Christmas Wrapping

Okay, so I said that my last 'Blog post would be the final one of 2007. Famous last words and all that...

Well, here we are again, another Christmas Day. So, how has it been? Well, it's Christmas Day, which is pretty much a guarantee of being 'any good' as days go. Despite starting out the day feeling a little like Shinobu Maehara in the Love Hina Christmas movie (now there's a reference to confuse the majority of you, thankfully!), since that point it's been a pleasant and enjoyable day. I realised just now that this has been my first day of real, unfettered downtime (i.e. not thinking about or concerning myself with work-related matters at all) in a long, long time. Hell, I've barely even touched a keyboard until tonight! I guess it really is something I should think about doing more often for my own good.

I think over the last couple of years I've also discovered that I really am getting old, in that I now enjoying the giving of gifts to others far more than I do receiving them. Sure, getting presents is great, but you can't beat the feeling of giving something to somebody that they really love. I guess I'm just a big softie after all...

Anyway, I'm rambling now. Tomorrow is Boxing Day, and I have at least one must buy item on my shopping list, meaning I'll have to brave the masses... Fun! Isn't it amazing how no matter how well prepared you are for Christmas and any gifts you know you'll be receiving and giving, there's always something you don't account for?

So, there you have it, Christmas in a nutshell - Lots of eating and lots of drinking (which I'm sat here trying to recover from), and a fair old whack of Christmas TV. Probably time for me to sign off and get back to it all in fact....

Ramping up for Christmas

Wow, what a day - Not only have I done a massive amount of work towards two reviews for Elite Bastards scheduled to go live this week, I've also found time to watch Arsenal beat Chelsea (oh how, how sweet that was to watch!) and... Well, write this 'Blog entry.

While most other people seem to be looking towards shutting down for Christmas, things seem to be getting busier than ever for Elite Bastards. The major operation for this weekend was to final finish off what will be the largest single review the site has undertaken thus far - It's taken a lot longer than I hoped to get around to and finished, so it's good to see it come to a close with a release slated for tomorrow. Then, by midweek we should have our GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB review out the door, which is another big plus. There'll be no rest for the wicked though, as we'll (hopefully) be previewing something new and unreleased motherboard-wise around Christmas Eve. All that, and there's still a huge backlog of work to churn through!

Anyway, the one thing I've been meaning to highlight in this 'Blog since the turn of the month is the latest visitor numbers for the site. Thanks to Quinn's moving the forums to their own dedicated server, and the change of our e-mail services to a third-party provider, we're now finally starting to find some headroom to eke a little performance out of, allowing us to serve more readers than previously. That, combined with some big-hitting articles for the month of November (two major GPU launches and the NVIDIA Crysis driver furore) drove our numbers through the roof, and saw our visitor numbers climb by over 35% compared to October, with our page views creeping towards the half million mark.

Overall, that sets us some pretty hefty targets to live up to for 2008, and I for one can't wait to see where the Elite Bastards adventure is going to take me next.

Anyhow, that's probably all my 'Blogging done for 2007 (unless I suddenly find myself inspired to jot something down), so now is the time to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year! Have a good one everybody...

Facebook and invading users privacy

Scary stuff...

Seeing as my 'Blog here is replicated on my Facebook profile, I figured I'd link this here - It's well worth a read if you want to know what Facebook are doing with your online surfing habits.

What a rough week

I can't really talk about it much (in fact, I can't really use this 'Blog for anything even remotely personal any more since someone decided to take liberties with it to create a tissue of lies against me, causing a great deal of upset to me and my family), but this week has been a tough one, with illness and worry aplenty, making it very hard to focus on anything outside of family matters.

Thankfully, there's now light at the end of the tunnel, although I won't be able to stop fretting for a few days yet, so hopefully I'll be able to hit December in an overall happier frame of mind. Fingers crossed everything turns out okay. Boy, do I need a break.

