Dave’s Good Stuff

This last weekend, we threw a LAN party at a friends house. There were 20 or so computers there, an X-Box, a GameCube, a Playstation2 and an 8′ pool table. A few hours into the gaming, a friend pointed out that the fan on my GF3 heatsink wasn’t spinning, and that the heatsink was blisteringly hot. Shutting my rig down, I took out the fan, jiggled the power connector a bit, reinserted, booted up and was pleased to note that the fan was spinning again. Several hours later, somewhere between 7 and 9pm, *fzzzt!* my screen went black. I’m now temporarily running a GeForce 256 DDR board while I wait for Leadtek replace my defunct board. They’ve sent the RMA form, so I just have to ship it to them for the replacement.

When my GF3 broke, something else snapped… my resolve to see through the various technical problems that accompany computer gaming. I decided to just go play some pool, and did so… for the next 7.5 hours. Myself and primarily two others played 8-ball nonstop from 10:30pm-ish Saturday night until 6:30am Sunday morning. I haven’t played in months and months, and haven’t played steadily in 2 years when I was in a local BCA league. Playing for 7+ hours was absolutely thoroughly and completely enjoyable.

There were no program crashes, no GPF’s, no blue-screens, no overheating or fizzled hardware, no OS/application incompatibilities and no complicated controls to learn before I could enjoy myself. There were 15 balls, a nice table, a stick, my opponent, myself and all the perfectly simple complexity of billiards. THAT was happiness. :)

A while back, I had problems connecting to any Quake 3 servers. Those problems ended up being incompatibilities between point releases. Now, however, while I can connect to servers just fine, I can’t find the servers I want to connect to! More specifically, the monster.com (ra3.monster.com) and Smackdown (http://www.smackcentral.net/) servers seem to have disappeared… I played almost exclusively on those servers and had forged a pretty nice banter with the regulars. That’s all gone now, and so I’m less and less inclined to want to play Quake 3 as a result (I’m sure she is terribly disappointed ;).

It’s like your favorite pub getting shut down. You get in your car (turn on your computer), turn on the ignition (launch Quake 3) and get ready to drive away, only to realize you no longer have anywhere to go.