What day is it again?

You know that things are getting busy when you can't remember what day of the week it is half of the time (Although I know that today is Friday, hurrah!), and that's exactly the state I'm in at the moment. As things stand, my workload for Elite Bastards is through the roof, where I've been snowed under with graphics boards, motherboards and the like. Of course, this is a good thing, so I'm not complaining, but at the moment my life seems to revolve around 'article publishing days' rather than the metric used by most normal humans, known as 'days of the week'.

The most excellent news hardware-wise for the site has been the recent interest shown by ASUS in the sampling department, which is probably the biggest single step we've taken during my tenure in the hot seat so far. Add that in to the likes of Foxconn, PowerColor and Cyberlink, and we're really starting to build us some useful contacts.

The only thing that dampens my spirits at this particular juncture is the continued lack of communication with NVIDIA - With G80 just around the corner, I don't even have enough concrete information for a technology preview (although it sounds like all but a handful of journalists who got invited to Santa Clara are probably in that very same boat) which is, quite frankly, both hugely frustrating and disappointing. Anyway, I shall just have to suck it up, keep on trying, and look forward to (hopefully) a more fruitful time out of the R600 launch whenever that may be.

There are more exciting times around the corner for the site, but I shall keep these under my hat until they're all finished and ready to go. Suffice it to say, one of these mysterious 'exciting things' in particular will be a relief and source of happiness for our regular readers provided it goes to plan. :o)

Away from my helter-skelter life of reviews, last Tuesday was also my birthday. I'm not much of a birthday person, but one individual in particular really pulled me out of my apathy to put a big smile on my face this week. Thank you - You know who you are. ;o)

Towards the end of November I've now been booked in on a week-long CCNA course as part of my 'real' job, which means that I might have some fancy-dan Cisco-related letters to put after my name soon with any luck.

Finally, today I was offered an Xbox 360 for £100 by a work colleague. Can I resist the temptation, considering Gears of War went Gold this week? Probably not, in all honesty. Brace yourself for me raving about the wonders of next-generation console gaming sooner rather than later. Or, more likely, complaining about how rubbish I am at using gamepads.

Learn the lesson, take the blows

So, after the best part of a week of feeling lousy with the 'flu, I'm finally back up, running and fighting fit.. Well, more or less anyway. It's pretty good timing as well, seeing as I've had to work quickly towards testing for and writing a UK exclusive (and, I have a funny feeling unless I get pipped to it, a world exclusive) review for Elite Bastards. As I seem to say far too often on this 'Blog, exciting times ahead... ;)

My personal life has also received a boost in the past few days, as I've finally swallowed my pride and embarrassment and gotten back in touch with someone who used to be a good friend of mine a couple of years ago. To cut a long story short, she was a mutual friend of mine and Tara's for quite a while, but thanks to Tara's incredible capacity for jealousy and paranoia I broke off talking to her for the sake of any further hassle (coupled with the fact that Tara had treated her like dirt in the past anyway, which made things all the more awkward). That turned out to be a big mistake of course, and I've really missed talking to Sara in the intervening period, until finally deciding to apologise for the way I just abandoned our friendship. Thankfully, my apology was accepted, so we're now talking and back to normal once again. So, that's another little bit of my life repaired for the better. Yay!