A traveling week for me

I've got a meeting tomorrow morning in NYC which means I'll be hitting the road at around 6AM to avoid rush hours going into the city. The meeting will take up most of my day but I plan on getting some gift shopping done for Vinney before heading back to CT. Then on Thursday I've got my trip up to ATI to talk Mac stuff but I'll try and drop by in between trips to give you all updates.

One of my 24-pin PSUs died on me over the weekend, throwing a huge wrench in my testing schedule, thus forcing me to set aside all HL2 CPU scaling testing until after I finish testing for Wednesday's launches. What's coming on Wednesday? Two things, both graphics, ATI finally sent out X800 XL cards to reviewers. The clock speeds are identical to the X800 XL we used in our X850 review so you should already know what it performs like. Our review on Wednesday will simply add power consumption and some discussion of availability to the information that we've already published. As we mentioned in the X850 review, the X800 XL is an interesting part but it will have to be sold and available at $350 (preferably less) in order for it to be competitive with the 6800GT.

Speaking of availability, ATI promised that the new X850 line would be available online a week after our review went live. They promised...and unless I missed something, they haven't delivered. This year has got to be one of the worst years in recent history for GPU availability, though admittedly not nearly as bad as the availability fiasco that led to the demise of 3dfx years back.

I've lost yet another office phone to bad luck, this is my 4th multiline phone in recent history that has just died. I don't use it that much, but I've had to temporarily steal the phone from Vinney's desk so I can actually answer calls. My favorite, most reliable, multiline office phone of all time is still the 3-line Nortel/Aastra Venture Phone that I bought back in '98. A little over a year ago it started acting up which is why I had to replace it, but I'm strongly considering finding one of those in good condition and picking that up again. The only feature it lacked that seriously bothered me was a way to delete all messages, it forced you to delete them one by one which can be bothersome if you let a lot of them pile up.

A friend of mine is in the car market for his first sports car so I'm lending my reviewing advice wherever possible. He wants my opinion of the new C6 vette which is the first Corvette that has actually interested me (the Z06 came close, but no cigar). I've been trying to get a test drive around here so I could give him my opinion but there's only one car at the local dealer and the general manager is using it as his demo so it's never on the lot. Plus I haven't had much time lately to go down there and bug them so it may just have to wait until I head back down to NC for the holidays.

We've been playing a lot of Halo 2 on Xbox live, I am thoroughly addicted and contrary to when we first started playing, we are actually competitive with most people we get matched up with. All my free time is spent with Halo 2 these days, I haven't had a chance to beat Half Life 2 yet. It's not that I'm not into Half Life 2, it's mostly that I don't want to spend more time in front of test beds than I have to. Couple that with the fact that for some reason Half Life 2 makes me nauseous after about an hour of playing it and you can understand why I've tended to stay away from it these days. I've never had a nauseous feeling after playing any FPS, just Half Life 2 for some reason. I haven't really investigated it much but it's quite strange; it doesn't even happen while I'm benchmarking it and watching the screen, only when I'm actually playing it. Very odd.

That's it for now, Vinney's got a late class tonight so I'm going to head to go pick her up shortly then I've got a review to finish before I force myself to sleep early in preparation for tomorrow's inevitably long day.

Hope you all had a wonderful weekend.