Reaching Out & Being Pushed Back

I've spent the last few days talking to a few companies I'd love to partner with, to bring you more reviews.  Now, on the internet we already have a lot of gaming related or performance reviews, but I was inspired more about the idea of working environment, development cycles, or throughput for the worker.

I'm interested in things like cables, drives, storage, cases and also the main centre piece of your working time, the machine itself.

I tried to speak to Intel, and was given a pretty flat "you're too small"... Believe it or not, 400,000 of you have passed through these pages in the six years they've been running (thank you so much), and by far the most popular posts are my programming tutorials, followed closely by the reviews.

Combining the two, could only be a win-win situation!

I have today therefore, sent missives to AMD, Asus and nVidia.  I've also sent online messages to some smaller storage firms, like Xstra in the EU and Kingpin.

It is actually quite hard to find UK based reviews of items, often you can be watching coverage of some great ideas from US sources, only to find either the items are not available or they cost an absolute fortune compared to US prices.

What else am I up to this week?... Well, I had a long researched article in the fire, it was related to my uncovering of several cheaters on US based IT courses, at least the US students were the only ones silly enough to get caught by myself.  However, during my uncovering of this situation one of the colleges in question took extreme exception to my posting about their students activities, and they slapped me with a "cease & desist" order.

Their order only covers publishing any names in the US, but my problem is, I can't prove conclusively who the students in question were, so if only one person out of a class of 29 were cheating in the manner I uncovered, then by just posting the name of the course or college, I would be defaming the innocent twenty nine; not something I want to do at all.

So, for now that article, as interesting as it was is on hiatus, and I can only thank the other three colleges and lecturers whom got back to me, however briefly, for your time and frank disclosures.

Arma 3 - Coop Play - Infantry Havoc

This stream saw us take up the role of medic for Alpha Squad, we were inserted into the AO via nighthawk and moved along the coast from the low ground, things went pretty much wrong from there on in, we lost our recon team, our A10 over cover was shot down, our support helo was shot down and when we were tasked with rescuing the pilot he was shot dead upon our arrival.

The stream picks up nearly an hour into this havoc, and finds Alpha pinned inside the perimeter of a small electric generating site, the roof of the generation hall has proven deadly, and we're running low on ammo...

After that hiccup the stream continues with the massive push by the enemy, so many soliders (rendered in ultra quality) are approaching the server is struggling to control them all, and my 770 GTX is struggling to render them all.

Finally the fire fight is over, Alpha Evac is ordered, we pop blue smoke, though the support pilot does not land on our marker... But we lived to tell the tale... Or did we?

Chess - Win

In my prior post I had posted that the en.lichess.org community was a little toxic, well, I'm happy to announce the registered community is actually quite nice... so far...

I decided after doing a bunch of the "openings" training (and being bad at it) I'd try a rated game...

I won, and not only did I win, but I had the opponent "Vecky" chat back to me, and it was a nice game, I enjoyed it.

As I said in the chat there, I celebrated with a nice coffee :)

More Chess - Toxic Players

I'm beginning to find the online Chess community a bit more feeble than I remember... I used to play on Yahoo Games Chess, years ago... I even met a lass through it once, seriously, chess got me laid... However, playing on en.lichess.org, I keep having my opponents leave the match!

In this case the chap had the upper hand, my opening went wrong, he moved his bishop aggressively into my centre, but then my knights rescued the situation and he left?!?!?!  Leaving me to just have to wait for his time to end or "claim victory".