Did I say I was going to take a break...

..over Christmas? Scratch that - Something very cool has just fallen into my lap which is going to take up a fair bit of time... ;o)

This is redirected mail...

Been a little while since I've made a proper Blog entry, things have been pretty busy the last few weeks, so there's a few things to catch up on.

Firstly, the Friday before last saw me attend my first ATI press event, a briefing in London about CATALYST 5.13 and AVIVO (The fruits of which you can read here). Hanging out with all the guys from the UK press was both overwhelming and daunting and very cool all at the same time - It's quite a head trip to meet those familiar names from the community like Fudo from The Inquirer and Rys from HEXUS (Who I probably owe some money for referring to Elite Bastards as 'the best domain name ever' at least half a dozen times in a ten minute period of introducing me to people ;)), as well as a handful of ATI guys like Andrzej, Godfrey and Richard Huddy. So, apart from feeling like the new boy in class amongst all those old hands, it was great to be part of the 'inner circle' as it were, and I'm hoping it won't be my last outing on the circuit. Now, if only NVIDIA would give me the time of day...

The big down side of the day was that I had to make a dash for the door pretty much as soon as the briefing was over (which meant I managed to miss getting a chance to say hi to Dave Baumann - D'oh!), to get back home and complete packing everything to move out of my old place early Saturday morning. Luckily, everything went smoothly (apart from breaking the sofa, which I didn't need anyway), and by Saturday evening all of my stuff was either back at my parents place or safely incarcerated in storage. Now, a week on, everything is just dandy, with my room here looking great and all my IT needs set up perfectly (better than it ever was at the bungalow). It's a big weight off my mind getting out of that dump and back here, and now I'm looking forward to entering 2006 with a renewed focus on the things that are important to me.

The past week has involved mainly sorting out the final parts of the move (mainly redirecting post, changing addresses for credit card bills and the like, hence the subject name from a Dubstar B-side), as well as working on the AVIVO article whenever I could. Saturday morning involved a race around the shops to sort out all of my Christmas shopping, which I sorted out with surprising ease. Then today has seen me working my arse off benchmarking a couple of boards to try and get the review out of the door before Christmas, as well as putting some sheen on a review from one of the other guys which should see the light of day in the next day or two. Once I'm done with writing up the video card review, there's one other short item I'd like to delve into before Christmas hits, after which I might even shock myself by taking a bit of a break for a few days (Although knowing me something else will pop up and grab my attention, and before I know it I'll be hammering away at another article).

Which brings me to tonight, and finally some proper time to kick back and relax by updating my Blog while listening to the new Belle and Sebastian album, The Life Pursuit - An excellent CD, possibly their best yet. Great stuff to chill out to.

Blog additions

Just thought I'd point it out for the less eagle-eyed amongst you - I've added a couple of things to the sidebar of this Blog in recent weeks. First up is the current state of play in my 'real' work Fantasy Football team (That's soccer to you American types). I was the office champion last season in a nail-biting finish, taking the overall lead by a meagre few points in the final week of the season. As you can see, my team (Fake Madrid, they'll always be in bold) have made a decent start to the season, and are currently sitting pretty at the top of the table. It's going to be tight though, so no room for complacency. ;)

The other item which I've added tonight is courtesy of music profiling site (and all-round 'cool thing') Last.FM, which now allows you to add HTML images showing your latest statistics wherever you please. So, I figured it would be cool to add a couple to my Blog sidebar, so you can see what tracks and artists I've been listening to for the past seven days. :o)

Anyway, I should have some cool and interesting things to write about in the coming few days, so keep your eyes peeled!

Dancing, laughing, drinking, loving...

Apologies for the lack of Blog updates, it's been a busy time for me lately. Focusing on recent events, last Friday was my new friend Katie's birthday, so I went out with her and a bunch of her friends for a night of drunken debauchery. Okay, so it wasn't quite like that... I wasn't drunk. ;o) That was then followed by waking up early(ish) the next morning to decorate what will become my room back at my parents place. Things are finally getting towards a manageable state on the move front, I'm pretty much organised apart from a handful of minor obstacles. Be warned though, I might be left without Internet access for a little while during the following few weeks, so don't worry if I disappear off the face of the planet for a while - I'll be back.

