Event: PDX LAN 5.05 - LAN Party Event Date: 08/11/2005 Written By: Warhawk Date Written: 02/12/2026

PDX LAN 5 was scheduled for August 11th, 2005, which meant it was time for another TMC road trip to the northern lands of Portland Oregon. Me and Kraz, Kaffine and Kuyaglen all rode up together in Kaffnes’ Lincoln Continental. This car was dubbed “The Couch Boat” both for its enormous road-barge size, and the luxurious couch-like bench seating.  

It was a long journey, and none of us could have imagined the adventures in store for us. I think we all learned something on that trip, something about ourselves, about one another, and most importantly we learned about the importance of good tires... but I'm getting ahead of myself now. 

Back to the lan... actually, lets talk about the accommodations first. We stayed at a different hotel this time, I don’t recall the name of it, but I do remember it being much nicer than we expected it to be. Kraz and Kaffine and I were sharing a room with Offspring who you may remember as a former TMC member who rage quit at one point.  At the time Offspring was a member of another group called TFS. TFS was a “pro” Battlefield team, which is why Offspring was attracted to them. Offspring didn’t actually play on the team, he just did administrative duties for the team, which gave us a prime opportunity to make fun of him.  

This particular PDX was to be on a much bigger scale than any previous PDX LAN. It featured a huge area with sponsor booths, and was dubbed the PDX Expo. It was also in a new location, a convention center, rather than the usual Holiday Inn. 

There were 800 gamers packed into that place along with tradeshow type booths from everybody from Intel to the Marines. 

 The biggest downside of the PDX Expo was that there was no internet access except for the half dozen demo laptops in the Intel booth. This meant that there were lots of people constantly hanging out in the Intel booth, checking email and browsing the web. It was 2005 and it was right around the point where internet access was not yet quite mandatory at a LAN event, but it was something that was really missed if it was not available.

One of Offspring’s side jobs was annoying the LAN admins and generally being a pain in their ass.  Offspring told us that during the course of his talks with the admins, he had discovered that there was in fact internet at the event. The catch was, it was only for the admins to use, and the gateway was located on some weird obscure subnet that no one would ever guess.

Once Kraz heard this he made it his mission to discover the location of this elusive gateway. He came up with a plan in which we all put our computers to use scanning IP’s for the gateway. According to him, we could scan a large portion of the available class A subnets (which is several thousand IP addresses), and it would only take a few hours. This would allow us to covertly discover the location of the hidden internet gateway and then we could discretely use the internet on our own computers. 

It was a perfect plan... on paper. We all got to work, scanning several thousand hosts per second with our “leet” IP scanning tools. Because we were still actively using our computers for gaming activities, we chose to have the scanner run at a slow rate in the background to avoid slowing down our games. We were set to find that gateway in oh, around 5 or 6 hours.  

At one point Kaffine went back to the hotel to sleep, and Kraz had the brilliant idea to make use of the full power of Kaffine’s PC while he was away and not using it. Kraz put his computer to work and had it scan IP’s as fast as it could go. At this rate, it looked like we would be on track to find the gateway in much less time. Unfortunately, Kraz totally spaced out when he set up the scan and included the broadcast range as part of the scan. That meant he was sending broadcast packets out to the ENTIRE network several thousand times a second, essentially it was like we were launching a Denial Of Service attack on the network. 

At the time, we were completely oblivious to this mistake, and went right along playing games while Kaffine’s machine was blasting away at the network with tons of traffic. The admins on the other hand were not oblivious, they noticed what was happening right away, and we might as well have put a gigantic siren on his machine.  Several times, an admin would come over, look at Kaffine’s machine for a second, and then walk away. Then another one, and another, then a couple of them would come by and stop for a second. They seemed to be waiting for the owner of the machine to return.  I don’t recall the exact turn of events, but I do remember getting nervous about all the admin attention on Kaffine’s machine, and Kraz saying to be cool. At one point a groggy Kaffine walked back to his PC, and immediately the admins descended upon him. Poor Kaffine had no idea what was going on, and at that point Kraz and the rest of us did not realize that Kaffine’s machine was flooding the network either.  It wasn’t long before the admins demanded answers and we had to come clean with what we were doing. While we didn’t consider scanning the network to be any sort of major infraction, we knew the admins would frown upon it and tell us to stop, so we beat around the bush a bit. It was only then that the Admins explained to us about how Kaffine’s machine was flooding the network with traffic. Only then did Kraz realize his mistake in setting up the scanner to scan the broadcast range, and we realized we were causing a lot more trouble than we thought.  

