My son asked me a question last night. He wanted to know if we could do one last “blow out” before my surgery. Something fun and wild, since I’ll pretty much be on my back for a while after I get cut.

“What the hell, why not” I replied.

We’re attempting to go to the SMo-g hosted by spoklan.net. What’s a “SMo-g” you ask? I’ll tell you…

It’s 60 people with their computers linked together playing games against each other. Much like my old lan parties (wich you can see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here… I used to have a lot of free time) there will be lots of people and plenty of gaming action.

There’s a catch though. This one costs money, and there is limited seating. I guess I should have checked how many slots were open before I paid via paypal. I looks like there’s only one seat left, and I registered and paid for 2. Hopefully it will all work out (read: someone won’t show up).

The games begin on Saturday at noon and finish on Sunday at noon. 24 hours of hot-hot frag action! I just hope I’m physically up to it!

I’ll bring the digital camera and take a few pics to share (if we get in).

In other news… my home PC was being an absolute bitch last night. I did the windows update thing and then rebooted. During the boot, I noticed that I was only showing 512mb of ram (I have a full gig). Then, I went all BSOD and life turned a little sour.

I pulled out one stick of RAM to see which one was bad (pull one out, boot, swap sticks, boot again). Pulling out one stick and firing it up still showed 512mb of RAM. Logic says the other stick is bad. I swap sticks and hit the power button… and get a big old pile of nothing. This confirms my suspicions.

I swap the ram around again… and get nothing. Hmmm… curious.

Now, no matter what I put in my machine, and no matter which slot I put it in… nothing happens. I put both sticks in my sons machine and viola! Both are good.

Crap… bad motherboard = cranky me.

I figured that I’d just let it sit and worry about it today, but my brother-in-law, David, suggested that I clear the CMOS by moving the jumper. I did it and what do you know… everything works again.

I guess the CMOS just got all screwed up or somethin’. I didn’t really want to replace the board, as I run an IDE RAID array, and finding another IDE RAID board is a little hard now (they’ve all gone to SATA). Life is once again good.

One last note: Don’t forget to check out the WWBD Big Red Head Forum. It’s been kinda dead in there for the past couple weeks. Join up today and entertain me. DO IT NOW!!!