Things are equally busy on other fronts - Last week saw Beyond 3D publish my review of a couple of Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO boards, as you've probably already seen. It's always a pleasure to do some work for Dave, and the feeling of having an article up at a site which is quite simply the pinnacle of 3D hardware knowledge always gives me a real glow of achievement - It's kinda like being on Mastermind or something. ;o)

There's been no respite at Elite Bastards either - I published my review of the Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO² there today (What is it with me and those boards?!), and I should be having a couple of graphics boards show up in the next day or two for review, which should keep me juggling moving and benchmarking in an... 'Interesting' fashion. God knows how I'll pull it off, especially seeing as I have another little project that I think some of you will like that I want to sort out in the next couple of days.

The best news on the EB front lately was being shown a piece of what can only be described as 'fan mail' from someone pretty high up the hierachy at a well-known company. A quick e-mail in his direction, and things could be getting far more interesting on the sample and information front for us, all being well. So, hopefully we might be able to provide some far more comprehensive coverage of product launches very soon, fingers crossed. :o)

Having said that, the 'best news' moniker has been stolen away from that information these past couple of days, by the fact that a couple of our forum members have dug into their own pockets to donate to the site. It may sound overly emotional, but it puts a lump in my throat thinking that people are willing to part with their own hard-earned cash, entirely of their own free will, to fund our little Internet adventure. I've put a lot of time and work into various facets of the site over my time with Elite Bastards, but it's always been primarily for my own satisfaction and enjoyment (as well as helping out and empowering our readers, obviously) over any financial gain. So, it really means a lot that people think that we're worth something in cold, hard cash. That may sound weird, but that's just me.

Anyway, that's my quick catch up Blog for the day, I'm sure I've missed loads of stuff, but I'll hopefully be able to keep you all filled in during the run-up to Christmas, Internet connection permitting. :o)

In a word... Argh!!

I think this explains it all.

Right now, my house has no power, and hasn't done since about 11am this morning. So, I'm sat here at my parents right now typing away from my laptop. Which is fine, except I have a bunch of news to post that I can't get to as it's stored away in Outlook on my main computer, and some work on an article for an NDA which expires tomorrow that is also out of bounds until the power comes back, which won't be until tomorrow morning some time.

Technology is great... Until the power goes out. :P

Fitter, happier, more productive...

After my solely geek-related last entry, I figured I should really dedicate a post to how I'm doing right now. And the answer is - Pretty damn good. I'm sleeping better, exercising more (yes, that's right, exercise - I'm going for runs every evening, slowly building my fitness and stamina back to somewhere close to where they were a few years back), eating better, and generally doing well all round.

I move out of my place almost exactly a month from now, so a fair bit of my time has been taken up with trying to arrange everything - Clearing things out at my parents place, clearing things out here, arranging storage for the stuff I can't bring with me, decorating, and so on. But I'm really looking forward to leaving the dump I call my house now - It doesn't hold any real use for me now, so I can't wait to get the burden of it and bad memories that go with it off my hands. All of this has eaten up a fair bit of my reviewing and writing time, but don't worry, normal service will be resumed soon enough.

Anyway, it isn't all hard work for me - Friday night, my good friend Gemma came down from Southampton for the night, firstly to catch up on everything (I haven't seen her in the flesh in forever!) and secondly to take what would have been Tara's place going to see Jimmy Carr (a British stand-up comic, for you non-UK people) as I'd booked the tickets several months ago. If you like old-school gags and joke telling, and aren't easily offended, then it's great stuff and I thoroughly enjoyed it...

"I went to Ask Jeeves the other day. I asked Jeeves... Why is Google so much better?"

Then, of course, Saturday was the England - Argentina friendly, and one of the best games of football I've had the pleasure to witness (Helped of course by the fact that England won - Just). I've also been dedicating some 'me' time to ploughing through watching Lost - I got fed up of waiting each week for episodes in the UK to air, so I went off and found the US episodes. I finished Season One last night, so I'll probably start off the second series tonight. Good, intriguing stuff indeed.

