A few days ago, Microsoft tricked me into turning Kaleidoscope, my desktop machine, into a brick (but with pretty lights). It wasn’t too much of an issue, because Kaleidoscope is almost exclusively a gaming and video editing machine.
At a LAN party last night, I was able to get the computer bootable again, on a seperate pair of hard drives, but I was unable to rescue my semi-important files from the other RAID 0 partition, so I mostly wasted a lot of people’s time and didn’t get around to actually playing anything on the desktop. But this is where nice laptops won at robotics competition kick-offs come into play.
After watching me flounder like a beached whale over my computer for a few hours, we finally got down to the business at hand: 5-on-5 CounterStrike, but using Kleinoscope (the laptop from which I perform most of my arguably useful computer-related feats outside of work). It took me a while to get used to the 1.5 feel again, and the differences inherent to the laptop (such as a lower framerate, slightly different feel, etc), but after I was warmed up, we played some de_clan1_mill – in my opinion an excellent, well balanced, interesting map perectly sited for 5-on-5 battles.
Blu and I got down to business fairly early, despite playing my un-favorite terrorist. The rounds were each quite intense, but we got the upper hand mroe often than not, thanks to Cheuk’s leadership, Blu’s mad AK skills (including an early ace), and my AWP pwnage (although I traded for a Colt M4 dropped by a CT in a heartbeat. I was pleased to end up with the best ratio and the most kills of all players while we were terrorists, a feat I repeated when we played 4-on-4, with mostly the same teams (Cheuk Hung was the traded player), on the other teams. As a CT, I played almost exclusively with the Colt M4, and it paid off quite well. At the end of the match to 15 wins, I had racked up 30 kills with just 9 deaths. My best moment had me watching the door at the second bombsite, and beginning to fire right as it opened. Three died almost immediately, and a forth followed quickly,though the ace eluded me. I had another chance at an ace later on, but I got too excited and only ended up getting two before being gunned down. Such is the way of CS though.
But I digress – I digrss a whole bunch. The whole point of this post was (supposed) to be about the computer. Well, the good news is that I performed some open-box surgery and recovered the video files and configuration files that I wanted to retain. And now I’m in the market for some Y-shaped power cable splitters, so I can power all four of my hard drives and my CD drives at the same time (novel idea, no?). Then I can whip up a 320-gig 4-drive RAID 0 setup that will (ideally) blow my socks off.
For your (supposed) enjoyment.
John Stossel is an anchor of ABC’s 20/20. His book Give Me A Break is the best introduction that I know of to the Libertarian perspective. If you’ve ever heard Stossel report, you should immediately hear his voice come through as you start reading this book. He gets down to business pretty quickly, but he doesn’t get bogged down in it, so you will always be wanting to read more.