Hump day

The Children of Hurin, Tolkien's 'last book' (according to his family), was released yesterday, so of course I did the Amazon thing and can only hope it arrives before the weekend. At least I hope so, since I finished Gemmell's last book last night. Nothing like an author dying mid-series on a set of books covering the Trojan war, with the last installment ending as Agammenon and his Greek allies tighten their noose around the city of Troy.

Speaking of children, the movie Children of Men didn't quite live up to its hype for either Melissa or myself. It was a decent enough movie with solid performances from Clive Owens and Julianne Moore (and a hippified Michael Caine), but its failure to explain why the human race had lost its ability to reproduce made for a fairly disappointing ending. This mystery probably appeals to a lot of viewers, just not me.

With NVIDIA's launch of their DX10 midrange 8600 parts this week, those of us working on the forthcoming multi-GPU series should hopefully start seeing some of these boards arrive on our doorsteps in the coming weeks. Now we just need to wait on AMD/ATI's launch, but it looks like the high-end contest will consist of GeForce 8800 GTXs vs. Radeon X2900 XTXs. And I'd best start looking at PSUs beafier than the Enermax 550w unit I currently use if I'm going to be running pairs of these graphic cards together. Not, of course, that I'm really complaining about the situation. I think I received only 4-5 graphics boards (a massive step up from 2005's zero review boards) to review last year, so being invited to contribute to this series was a great opportunity and I'm actually really excited about it; particularly since on the CPU front things look to remain fairly slow until late summer or early fall. I just hope with Ian due on June 13th that I can get a good head start going on my article by late May.

The insanity at my current job continues unabated. This week's choicest morsel was when the boss was presented by a co-worker with a scenario and subsequently asked, "Doesn't this make more sense?" To which he replied, "Yes, it does, but we're not going to do it that way." Note to IT companies: good technical skills do not always translate into good management skills. Thanks. In other job-related news, the Air Force has apparently settled on CompTIA certifications as requirements for future IT contracting personnel, so I printed out and brought home a 128-page Network+ transcender study guide that will probably languish on my desk until it's woefully out-of-date. Well, then again, network topology, protocols, and standards aren't likely to change too terribly much over the next year or two, just that the thought of re-memorizing the OSI model and other sundry garbage when I'm already MS Net Ess certified isn't a real motivator to study.