Anyway, this seems as appropriate a place as any to finish with a word of thanks to all of you who've comiserated me, talked to me, worried about me or helped me out over the past few weeks, every one of your comments and thoughts were much appreciated. As you can hopefully see though, I'm doing just fine. ;o)

System upgrade time

Now I have more time and money afforded to me, and thanks to some irritating instability of my Pentium 4 system (When I say irritating, I mean random hardware-related reboots irritating, not stupid little application error irritating), I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and put some thought into upgrading my system. I wanted to build a machine that would last me into the future (Like that ever happens!), so here's what I ended up with.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+: As with many people right now, when it came to choosing a CPU my mind was caught between going for stellar single core performance, or more modest performance on a dual core platform. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that much of my time is spent on the desktop . On a quiet day, I'll have Outlook, Firefox and Azureus running, but it isn't unusual to have a lot more going on at one time - Take last night for instance, where in addition to the aforementioned applications I also had Excel, Frontpage, WinAmp, Paint Shop Pro, Notepad and a host of Windows Explorer windows open at one time. So, I opted to go dual core, and I haven't regretted it one iota - If the move to a HyperThreading capable CPU was a boost, the move to dual core is a giant leap. It's something you need to experience for yourself rather than have it explained to you, but things feel smooth!

Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard: Picking a motherboard was an easy choice for me - I've been using the 'vanilla' A8N-SLI in my test system for some time without issue, with my only niggle being the annoyingly loud southbridge fan. The A8N-SLI Premium removes this issue thanks to a passively cooled southbridge, and throws in BIOS-level SLI switching as an added bonus. A stable, decent performing motherboard with all the features I wanted at a decent price made this a more than obvious choice.

2x BFG GeForce 7800 GT OC vieo cards (SLI): When it came to picking a video card, the decision was made easy for me for a number of reasons. Firstly, I already had one of these boards sat around waiting for review, so picking up a second identical card gave me the opportunity to run an SLI configuration for a real pixel-pushing behemoth. Secondly, much as I would have loved a Radeon X1800-based board to partake in anti-aliased floating point blending abilities and other feature packed goodness with, the price difference between an X1800 XL and the £200 BFG board was too much to stomach - The price:performance ratio of this part is simply unbeatable right now. And boy do these things perform! I don't remember having such a tingly feeling playing games since I moved from a Radeon 8500 to 9700 PRO some years ago - F.E.A.R. at 1280x960 with 4x AA, 8x AF and everything on maximum (Yesy, that includes soft shadows!) is a sight to behold, as was Call of Duty 2 last night at 1280x1024, 4x AA and 8x AF with everything maxxed out.

Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatal1ty sound card: This was the biggest 'luxury' on my list, and to be honest I really haven't stretched its legs yet, but I felt that my old Audigy board was ageing and could probably do with something later and greater to take its place. The X-Fi certainly seems to have its share of nifty tools, and I haven't noticed any performance impact from sound effects in-game as I did on occasion with the Audigy, so I can't complain. The only downside right now is that I've found it impossible to get the optical output working, but that's a whole other story.

2GB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM (CAS 2): We seem to be rapidly approaching a world where 1GB of RAM won't cut it, so this seemed as good a time as any to make the move to 2GB of memory. It's hard to appreciate how much difference the added RAM is making in the context of the whole system, but certain things certainly seem nippier when in the past there'd be a bout of hard disk thrashing, so I'd like to think it's done some good.

Enermax 535W SLI power supply: It's a power supply, and even I can't get excited about that! It has all the connectivity I need, adjustable fan speed, and it just works, which is all I ask of it. If it doesn't blow up and kill or electrocute me, then it's a good unit in my book.


So, there you have it - A little time and a lot of money later, I'm left with a system that I can be more than proud of - It performs great, feels responsive, and makes gaming more enjoyable than I remember in a long time... Mission accomplished!!

Big changes, familiar faces - The future of Elite Bastards

I mentioned a couple of days ago I'd reserve a separate post for some Elite Bastards-related goodness, so here is the news as promised.

As of Sunday, I officially took over the financial support of Elite Bastards. I now pay the bills and the server is in my name so, officially speaking, I'm the new owner (and/or Editor-in-Chief if you prefer) of the site. This won't really have any obvious impact on the day-to-day running of the site - Zarathustra will still do his thing when the server needs it, Quinn is still webmaster and all round 'making things look pretty' guy, and I'll be churning out news and content as much as possible. The big change really is that obviously running a web site such as ours isn't always a cheap business, and my recently changed circumstances mean that I can offer the site both the time and financial stability it requires to grow and prosper - Good news I'm sure you'll agree.

My first act after making this change was to sort out an issue that has plagued the site for some time - Its lack of RAM. I'm sure many of you have noticed periods of slowness or inaccessibility after new articles had been published, and this was due to the lack of memory required to handle a large number of concurrent connections. I've now had the amount of RAM in the server upgraded from 512MB to a much healthier 1.5GB, and even before we've tweaked the configuration of the server to make the most of this new memory things are looking far smoother. Our next priority is to move to a new Content Management System, but I wouldn't want to say when that'll be finished, seeing as it was originally slated for this Summer. ;o) Beyond that, I have a few ideas of things I'd like to see happen at the site, but that's one for the future.

To close, I'm sure you'll all join me in thanking Zarathustra for the considerable time and money he's ploughed into the site thus far, without which we wouldn't be here right now. And of course, thanks to all of the staff for their contributions to the development of Elite Bastards.

I'm always open to suggestions as to improvements or changes to the site from any angle, so if anyone ever has any ideas, you know where to find me.

It's my birthday, no-one here day, very strange day...

If the subject title isn't clue enough, today is my 26th birthday. It isn't quite the day I was expecting it to be a few weeks ago, but oddly enough I feel very content about the whole thing. It's been pretty much an ordinary day spent at work, then coming home to cook myself a fantastic meal (If I may say so myself! I tend to hugely downplay my abilities in the kitchen due to the simple fact that I don't really like cooking), just generally relaxing for a bit, and soon I'll be settling down with a stack of anime and a bottle of wine. I really can't find cause to complain about that... :oP

Aside from Tara leaving at the end of last week, I was also saddled with a nightmarish cold (Which still hasn't disappeared completely) which has left me pretty drained for a few days now. Thankfully, it didn't stop me crawling out of bed to deal with answers to an interview I organised some time ago. It turned out to be one of the best, most well-received articles I can remember at Elite Bastards, which is always pleasing, although to be honest most if not all of the credit should go to Voudoun and John Reynolds for their work in compiling the questions. Let's be honest, it's the questions and answers people read these things for, not any nonsense I spout by way of an introduction! There is another point of Elite Bastards business which should be mentioned here, but I'll save it for another day and another post as it's too important (to my mind) to bury in with everything else. It's good news though, mark my words. :o)

The joint mess of separation and cold have meant not a lot of benchmarking has been done lately, and to make things worse when I did go to crack on with it yesterday my test rig which I was trying to rebuild was playing up something chronic. I've left it to it's own devices today, but tomorrow I'll attack it with vigour to hopefully get back on track. What makes it more frustrating is that my current testing project isn't even for Elite Bastards at all, but for another site I've written for in the past, that doesn't begin with H. ;o) Ah well, fingers crossed it'll behave tomorrow.

Anyway, enough rambling from me for today. Now, where's that bottle opener...

Everything changes... Everybody hurts

I'll keep this post short and to the point, as it isn't something I want to dwell on - My wife has left me for another guy, and is moving out of our house on Thursday. To make things worse, the guy in question didn't know she was married, and in fact still doesn't believe the fact despite my protestations to him. So, it came down to a simple 'Me or him' scenario, and Tara chose him.

So, that's it... It's over. I'll be moving back into my parents place as soon as possible, a move which will actually have previously unforseen benefits for Elite Bastards. Even the darkest clouds have a silver lining, I suppose...

"When the truth dies...

...very bad things happen"...

A productive few days

It's been a pretty busy time for me Elite Bastards-wise one way or another lately, but Tara was away in Southampton visiting a couple of friends at University there over the weekend, which left me as master of the domain and thus offered me the opportunity to plough through editorial, which I grabbed with both hands. At the tail end of last week I squeezed out a technology preview of ATI's Radeon X1000 series, which turned out pretty well I thought if I may say so myself. This left me the weekend to focus on a couple of articles - Firstly, a review of Club 3D's Radeon X800RX, which I published today, and another piece which should go live later in the week. With any luck this should let me refocus on the GeForce 7800GT review, but I get the feeling that more distractions will be coming along soon. They should be good distractions though, so don't worry. ;o)

Away from writing-related stuff, I took some time on Saturday to chill out and watch the England game (althought the words 'chill out' and 'England game' invariably fail to gel particularly well in the same sentence), and also did a little catching up anime wise, taking in the latest episodes of Bleach and Full Metal Panic : The Second Raid as well as continuing to work my way through the first series of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Upon Tara's return on Sunday afternoon we also sat down to watch Sin City together, and I have to say the second viewing was at least on a par with the first. It's still my movie of 2005 so far, no doubt about that.