We now return to our legally friendly, boring and safe discussion of my website work...

Why? - Good Friday (Boards of Canada Remix)

Need I say more? Not quite a new album, but new Boards of Canada material is always a guaranteed jaw-dropping musical experience, and always likely to veer off in an entirely different direction to whatever you were expecting from the Sandison brothers. Is this remix any different?

Of course not. Once again, fantastic beats are the order of the day.

"Looking at the stars, must be a reason..."

This is probably the simplest 'Blog entry I've written in a long time, but I have to say it - I'm happy. Incredibly so. I love my life.

Elite Bastards is going from strength to strength, my 'real' job is both challenging and moving forward in the right direction apace, Arsenal are top of the Premier League, I know some fantastic people, the sun was shining in a beautiful Autumn day today, and I've just learned that karma really is a bitch, and that you reap what you sow in one of the most hilarious stories I've heard about one of my friends (EDITED FOR CLARITY) in a long time.

Today is one of those days when every breath feels fresher, food tastes nicer, every joke is funnier, the sun on your face is warmer, every conversation more interesting, every song on the stereo sounds better. Like I say, I love my life. Long may it continue.

Another month gone by...

...means another leap in Elite Bastards' readership. The September statistics are in, and visitor numbers have increased another 8%, with page views up around 11.5%.

That's all there is to say really - I'm one happy camper yet again.

Due to a high level of shipments...

...your delivery has been delayed. Thanks Scan, for screwing up my review schedule.

For all the glamour of getting to test and play with the last hardware and software, I would imagine that a lot of people outside of the review business don't realise how much thought goes into scheduling testing and article writing... In my case at least. More often than not these days, I have at least half a dozen pieces of hardware 'in flight' and awaiting review, coupled with vendors anxious to get said samples turned around, review exposure, and so on. This can involve making some pretty tough calls at times, and quite often scheduling everything in such a way that I can produce two quality articles a week while keeping everybody happy is an almost arcane art form. Nonetheless, it's something I try to do to the best of my ability - Some sites regularly take on hardware and fail to make time to review those samples, which is a trap I never want to fall into. On occasion, I fail to get things right (the recent PowerColor Radeon HD 2900 XT was a perfect example of a sample that got its testing/review time pushed back and back for various reasons, and once that kind of slide starts its hard to halt), but overall I like to think that time management is one of my fortes, and certainly most of the vendors that I deal with seem pretty happy with my efforts at both turning around samples quickly and, perhaps more importantly, keeping them in the loop as to what is (or isn't!) going on.

When something comes out of left-field to strike down your beautifully prepared plans, which are often arranged thinking weeks ahead in my mind, it really is frustrating, hence the whole reason for this 'Blog entry. With a huge amount of hardware coming into the Elite Bastards lab at the moment, I had everything planned out perfectly, with the weekend largely set aside for benchmarking our first Intel X38 motherboard sample - As this needs DDR3 memory, I ordered some from Scan at the start of the week, scheduling it to arrive on Friday in perfect time for the testing. This remained the plan until tonight, at which point I'm informed that said delivery is delayed, thus knocking down the whole beautifully arranged set of dominoes.

Thankfully, going back to the drawing board has given me time to look at something that was very much on the back burner, which should now (provided nothing else goes wrong!) make up next week's first article, potentially with a different motherboard review to follow, pushing back the X38 piece an entire week - Not perfect, but it keeps things rolling along at the pace I try my best to keep.

Of course, even the 'two articles a week' mantra isn't always possible - Sometimes due to plans going awry, and sometimes due to plain laziness on my part... We all need a break sometimes, right? However, also on the horizon are at least a couple of occasions where we have articles/reviews coming up that will take a lot of testing and groundwork. One in particular is going to be the single biggest review we've tackled on the site yet overall, and another exciting step up for both the content quality and reputation of Elite Bastards.

