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Putting one's education to use

Ratso had a plan for this road trip. A plan involving Halo 2. Originally he was going to find a way to run the X-Box off a car cigarette lighter so he could play on the way out to Blacksburg, but he slept instead.

When we got back to the hotel after the poster session Friday night, he began to set things up. He picked up an RF cable from Radio Shack so he could hook the X-Box to the television, then networked the X-Box and his laptop and used the hotel's high speed wireless internet connection to play online.

I hung out with them for a while. At one point, Ratso was playing Halo 2 and talking on his headset to other players, Cali-boy was playing Halo 2 and talking on the phone with his fiancéand Mountain Girl was playing games on Yahoo Games and talking on the phone with her mom, explaining to her mom how to log in to some online service.

Back when I was in college, we actually had to talk with each other when we were hanging out together. Times change.

While I was there (before I went to bed early), one of the games involved some French guys. When they shot Ratso, he could hear them insulting him in French.

I told him to call them a bunch of Canadians. "Or Belgians! Yeah, that's even better."

They stayed up till 1:00 am playing Halo 2. They even got MG involved. She told me the next morning, "Oh yeah. I was shooting things and talking smack on Ratso's headset. Some guy thought I was six! Another guy said, 'Hey, dude!' and I said, 'I'm not a dude, I'm a chick!' And then I stole one of those jeep things and drove around honking the horn—and Ratso and Cali-boy didn't know you could do that—till someone shot me and stole it."

317 words | December 6, 2004 09:37 PM | Ivory tower