Continuing the movie theme, I went to see A History of Violence with the wife last weekend - Not a bad movie, and decent entertainment, although to be honest I think I enjoyed it more than Tara did. Music-wise, I'm still hopelessly addicted to the new Boards of Canada album, The Campfire Headphase... I'm not even going to attempt to desribe its musical genius, you just have to find it and listen to it anyway you can. It's quite possibly one of the best albums I've ever heard. Period.

Weekend away et al

As most of you reading this will doubtless have already noticed, I got back from my short break on Monday afternoon. Those handful of days in Wales were definitely much needed to recharge my batteries, and just spend some time relaxing and chilling out - It was really nice to just have some time between me and Tara, with little in the way of the other distractions that tend to crop up in day-to-day life. I might put together a slideshow of pictures from the trip as an MSN Spaces slideshow to bore you all with some time, so be warned! ;o)

Thankfully I also have all of this week off work, so it's meant plenty of sleeping in, and has also given me time to finish off the Radeon X800GT review I started before I went away for Elite Bastards. If you're interested, I've just gone live with it here. I should be starting the mammoth task of my GeForce 7800GT review next, so don't be surprised if you find me rocking in a corner muttering 'No more benchmarks, no more benchmarks...' any time soon. ;o)

Away from all things Elite Bastards, there isn't much to report - I'm ridiculously obsessed with the new Boards of Canada album right now, which is quite frankly one of the best things I've heard. Ever... Not to mention being strangely cathartic and inspirational at the same time to my writing. This weekend I should also be going to see A History Of Violence with the wife - It looks good from the trailer I've seen, so I hope it doesn't disappoint.

So, there you have it, everything I can think of to say for now. :o)

Romantic and relaxing weekends

Well, this week is turning out to be a mixed one for me thus far. On the down side, I have a nasty cold right now, and if there's one thing I hate with a passion it's feeling ill. I've been fighting it all week, but today it finally got the better of me to the point of pissing me off.

However, the good news is that I have the next week and a half off work - Whoo-hoo!! What's even better is that tomorrow I'm leaving for a long weekend in South Wales with my wife, which should be a fabulously relaxing break for both of us. No laptops, no mobiles, just the two of us in a little cottage in the middle of nowhere, you can't get better than that. :o) I can't help but think of it as a kind of belated honeymoon, seeing as we didn't have anything of the sort when we got married in Las Vegas last year, and tied the knot in our last couple of days there.

Last weekend was also a pleasant one spent with the wife - On Saturday afternoon I took her to see AFC Bournemouth play for the first time, in what turned out to be an incident-packed game. Very enjoyable indeed, although an hour to get out of the car park was not so much so! Also, any facility which thinks that £3.40 for two bottles of Coke is reasonable needs their heads examining. Note to self - Smuggle in your own drinks next time! On Sunday, we went and spent some time with my parents and had a great meal there as always, and the majority of the rest of the weekend was just spent chilling out together. A simple but enjoyable time, and a great reminder of why I love spending time with Tara so much. :o)

Moving off in to the World of Elite Bastards, I've been working on testing for a Radeon X800 GT review most of this week - The benchmarks and the like are all done, so it's just a case of putting the actual content together when I get back from my break away. Perhaps a little more excitingly however, I've finally gotten my hands on a GeForce 7800-based board - Don't expect to see a review quickly for this one though, I intend on covering every angle I can with a fine-toothed comb. :o) I need to get hold of a relevant part to compare it to as well, but that's all in hand... :oP

I think that just about covers everything, I just wanted to get a few things down before I leave for Wales bright and early tomorrow. I'll be sure to tell you all about it, and bore you with pictures of fields and sheep, when I return early next week! ;o)

One year ago today...

Today's Blog post is a simple one, no talk of work or computer hardware.