We almost got in huge trouble, and would have been "made an example of" because it's you know a "serious matter" and "no one should be messing with the network"... or something. It was a very serious and intense conversation with Vector and the admins and it looked like we may have to head home early. We screwed up pretty bad, but we were able to smooth it out, and yeah... we stopped our scanning. We never did gain internet access but we made a valiant effort.   

Even though it was a huge lan party of epic proportions, I think I played about two games. One was Dungeon Siege 2, which wasn’t even out in stores at the time, but somehow someone had it shared on the network (score!). The other great game we found was called Flatout and it's a destruction derby type game.  

Other activities included, a rock paper scissors competition, musical chairs and a bunch of other crazy competitions. At one point us TMC guys decided to have our very own light show in the parking lot. This involved us gathering a bunch of the intel bouncy balls, which had LED lights inside of them that would activate when bounced. We got as many as we could find and launched them skyward in the parking lot and marveled at the lights as they flickered in the night sky and bounced all over the parking lot. The LED functionality was pretty much destroyed after about 10 minutes of this, but it was fun while it lasted.  

At one point during the lan we were invaded by a whole crew of Star Wars Storm Troopers. They all came in and everybody flipped out. It was awesome. Boba Fett was there too, and they even had a Jawa.  Of course we got our pictures taken with them. 

One of the surprises of the trip was hanging out with Kuyaglen. I never really realized how off the wall he was. He’s the type of guy that will do or say just about anything to get a rise or reaction out of people around him. His outbursts would become more and more random and nonsensical as the LAN wore on and he became more and more sleep deprived.

The LAN lasted for 4 days and as far as we could tell Kuyaglen never actually went to bed, although he may have gone into the hotel room maybe twice. At one point he totally passed out right in his seat at the LAN. He woke up hours later only to find out he had been literally “owned in the face”. Someone had come and drawn various things on his face with a black sharpie.  I think they even displayed this on the huge projector screen at one point.  We don't know who exactly did it, but I suspect the guys from the wKa clan.  

Speaking of the different clans. There were several world class clans in attendance. The top Battlefield 2 teams in the world were there. The table across from us had team Enigma, which flew in from all over the country to be there. They were a good team, but they got owned by TFS, which also flew in from all over the country to be there.  TFS was then owned by team Paradigm Shift, who then went on to own wKa in the finals.  TMC pretty much just said "screw that!" and stayed in bed and slept in on that day. That's how we roll! 

The event was a lot of fun, and when it was done we packed up and headed back down the road for the long and arduous ride back. I was soundly asleep on the couch-like seat in the back when I was woken by a terrible flapping sound, as the car bucked up and down. We quickly pulled over to find that the rubber tread had actually begun to peel right off of one of the tires. Apparently these tires had not been changed in quite some time.

With the help of AAA, we got the spare installed, but it was definitely not suitable for driving 700 miles back home. It was Sunday night, which meant all the tire stores were closed. This left us in quite the bind. Luckily, Kaffine's grandparents lived over in Washington, so we headed there for the night. This then made the trip a bonafide three state road trip. 

Kaffine's grandparents were really chill and had a nice house.  We stayed up late that night, but Glen, being ultra tired from staying up for 4 days, just passed out right in front of us while we were hanging out and talking.  That's when the sharpies came out... there was much giggling and uncontrollable laughter going on during this, and it was fun times. 

The next day Kaffine got some new tires, and we finally made it home, and so ended the TMC PDX LAN road trip 05!  

I don't know where the pics came from but I assume Kuyaglen took them: