January 16, 2004

Today is the big game. We managed to get eight people to confirm for the game this evening. We are worried that the house may not be able to handle the amount of power needed for the game so we called Phil and he is hooking us up with three additional LCD monitors. We have five here in the house so that is enough for everyone to have one. York and Avon had school cancelled today so Tony and Jeremy don’t have to be at school. Andy and I went up to Avon to pick up Tony and we went over to Tom Wahl’s for some lunch. We headed back to the house and Tony spent the afternoon trainging with Andy and I.

I spent most of the day working on NTI’s new instant messaging server. It took quite a bit of work but it is finally up and running. We are very excited to have our own corporate IM server. It is a nice addition to our services line-up. We are hoping to be able to sign up new IM users as early as this week. Eric and I are already beginning to use the new system.

After the work day was over, Jeremy came over to get started. Arti arrived around 7:00, Josh around 8:00 and Phil arrived around 10:00. We did away with out slowest machine because we have been concerned that it might be causing problems in the game. Our slowest machine was removed and Phil provided us with another one of almost double the speed. We had to do a lot of work to get places for everyone to play at. Min and Andy got to play in their own rooms and I got to play at my desk. Art and Jeremy shared the secondary desk and Tony played at the third basement desk. Josh and Phil split the dining room table. We had to run ethernet cable around the upstairs to get connections for Josh and Phil.

We got two games in but it took almost eight hours to play them. The first game was Min, me, Jeremy and Phil vs. Josh, Art, Andy and Tony. We got our butts handed to us in the first game. We took a twenty minute break or so between the game and then swapped Jeremy and Josh and played another game. We did pretty well in the second game. It was really exciting to be able to play with so many people. We tried playing with 200 population giving us 1600 total units to control. It was really exciting. But we decided that having a few less units would work better so we went back to our regular 150. That worked really well.

We played until almost 6:00 am. Boy were we tired. Phil had to be up at 7:00 to be able to get to work. Phil, Josh, Joanna, Jeremy and Tony all crashed here.

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