Infernal Machine!

This weekend was slow and quiet, marked by some rain and lightning. Jason and Judy had a Thrift/Rummage sale to raise money for their daughter's move to California. I finished up Jake's machine - Infernal Gtwy only to find that I would need to invest some more money in a new graphics card for it. Andrea and Jacob continued with their weekend play time. We had a holy terror of a Saturday afternoon with Jake's friend, Zach. ALso, the truck finally died.

Weekend Sale:
Well, this weekend was two sided for Jason and Judy. They were clearing out the store of the left over gifts and were helping their daughter raise money for her trip. I managed to finish building my A2 collection and am making plans for a fourth and final A2 "Kitty Kat" so I can post a lovely picture of the four of them.

Judy has been working on the yard sale/rummage sale all week and was able to clear out much of her remaining gifts from the store. They are planning to move the store back to Fairchild where they will have it "Pro Shop" style.

Infernal Gateway:
I built Jacob's machine on Sunday, having only to buy a Processor fan, 512MB stick of RAM, a CDROM, and a monitor. It totaled about $100, but I had the machine up and running within three hours. The old Gateway board is going to be scrapped completely. Now that all of that has been done, I will focus on getting a replacement laptop.

I do need to get a few last upgrades for the system. I plan to buy a 256MB Graphics card to put in my computer and move my old 128 AGP over to Jake's. This will allow him to play all of the games with no noticeable drop in frame rate. C&C Generals is horrible slow on that machine, even on low settings. I am somewhat disappointed.

UT runs full speed with all high settings, but I have to use the S3 support for the graphics driver. Its not that bad. I can always upgrade to DirectX 9 on that system, anyway. Still, I would really like to build a dedicated UT Server that runs my UT levels 24/7. Right now, I can do that by using Jake's Machine to serve. I also have the ability to use the laptop to play on.

Current Specs:
1.7GHz P4
512 MB of RAM
20GB HD
64MB Unichrome GFX
Windows 98SE ~ moving to Win2000 in a few weeks!

In fact, all of the Win98 machines are scheduled to move over to Win2000! woohoo!

Hell with Jake and Zach:
Ok, I didn't know Zach was ADHD like Jacob. I also didn't know that the two of them would be sheer hell the entire time they stayed together. I found out the hard way at Wal-Mart and Target. I feel sorry for anyone who has to put up with the two of them together. Never again!

Death of the Explorer:
SUnday, on my way back fro picking up the parts to complete Jacob's computer, the truck died. I managed to get it started each time long enough to get it a few more blocks only to have it die permanently on Lana lane and cruise to a halt. We are currently looking at our options to replace or repair it, but its likely I would need to get the car fixed. We don't need anything fancy, we just need the car to come to a stop when you step on the brake.

Hosting and Toasting

This weekend was pretty busy. I had completed the Home Network on the previous weekend and the last week was a running test of how well it would stay up. Its still up and running!

Saturday I spent the day with Jacob at home and tried to stay cool. It wasn't very difficult to do and a steady supply of ice water, lemonade, and Margaritas helped. Jacob and I spent much of the day playing C&C Generals while I pieced together what we would actually do a the event on Sunday.

Sunday morning we hit the field at 9am and I began building the chemical weapons props for the game. Sunday was not really hot, it was just muggy in parts of the field. Again, I drank plenty of water. Jacob had to stay home and actually went over to his friend's house most of that time. The game was a success, even though it was rather random at how the game went off. 16 players showed up and enjoyed themselves. I enjoyed a lovely supper of Corndogs and onion rings with homemade root beer. I'm making plans to repeat this game later this year, so we'll see how that goes.

Monday was really busy at work and I spent the day with computer repairs and answering calls. I managed to stop long enough for Tacos for lunch, but then went right back to duking it out on the phones. Monday evening, we went to an Eau Claire Express Baseball game. Kris got "fan Deck" tickets from Xcel, which are basically $25 tickets with all you can eat/drink - hot dogs, brats, hamburgers, BBQ, nachos, pop, and beer. I opted for Coke and Ice Water. It was still a little hot.

Annie Prepares for Camp
Andrea is heading off to a Lutheran Youth camp later this month. She's really excited about it and can't wait. Naturally, she thinks the entire thing requires her to have massive amounts of money so she can buy camp trinkets and snacks. What she doesn't know is that an anonymous family friend sent her $100 with a return address of Mathew 19:14. Kris was unusually creaped out by it.

For you church goers, this is the verse that, to summarize is "give your children the opportunity to worship." I am completely fine with that - the kids could certainly use that in their lives. But Kris was a little weirded out that someone would give an anonymous gift. Neither her or her kids like surprises to the point that it just sucks trying to surprise them. They insist on knowing every intimate detail and will quiz you until you wish a tree would land on your head to get you out of it.

I haven't told Annie yet, because I don't think she should know about it until she heads off. That will also keep her from blowing the money before. The less she knows about how much she has now, the better off she'll be.

Weekend Plans
This weekend, I plan to finish up Jacob's computer and network it into the rest of the house. I still haven't decide if I'm going to scrap Infernal Gateway just yet. I need a few parts for it if I do.

• CD Rom - I had to pull the one out of the HP because it was dead.
• RAM - prolly just gonna stick a 512 stick in Annie's machine and take one of the 256 out for Jake.
• Proc fan - I need one in this machine regardless.

So I'd really only need to spend about $70 to build this one from the parts I have at home. Not too bad, If I do say so myself.

Jake's system will have Windows 98SE so it should be ok with just 256 MB or RAM, but I'll prolly just stick 512 to be sure. After that, a $35 monitor should be all I need to get him up and running.

100th Post!

This last week has been pretty busy. Work, the kids, airsoft, and other family stuff has kept me tied up.

Niece was born
Vanna and Tim's Progeny - Eva was born on July 3rd, bringing a much-needed end to the "Expectant Mother" emails to make way for about a million and a half baby pictures. I haven't spoken with any family in a few days because they have been all over. I'll call this weekend, after I finish mowing the yard. Best of luck to you three!

Annie getting a Kitten
I was not exactly against this, but I thought it was not exactly a very good idea. We already have two dogs that neither kid will take care of and now we have to care for another poor animal. Like most things, the novelty of having a kitten will wear off and Kris and I will end up taking care of her. Meanwhile, we've wasted untold tens of dollars on cat toys, junk, and meaningless crap that none of the cat we had growing up would have even looked at twice. Apparently, Annie is going to teach the kitten to play with it. Yeah.

Home Network almost ready
I set the kids' computer up in Annie's room and will be doing the hardwiring this weekend. The Router will be in the basement with the Cable modem. Then I will run cable up to the living room and over to Annie's room. "Infernal" will be staying downstairs and begin its duty as file server as soon as I get the first 80 GB harddrive for it.

I picked up a small 5-port router from Ram Tech and will likely make all cabling by hand. I could probably use two 50ft cables to do everything and just cut and splice where needed.

I am eyeballing a second case to build "Infernal 2" - a second system using my gigabyte board. The kid's system definitely needs more RAM and possibly a GFX card. Running XP Home with the 512, the system is really dragging. I briefly considered buying a stick of 512 and tossing it in with one of the 256 I already have in there, but decided against it for the time being.

Last step at this point is to grab my wifi access point for wireless on my laptop. I am still trying to decide where to go for that. Most access points run a little more than I am willing to spend on one.

Airsoft Game on July 15th
I have a game I am hosting on the 15th. I am still preparing for it, but have decided to keep it simple and focus on just creating a scenario that people can enjoy. I posted the event details below.