MAGFest Report

Wednesday

Around 10-11 this morning the northbridge chip on my parents' motherboard blew up. Since our network topology is totally stupid and thus uses Internet Connection Sharing on their computer, which is connected to a switch that connects to the rest of the network, this took out my connection to the internet, just before I was about to print me some Google Maps directions.

We got my dad's laptop hooked up directly to the cable modem and I looked up the directions. We couldn't get the printer working on my dad's laptop, so get this: I wrote them down on a sheet of paper with a pencil. Wow.

Anyway, I left around 1 PM, and it took about 2.5 hours to get up to the Hilton Mark Center.

All MAGFest had this night was LAN and Jamspace. LAN was busy doing its signature thing where it wasn't actually hooked up or running, as the primary focus was on setting up Jamspace for the New Years' Eve party/balls dropping event/concert.

At some point during the night we managed to go from the top floor of the hotel (floor 30) to the bottom floor (the Lower Lobby) without the elevator stopping. Ears popping as we went down. It was fun.

Thursday

The reason we couldn't get the entire hotel on Wednesday night is that we were double booked with some wacko James Bond convention that had gambling, alcohol, and lots of formal attire. They exited around 2-5 AM (I didn't check to see, but we explored the back hallways of the hotel for a while afterwards, technically looking for a good route to run some fiber optic network cable to the registration desk but just generally exploring the inner hallways of a 5 star Hilton and turning away employees when they asked us if we needed help.)

People started actually arriving, and eventually we bugged the hotel to get the power boxes we needed and actually got the LAN room going, sans internet. Later the internet got going as well, though slow as balls. We're using a totally ghetto network to circumvent having to get gouged out the ass by the hotel for internet connection fees for a shitty connection. It involves using 3G-enabled cell phones, and supports adding and removing them on the fly, so people can just donate their phones towards the greater cause if they'd like.

I bought both of the Angry Video Game Nerd DVDs. ScrewAttack had a special deal where normally the prices for each were higher, but if you bought them together you only had to pay $40. Pretty nice. Caught wind of the official word that The Nerd was floating around the convention, and went looking for him but didn't find him. Oh well.

Friday

My staffing shifts began at 6 this morning and concluded at 10 AM. Got some food from the staff food room and crashed in a friend's hotel room. Went to Planet Skill's concert, which was the first set, and it was just A_Rival doing some awesome raps, including one dedicated to the ladies where the main line was "push it in, push it down, turn it on". Think about possible innuendo for a while and then /facepalm and realize that the main line is telling you how to start up a NES game. I remembered to bring earplugs this year. That's probably why I forgot my watch.

If you look closely during the two videos I linked, you can see me briefly. I'm wearing my Nyoro~n Churuya-san shirt (that I bought at Nekocon) and my face kinda looks like it's emerging from my hair. Maybe when it gets warmer I'll get a haircut.

Also, Leninade is awesome.

Saturday

Starting at 2 AM, I had three shifts lasting two hours each, so my Saturday staffing duties ended at 8 AM. I was falling asleep by the end of that. Wandered into Jamspace and played drums for a while, that revived me. After I was sufficiently revived, I grabbed some breakfast from the staff food room and went to Benjamin Heckendorn's panel, and then hurried over to Events 1 to catch the end of the AVGN panel (scheduled at the same time FTL). Missed the fan-made Megaman movie 20 minute screening and Q&A because I was too damn tired and crashed in a friend's room.

Woke up, showered, and got to the staff food room for some food, then on down to the game room where I played some mo'fuggin Guitar Hero World Tour. With a Rock Band guitar. The RB guitar sucks donkey dicks. The frets click, the strum bar doesn't, and the whammy bar is too hard to use.

All through this weekend, I've been playing drums on Rock Band. It's pretty damn fun.

For some reason, Guitar Hero was massively discriminated against. At one point there were three full Rock Band setups in the game room, while World Tour had a TV and RB guitars in the middle of the game room. I wanted to play WT drums :(

Sunday

One final two hour staff shift beginning at 2 AM to close out my staffing duties for the weekend. It concluded without event. Then a friend of mine loaded me up with some spiced rum to drink (who needs a chaser, seriously), so I was pleasantly drunk for a while.

Three of us on MAGFest's forums inadvertently created a really awesome thread, so one of us printed the fucker out and assuming we can find the third one of us, we're all going to autograph it and sell it at the auction. Rod and I never found FreakTard, so... that didn't happen.

The theme of the weekend in the LAN room was most definitely the Jizz In My Pants video. I torrented it on our private Bittorrent tracker and it was the third most downloaded torrent.

Monday

Well, I got home last night, but due to the aforementioned problem with my parents' computer, no internet access until now. What's the difference? I paired the cable modem with my computer. It looks for the first MAC address it finds and only communicates with that, and if you want to have multiple computers you need NAT, which is normally provided by a router, but that would mean we would have a sane network topology. So here, NAT was provided by Internet Connection Sharing on, you guessed it, my parents' computer. That means our network goes somewhat like this: Internet <--> Cable Modem <--> My Parents' Computer <--> Switch <--> My computers, my dad's laptop

Staff food room rant

The food in the staff room was awesome, but overall the experience was worse than last year. Let's compare, shall we?

Last year, the staff room had unlimited amounts of spaghetti, ramen, and rice for us with all the appropriate toppings so that we could fashion ourselves simple, yet tasty meals. The room was open round the clock (well, people slept in it periodically, but we could still get in and get some coffee in the morning hours). It was on the 12th floor of the hotel, which took some time to get to but generally wasn't that much of an issue. There was actually space to sleep and the people staffing it didn't have an entire room reserved to themselves. The people staffing it were also less full of themselves because they weren't actually cooks that considered themselves to be awesome.

This year, it had scheduled mealtimes (that doesn't mesh well with MAGFest in general), was closed between them, and there was a note on the door saying knocking after 1 AM would have dire penalties. Portions were small and you could only have one unless you managed to sneak another. I had to stay in there for 10 minutes or so eating the random snack food to actually feel like I'd had a decent amount of food before leaving. It was on the third floor of the retreat wing of the hotel, which took a decent amount of walking to reach the choice point between stairs and a really slow elevator.

Give M6's staff food/crash room back to us, dammit. I'd go to the 12th floor of the hotel again if I knew I'd be able to get a full stomach or some decent sleep just by walking in.

Summary of items purchased

AVGN DVD volumes 1 and 2 (5 DVDs total!)
Several bottles of Leninade
An accidental package of Halls mints from a vending machine, was trying to buy the item just above them and inputted the wrong code.

Other items obtained

Two MAGFest 7 shirts (we had two styles this year). This is because I was owed a shirt from M6 because of staffing that wasn't available because they ran out of XLs.
A blue SanDisk MP3 player that someone left in the LAN room. If it's yours, claim it, if you don't, I'll use it myself.

Edit: Blogger has issues with posts started as drafts... It didn't update the post time when I actually posted it. The formatting was also kinda weird. I've fixed both of those issues now.