Inquirer loses contest.... again

ONCE AGAIN, THE INQUIRER lost the Intel Ultimate Geek contest at IDF. The win once again went to Ken Haugen from MPC.

The challenges this time started out easy, then got downright evil. There three rounds over two days, the first being open to everyone. That was geek trivia, and had everything from what year the 4004 came out, to pictures of the Commodore Pet. This was meant to be a weed-out round, and The INQ tied for first with 33/40. We would have done better, but for the past several years, they have been progressively outlawing our creative interpretations of the rules. Bah.

The second round was held the next day, and that was a little more promising, Unreal Tournament III. Playing against a group of geeks is bad enough, especially since I have logged all of 45 minutes in the game up till that day. The top 10 scorers in trivia went on to this round.

There were two groups of five, each played a timed 15-minute round. Top kills wins, least deaths was the tie breaker if necessary. Easy enough until they threw in Annie "Ecstasy" Leung of Team Evil Genius. Yeah, a pro gamer in the mix. We all lost. Really badly. We got our asses kicked by a girl, but the group I was in did best, the top scorer got a little over 1/3 the kills of Ecstasy. She wasn't trying.

You will lose to her as well

That said, the match was quite unfair. Creative rules interpretations were banned here as well, I did ask. No go mode, no full weapons, no nothing. Level playing fields suck, especially when everyone is better than you. They wouldn't even let me fire the foam rockets I swiped from the Rambus booth at my competitors. I came in third because of blatant judicial non-favoritism.

Shooting opponents in the back of the head was forbidden (Picture courtesy of Nico Ernst)

From there, the top five went on to the third round, and this one proves that Intel is as evil as people say, and I mean that in the most complimentary way. It involved building a laptop, booting it, configuring it, using several networks, and other related tasks. The contest was divided into 4 sections, and each of the contestants were given a pet judge to stare over their should and check them off on all tasks.

Me and my judge (Picture courtesy of Nico Ernst)

90 minutes were allotted to do the jobs, even though they thought it should only take about 60. We were all given an instruction sheet with about half the needed information, the blanks were essentially the contest. Once you complete one stage and the judge checks you off, you are given the next stage's information. You don't know what you have to do beforehand so it is easy to screw something up in an earlier round that bites you later.

It looks easy enough

The first stage was to build a laptop, put in a CPU, HD, modem, Wi-Fi NIC and RAM, then configure it. While this may sound easy, they gave you multiple CPUs without markings, multiple nics, and a few other cards just to be mean. You had to figure out what was what, that is easy, but which TurboMemory module was the 1G version? You know those parts numbers from memory, right? Multiple versions of each part made life difficuly.

From there, you had to go into the BIOS and fix all the things purposely screwed up. It was a dev BIOS, and they changed a lot of settings hidden in sub-menus. PITA. WTF. WTFLOL. WTFLOLBBQ. From there, you had to go into the vPro settings and config the embedded IPs and related info. If all was well there, and you unFSCKed the BIOS enough to allow it to boot, it was off to round 2.

Round 2 was to go into the Broken OS and configure the laptop to draw less than 17W of power. Easy enough if you got the BIOS right, just turn down the screen and volume, kill tasks, and off you go. If you didn't get the BIOS right, or turned off the wrong device, you have to figure it out and correct the problems. The clock was ticking. It was the easiest round.

From there, the third round was the hardest, configure the network to see a server. It was broadcasting half of a password, so you needed to sniff packets with Wireshark, and decode them. Piece of cake if you use Wireshark regularly. I don't. Luckily, from the time it took, none of the other four guys did either.

Once that was done, you had to rewire the network again to see second laptop on your desk. The second half of the password was the RAM ID on your build laptop, which you had to sniff remotely with vPro tools. Piece of cake if you configured your IP in the BIOS right, and once again, I didn't. Reboot reboot reboot.

From there, stage four was to rewire the network again, log into a server securely, and grab a video file. Somewhere in that file was a code phrase which you had to make into a text file and upload to a server. The first to do that wins. The joy of watching videos of Centrino magazine ads can not be described in mere words.

In all of this, if you were stumped beyond words, you could get a hint. Hints came in an envelope with hopefully the right info in them, but all had a time penalty. If you took a hint, you had to stand back and not touch anything for between 1 and 8 minutes. I took two 1 minutes ones, the first one on why the )%#(%*ing FSB would not hit 1066, and the other on sniffing the passwords.

The final tally had Ken Haugen winning by about 10-15 minutes, and driving away with a new Smart car. Your humble and somewhat ham-handed narrator came in second for the fourth time, and third place went to Mark Atchison from SMSC.

Ultimate Geek 2008 was as usual part pain, part frustration, and all fun. If you are going to Fall 2009 IDF, I recommend taking a crack at the game, it is free. If you are as good as Ken, you might drive away in a new car. µ