Reading a long, onerous 'Blog entry like this, some of you probably wonder why the Hell I go through all this... To be honest, even the mundane stuff like planning my time and schedules excites me, and I really do get a great amount of joy from keeping Elite Bastards running and growing. A lot of people I know tend to take me simply as quiet, laid-back kind of guy, without realising just how much passion and drive to make any endeavours I embark upon succeed I have. I guess you could almost call it my secret weapon... ;o)

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Watching any anime series twice is pretty unusual for me, but three times... Well, it just doesn't happen very often. But, between the release of You Are (Not) Alone in Japan and me having a week with plenty of spare time on my hands, I found myself sitting down once again to make my way through Neon Genesis Evangelion - Doing it 'the proper way' of course: Episodes 1-20, the Director's Cut of Episodes 21-24, and then End of Evangelion as Episodes 25' and 26'.

For some odd reason, Evangelion is the only anime series I've only ever watched in its dubbed form previously, so third time around I righted that wrong and watched it with subtitles, and boy am I glad I did. I'm not sure whether it's down to a superior translation in the subtitles, better voice acting from the Japanese seiyū, some kind of third time lucky effect or just the fact that things work better in my head when I read them rather than hear them, but somehow this time around many of the subtleties of the Eva universe I'd missed out on previously clicked into place. Perhaps it's simply that I've matured, but watching the series this time, I found myself understanding far better the feelings, idiosyncracies and inter-personal relationships of the main characters, which made for a more satisfying and 'final' experience, particularly when it comes to that much-debated final episode in End of Evangelion. That isn't to say that I've completely figured out what those meaning-laden final seconds and words mean to me personally, but somehow this time around I came away with a more comprehensive feel for the world left at the end of the movie.

The one thing I really still can't get my head around is why so many people (and by this I'm talking viewers of the series, rather than in the show itself) hate Shinji Ikari so much. Of course, he is very much a 'flawed hero', and an excellently realised one at that (second only to Code Geass' Lelouch by my reckoning), but is he really the whiny, irritating character so many people see him as? Considering he's all but press-ganged into risking his life under the command of a father he hates, while being subjected to emotional and physical ordeal after ordeal, would anyone expect any different? I suppose it's just a personal thing, but I've always found Shinji's character fascinating, as I do Asuka's - I guess they simply both have facets that I can relate to directly, either in myself or people who I've been close to.

Anyway, at the end of the it all, the one thing I love most about Evangelion is how it engages your mind on so many levels - You come away from that closing scene wondering so many things, not just about the series, but also about yourself, your place in the world, and indeed the world around you itself. I really hope the new tetralogy of movies manages to keep that depth, while still adding something new and interesting to the franchise - Personally, I can't wait to see the first installment for myself, even though it appears to offer little deviation from the first six episodes of the original series (albeit squeezed into almost half the running time).

On the up and up

Okay, so I'm really pissed off about something today (and no, not just going back to work on Monday, that I can live with), but at least it hasn't been all bad news - Since we've been using Google Analytics at Elite Bastards for our traffic analysis, I've been able to keep an eye on how things are going visitor-wise month on month. The numbers for August came in this afternoon, and we've seen a very big increase in our overall traffic:

June: 243,392
July: 259,067 (+6.44%)
August: 309,747 (+19.56%)

Considering we're still largely limited by our infrastructure (until the forums are moved to their own dedicated server at least), this is a fantastic achievement to my mind.

A good excuse to forget my troubles and have a drink or three tonight methinks!!

Hey Venus

Hearing that a new Super Furry Animals album is close to release is always enough to excite me, and so it was when I first started hearing and reading talk about Hey Venus over the past couple of months.

