Tim Smalley’s weblog

I’ve read about Twitter quite a lot ever since it launched, but I never got around to signing up until the other day. Anyway, I’ve signed up and I’m tweeting at fairly regular intervals - you may have noticed the sidebar plugin I’ve installed.

Anyway, if you’re interested in what I’m thinking and what I’m getting up to, you can follow me over here.

Moving house is a pain in the ass.

It always sounds like such a great idea… especially as I first moved into the Ascot area not really knowing where the best place to live would be - Camberley seemed like a great place and I’ve lived there for nearly two and a half years now. It’s “only” 10 miles from Ascot, it’s a decent sized town and it’s close to Reading, Farnborough and Basingstoke and is about an hour on the train to London.

However, my trip to work in the morning has got worse and worse - not only has the price of petrol gone up from around 90p per litre to over £1.10, but traffic seems to have got worse too. It used to take no more than 20 minutes to get to work in the morning, but it’s now closer to 30 minutes on average, and up to an hour on a bad day.

Ever since getting married to Kai at Christmas, I’ve been eyeing up a move for when she eventually moved over from Taiwan. Finding a place that’s in a nice spot for me (for work) and somewhere that’s close enough to local amenities and a park so that Kai has things to do during the day when I’m at work proved harder than I first thought - I thought about getting somewhere for ourselves on our own, but then started looking and found that most of the nicer places were simply too expensive.

So we ended up finding a big enough house that we could share with some friends. I’ve been sharing a flat with Geoff for over two and a half years now, and he was the guy that introduced me to Kai in the first place - it seemed like a good option to continue that for another year. But we still couldn’t find anywhere that suited all of us.

Kai and I didn’t really want to live in a flat any more, but we couldn’t find a house that was in a suitable location with enough space. Most houses are tailored to families (not surprisingly) and as a result there’s only one decent sized bedroom. We must’ve viewed about 20 houses (and looked at several more online that didn’t pass the “is it crap at face value” test)–none of which were in any way suitable for all of our requirements–and it was getting to the stage where we were going to start looking at flats.

However, we then struck gold and found a brand new place in a new estate on the Ascot side of Bracknell - a perfect location for getting to work, and far enough away from the dodgy areas in the town. It had not two, but three decent sized bedrooms, two bathrooms (both with showers) on a three up property. The only problem was that it was a four bedroom house… and the rent was pretty steep - at least, it was too much for me, Geoff and Kai (who isn’t working) to cover ourselves.

Luckily though, Harry, the guy I’d just employed as part of bit-tech’s 2008 editorial team expansion was also looking for a place to move to, but he was in a position where he couldn’t afford to rent on his own property - and there was no-one for him to share with. He was looking at a flatshare with randoms… and I baulk at the prospects of having to doing that myself personally.

Thankfully for us, he jumped at the opportunity - he wasn’t looking forward to flatsharing with randoms either! That not only meant we could grab what was easily the best property we’d seen, but it also meant that we could (all) do it affordably.

I’ve spent most of this weekend packing up ready for the move next weekend, and I have to say I’m getting tired of filling boxes with stuff. But it’s a good time to get rid of useless crap that you’ve not used for the best part of two and a half years! The annoying thing for me is that our check-in time is 9:00am on Saturday and I’ll probably be somewhere over the North Atlantic at that point - I’m in San Francisco for a few days at the end of the week and don’t get back until 1:30pm on Saturday.

I’m then in Taipei a week after the move, which means I’ve got a crap load of work to catch up on, but I’ve also got to make sure the house is straight before I leave as well.

Hopefully Geoff (with the help of a few others) will be able to get things rolling for when I get back from Heathrow - I’ve got to get everything packed and dismantled before I leave mid-week. I’ve moved in between trips before, but in the past it’s been much tighter than this time around - I literally got off the plane from Computex 2005, picked up my keys a few hours later, moved, and was then on a plane to San Francisco no more than 36 hours after returning from Taiwan.

I can’t wait to get settled into the new place, but Lord, I hate the bits before everything is actually sorted and straightened.

We talk about a lot of things in the office to help pass the time by - a lot of these topics focus around general industry trends because, after all, when you get a bunch of geeks together in a small space, they tend to talk about all things geeky. One topic that has really stuck out in my mind recently was one that Joe recently wrote a column about.

He asked what was the game that turned you into a hardcore gamer. There’s already an interesting discussion going on in the article comments and I’m really surprised by some of the responses.

The game that led me down the path of no return was Asteroids on the Atari 2600. I don’t know whether that’s me showing my age, or just me developing at an early point in my life, but I couldn’t get enough of that game. What’s great then is that an updated version was released on the Xbox Live Arcade.

I purchased it in an instant… without thinking twice. I knew I could go back to my childhood, playing a game that I used to play almost religiously… or at least when my parents didn’t tell me it was time to do some homework, or because Coronation Street was on. Yeah, I hated that show - it got between me and my game and I never liked anything coming between me and my game.

The game that really got me into PC gaming was probably Civilization - I used to play that game during my lunchtime at school. We had to break into the school network to get it installed, but that effort was well worth it. We then followed up with Civ2 when that came out in 1996, as it added multiplayer support over the network (well, technically it was introduced with CivNet in 1995, but we were quite content with Civ at the time)… but damn, that game sucked up a lot of my time.

I could go on and on about the games that I’ve been crazy about… but nothing comes close to Asteroids and Civ for me. Anyway, we’re interested to hear as many different angles as possible on this - please share your own experiences with us in the comment thread.

