TheChrisD - Rant Central

BYOPC 8 - The aftermath

There were a lot of computers, a lot of CAT-5 cable, a lot of pizza, sugary drinks, more pizza, Rock Band rocking and failing, and a fire alarm. Normally when you put that all together, something goes wrong. Except when it’s being run by Games Soc

I’m going to attempt to write this from a "timeline" point of view. I expect it to fail midway through and suddenly revert to huge paragraphs. Just to warn you

Friday 8:15pm: Gav IMs me asking me if I was at the setup of the Venue for the weekend. I replied within 2 minutes (since I was cooking dinner at the time), and by then he was already offline. It would have been nice to be told about the setup a little earlier, as then I could have come down and helped out!

Saturday 4:00am: I go to bed. Not helpful when there’s going to be 24 hours non-stop starting in less than 8…

11:30am: I wake up and drop down to see how everything is going. 5 people have arrived and set up already - mostly the committee of Kev, Rob, Matt, Seán, and Ian. Seán reveals his other computer that he had kindly lent to me for the weekend. Looks like a decent enough computer, and should be able to handle some decent games unlike this machine I’m on…

12:15pm: F1 qualifying - Gotta have priorities!

1:30pm: Right, I’m now down with most of my stuff. 2 more trips to pick up everything. Seán off at work for CSD, so my computer will be set up after he comes back. No rush, especially since most of the tournaments don’t take place until much later on in the day.

About 3pm: A group of us leave for the Omni shopping centre. Heavy spending ensues on Subway lunches, Zumo smoothies, snacks and crap in Tesco, and games and vouchers in GameStop. Well, game for me, game vouchers for prizes for the tournaments. And if you are interested at all, I decided to expand my DS library by adding Yu-Gi-Oh World Championship 2008

About 4 something: We arrive back from the Omni with arms full.

6:42pm: I buy CoD4 for the PC from Steam. Downloads very quickly at 2Mb/s - shouldn’t take too long to get all 8GB…

About 8ish: Counter-Strike: Source teams are made and the tournament begins. A very long-winded affair with 6 matches, each lasting around half an hour to 45 minutes.

1:16am: Connor becomes the first person to crash on the couches upstairs…

Sometimes after 1am: Our CS:S team wins the last of our 3 matches, and wins overall! Woo! Although it was train (Still-Training) who carried us most of the way - one time going 32 and 5 for the 15 round half…

About 2-3am: CoD4 apparently doesn’t work on this computer… Apparently the graphics can’t handle "alpha blend so glow will be disabled". Yet it doesn’t start. Oh well

Between 4am and 9am: Either nodding off on the couches upstairs or walking around checking out what others are doing downstairs. Given that I was nodding off, I don’t remember much

9am: Prize-giving. For being on the winning CS:S team, I won a €20 voucher for GameStop - one of those that we bought on the trip to Omni the day before! If I’d have known that I was going to win it, I would have waited until getting it before buying my new game!

11am: Clean-up begins. It’s astounding the amount of rubbish that was generated by us, although there were about 25 pizza boxes to throw away as well as all the remnants of all the snacks we had to keep going during the day.

And I’m back in my room now. Surprisingly I didn’t get through as much food as I thought I would, so at least I have a nice stock of snacks for the next week or so. Also have a good bit of leftover pizza to have for lunch and dinner - I must have eaten too many snacks since I only managed half of my student Crowd Pleaser this time round…

Now I’m off to watch the F1 before setting all my stuff back up in my room, enjoying my new game, figuring out whether CoD4 will run on this machine (highly doubtful), and catching up on sleep! Don’t expect me to wake up Monday morning!