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I’m really surprised about this, really shows how ludicrous the housing market is in the Bay Area. How high does your income need to be to afford a bigger house?!
> [High AC cost.] Perhaps we have too many windows letting in too much sunlight... My office has automatic blinds that open and close according to some climate control system. The blinds are within the double glazing, so they can't be damaged by weather (or cats). The nice version for a home would be something like [1]. I'm sure the owner could program the automation so they only change position if no-one is in the r…
This is truely living the dream, well done mate! It is indeed crazy that cabinetry costs the same as the technology. How does the cat restroom exhaust work? Always on or does it have a sensor? Do the cat doors prevent sound getting into the kids' rooms from the living room?
The cat room fans are standard bathroom fans. At present we just leave them on all the time -- you can see the switches taped down in the photos. I suppose it might be a good idea to rig up a sensor...
I never had the tenacity to consider my build "finished," and definitely didn't have your budget, but I built a 5-player room[1] for DotA 2 back in 2013.
I got really lucky with hardware selection and ended up fighting with various bugs over the years... diagnosing a broken video card was an exercise in frustration because the virtualization layer made BSODs impossible to see.
I went with local disk-per-VM because latency matters more than throughput, and I'd been doing iSCSI boot for such a long time that I was intimately familiar with the downsides.
I love your setup (thanks for taking the time to share this BTW) and would love to know if you ever get the local CoW working.
My only tech-related comment is that I will also confirm that those 10G cards are indeed trash, and would humbly suggest an Intel-based eBay special. You could still load iPXE (I assume you're using it) from the onboard NIC, continue using it for WoL, but shift the netboot over to the add-in card via a script, and probably get better stability and performance.
> Jade and I needed a bigger house, but we really could not afford to buy (much less build) anything bigger in Palo Alto. I’m really surprised about this, really shows how ludicrous the housing market is in the Bay Area. How high does your income need to be to afford a bigger house?!
> Normally, maintaining twelve machines used by random guests would have two huge problems: Maybe you did this with your other house but I would have thought guests would bring their own computer to a LAN party. All you have to do is provide the space and network capability?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mostly haven't used a mouse pad in decades... until recently. I now have a mouse pad on my main work desk because the wood where my mouse was kept attracting weird black spots. They were easy to clean off but weirded me out. And I guess it would be sad if I ended up with a permanent wear spot... But I think the LAN parties don't really happen often enough to cause much wear. In 10 years at the old place no one used…
> the wood where my mouse was kept attracting weird black spots Have the same issue, but can't subscribe to mousepads. I believe that's dust getting in the crevices of the wood.
> Normally, maintaining twelve machines used by random guests would have two huge problems: Maybe you did this with your other house but I would have thought guests would bring their own computer to a LAN party. All you have to do is provide the space and network capability?
I think the lack of any standing offerings of variations of Quake is a glaring mistake but easily rectified. :)
It's really heartening to see lan gaming continued and offered in such a way that the amount of hassle and setup is minimized and the gaming is maximized. We spent far too much time in the 90's and 2000's dealing with driver issues, etc etc. Bravo.
My lan parties were more adhoc. Plan to play at some dudes/gals house, bring pcs/laptops/consoles and other gear, run cat5 cable between rooms, hook them up to some shitty switch and go to town. Many hours of sweaty gameplay. Piss off the neighbors. Trip a few circuit breakers.
This “lan party” has such a corporate feel to it. Almost reminds me of a typical work office. Just what I need after grinding it for 5 hrs and commuting home for another 1-2 hr — to experience the work environment again!
I’m actually more interested in the dedicated cat walk and doors that lead into various rooms.