Updates

Sorry for the lack of updates, my life has gotten really really busy. Architecture, as predicated, has consumed my life and now, I have almost zero free time. I'm still going to make LAN-O-THON v4.0 a great event, I'm devoting every spare moment this week getting ready for it.

This past week our box of goodies from Alienware arrived and earlier this week, more stuff should be arriving. I post pictures soon.

Please sign up early as it will make check-in for the event go a lot faster for everyone. We need help setting up on the 25th so if you're available stop by the RHA office around 1pm or Cypress E later in the night.

See you there!

Weekly Update 8/18/07

LAN-O-THON v4.0
While I was away, I got two more offers for sponsorships. I don't have anything to confirm yet though. I started work on some ads again. Hopefully I will have some ready to post soon after classes start.

Inside LAN-O-THON
I'm still working on more site content... I know I'm slow.

The LAN Party Initiative
I setup a group on the steam community for our group, check it out

Weekly Update 7/13/07

LAN-O-THON v4.0
I got an interesting email out of the blue from a company interesting in sposnoring our event. I'll let you know how it pans out.

The LAN Party Initiative
I'm still planning on getting a Counter-Strike: Source and a Half-life2: Deathmatch server for our group. East coast Source servers are still backorder at gameservers.com. Consider supporting the group by shopping online using these links. To raise addtional funds I'm going to sell reserved slots for $3 dollars (good for a spot on each server) or add $3 dollars more and get some admin privileges such as setting the map rotation. Discuss this more over here

Inside LAN-O-THON
I've started work on my freeBSD article. I'm trying a few different things out to see what works the best. My box is a little slow installing it so its going to take a little while.

MCD Portal (the CMS I'm writing)
The CMS I'm writing is looking great. I got the registration and login forms done, sessions and user/group data inheritance works. A lot of the code is a mess but I'll work on it later. Next is applying the Acl info from the user session info.

Weekly Update 7/6/07

LAN-O-THON v4.0
I haven't heard back from any more companies on sponsorships. I did follow up with a guy from thermaltake so hopefully I'll have banners up soon for them. I'll post another picture of my LAN Party surprise tomorrow.

The LAN Party Initiative
I'm going to get a Counter-Strike: Source and a Half-life2: Deathmatch server for our group soon. East coast Source servers are still backorder at gameservers.com. These server cost money to run so consider using these options to support it. To raise addtional funds I'm going to sell reserved slots for $3 dollars (good for a spot on each server) or add $3 dollars more and get some admin privileges such as setting the map rotation. Discuss this more over here

Inside LAN-O-THON
I bought a hard drive to setup freebsd on so this week I'll start working on my server guide.

MCD Portal (the CMS I'm writing)

The CMS I'm writing is coming right along. I got the display block system setup and now I'm starting work on the first module- Users which is probably the most critical as it controls user registration, login and who has access to what and I started laying out the database setup for it. The first subcomponent I'm have to tackle is the ACL (access control list). the ACL is the bit of code that detrimes whether not a user has permission to access a component and will allow me to grant indivual users the rights to somethings like add news articles but not others like delete those articles. I've never used such an advanced ACL setup like this but I'm using the ACL componet of the Zend Framework so going to be fairly easy I hope. My goal is to have a working site by the end of July. The next module is news and then search and then I would like to work on recreating all that ALP can do using my new cms.

Personal
My parents family room remodeling project is getting closer to being done. The walls were painted and the floor got tiled this week but we are still waiting on the trim, finish electrical and windows to replace the old ones. I can't wait to be done baby sitting this project so I can work on other things.

My dad took off work today so he could finally clean and prep the sailboat he bought used a few months ago. He's been so busy that we've haven't gone sailing on yet and it's just been sitting in storage so I'm glad the boat's getting one step closer to being sailable. The picture left is the only picture of the boat I have at the moment. Its from the sales listing so I have no idea who the guy on the boat is. I'll try and remember to take a new picture tomorrow.

Weekly Update 6/23/07

This week I launched my new LAN Party Initiative. I still have a lot of work to do to get things set up but it will be ready to launch by the time classes start back. Join this Facebook group for more information. I'm Already impressed with how many people join the group. It's going to be a great fall semester. (that and me being run over by the SACD work load)

I posted my article- How to: Make a LAN Cable but it still needs one more editing pass. I also need to add a section on the differnet types of cat5 cable and which ones are best for patch cables. I'm not a very good writer and I get tired of proof reading after a while. I still need to post the video version too. The next article "How to: Install pFsense" is on hold until version 1.2 comes out of beta and "How to Setup a web server" is also on hold until I get a new hard drive for my server box. So my article for this next week will be either budgeting or event layout. Also I want to start posting reviews of HL2:DM maps so I may start a couple this week.

As far as sponsorships go, I don't have any new information. Still waiting to hear back from companies.

In other news, this blog is finally in the yahoo search results. After yahoo failed to crawl my site automatically (they have something against Google's blogger app. All the other search engines picked it up on their own), I manually submitted it 2 week ago and finally it's showing up. Over 60% of my blog hits come from Google so it's good that I can get some from yahoo too.

I also got a surprise planned for LAN-O-THONv4.0. It will help shed light on our event. I'll post a teaser pic next week.

Weekly Update

Ok this week I finally spent some time to type up an email to send to companies who only list an email address for sponsorship request. I kinda like the Email thing because it gives me a chance to explain all about are event in a little bit more detail than some of the web forms on some of the other sites. So yesterday I sent out about 5 emails to these remaining companies on my list and one company was quick to bite- Velocity Micro. I glad they came on board for our LAN Party. If you had to pick a company to buy your custom computer from, they should be at the top of your list. If you don't believe me have a look at this Super in depth review by [H]ardOCP and you'll see why they're so good.

In other news, I'm still really grateful for electricity because a day in Florida without it is $%^#!

Weekly Update

Not much LAN Party news this week. I'm still waiting to hear back from a bunch of companies and I found a few more to email to ask for sponsorships.
I had a fun week at the beach but I'm glad to be back. I can only handle so many days with my whole extended family (15 people total). At least I wasn't without internet. It just by happens that the hotel in Ormond Beach we stayed at is in the same Bright House network as our house in Orlando so we just brought our Cable modem and Wireless router with us and had our own private wifi spot all week.
Yet I couldn't go a week with out fixing someones computer, in this case my uncle's laptop (which is faster than mine). It was an easy fix and I got a free dinner out of it.
On Thursday my family built an awesome sandcastle-

Weekly Update

Well I've add two more articles The LAN in LAN Party and Electricity, The real LAN Party Fuel and I have more to do. I also went through and redid the all the tags on each blog entery so they fit better. On Thursday, I went through my list of companies that sponsor LAN Parties and submitted a dozen applications so hopefully well get a bunch of sponsors. Alienware already got back to me and they are going to sponsor us again.

Some of next week I will be away on vacation so I don't know how much I'll get done.

On a side note I got the chance to tour a great architecture firm today and that was a lot of fun.

Weekly Update

Well this is something new. I'm going to try and give weekly summary of how I'm wasting my summer and how thing are going for LAN-O-THON.

I've spent the last week making LAN Cables. I made two more bundles of 12 so now I have enough for LAN-O-THON v4.0. I took some pictures of my methods and I'll post them when I get some time. I also have two more articles almost done- electricity and networking. This week we also got our first confirmed sponsor CPU Magazine. They are going to send us 50 copies of their magazine for us to hand out at the event.