Well
the BTM weekend is almost upon us, and we’ve all
been burning the midnight oil since BTM40 with major
renovations to the Abattoir’s LAN Central…
As more and more Servers come online at the Abattoir,
it’s become quite apparent that neither the Abattoir
Lab nor Infinity’s room are capable of sustaining
them – the fan noise, the heat, the power draw;
it’s all too much, so action has been taken!
At BTM41 this weekend you’ll have the chance to
take a peek at our brand new Abattoir Server Room!
Built right in LAN Central, we’ve engineered a nice
little nook that will secure all our Servers in
one central area… With this construction came
the daunting task of moving and redoing the entire
Abattoir cLANetic-Energy®
Network from front to back and top to bottom, not
a task to be taken lightly. Infinity
hit the walls and cables with the tenacity of a
bull in heat -- After the dust settled around 3am
this morning, we’ve got ourselves one spanky set-up;
we’ve even added a third hub to the stack and increased
our network capacity by 50% and managed to actually
make more room at the BTM for elbows! Now
sporting a giant screen display that will be used
for tournaments and sponsor product placement, LAN
Central has taken a quantum leap in class; we hope
you enjoy the new amenities.
The
Abattoir’s LAN Central I should mention will now
be robotically cleaned by the Abattoir’s new pair
of Roomba
robotic floor vac/sweepers… I’m sure you’ve
seen these little guys on television already, produced
by iRobot, let loose in a room these little guys
do one hell of a great job picking up after you.
I don’t know anyone who owns one (…let alone two
of them…) but since I’ve had them I have discovered
a few interesting tricks with them while observing
their fascinating behaviour and will be coming out
with “Stupid Roomba Tricks” on video soon…
For instance, there’s the “Roomba Square Dance”
I like to call it, put two side by side and start
them, they spiral out till they touch each other
which signals them to attempt to find the wall and
map the room; since they both get triggered by each
other to do this at the same time, they end up reversing
their rotation and “dosado” around each other…
Maybe it’s me, but I find this funny. Perhaps
we’ll use them at a BTM in a tournament somehow.
BTM50 “Roomba Wars” Edition – when robot vacuums
go wild.
Hold
on to your cell phones and generators; it looks
like the major flare of Oct. 28 which came from
Sunspot 486 will be pounding the Earth’s magnetic
shield today… Here’s a snippet of the full
story from Space.com: A major solar flare
unleashed Tuesday began to punish Earth's protective
magnetic field early Wednesday. The storm, perhaps
the third most powerful on record, could have more
effect than one in 1989 that knocked out power to
an entire Canadian province. Depending on
the storm's magnetic orientation, it could set off
a dramatic display of colorful Northern Lights well
into mid-latitudes of the United States and Europe
into early Thursday. Already early Wednesday,
the NASA-run web site Spaceweather.com reported
aurora had been spotted as far south as Bishop,
in central California, signaling the storm's swift
arrival. Meanwhile, satellite operators and power
grid managers prepared to endure a potentially damaging
event. And astronauts aboard the International Space
Station took cover from heavier radiation sent out
by the flare. They are not expected to be in any
serious danger. "This is the real thing," said John
Kohl, a solar astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics and principal investigator
for an ultraviolet imager on the Solar and Heliospheric
Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. "The eruption was
positioned perfectly. It's headed straight for us
like a freight train." – Shields up!
One
last quick FYI: As of last night/early this morning,
we’re at the stage where all Abattoir Servers and
our DSL connectivity will be moved to the new Server
Room, as such, you can expect interruptions in services
this evening – mainly, the SuperFTP Server, Portal
Server, Game Servers, MeatCAMs and the like will
be going offline tonight around 6pm for an undetermined
period… We will make all attempts to minimize
this outage (…aka: we’ll run…) The Abattoir’s
website and BBs will not be affected. Have
a great and safe Halloween weekend and see you at
the BTM!!