One year ago today, I got married. This post is just to share the occasion of our first wedding anniversary with anyone who cares to listen, and to thank Tara for making me so happy and just generally making me a better person, not just for the past year but for the four years we've known one another in one way, shape or form.

I know she almost certainly isn't going to read this, but it really doesn't matter - I just want to shout out to the World that, right now, I'm still the happiest man alive, just as I was a year ago today. There are so many memories that I cherish, and still many more yet to be created. I really don't think I could be any more content. :)

On the hardware trail....

As I mentioned in my last Blog post, I don't think an entry goes by where I don't tantalise you in one way or another about great things to come at Elite Bastards. This past week, however, has proved to be a bumper week for 'Things you should probably get excited about'.

Aside from my break while working full-time for HEXUS, I've been with Elite Bastards in some kind of staff capacity for over two years now, and in that time we've grown. A lot. Not just in traffic and forum numbers I'd like to think, but also in maturity and nous. Sure, we still screw up and make mistakes, and we still don't always handle things as well as we perhaps should, but as a whole we've learned one Hell of a lot, and I'd like to think that it's all filtered down into a better experience for our visitors.

Anyway, I think any hardware site worth its salt reaches a point of critical mass where manufacturers and companies start to sit up and pay attention when you request something from them, rather than simply hit the 'Delete' key. And I believe that this week has demonstrated that we are now beginning to take on that critical mass. I'm not going into details until I have concrete hardware in my hands, but what I will say is that this week has been a boon with regard to relations with several hardware manufacturers. There's one deal in particular which I'm really excited about that's been verbally agreed for some time, but now appears to be reaching that final stage of actually getting review samples, but I've also had a number of very fruitful conversations that look exceedingly likely to help bring more reviews and content to you guys. Like I say, I won't promise anything until I have it sat in front of me, but I have a very good feeling about the way things are going.

Of course, this doesn't mean I'll be sitting back and resting on my laurels - Indeed, it's going to require even more commitment and effort on my part to make things work out and prove that we've got what it takes to be up there with the regulars when it comes to the sample-winning lottery.

So, watch this space, and carry on telling me and the rest of the staff what is good, what is bad, and what you want more of, and I'll keep on doing everything in my power to try and secure the latest and coolest hardware to review. I know I won't always get it, but it won't ever stop me from trying. :)

It's been a while...

My God, I haven't updated this in an age!! :oO

To be honest, the reason why is that I really don't have much to report at the moment, things are just ticking along without anything too spectacular happening. Maybe I'll have some more exciting things to say in the next two or three weeks, but we'll have to see on that count. :oP (I feel like I always say this in every Blog entry, but nothing seems to come of it all that often!)

Elite Bastards is.... Well, Elite Bastards. As always, things in the pipeline, a pile of as yet unreviewed hardware on my desk, and hopefully bigger, better things to look forward to (Although still no 7800 GTX!). At the moment I'm working on an article on NVIDIA's SLI anti-aliasing, which to be honest is probably one of the most in-depth things I've done in a while. It's shaping up pretty nicely though, and if I'm disciplined I might just get it done and dusted by the end of this week.

Away from all that, last week saw me take a week of work, which turned out to be very relaxing - It was great to be able to spend a full week with Tara, on days out or just lounging around. It really recharged my batteries somewhat, so hopefully I'll be able to take another week or so in September to enjoy some more time away from the office and all of the boredom that entails. :oP And yes, that is me admitting that I miss full-time hardware reviewing. ;o)

Weird dreams and the 7800

I knew there was something I'd forgotten about in my last Blog entry, and now I've remembered it...

You know you're thinking about video cards way too much when you end up dreaming about them at night. Yep, that's right, I had a GPU-related dream... About SLI to be more precise. The weirdest part is, there weren't actually video cards in my dream, SLI seemed to be represented by two snakes - One was green and one was blue. I'm not sure what they were doing exactly, but people around me were clearly referring to them being together as some form of SLI. No, I don't know what it means subconsciously either. And no, I wasn't smoking anything.