This week, the album was released and... Man, what a disappointment. :o( Sure, there are one or two catchy tracks in there (with current single Show Your Hand being the pick of the bunch), but aside from that it's possibly the most bland collection of songs the band have ever managed to put together. For a band that has always delighted in fusing more traditionally indie and pop influences with what can only be described as psychedelic techno, the almost complete absence of the latter has left this album with what amounts to little more than a series of cookie cutter tracks - Lyrically clever in places (as always), but almost entirely lacking in punch. No moments to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up or have you grinning from ear to ear, the whole CD is really an exercise in mediocrity. I know the band have fallen on hard times financially and are doubtless looking for a more mainstream release to help tend to their bank accounts, but I'm not entirely sure that largely culling some of the properties that have made the band so unique is a good idea.

It seems that 2007 has been quite the year for good artists releasing uninspired new albums - The Scissor Sisters, The White Stripes, and now Super Furry Animals. Maybe this really is the death of the album that the media have been talking about so much recently....

You just hold me down so quietly....

A lot of us on this little place called the Internet lost a friend this weekend.

Rest in peace Dries - You were a kind, generous and fun-loving guy, and you won't be forgotten.

We Are The Night

It's been a while since I've been truly impressed by The Chemical Brothers work (not since Surrender, truth be told, aside from the odd track here and there), and I wasn't expecting too much from the new album based on the current single (catchy, and liable to get stuck in your head, but with no real meat to it). Well, I was wrong, the new album We Are The Night is awesome. Not uniformly so, sure, but it has enough outstanding tracks to keep dragging me back for another listen.

It might be the slight Boards of Canada-ish feel to some of the tracks (or rather, sections of tracks - The intro to Saturate could almost have been pulled from Macquarie Ridge, and the reversed loops on Harpoons are about as BoC as you can get), but there's more to it than that. The Klaxons contribution is awesome, The Salmon Dance is as ridiculously sublime as the name suggests, and as for Burst Generator... Let's just say I haven't had a dance track make me want to get up and... Well, dance... Like that in a long time.

After so many disappointing albums this year so far, it's really refreshing to find something that actually makes you sit up and take notice.

It's been a while...

Hmm, I haven't updated this in a while, mainly because it's been the same old slog recently - Not in a bad way, just plenty of work to be getting my teeth stuck in to. I'm slowly but surely growing my section of the business in my 'real' job (with some exciting times up ahead), to the point where I should hopefully soon be getting an assistant, the first step in building up my currently isolated job into a full-on department. In the meantime, Elite Bastards has seen a sudden Summer flood of review samples - It's almost as if all the vendors knew it was going to be a wet Summer and decided to give me something to do with my time. ;o) Anyhow, we've seen several new faces who are keen to work with us on the sampling front lately, which is always thrilling news, and that combined with some time off work has let me reach a point where I actually have more reviews on stand-by than I have time to publish each week!

Not a lot else to talk about aside from all that though - The new White Stripes album is rubbish (title track aside), I've become addicted to watching Big Brother (for my sins), Lucky Star is fast flying up my mental list of 'funniest anime ever' and, err... That's all really. I still have plenty of holiday left to take from my 'real' job before the Summer closes, but I've more or less made my mind up that I won't be going away anywhere this year - Instead, I'm seriously considering saving my money for the next twelve months to go and spend a week or two in Tokyo, Japan next year. It's somewhere I've always wanted to go and life's too short, so why not?

Wherever I lay my phone, that's my home

It had to happen and finally it has - I upgraded my phone! Gone is the shoddy, battered old Nokia 3310, and in its place is a shiny, fancy Nokia 6300. Hurrah!

I've also gone from Pay As You Go to a full-on contract, and changed my number so that only people I want to have it do (unlike my old mobile number, which was still known to all sorts of undesirables *cough*my ex-wife*cough*). Of course, if I don't hate you but you don't have my number yet due to my own absent-mindedness, drop me an e-mail and I'll let you have it.

