Age of Empires: Empire of Annoyance

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve played Starcraft into the ground, and then some. In an attempt to keep the LAN parties, fresh, fun, and exciting, we decided a good idea would be to try to get Age of Empires running. Mike, one of the regulars, had previously burned a copy of both AOE2 and its expansion from a mounted copy on his HDD.

It’s at this point I should probably point out to all people in a position of authority, that I in no way practice in or support pirating music, software, or any other form of copyrighted material. Anything said in this blog that may indicate otherwise is strictly for the purposes of great hyperbolization and spellbinding storytelling. Honestly, I wouldn’t know anything about .exe cracks or using bittorrent or Soulseek to easily and efficiently download gig after gig of music, television, and software. And my ISP most certainly has NOT blocked all but one of the standard bittorrent ports for me due to my excessive and unrelenting downloading. And I most definitely do not have nearly a TB of 700MB/40 minutes video on scores of DVD+Rs and HDDs, no siree. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Ok, back to the story. I use aforementioned discs to install AOE on Galileo, and when I try to run the program, I am told that I need to insert the AOE disc to continue. Annoying to be sure. Even more annoying, I still have the AOE disc I used to install in my computer. I call up Mike and ask him what gives, but he’s not a clue, as he’s never had this problem.

Fast forward to the next LAN party. We spend a good two hours looking for a crack for AOE so we could get it to run. Finally we find a crack for the version we have, and we install it on three computers to test it out. The game runs on all of them, and we’re excited about this prospect. We weren’t so excited about what occurred next though.

Vincent, who was using Tesla, set up a LAN game for us to join. We join and hit ready. Vincent hits the button to start the game and we are greeted by a message kindly informing us that we must all have the same version before we can start a game. This puzzles us, as all three computers installed off the exact same discs, used the exact same crack, and in all other ways were identical so far as the AOE software was concerned.

We try it again, using a different computer of the three to start the game. Same problem. Eventually, we discover the problem. When we all join the game, everyone appears to have version 4c. However, as soon as the “Start Game” button is pressed, something causes whatever the host computer is to randomly decide that instead of version 4c, it’s instead running version 4d. This obviously causes the version incompatibility message, and prevents us from playing AOE.

This all occurred about a month ago. We’ve still yet to find the root cause of the problem, or a solution. At this point Starcraft is no longer played into the ground, but has actually been played deep into the Earth’s iron core. Let’s just hope we can figure this out soon.

Episode VI: Return of the Headache

Since I made my last post chronicaling my triumph over the evil flash drive, the machines seem to have convened and decided to attack. In the the last few hours, Tesla (my PIII desktop) has restarted twice. I know this because despite being over a meter from him, and the moniter being turned off, I can still hear the distinctive beep of the BIOS posting. Tesla has decided that it's a fun game to restart when with no input, and no programs running.

If that wasn't bad enough, not a half hour ago I tripped a 15 amp fuse in my apartment. Now, I regularly host LAN parties at my apartment, and I've had a load no smaller than 4 laptops larger on this circuit than what was going just now. There is absolutely no reason that this should have happened on such a (relatively) small load. But it did, darkening the entire apartment. Thankfully a quick reset fixed the problem; not that that'd be the end of my problems.

Very carefully planned by my computers, (I swear that at night, they are learning without me, and then using this new knowledge to plot) all the clocks in the apartment were set back to 12:00. They know how much I hate resetting the clocks, mainly because I'm a little (ok, hugely) anal and I refuse to set them to anything but the exact correct time, to within less than a second of error. See, this was their plan all along.

Further more, this power outage managed to cause the light bulb in one of my lava lamps to burn out (despite the lava lamp being plugged into not one, but two surge protectors.) So now I'm going to have to replace that as well. Do you see what they are doing to me?

I'm still not sure how I'll sleep tonight, knowing that they are out there, sitting on my desk, still plotting, still seeking retribution against my enslaving will. I'd unplug the router, but I don't think that'd stop them; it would just make them angrier.

Episode V: The Dragon Strikes Back!

This is supposed to be a blog about how technology manages to plot against me at every turn. But today, I struck back against my electronic oppressors. I was doing my laundry (I can imagine you already have some idea where this is heading) and as I was removing my clothes from the dryer, I was greeted by a sight more soul-freezing than an orgy of banshees.

My 1.0GB Cruzer mini flash drive.

Horrified, I reached into the dryer and retrieved my flash drive. It went through a 33 minute washer cycle followed by 45 minutes in a dryer at temperatures that I don't even want to think about. Surely, thought I, this flash drive is figuratively, if not literally, toast.

