The Technical Difficulty Weekend

On Thanksgiving I suffered a stroke in my exocortex. No, don't worry, I'm not talking about a medical condition! My handheld computer isn't working. And like Manfred Macx in the third chapter of Accelerando! ("Tourist"), I and those around me noticed the effect immediately. Symptoms included a complete lack of any idea what I was scheduled to do, when or where I was scheduled to do it, passwords to allow access to it, and the contact info of people I was scheduled to do it with. The patient was also increasingly observed to pace back and forth muttering about missing several days in a row of flashcard testing and drilling in vocabulary memorization.

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Fortunately overthesun shepherded me to the Penguicon cube cleaning on time and I have now put the organized catalog and map of the storage unit on another part of my exocortex, the EncycloPenguicon wiki.

Bill participated in the cube cleaning too. While there, he gave me a wireless laptop card that he found for really cheap on the internet, sold under the name of the Orinoco chipset. That's the chipset that Linux is compatible with. Now I can return the one I borrowed from phecda. Unfortunately the new card was falsely advertised, because small changes were made to the chipset, giving it a trait that makes it unique among all cards that have ever been labeled "Orinoco": instead of the most compatible card ever, it's completely incompatible. phecda's Netgear card worked fine under Linux, so this is a step down, but it's a step up in terms of ownership. Fortunately at the LAN party overthesun installed Windows XP and Ubuntu double-booting on the laptop, and the new card works under Windows. (That is to say, it works everywhere except my house, because the home wireless network is so secure it locks out the only intended user.)

Speaking of the LAN party, we played a lot of single-player games together, but only got one game to work in multiplayer mode over the LAN. It turns out to be mind-bogglingly difficult to set up a connection with the older, unique and quirky games with personality that we enjoy, such as Red Alert 2 or Mech Commander. Fortunately Freelancer worked, and that game is truly a thing of beauty. From online guides to how to throw a LAN party, it turns out that successful LAN gamers typically use the latest cookie-cutter first-person shooter, churned out by risk-averse cookie-cutter game publishers, that billions of boring conformists are currently playing. Nevertheless, overthesun, rachelann1977, cosettevaljean, Drew, and I had a great time snacking, drinking tons of caffiene, laughing, talking, teaching each other how to play various games and watching each other play them. No doubt with what we have now learned, our next LAN party will contain more actual networked gaming.