Aside from that, this past weekend was taken up with two things which couldn't be more different. On the one hand, there was drinking copious amounts of wine while watching the Eurovision Song Contest, which is always good for several hours of hilarity. On the other, and taking up the rest of my weekend, was the far more serious business of sifting through 2GB of information, images and videos to put together an R600 architecture and technology preview for Elite Bastards. Delving into a new architecture is always both stressful and rewarding in equal measure, split between learning new things (which is always good) and fretting about whether you've got it right and covered all the salient points. All in all, I think I did a pretty decent job, and am actually glad I didn't have hardware testing to worry about directly alongside the 'science bit' - There's no way I could have produced 8,000 words and been as comprehensive if there had been benchmarking involved as well! Having said that, I'm now itching to get my hands on a board to match the theory with the practice.

Away from my hard work and motivation over the weekend, I'm really feeling very much burned out right now. My real job has been a very hard working slog lately, and it's left me generally drained when it comes to sitting down to test or write for EB (as you may have noticed by the content slowing up). The whole thing has reminded me that, earlier this year, I had both an additional hardware and games reviewer lined up for the site, both of whom have since disappeared without a trace or an article to their name. I could really do with some dedicated help, but that whole scenario has soured me somewhat to the idea of getting assistance outside of the awesome team of guys I have on staff already. We'll have to see I suppose.

If nothing else, I have a week off work coming up soon, with another to follow not long after, which should give me some much needed respite and chance to recharge my batteries. With any luck, the full version of Forza 2 should be out on the Xbox 360 by then - Have I mentioned my addiction to the demo yet? ;o)

I like hexadecimal

My favourite string is:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Stepping blinking into the light

Okay, own up - Who stole the last six weeks?! It really doesn't feel like the beginning of March since I last wrote an entry here - Where is the year going?

As you can probably guess from the intro, the last month or so has been a blur, focused almost entirely around my work. My 'real job' has been a busy yet heady mixture of meetings, disasters, recovering from disasters and more meetings, while Elite Bastards has seen me take in the joys of the Birmingham NEC for Channel Expo 2007 (with a little 'real job' stuff mixed in for good measure), while piling through the huge backlog of review samples that had been building up. Thankfully, I've managed to cut a swathe through that particular pile... Just in time to receive a bunch of new hardware for review. As I'm sure you all know by now though, I wouldn't have it any other way...

The big highlight of recent weeks on the review from has our involvement with the GeForce 8600 GTS launch - It's always a real buzz to be caught up in these things despite all the hard work and brain power involved, and the adrenaline never fails to start pumping in those final few minutes before you hit the big red 'go live' button, send off the mailshots, and then sit back and wait for the thoughts and reponses to your writing. I was pretty pleased with our finished piece on G84, and it seemed to be received well from all the comments I saw, so a job well done I'd say.

Away from EB, not a lot to report really - The girlfriend is no more (as in broken up, not as in dead, don't worry), and the weather is fantastic right now. Oh, and I need a holiday - I haven't had any time off work in eight months now. :oO

Still juggling those balls...

An entire month without a new 'Blog entry can only mean one thing - I've been busy. Very busy. This has indeed been the case throughout February - I don't remember ever having so many things to deal with in my life.

Top of the agenda has been my new position in my 'real' job - Despite being deceptively simple at its core, I've been driving hard for a lot of improvements and extensions to the remote management system of which I'm now in charge, which is in turn generating more work and revenue for the company. More revenue for me too - Two pay rises in as many months says I must be doing something right. ;o)

My efforts on this front have had a nasty side effect of slowing my output at Elite Bastards, but I'm now starting to regain my focus on that front I hope. I have a few reviews on the go at present, and last weekend I spent a very pleasant few hours in a Covent Garden restaurant with a couple of guys from AMD, chewing the breeze about CPUs and chipsets (With a very brief mention of R600, of course). The main focus of the chat was, of course, AMD's recently launched 690 chipset - I have all the relevant hardware sat here at the moment, so it's something else for me to crack on with.

