Quite a bit to talk about in this post. Let’s get started.

Not last weekend, but the weekend before it, perhaps known as two weekends ago, or maybe even the weekend previous to the previous weekend…however you feel you need to term this date in time, Steam had a sale on Left 4 Dead. Like the impulse-friendly consumers we are, Kenny, Travis, Peter and my own lovely self devoured the $25 sale like it was fruit on Katee Sackhoff’s body. From there, an obsession has been born.

That very first Saturday Kenny and I were consumed with completing the No Mercy campaign. Halfway through scene 3 of it his motherboard exploded. Yes, Kenny lost his motherboard on his very first playthrough of Left 4 Dead. Not one to be stymied by such a tragic occurrence he brought his computer over to my place to attempt to use some of my spare parts to revive it. When that failed and his beautiful server case sat on my credenza containing all of the life of a piece of old hickory we decided to head to Swerdlin & Company to play on mine and Travis’ computers there, which luckily enough contain Radeon HD 2400 XTs. Not the best cards in the world, no, but capable enough. And so it was that at 12:30am on a Sunday I strolled in to work with the explicit purpose of playing a PC game on the LAN. And it was glorious.

I’ve spent some frustrating time since then setting up the literal Jux 4 Dead dedicated server. This experience has taught me that Valve can’t write server software any better than a dozen script kiddies with perl and Notepad. Can’t win them all folks, I suppose.

My time with Left 4 Dead has caused me to merge with Zoey, my chosen avatar. We have become one. At least while I’m playing the game. I suppose I should be thankful that I’m confident in my sexuality.

Other events: Travis finally deduced a way to successfully give our new fileserver a second NetBIOS name, effectively eliminating all of our migration issues. Of course both of us had to be at work from 9:00am Tuesday through 5:00am Wednesday (a period broken, in my case, only by my leaving to join my Dungeons and Dragons group all too briefly), but it did eliminate a whole lot of file cleanup and random services breaking.

Finally I put an offer in on a house. It was accepted. More news about that to come.