Pete and I spent Easter in London and it really is an amazing place. Here’s an overview for anyone that’s interested.

Friday we ventured from our hotel into the central city and met up with some NZ friends for a couple of hours. It was so nice to see some familiar faces and hear familiar accents! After lunch (I had my first Cornish Pastie – Yum!) we had a tour around The Tower of London (enjoyed looking at Liz’s Bling!!!) & then spent the rest of the day visiting the the central city attractions -Buckingham palace, Big Ben, The Houses of Parliament, Westminster abbey, St. Pauls cathedral & Trafalgar Square. Just before it got dark we managed to visit the NZ monument at Hyde Park corner – I felt so proud to be a Kiwi with the artistic monument sitting in quite a prominent part of London.

Saturday we saw the changing of the horse guards at the entrance to St. James Palace and visited the British Museum & Harrods (where there were by far more tourists than shoppers!!). We had a great time meeting up with our German friends who just happened to be in London for the day. In the evening we blew the budget on theatre tickets and throughly enjoyed it – we’d really wanted to see Les Miserables and we both loved it!

Sunday we went to a service at Westminster Abbey which was really special considering that it was Easter Sunday. It was nice to see a church to full capacity despite the fact that there were a lot of tourists. The message though full of ceremony was clear – I like that about Easter! In contrast to the serenity of Westminster Abbey we then joint the crowds and queues at the tourist attractions and went on the amazing London Eye and then to the Natural History Museum.

Monday we chose to go to the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew and had a lovely day (with relatively few tourists) wandering around the gardens and through the glass houses. It was a beautiful place even though we where probably there a little bit too early for all the spring flowers.

The weekend was fantastic with no dramas until we cut it pretty fine getting to the Airport for our return flight home. I guess traveling teaches you a lot and lets hope that we learnt our lesson that time!

It was full on from the moment we arrived to the moment we left. We arrived home on Monday night exhausted and pleased that we decided to base our OE form Newcastle rather than London! It feels like we saw a huge amount but there is just so much more to see if we make it back again.

Here are a few of my favourite snapshots of the weekend …

London Tower Bridge

St. Pauls Cathedral

NZ monument at Hyde Park Corner

St. James Park

Horse Guards Parade

London Eye

Kew Gardens

Posted in Life's happenings, Travel | | 1 Comment »

I’ve been keeping an eye out for the new series of cards from Nvidia. Today I was pleasantly surprised to see that the 8600GT was available on Amazon.co.uk. The 8600GT comes in two sku’s, initially only available from XFX. One is the “XXX” model (£109.24) while the other is “non-XXX” (£97.98). I have no idea what these mean but suspect that the XXX may be overclocked.

Also available is the XFX 8600GTS in three sku’s; the standard model (£136.38), the XT (£148.94) and the XXX (£158.87).

I also found the XFX 8500GT for £61.57.

Wow, there’s some interesting thinking to be done there, some very well placed price points. From experience I think we can expect the other vendors to come in with prices slightly lower than this, so it’s a very good start. Now the DirectX 10 generation truly begins.

Posted in Current Events, Gaming, Tech | | 1 Comment »

I am so far behind with the video editing (I’ll be recording our third video when we go to London this weekend) but we finally have our first video up for viewing. This one was kind of done as a bit of a diary for ourselves to remember what it was like in those last couple of weeks, but I thought I’d release it here as some people might like to see it.

Hopefully I’ll get a higher quality divx up here for download shortly, but I had enough trouble getting a 90mb file uploaded to youtube without trying to upload a 190mb divx to our server. [update: here it is (189mb) only took two attempts thanks virgin.]
So anyway, here’s the vid. Music by Lydia Alice and Calling Elijah.

[gv data="http://www.youtube.com/v/NjCdG3FaBic"][/gv]

Posted in Xbox 360 | | No Comments »

One of the new pieces of technology I’m pretty excited about is the new range of video cards from Nvidia. These are cheaper versions of the barnstorming 8800 boards including; 8600GT, 8600GTS (aka Ultra) and 8500GT. They had been expected to launch on April 17th.

However in news out from The Inquirer, the G84 and G86 chips have been delayed. Since the new 8500 series is to be powered by the G86 and the 8600 series are to be powered by the G84, they might as well say that the cards we’re waiting for are not coming out in April.

For those who aren’t counting down the days, my birthday is in mid-May and I’m still hoping that the range (or at least the 8600GT or 8600GT Ultra) will arrive in time for it. Otherwise I might be delaying my birthday (am I allowed to do that?

Apparently Nvidia “need a respin” though what this actually means I have no idea. If I was cynical, I might suspect that they were just holding these cards back until they knew what ATI were doing with the R600.

Hopefully they don’t take too long.

Update

Update 2: Despite ‘some blog reports’ the new series of cards have launched.

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