Sean and Thomas found a flyer on a bulletin board a AUM for LAN parties! There's an outfit up in Clanton just starting up called Lanifesto who plan on doing them monthly, it seems. The next one is Halloween, so we're packing up the van and heading up for 12 hours of fun.... They'll be playing some Half-life 2mods, some Unreal Tournament 2004, and a Quake 3 mod too. I got UT2K4 reloaded yesterday, now I have to bring up the old AFCEA Montgomery game server so we can all get the patches and mods off of it. We haven't been to a LAN party in almost Four years, so it should be a real treat, even if I can't remember how to play the games. I haven't decided if I want to take my fog machine yet... :)

I started cleaning my office this afternoon, but didn't get very far. As I was boxing up old stuff, I wondered if the guy whose website I ran across a while back was still in the business of modding the Panther XL joysticks to pure USB connections. I took a break to search, and sure enough, he's still at it. Even better, he's posted some pretty cool videos of the devices as modified, which got me to thinking, "why not do it myself?". I watched a few of his videos, and picked up the name of the USB controller chip he is using, and did a quick Google. There's a guy who sells them on his website, so I bought three. I still have to replace the wiring harness (some of the wires break after repeated use, since they run up through the joysick where it pivots), which I'm hoping I can use some old VGA monitor cable for. If not, I'll have to go out and find something different. 3M makes a 3644X Series that might work, but I'll wait to see how the monitor cable works out.

I have six Panther XLs, two in pristine (unmodded) condition, and four having the trackball replaced by optical mouse. One of the four already partially modded will be my guinea pig, to see if I can figure out which wires go to which connector on the controller. I'm hoping that doesn't take to much brainpower. I'll post pictures as I go. Now I have a real reason to clean up the office; I have to be able to actually get to my workbench for this project.

An awesome thing happened to me Monday... I came home from work to find a Fedex pack on the kitchen counter, addressed to me. I was mildly confused (more so than usual, actually), since I couldn't remember ordering anything, especially when I saw the from address was simply "nVidia"... Feeling the package didn't help much either, It felt like a video tape. I opened the bag with anticipaiton, and pulled out a box and a letter... Letter? What does it say?!?!! Basically, Thanks for being a member of "Club SLI", and by being a member I'm automatically entered in their raffle contests. Turns out, I'm a winnner ! I finally take a good look at the box, and I probably could've been knocked over with a feather. It's only the most talked-about game of the season, Crysis.

W00T!

This is the game to make you upgrade your machine.... My puny Radeon 9500 Pro is really having a hard time, and even Thomas' 9800 and C.J.'s Nvidia 6600 AGP can't do very well with settings above "medium" !!!!