Ever since Nvidia launched its GeForce 9600 GT, I’ve been pondering a number of things - the biggest one being ‘why now?’. There are many cards in the performance mainstream market, and I think the problem boiled down to the fact that Nvidia was caught off guard by the Radeon HD 3850.

The result was a slew of cards from the green team that didn’t really compete with ATI’s excellent mid-range offering and just served to confuse the market. So what we’ve ended up with is The Sea of Grey, as I’ve coined it.

The problem is that because there are so many good-to-great products, the consumer doesn’t know where to start. Is the 9600 GT better value than the 8800 GT? What about the 8800 GS? And where do ATI’s cards fit into the picture?

Well, I hope that this article goes some way to answering the questions - I’d stick to the GeForce 8800 GT and Radeon HD 3850 512MB cards… and if you need something that’s in between the two (in terms of price), look at the GeForce 9600 GT.

A few weeks back now, me and Geoff landed on quite an awesome deal to upgrade our home cinema setup. Not only did it include a 50″ Samsung DLP HDTV, a 5.1 Dolby/DTS amp, DVD player and speaker set, but more importantly an Xbox 360.

I’ve been looking to get an Xbox 360 for a while, but I couldn’t justify buying one brand new - I’m not an avid console gamer, but I certainly enjoy playing some games on consoles in front of the TV. For example, I went out and bought a PS2 to play GT3, and then sold it once I’d completed the game. I then went and bought a PS2 slim to play GT4.

One game that I’ve really got into was Gears of War - normally that wouldn’t surprise anyone, because it is a truly awesome game, but it surprised quite a few of the guys in the office because they know I’m a usually in the “FPS games belong on the PC” mindset. While Gears isn’t first person, it’s still a shooter - a bloody good one at that.

I also really enjoyed Bioshock on the Xbox 360 too, arguably more than I enjoyed it on the PC when I had the chance to play an early build of both versions at 2K Games’ offices in July. That game, in particular, has left me in a bit of a sticky situation - I want to play the PC version because that’s my heritage when it comes to first person shooters, but I found myself really enjoying the 360 version too… so much so, that I think I might have to buy both versions of the game.

Anyway, the real point of this post was that I finally signed up to an Xbox Live Gold account yesterday, so if you fancy handing my ass to me in Gears (I’m not particularly good, yet…), I’ll see you online - my gamertag is “mitmitmit“.

It’s been coming for a while, but today I can finally say that I’m the Editor of bit-tech.net. Over the last few months, I’ve been running bit-tech but I’ve not had the title to go with the job - instead, I’ve been on a trial period to prove that I was up to the task.

I didn’t doubt for a minute that I wouldn’t be able to handle the job though, as I announced that I would be taking over the Editorial Reins at bit-tech in April. Since that announcement though I have had a few very tough months in my personal life and without the help of the other guys that work with me on bit-tech, I don’t know where I would be today. One thing is for sure though: the site wouldn’t have continued to progress in the way it has.

Things are moving along like a well-oiled machine at the moment with everyone pulling in the same direction. The changes we’ve made to the site have generally gone down pretty well in the community and there are some more community-orientated changes to follow in the future. I’ve always been a very community focused guy when it comes to bit-tech, because becoming a member of bit-tech’s truly awesome community was ultimately how I ended up getting a job working for the site… and look where that has got me today.

I received an email this morning from Michal Brichacek, a student at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan who is cycling from Alaska to Panama - over 12,000km - in order to raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

I wouldn’t call myself an avid charitable donor, but this is something that is extremely close to my heart, as earlier this year my fiancée was diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer. I can’t begin to describe what a horrible disease cancer is - it has been a truly devastating experience for everyone that is close to me and Kai, but one thing that it has done is bought both of our families much closer together in order to collectively fight the disease.

On my recent trip to Taiwan for this year’s Computex trade show, I decided to read Lance Armstrong’s book, It’s Not About The Bike, instead of watching the in-flight entertainment. It’s a quite simply legendary story where Armstrong tells all in his fight against cancer. It’s a must-read for anyone that is looking for some inspiration.

Having seen both the effects of cancer (and the treatment) first hand, and read Lance Armstrong’s story, this was an ideal opportunity for me to donate.

Michal is currently in San Francisco and has already covered almost 5,300km in his first 45 days on the road. You can follow his progress on his website, Cycling For A Cause and, no matter how big or small, please support his amazing journey - he’s attempting to raise $1 USD for every kilometre he covers!

MySpace has said that it is launching a news aggregation service under called MySpace News in the second quarter of this year. It will rely on both algorithms and user rating (basically a combination of Google News and Digg).

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It’s surprising that the venerable JPEG image compression standard, which dates back to 1986, is still the best we can do for photographic image compression. There’s a sequel of sorts to JPEG known as JPEG 2000 and it’s the logical heir to the JPEG throne. JPEG 2000 promises higher image quality in conjunction with much smaller file sizes.

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Here’s an interesting article that talks about the costs of leaving your PC on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You’ll be surprised how much it uses, even when its sitting idle. To some extent, I disagree with the author’s comments about not using high-end kit. Providing you’re responsible when it comes to turning your PC off when it isn’t being used, I don’t see a problem with enjoying the marvels of high-end CPUs and graphics cards. Leaving a PC sitting idle isn’t good for the environment, no matter how energy efficient you think it is.

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