Friday 29th February 2008 is kind of an extra day, so I thought I'd fill it in with some of the stuff I have let out over the last few months and use this extra day to re-evaluate the way in which I blog.

Every couple of days, Fiona asks me, what are you blogging about today. I think about it for a minute, realize that I am still working on the same stuff that I was working on a couple of days ago and then end up not blogging. But yet, every time a friend comes around, I find I have plenty to talk about. So do I blog on just IT stuff, or do I blog about all sorts of things that I'm doing?

Is it possible that some of the other things in my life, might be of interest to readers who visit tech sites? Hell yeah. So why don't I blog about it?

Well this is my blog to change all my future blogs. I have been so hung up on finding something ingenious to say about a topic in the tech industry that I have neglected all of the other exciting things that have happened in my life since we launched this site - some things that could even be classified as remotely techy!

So we launched tkArena back on January 7th. I was sitting in a hotel room at the Excalibur hotel in Vegas at the time. I had spent the week earning blisters on my feet as I tried to cover as much of CES as possible. One of the really cool things I got to see at CES that was kind of tech-related but it wasn't, was a giant Bumblebee on Dolby Digital's stand. As I've had a few of my geeky friends ask for a copy of the photo when I've shown it to them, I thought I'd post a copy of it here. 

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After going to CES, I spent the weekend 4 wheel driving with a good friend in Texas where we were not only privileged enough to do some amazing things in a H2 but we also managed to push it to its limits and kill it! There's nothing like getting out of a 4 wheel drive and finding bits of the diff on the side of the car to confirm how dead it actually was. 4 wheel driving is something that's been an interest of mine for several years now and although I don't get to do it as often as I'd like, I always enjoy pushing technology and machinery to its limits in the great outdoors.

After going out to some fabulous restaurants and getting some incriminating photos of exhausted business partners falling asleep in bars, I headed out to Detroit to visit some family. While I was in Detroit I was lucky enough to visit the motor show there. And if the automotive industry tickles your fancy, I've got some photos that will blow you away! Now at CES, I got photos of bumble bee in his full glory, transformed state. In Detroit I had the pleasure of seeing the disguised version of bumblebee, a very sexy yellow Comoro.

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We went to the motor show on the very first morning that it opened, which was kind of lucky for us because it was extremely cold, around 0F and not many people bothered to make the trek out there first thing. So I was able to get lots of clear photos without all the background traffic of attendees. One thing I did notice was the amount of hybrid cars being showcased. Humvee, Jeep, GM, Ford - they all had one or more forms of hybrid cars. Rather than just talk about it, let's have a look at some.

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This concept Chevy Vault has a rechargable electric battery and an onboard raneg extending gas generator. After drivning for 40 miles the car would switch to gas, ethanol or biodiesal fuel. Not only is this a green type car but unlike most of the other concept cars at the show, this baby actually looks tough. You can tell it's related to the transformer bumblebee.

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This Hx Hummer was very cool looking. Aside from the fact that it's a hybrid, I don't have much more info on it.

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There's nothing like getting a nice shot of the rear end! The Hx is more along the size of a Jeep than a Humvee - even smaller than the H3. It looks like Humer are going for the light 4WD this time around.

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No idea what Suzuki were thinking when they designed this utility vehicle. This funky looking green thing is a hybrid designed for council workers. It even includes light saber looking flash lights as door handles.

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Just for your desktop pleasure, here's some photos of the sexy looking speed racer car. I must admit that this gorgeous looking retro car looks a lot better in real life than it did in any cartoon. Check out more info about the movie here: http://speedracerthemovie.warnerbros.com/

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The guys who designed this amphibious vehicle were on something really funky. Apart from an amusement park, where do they really think this thing would be used. I mean, just watch some old James Bond movies if you want to know how to make a sexy amphibious car.

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Jeep may have been giving the attendees of the motor show the wrong impressions of the 4 door Jeep Wrangler's capabilities. They don't need to pretend that they can drive it up a 180 degree angle to sll me on this baby. I think i might have to trade in the old Cherokee.

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This is a new concept Jeep Renagade - a hybrid deisel/electric. The propulsion system combines a 40-mile lithium ion battery and a BLUETEC diesel engine providing 110 miles to the gallon.

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The two seater Renegade is really designed for the 4 wheel drie crusing enthusiast and fun activities like going dune bugging. It kind of reminds me of a buggy out of a cartoon I used to watch as a kid.

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The Shelby needs no introduction, especially if you're a Knight Rider fan, you'll know this is the shell for the new kit. I definitely developed a new appreciation for the Shelby Cobra after seeing it in the pilot episode of Knight Rider.

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The Bullet is a concept car from Ford based on a Ford GT. I'm not an expert on it, but I'm sure there'll be guys in our forums that will be able to tell us all about it.

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The A BAT from Toyota is only in here because of it's name. It's a hybrid truck but i could some uber-tech geek going out and buying this truck simply because he had an old motherboard that he used to be able to overclock with that had a similar name.

