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!!