Finally, amongst all this, I've been trying to make plenty of time for my girlfriend too. If I'm honest though, I don't think that particular relationship is going to hold out much longer - It's hard when the person you're with doesn't understand your passions in life and what drives you, and that seems to be the case here. Ah well, c'est la vie - It may sound odd and a kind of backwards way of looking at things, but I'm really keen on making myself more time for review writing again starting soon, I've really missed the challenge of growing Elite Bastards and writing definitive reviews for the site. I suppose that makes it official - I'm a workaholic.

So, that's basically my month from a 10,000 foot view - Lots of meetings, lots of running around getting stressed, and so on. I'd like to pretend March will be somewhat calmer for me, but that just isn't going to happen... ;o)

Left Side Drive

Well, I haven't written anything here since the beginning of the year, so I figure a quick update is very much overdue.

Thus far this year, I haven't been pushing quite as hard on the content front for Elite Bastards as I need to be - We've had some awesome reviews and articles hit the site, so the quality is there (of course!), but I need to ramp up the quantity again somewhat. I certainly have plenty to be getting on with, in particular with the arrival of a couple of copies of Windows Vista on my door step this week. Thus far, it's been more of a driver-induced nightmare than anything else, with Vista RTM drivers simply not available for some of the hardware I use, which is really beyond frustration considering the long gestation period of the Operating System . Come on guys (ASUS and Hauppage, I'm looking at you), pull your fingers out!

Anyway, the main reason right now for something of a slowdown in my writings is, quite blunty, a bit of romance. :oP Yes, I've gone and fallen head over heels with a very awesome someone (who shall remain nameless at this juncture), which has left me more than a little easily distracted and short on time when it comes to doing anything else. It's all good though if you ask me.

Finally, my new position in my 'real' job starts at the beginning of next month, so I guess I'll have to wait and see how everything shakes down time-wise once I've settled into all these exciting new happenings in my world. Don't worry though, I'm sure I'll be back working myself to the bone on the review front in no time. ;o)

No time for running away now...

Well, here we are, well and truly ensconced in 2007. Of course, New Year is traditionally a time for looking back on what has gone before, planning for the future and so on, so it would be remiss of me not to do something along those lines.

Personally, I wouldn't say 2006 was the most eventful year ever, but it was certainly a pretty successful one overall. Elite Bastards' readership grew substantially in my first full year at the helm, seeing us reach that critical mass where we actually get pretty decent pickings on the sample front. My 'real' job has been somewhat turbulent for reasons I'll explain in a bit, but in a good way at the end of it all. Oh, and I finally figured out that the ex-wife is a sociopath and pathological liar, which must count for something? It certainly makes me glad to be away from all that hassle. On the flip side of that I've met some awesome people during the year, some of whom will hopefully remain a big part of my life in this coming twelve months.

So, what of 2007? Well, one of my bigger challenges will begin in February as part of my 'real' job - With the contract I'm currently assigned to petering out at the end of January, I'll be moving into a new role, in which I've basically been given my own department (dealing with remote, proactive support) with a free reign to improve and extend it as I see fit. There's going to be a lot to learn, but it sounds like an exciting opportunity to me - I look forward to getting stuck into it.

Then, of course, there's Elite Bastards, which involves the tough job of maintaining the pattern of growth we set for ourselves in 2006. As I write this, I've basically sealed the deal on getting an additional hardware reviewer on board, and am just trying to sort out the kinks to make his life easier hopefully. I also have someone else whose promised to kick out a load of game reviews, so hopefully our editorial output should be even greater this year. Once that has settled down, it may be time to start looking into the dreaded advertising to bring some revenue back to the site. Finally, in the first weeks of the year one of our intrepid reporters (aka Jollemi) is going to be jetting off to CES in Las Vegas, which is a pretty damn good start to proceedings if you ask me.

All in all then, you could say I've set myself some pretty hefty challenges for the year, which is both exciting and a little scary. Wish me luck!