12 teenage boys. Ethernet. Red Bull and other such powerdrinks. Snack food. Pizza. Outisde from dusk till dawn, gaming on the deck.
Unfortunately, they will be directly UNDER my bedroom window. Might need to move the box fan into place to create some white noise.
My son’s idea of a birthday party… at least I know where they are. And nominally what they’re up to till I fall asleep and things out there get really interesting.
I remember 17. 
Cartooniverse
As long as they won’t be majorly pissing off the neighbors, I gotta say that’s a great idea.
Yay LAN party! We’re busting some Q3 Arena over ribs and beer at my place on Sunday. I freakin’ *love *LAN parties.
excuse an obviously out-of-date codger, but what’s a “LAN party”?
A LAN party is when you have a bunch of geeky computer gamer types meet up with their PCs in tow. They then form a Local Area Network on which they play head to head multiplayer games, usually for a long long long time. Caffeinated beverages and unhealthy foods are consumed. Porn and Music are often traded. That kind of thing.
I don’t think this is what parents mean when they tell their kids to play outside… 
Please please please tell me you all checked the weather ahead of time and rain is not in the forecast. Assuming the deck isn’t covered. However, that does sound like a fantastic idea…
– IG
That reminds me, I have a 100 person LAN party to host coming up next month. I should really start working on those tournament rules instead of doing what I usually do and make it a “surprise” tournament (read: procrastinated until about an hour before the event)
Oh look, something shiny! wanders away
Porn? PORN? Goddamned kids. 
It was great. Not the first LAN he’s done ( -sigh-…not nearly ) but the first he’s done outside. It’s perfect. The deck is just a few feet above grade, up against the house. I ran power from two ends of the house, through windows. Blocked the gaps in the window with foam. ( bugs.). Dropped the Ethernet through a window. 10 boys played.
At some point around 12:30am they all walked the mile to the local diner, hung out, came back, played. They play Counter-Strike, so it is a bit of a misnomer to call it a L.A.N. party as they are playing each other ( and other clans ) over the Internet.
I stocked up on caffeninated power drinks. Most of them were consumed. I put out cookies and peanuts. None were touched. Appparently my judgement in snack food is out of date. Good- I won’t get junk food again for 'em.
Son checked the weather for days before this. 10 boys in the family room woulda been rough, we would have put them into the dining room. The area was dry as a bone with not even a hint of precipitation. I figured they wouldn’t last through dew point and I think they did not. I awoke to find a huge tarp over the tables. All monitors were pulled in under it. All of the CPU towers are gone, so it must have been when dew point hit they got worried about the moisture and shut it down.
I was really starting to get worried about the kid and the utter lack of physical activity. He’d been getting pudgier, sitting there year after year summer and winter, gaming. Of late he’s been hitting the bungee-cord workout machine we got him and the new Nordic Track Elliptical I got. -shrug- If gaming is what flips his switch, that’s fine by me.
This was a birthday celebration. The Man-Cub™ is 17, he has nice friends, good student, just inducted into the National Technical Honor Society, etc. What’s not to like?
Now, what was that about kids trading porn??? :eek:
Uh. I gotta ask. I mean, I am moderately computer-literate but I always struggle with the idea that a SINGLE Ethernet wire can support the high-speed gaming packets flying to and fro without excessive lagging.
Can you really run a L.A.N. party for 100 people off of a single Ethernet wire? I have DSL and it’s pretty zippy. I’ve got 1mg down and 375k up. Going to upgrade for about ten bucks a month more to 3meg down, but still…100 players at once?
I always imagine this as an extension cord analogy. You can plug fifty things into a single extension cord but at some point* you hit the wall and blow a breaker. In the case of Ethernet, wouldn’t the gaming slow to a crawl with that many players?
Yes there is a ceiling to the data that can be passed on those cables, but the truth is you’re not using a single cable to serve 100 computers. In the old days when you used Co-Ax cabling you would set up a sequential network where cable passed computer to computer. With Ethernet it’s like spokes of a wheel, cable goes from machine to hub. So the limiting agents are the hubs and routers and the big ones can easily handle 100 connections.
– IG
I wasn’t referring to a physical choke point but an electronic one. I’ve jacked into a 50-port Ethernet router while in someone’s tech support area, and the t.v. network where I used to work had routers with several rows of ports, with 20-ish ports per row.
They slept a few hours, woke up and were at it again. -cackle- They stopped a few hours later but I had to give em credit for the third wind that had em gaming again after a bit of sleep.
For some reason, this makes me think of an electronic version of the morning after the “Unexpected Party” in The Hobbit.
We have high-quality 24 port all gigabit switches. (I can’t recall the exact brand or model at this time, they are in storage or else I’d go look) We have 6 switches. 5 of those are for people to plug in to (each table supports 20 gamers), and then each switch runs to the master switch. I assure you, the limiting factor for speed is the hard drive of the computer you are taking files off of, not the network itself. Games run at such a fraction of the bandwidth it takes to trade files, they barely shows up as a blip at all on the network monitoring software.
I should note that we do not offer full internet at our events. It isn’t cost effective. We have one cable connection for all 100 computers. This is enough to verify Steam (so that Counterstrike works) or to get patches in an emergency, but not enough for everyone to play online games with people not at the event.
/shameless-plug
If anyone is ever in the michigan area and wants to go to a good LAN party, check us out. This site lists most of the ones in the area, I currently work with the Realms of Chaos and Synergy groups. Boxheads and Waldoman events are very good too.
/shameless-plug