TP LAN
Yay the TP LAN is on!
Swoop and I flew in yesterday on the 6.30am flight from Wollongong to Melbourne. We grabbed a coffee and waited a few minutes for Crak to arrive. We headed back to his and Garny's place and settled in. After changing into our TP golf shirts we grabbed some Subway for lunch and went to play golf at Waterford Valley Gold Course.
It turns out I suck at golf (we'll, what do you judge your first ever performance against?). We spent a lot of time looking for my lost golf balls in the rough. I think I lost around 8 all up but I think we found more than we lost at the end of the day. Crak was pretty good and was the overall winner, Swoop hit a fair few good shots too but struggled to keep his score down. I stopped counting my shots for each hole after about hole 5 - lucky we had a 12 shot cap (which Crak reduced to 10 for me on the back 9). Driving the golf buggy is fun and they were pretty quick. We didn't get busted for having the third person hanging off the back of the two seater buggy, I guess because there weren't too many people about Friday afternoon.
After golf we went to La Porchetta in Glen Waverley for dinner. Pizzas all round. Then back to Crak's place to re-hydrate and try and convince Artanis to come over. He finally did and brought along his 'spare' computer (mobo, cpu, gfx card all sitting on a anti-static bag on a cardboard box. After a few attempts and the onlookers thinking we'd need to call 000, he got it started with alluminium foil sitting underneath the power connecter stuck on with some stickers. Since there was no case the power switch was a screwdriver.
Hurrah! It worked (well it posted, but hasn't got much further than that yet - I guess that's this afternoon's job. I spent a futile hour or to trying to get bf1942 running on the Thinpad T-41. For some reason it starts OK then when you move the mouse at the profile screen it crashes :s. Oh well, the main purpose of this LAN for me wasn't really to play games. I might have some luck with CSS but I'm not really fussed.
After that we played Nintendo Wii sports on Garny's Wii (still haven't met Garny, he was at work yesterday and we were still at golf when he had to leave to go bush for paintballing the next day).
Being the first time I had Wii'ed, I was a little unsure of the controls but picked it up very quickly. It's a great design from Nintendo and been novel and accessible it's not hard to see why it has quickly become the #1 selling console. I think 'active' games will be the way of the future. Just think of BF2 with the old-style 'light-guns' but such that they are much more accurate.
After Wii'ing we all headed off to bed. For some stupid reason my alarm clock on my mobile phone had a 6am reminder in there still so I _still_ got up at 6am today (well, yesterday was 4.45am). Anyways I got back to sleep for a little bit and lay there for a bit because Crak and Swoop are asleep. At 8.30am I thought I'd better get up and do something so here I am :)
Today a few others will be coming round (Ben, Kicka, Lance, Rance) and some gameop friends of Crak. It will be fun. I'm looking forward to the BBQ...
