LANUG continued its tradition of party-till-the-wallpaper-bleeds
meetings tonight and this morning. Festivities began at 7:00 and ran
till well past midnight. Tiki torches provided guidance to Eleu's back
house, where an extremely well-provisioned barbecue grill provided a
near-endless stream of hamburgers, Italian sausage, and other comestibles
to anchor Eleu's killer bean dip, hummus, and rice. This man knows how
to host a meeting.
Guest Way Wong of Byte Size Software demonstrated the usefulness
of several of his products. Guaranteed useful, because he wrote 'em to
please himself, and others agreed. Special guest Loren Finkelstein
decided that yes, LANUG really knows how to have a meeting.
Comedy relief was provided by LANUG's own Woo Lee, who disassembled
three of his seven 2100s to install SER-001 serial implants. The first one
he installed has already been somewhat worked over. The back cover popped
off to reveal a positive blizzard of small yellow sticky pieces of paper
covering over 1/3 of the motherboard, to provide insulation for not one,
but TWO Pixsolution implants in one machine! One speeds up the Newton while
the other speeds up the real time clock. With this amount of extra
hardware flapping in the breeze generated by all the little stickers waving
around, there was no hope of finding room for the SER-001.
The other two 2100s took their medicine properly, though it was found
that one of the implants was defective. Woo tested another one (he has 10
SER-001 kits, apparently) without bothering to replace the back, and it
worked. A 2100 works just fine without the back cover, and in that
configuration is thin enough to be even more interesting. We suggested he
just leave the back cover off and tape over the motherboard with masking
tape, but he declined.
Woo's third 2100, his "main machine", already looks as if it ought
to be held together with masking tape. Its case has been worn shiny, its
screen has been worn cloudy, and there is a strong sense that various bits
are missing. Certainly, various of its bits did seem to be missing when
it was time to put it together again, but Woo found every last bit, although
he did have to shake out his shoes. He was also kind enough to take a break
and give us all a Tarot reading using his full Tarot deck of linear flash
cards, which make an impressive layout ("Your future is crossed by the
32Mb card, which means you'd always better remember where your towel is.").
Now, at any normal meeting, members would be hanging over Woo's
shoulder as he performed all this surgery over several hours. Mostly,
though, people just stepped over Woo's hardware collection as we all sat
around and tried to figure out why we couldn't successfully beam our owner
cards around. Be it noted that no one crunched any of Woo's hardware, and
he did eventually find every last plastic bit and every last screw, though
the case of his trusty warhorse Newt did crack when he screwed it back
together. Many packages were beamed about among the audience, and a number
of party-favor 4Mb cards, eMate pens and various CDs were handed out.
Then the two different cakes came out for dessert, fresh-brewed
coffee woke everyone up for the drive home, and Eleu's home net still
utterly refused to talk to any Newtons.
If you miss an LANUG meeting (all meetings guaranteed five hours
or more), you've missed out on life.
Mike O'Brien
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sun Sep 09 2001 - 19:47:57 EDT