ACM LAN Party
First, an advertisement:
LAN Party, October 28th, 7:30pm till Whenever, Nichols 122
Once again I’ve been asked to run a semester LAN party for the department chapter of ACM.
This is always an interesting task for me for a few reasons. First, I don’t really game anymore so I feel a little “out of touch” at LAN parties. Second, I have no affiliation at all with ACM. Third, it’s always so amazingly unorganized, heh heh.
Today I had my first real meeting regarding the LAN party (yeah… it’s tomorrow), and it went really well. Present for the meeting were Ryan Summerskill (ACM President), Jeremy Mason (VP), Adam Jundt (Sec), Ryan Feldkamp (Co-Treas), and Roland Craddolph (Co-Tres), or pretty much every one of the officers from ACM and myself.
The plans so far were pretty much non-existent and Ryan let me know in no uncertain terms that the last one was a big cluster and that it was all me. He gets massive points for being blunt and to the point, and that enabled us to get right to business.
The primary challenges in this situation are unknowns due to lack of planning, but nothing that I don’t think is handleable. The two big questions marks are number of people coming and power distribution and layout. There wasn’t anything cohesive put together for a website, and therefore there wasn’t any preregistration of any kind. (In fact, it appears that all of their limited marketing has an URL for the original site that I made about a year ago. ouch!) We’re also not entirely sure where the power distribution break points are in the building for spreading our load.
However, the last two LAN parties that took place the head count was pretty consistent at around 40, so we expect a similar turnout. We also have all noticed some first hand interest in the LAN spreading by word of mouth, so the turn out shouldn’t be any less than expected. On the power distribution issue, it seems that the easy work around is to use extension cords to spread out physically as much as possible… and that appears to work for the most part.
Then we divided up the tasks remaining, especially server preconfiguration, and prepared to make things happen.
As a result, I’m actually kind of looking forward to the LAN party. I think that it’s going to be better than it was last time I showed up, and I had a pretty damn good time then too. 
So if you’re in Manhattan and don’t have something to do on a homecoming Friday night (yeah, I know, everyone’s busy), come by and hangout with me.