Looking at more of the GeForce 7800 GTX reviews around the web the past few days has made me realise two things:

1. I really want one to review
2. I need a monitor with a higher maximum resolution than 1600x1200

I'm not sure quite why I have such an urge to check one out right now considering that there isn't a lot new feature-wise to see on it (Transparancy anti-aliasing aside), I guess I'm just a whore for new hardware. Oh well, I'll just cross my fingers and see what comes up. :o)

On a final note, why does the rain always seem to wait until the weekend? :o| At least I've finally gotten around to booking some time off work about a month from now, which means you guys either won't be seeing very much of me between the 18th-22nd July, or you'll be seeing an insane amount of me while I plough through content aplenty. I wouldn't hold your breath for the latter though. ;o)

Longest day (+ 1)

Well, it doesn't feel like almost a month since my last Blog post, but apparantly it is so... Oops.

The World of Elite Bastards has been full of some somewhat exciting happenings recently. NVIDIA didn't answer any of my e-mails trying to get hold of G70 information, but thankfully that didn't stop me getting hold of it all anyway. :o) Hopefully my efforts might stand me in better stead with them next time around, although I won't hold my breath. I've also put a little time into trying to build up relationships with AIB partners of (specifically NVIDIA) at the moment, and have hopefully made some steps in the right direction.

More importantly, the other even more exciting thing at EB which I'm nurturing has moved another step closer to fruition - I can chase it down a little more now the G70 article is out of the way, so hopefully soon I can start talking about it a little more. There's also a third 'pretty cool' thing which is a bit of a work-in-progress content wise, so hopefully that can move towards its actual 'getting an article together' stage soon. On top of all that, I still have a fair old pile of hardware to review, and quite probably at least one item to give away to a lucky reader!

Finally, Quinn is currently working on a Content Manaagement System for the site - It looks like a dream to me right now, with everything I need and then some. Again, hopefully that's something we can start showing off sooner rather than later once we've got it how we want it.


Away from EB, I saw Sin City, and it was the single most fantastic movie of the year so far. I'm not even going to bother waxing lyrical about it, just go and see it for yourself if you haven't already. War of the Worlds is the next movie on mine and Tara's 'to see' list, so we'll probably go and catch that on its opening weekend.

This past Saturday I was in London with the wife, being cultured and stuff - We went to Tate Modern to catch the Frida Kahlo exhibit going on there. Some fantastic works of art on show there, I was seriously impressed. We also spent some time shopping (Well, her shopping and me paying), and I also took her to see my spiritual home for the first time - Highbury, current home of Arsenal football club that is. She has a hugely embarrassing picture of me acting like an idiot in front of it as her current desktop backdrop, but no, I'm not going to let any of you see it. Ever. It would have been a perfect day, had it not been so damned hot! Pushing through crowds of sweaty people on the tube in the heat quickly loses its novelty value, I can tell you.

I'm sure there were a load of other things I meant to add here, but I can't think of them. Who knows, mabe it'll stand me in good stead when it comes to updating this thing more frequently?

Moving on up

Not a lot to report, but I felt like I really should put something in my Blog to close off the month.

I'm nearly finished with my GeForce 6600GT review. Honest. Well, kinda. Hopefully I'll be done with it this week, if not I should be lynched. Away from that, I knocked out a brief CrossFire preview today to keep up with the Joneses. I'm also sat on some other pretty interesting information that I can't talk about, plus another opportunity for Elite Bastards that I'm very excited about. It could be a great stride forward for us as a site, and also pull us out in some new and intriguing directions. I don't want to reveal anything until I actually have guarantees in hand, but I'll keep you guys posted. :o) While we're talking EB gossip, the coming weeks will hopefully see the beginning of a redesign of the site. Again, I'm excited, although I do need to sit down and put the suggestions people have made together into a cogent plan on things we should look at doing.

Away from the site, things have been ticking along pretty reasonably. Arsenal won the FA Cup, and very undeservedly so, work is busy (But never too busy ;o)) and I have both the new Coldplay and Royksopp albums (Both of which I'm undecided on as far as my 'like-o-meter' goes). Went and saw Star Wars: Episode 3 on the opening night - I think my wife enjoyed it more than me, but it was still the best of the latest trilogy by far. To my shame, I laughed at one point where I was supposed to be upset... My wife will never let me near children again now I fear. :o( We'll probably try to catch Sin City this weekend (Yes, the UK sucks for movie releases), although I have a nasty feeling it's going to be a case of style over substance.

As a final point, I need a holiday - Anywhere know of a good place to stay in Wales, in the Cardiff area preferably?