So imagine my surprise when I plugged it back into my laptop, as you can see in the picture below (well, you could see better if the room was darker, but trust me here,) it worked. Not only does it still work, but all the data is still intact. I have sent my flash drive to the depths of hell and back, and it fears me such that it still functions! I am master over the flash drive!


Now if only everything else I own would be this kind to me.

The Vacuum of Duum!

The other day, whilst taking out the trash, and was pleasantly surpised by the sight of a vacuum cleaner in the dumpster. Now, being the technophile I am, I'm never one to just pass up the wealth a vacuum offers. You've a motor, meters upon meters of wiring, a switch, and if you're lucky, some lightbulbs.

So I grabbed the vacuum and drug it home. An hour later (they sure do put a lot of screws in these things) I had disassembled the motor and tossed all the extra plastic. One slight problem. The only wire I made noteof the location of was the ground. Not that big a problem, except that ignoring the ground, I had two wires coming out of the switch, and three wires coming out of the motor. Using a small amount of logic involving wire lengths and the assumption that the company that made the vacuum didn't want to use more wire than it needed to, I figured out (I think) how to properly rewire the motor. Now to plug it in, turn it on, and test it.

And that's when it happened.

The torque caused by the motor spinning up (which I really should be used to by now) sent the motor spinning across the table I had it set upon. After about two revolutions of the motor, the wires caught it (or it caught the wires) and it stopped spinning. It was about that time I saw a very bright flash of light, which naturally led me to immediately unplug the motor.

So, that was scary. But no one got hurt, so all's well, yes? That's what I thought, until I examined the motor and found this...




Somehow, something caused the metal casing of the motor to explode. And trust me when I tell you that this in not thin and flimsy metal. I'd be hard pressed to pierce it with a screwdriver, a hammer, and a 7 year old who has recently run out of Ritalin. I still have no idea what caused this, but I do know that I'm lucky to have lived through it.

Counterstrike "No Error" Messages

I have 19 computers in my apartment (and you wonder how I can have so much trouble with the stuff,) so naturally one of them is running as a dedicated Counterstrike server. Of course, most of these computers are Pentium II machines, meaning that CS:Source is somewhat out of the question. And seeing how I can't stand Steam with a passion, the version of CS running on the server, as well as all these machines, is CS 1.0.0.5. And it turns out that this version has some of the most peculiar error messages.

I begin by submitting to you the following message that seems to be rather commonplace in running the server.


"NET_SendPacket ERROR: NO ERROR"
There is an error, but the error is that there is no error. If this confuses you, it's for good reason, as the extension of this logic goes as follows:

• If there is no error, then that is an error
• To rectify this error, an error must be created
• The very fact that "no error" is an error creates an error whenever there is no error
• This "no error error" then solves itself, creating a lack of error
• There is then no error, which is an error

If you think that's a bad error message, then you'll love this one. Sadly, I don't have a screenshot of this message, but there's a story.

It all started on a Friday night. Between 6 and 10 people had shown up for the biweekly LAN party, and we were getting ready for fun. Over the past few months, we had played Starcraft into the ground and were looking forward to trying something new; Counterstrike. I had spent the day prior installing the game on all desktops, and the better part of an hour getting it installed on the various laptops people brought. Finally, we are ready to play, so I fire up CS and try to create a server. Instead of creating a server though, the following window pops up:


cs1005.exe

The version of Half Life: Counterstike that you are using is out of date. However, there is no newer version available.

____
| OK |


That was it. No suggestions on remedy, no abort/retry/fail option, nothing. A message saying that the newest available version was out of date, and all I could do was acknowledge the message.

Eventually I reinstalled CS on that computer and the problem solved itself, but we had quite a laugh in the process.

The Purpose of This Blog

This blog will be a living witness to the combination of technology, me, and often a lot of pain. A few of the many topics that will be visited include

• A motor I salvaged out of a vacuum cleaner, which quickly exploded
• Some of the most bizarre error messages ever seen
• Stories of what happens to a LAN party when no fewer than 8 electronic devices malfunction
• Wiring diagrams of the apartment, along with rants about why there is static when trying to listen to device A on stereo B after channeling the signal through devices C and D
• A laptop that suddenly turns off and smalls like burning (this story did not have a happy ending)
  
• Did I mention that things explode?
• Oh yeah, I get electrocuted quite a bit as well
• And much more as the gods of all things technological shake their heads in amusement just before deciding how next to smite me.