Sunday, January 29, 2006

Deadlines met, time to chill out a little...

As ever, I have to start this Blog entry by apologising for the lack of updates, but recent weeks have given me little to no time to sit down and do anything unrelated to work in some shape or form.

Thankfully, the results of all that hard work are now in the public domain, in the form of my 3DMark06 and Radeon X1900 XTX reviews. Despite how much I may moan about the amount of hours I had to put in on those two projects in this post, I can't really cover up the fact that I loved every minute of it... Playing with, testing and getting to grip with a new version of 3DMark is always an educational and informative experience, and it goes without saying to anyone who shares my level of geekiness that getting to find out about and then try out a new high-end video card is pretty much on top of the thrill-o-meter.

I won't wax too much lyrical about my day in London for the R580 briefing, but it was cool to catch up with Rys again (properly this time!), get to meet Dave Baumann at last (after I somehow missed him last time around, even though he was apparantly only sitting a couple of seats away at the AVIVO briefing in December!) and also meet Gary Jones, Club 3D's legendary lifesaver (to me anyway!) in the flesh, as well as a bundle of other people.

Anyway, after my exertions on those two articles I've been taking something of a breather for a few days to regain my composure - I have a few things I wouldn't mind investigating on the back of my recent work, so I'll probably plunge into something during next week. We also have a couple of other articles coming up which could prove pretty interesting too, but both of those are out of my hands. :)

Outside of Elite Bastards, there isn't much to report - Work has been somewhat busy lately, and I have a pay/performance review coming up, which will doubtless end in disappointment. I could really do with a week off soon, but I'm not sure if and well I'll get that sorted. I'm also looking at forking out a bundle of money on my car in the next few weeks, with an MOT coming up and it being in dire need of replacement brake pads. Truth be told, I really want to find myself something newer and better, but at the moment I just don't have the money in the bank.

Friday, January 06, 2006

Belated Happy New Year

So, here we are - 2006. Still no hover cars, teleporters, Transformers arriving from 1986... All pretty boring isn't it?! I'm not much of a New Year person in all honesty, I don't buy into a lot of the ideas of making resolutions, clean slates and the like - For me, it's just a continuation of what went before, and if there are things you want to change about yourself or your life, then you should be doing it when you realise that something's wrong, not because there's a new number in the year. But, there you go, I'm just a killjoy like that.. ;o)

Having said that, the start of a New Year always seems to be a good opportunity to set new targets and review any you've made before. As far as Elite Bastards goes, I really feel we've made progress, even just in the last couple of months - I won't bore you with statistics, but we're slowly beginning to draw in more readers on a regular basis, and certainly our 'big' articles are getting more exposure, which can only be a good thing. To continue that growth, what we need is content, content, content, and good quality content at that. We certainly should have a couple of big hitting articles showing up in the coming weeks, and I'm really hoping (with some work on my part too) that said articles will help to snowball the reputation of the site as one worth reading and/or dealing with. On that matter, I saw something over the Christmas period which brought a huge grin to my face, but you guys will see it soon enough (If you haven't already for the chosen few ;o)).

The only fly in the ointment which I was hoping would be done and dusted by the time we entered 2006 is the lack of our new Content Management System, as we're at the point where doing things as we are currently is holding us back. Hopefully we'll get something together sooner rather than later though.

On a final point of Elite Bastards business, I'll be off to London one day next week. And that's all I can say on the subject right now.

Away from web site goings-on, my Christmas and New Year was pretty cool, but quiet. Killer present of the year for me was a DAB digital radio, which has seen me glued to BBC 6 Music whenever I get the opportunity - It's almost like they can read my mind and pick up my musical tastes whenever I tune in, it's uncanny.

As for what 2006 holds for me personally? Well, there are some intriguing happenings at the moment, so even I don't know where I'm going to end up by the time the year is out.