First experience with a LAN

I was bored this Saturday. Very bored. I had spent most of the day playing Warcraft III by myself and I was getting pretty tired of it. That’s when the idea hit me. I had been poking through the menus in Warcraft and noticed that there was a LAN (Local Area Network) option. This sounded fun. I would be able to battle against someone in real life… The only downside is that they would have to be at my house and they would have to have their own computer… That’s where my brother-in-law comes in. I went over to Jamie’s house and we gathered his computer hardware (including a huge 50lb monitor, we were dedicated) and brought it over to my house.
I did a little reading online but wasn’t able to successfully connect the two computers together using a cable between our network cards (as a couple of articles stated this was possible). So, after several hours of frustration and fruitless labor, we went out to buy a hub or switch. After having no luck at Wal-Mart (not my idea to go there in the first place) we decided to go to Office Max. We found a D-Link switch for $30 and that was a wonderful purchase. We got home, plugged it in, hooked both of our computers to it and voila! It worked. We were now able to play against each other. It was pretty cool.
So this got me thinking. Since I didn’t pay for the switch it isn’t mine, but I know that I want a way to do home networking (not necessarily for now, but later). I had some money in PayPal from some stuff that I recently sold on ebay so I got on ebay and got some equipment. I purchased a router/switch (so I can have multiple computers online at once) and a newtork card (because mine doesn’t work and I’ve been using a USB to ethernet converter).
I’m mostly looking to the future. Kristen and I are both online a lot and we plan on buying a Mac later this year or so. Once we have the new computer I’d like to have them both hooked up so we can be online at the same time and also be able to play games and other fun stuff like that. So, I’m taking steps.
I’m sure that I’ll have some other things related to this once my hardware comes in the mail. I’ll write back soon.