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I have to thank my cousin Rachel and her father Johnny for spending the day with me at the Detroit motor show and dragging themselves out in the freezing weather.

These last two photos were taken on the booths at their respective car dealers and uploaded to the net at a later date - a really good idea from the dealers as it gave them a lot of personal information about anybody who had their photo taken a you had to fill out an essay to get a hold of it.

So after finishing up a freezing week in Detroit, I had to head back to Melbourne to a horrid dry heat, to enjoy sweating on a daily basis. The first thing I did was to get back into some of the benchmarking on dual vs quad core stuff. I hit a couple of hick-ups with faulty hardware. It took some fiddling around to figure out what the problem was. It turned out to be more than one thing, which is always a headache. Not only did I have another motherboard that didn't support the new CPU (which has apparently been fixed now) but I had a power supply that was not compatible with particular video cards! What the? That's right, I'd plug in a GeForce 880 GTX Ultra and have no problems. I'd plug in a GeForce8800 GTX and the system would run like a dog. It wasn't until I uninstalled Windows Vista and installed Windows XP 64 that I got the low-power message from the GTX graphics card. Then I realized that it was actually a problem with the power supply. I mean why would a PSU have no problem with a high-end card and not with a card that's just one step down in the same series of graphics cards?! The cards were even from the same manufacturer. I don't know, but changing the PSU solved all the issues and now, finally, I've been happily benchmarking for the last week or so.

Following user demands, we are doing some of the so-called real-world benchmarking which involves some re-thinking about the way I test things. Due to cheats in drivers and actual benchmarks themselves over the years, it's almost impossible to get accurate results from them to compare hardware. At the same time, I don't just want to exactly copy the testing methodology that other sites use. We have to do what's best for our readers and what makes the most sense to me. Developing benchmarking methods for the first time is a hell of a lot more time consuming than I originally thought. And after spending a few days doing real-world benchmarks, I have definitely come to appreciate the time and effort the guys over at HardOcp put into testing for their articles. It is definitely a lot more time consuming than hitting a time demo batch file and walking away to do something else.

I even got told off (kind of told off) by Fiona when she was asking what I had been doing the next day, as I had been playing games all afternoon the day before. Although you need to play through all the game fully at least once, during testing I found that I am playing certain levels several times to find the sweat spot. In Crysis, I found a section towards the end of the game when you take a gunner position in a H2 Humvee (luckily the diff doesn't break in two) and defend the convoy on the way down a hill as the NPC is driving, giving you a guarantee of a very similar type of scenario during every benchmark. The other section of the game is the end-scene with the end couple of bosses. Lots of explosions going off on the aircraft carriers desk etc. Admittedly the first time I played through that end section of the game, it was a bit of a let-down cause just as it was getting exciting, it was also getting a lot more demanding on my PC and I had to pause the game and back off some of the settings to continue. I've set the highest possible settings for this level and gone back and tested the other level s using the same settings, recording all of the information using fraps. The question I keep asking myself, is how far do I go with the amount of games I test? Do I need to test five first person shooters or is one or two sufficient? I want to try and over most genres for fps, RTS, MMOG etc since they all have different requirements, but I might stick to a maximum of four or five games overall. There's no use testing something on high end hardware that doesn't even scratch the surface of its capabilities. Commenting that Half Life plays on max settings smoothly all the time is sufficient.

The other thing that has been happening in my life outside of work, is that I've somehow been roped into assisting the archery club that I'm involved with, with their website endeavors. If it wasn't for a listing on a local council's website, I would never have found the club and they've already had a couple of people try and build a website for them. Website building is not something I do or have attempted for many years. It's definitely not my expertise but their requirements are extremely simple. I was even thinking of using something like Google Site Builder which I found out about at a Google seminar that I went to in Sydney last week. We have already covered some of the core Google applications that are available to the general publish but there are a lot more of them that I never knew about. Google Apps is a business tool that allows an organization to consistently use the same applications for all their communication needs. Like the group of us there at the Google seminar, you might think you are already using Google Apps, but you're not. Google Apps if far more than just Google's list of applications, it's actually a complete package put together by Google which includes the majority of their applications but also has features like domain name linking etc, ie. you can have mail@tkarena.com using Google mail and have member's sign up for a tkarena mail account using their software (ie. gmail) but with your corporate or website name. Google calendar allows you to organize meetings and conference calls across the world in different time zones and Google docs allows you to store and work on documents from different sides of the world. All of these applications are bundled under one domain name login interface. There are free versions and corporate levels versions that cost about $50 per year per user. These style of application is definitely going to pave the way for smaller PCs and mobile units and the storage requirements for a mobile office will actually decrease as everything is being stored online and broadband is becoming broader across the world. I can download 350MB files in a couple of minutes now on our ADSL2 connection. And even wireless technology around the home allows us to stream videos anywhere.

So, that's basically where I'm at at the moment. I hope the ye candy in this blog made up for my babbling's.