Event: Octane 9 - LAN Party Event Date: 03/28-29/03 Written By: Warhawk Date Written: 04/14/03

This Octane, like all Octanes before it, rocked! New things this time around included a Generals tournament, which yours truly made it to the final round of, but was ignominously defeated by Sargeras.... I'll get you next time.. NEXT TIME!!

There was also a Jalapeno burger eating contest, which was great fun (to watch, not participate in im sure). Contestants had to eat a burger loaded with jalapenos then (and this is the tricky part) keep it down for at least 5 minutes. The prize was a gift certificate to frys.

Speaking of food. There was some new offerings in that department... namely in the form of steak! mmmm.... steak... It was quite taseful, I suggest you try it next time.

ADDENDUM - 01/19/2026 By Warhawk

One funny story from this event was about a guy that went by the name "The Deionizer", he was quite a character and it's hard to know where to start in describing him. He was a regular at Octane LANs and other LANs around the area. He was also a regular forum poster and was well known among the community. At his core, he was a nice kid; however his relationship to social norms was often strained. He certainly seemed to have plenty of unfounded confidence in his technical abilities.

One story that exemplifies this would be one that came out of a house LAN were he was upgrading his RAM. The Deionizer, like most of us in the LAN scene, took pride in building PC’s. We all thought of ourselves as more knowledgeable than most on the subject of PC building and The Deionizer was no exception.

In the hierarchy of difficult things to install in a computer, installing RAM ranks among the easiest. Anyone who has ever installed RAM knows they are made in such a way that they can only be plugged in one way. This keeps people from plugging them in backwards and that sort of thing... or at least it keeps *most* people from doing that. Somehow through sheer force of will, The Deionizer was able to plug his RAM in backwards. Unfortunately, this ended up ruining the RAM and the motherboard.

Another story about The Deionizer took place at one of the first few Octane LAN events. At this event he was competing in a Counterstrike Tournament. Unknown to him, the admin was spectating the match and was projecting it on a giant projector screen that The Deionizer had his back turned to. During the match, murmurs started to spread through the crowd as everyone watching began to realize that the player being shown up on the bigscreen was clearly cheating. A crowd began to form behind The Deionizer as everyone began to realize he was the one doing the cheating. The Deionizer was so oblivious that I don’t think he realized everyone was onto him, and instead thought a crowd was forming around him because he was so awesome at the game (although, I'm fairly certain he ended up losing even with cheats). This cemented his status as a pariah immediately within the local LAN community. 

At Octane LAN 9, The Deionizer showed up wearing a T-Shirt that was similar to the type a security guard would wear. On the back of this shirt in bold letters it said “STAFF NETWORK SECURITY”. Joe was strutting around the LAN wearing this shirt with an heir of self superiority. It was as if, in his mind, the LAN was a bar, and he was the bouncer.  Obnoxious tough guy posturing was nothing new to the LAN scene, but even this seemed a bit much.

In a cruel twist of ironic fate, a guy that went by the handle “Alien Venom” from the typ0 clan was browsing the network and came across a computer that actually had the windows folder shared; which is not something you want to be sharing on a network full of mischievous computer kids. 

Not only was the windows folder visible on the network, but it had full read and write access enabled on it. This meant that anyone on the network was free to add or delete files from the operating system of this particular PC.  Alien Venom laughed and wondered aloud who would be dumb enough to leave their PC wide open like that. After looking a little bit closer at the network name we all realized that it was none other than The Deionizer. That's right, the guy wearing the “NETWORK SECURITY” T-Shirt had left his PC on the network completely unsecured.

After the laughter was contained, Alien Venom felt it was his duty to teach The Deionizer a lesson in actual Network Security and began deleting random files from The Deionizer's operating system. It wasn’t long before the entire PC crashed requiring a complete reinstall of windows. It was a bit cruel; but poetic at the same time. I'm sure this wouldn't have happened to him had he not beeing wearing the NETWORK SECURITY T-Shirt. The Deionizer would always end up receiving an outsized amount of abuse and critisim amoung the LAN community, but at the same time his behaviour was hard to ignore.