Classes are officially over but I do have to head over to campus this afternoon to contest the way a program my partner and I turned in close to two months ago was graded just a couple of days ago. It's something that could have been resolved via email but that only works if the person you're emailing actually responds to you :) Anywho, that's unfortunately what I'm up to this afternoon.

I got Deus Ex 2, I loved the original but I hated the fact that it ran like crap on anything but a 3dfx based card (which were far from the fastest cards out at the time). The sequel unfortunately won't run at higher than 1024x768 without getting choppy on a Radeon 9800 Pro; I have yet to try it on a NVIDIA card but I'm quite curious. I'm going to see if I can make a benchmark out of it at all as it could be an interesting addition to our game suite. I can't tell if the game is CPU or GPU bound yet as I haven't loaded it up on anything other than the Athlon XP that I happened to be near while I had the CDs, I will play around with that today.

Our first peripheral review in a very long time has been published today as promised, it's a 3-way shootout of entry-level pen tablets. If you're an artist and are curious about these things then you may want to take a look at the review. The next peripheral review due out is a Sub-$200 Photo Printer roundup and I'm hoping to have that available next weekend. This stuff is all new to us so we'd appreciate any feedback, including things you'd like to see on the peripheral front.

I mentioned storage reviews in my last blog, but I'm still looking for more response in terms of what you'd like to see first. One problem with the test suite as it stands is that it only tests up to the first few hundred MBs of the drive it is installed on, so what you lose is a difference in performance between inner and outer transfers. I'm working on a couple more test suites to stress those conditions to provide a more thorough analysis of disk performance, I'm hoping to have that done by the end of the weekend.

I saw Elf last night; it was better than I expected and actually pretty entertaining. I still haven't seen Matrix Re...Ra...the third one. I was waiting for my girlfriend to come down to see it with her but now I'm more and more tempted to just wait until it hits the $1.50 theaters, that somehow just seems wrong given that it is the Matrix. Maybe that will be my Christmas Day movie of choice this year :) Nothing is better than going out for a drive and seeing a movie on the 25th, the roads are empty and so are the theaters.

Enjoy the Saturday, as warm or as chilly as it may be where you are.