up to my house in the U-haul and I saw one of the multnomah county sherrifs cars parked outside our house. I came up to the porch to find the officer handing my mom the pappers for a lawsuit against our family courtesy of our neighbors. So she wasn't bullshitting
This means this. They are suing us for not paying up on our half of cutting down a tree in our yard that was overhanging into their property. I've learned recently that they've lied about a few things on the documents, and we have a heap of evidence to launch a coutner suit.
Example, the husband of the woman who's suing us sprayed my window at around 10:30pm at night while I was playing music as I usualy do and got water in my room. He did this out of drunken rage. Well I recently learned that under law, this counts as battery. But this is just one of the many things we have against them.
Anyways, I got home, unpacked by shit, put in new IDE cables cause I bought some rounded ones, turned it on and the PC wouldnt boot. Spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what was wrong and it turned out my CD-ROM drive, not my DVD drive, was broken and wouldnt allow my computer to boot at all, which was really strange, anyways, I got it working, then I went to bed and woke up today at 1:00
Special shoutout to Vector for allowing PDXLAN to continue on for the past 2 years. I enjoyed myself and working at PDXLAN was one of the best experiences of my life.
