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Scott Wasson
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Morning, all. We’re back and, I think, mostly recovered from CES, provided that we didn’t bring home any swine flu or black plague again this year. CES is a pit of contagion, among other things.

The way we do CES is particularly grueling. You see, the show’s area is vast, covering multiple floors and buildings, including the massive Las Vegas Convention Center and several other venues. Companies set up shop either somewhere in one of the expo centers or, more commonly, in a hotel suite somewhere around town. They’re scattered everywhere across Las Vegas in semi-random fashion. We make appointments to meet with them wherever they may be—one meeting after another, all day for four to five days straight. What ensues once the show starts is an insane marathon of long walks, cab lines, cab rides, monorail trips, questionable navigation, logistical second-guessing, and poor cell phone service. We walk at least 5-7 miles each day, on concrete in dress shoes, standing for a total of eight or more hours in between jaunts.

By the end of it all, we’ve generally seen everybody once or twice, we’ve taken hundreds of pictures and pages of notes, and we’re physically shattered. If I weren’t so exhausted, I would have been amused, on Thursday evening, at the picture of Geoff and Cyril sitting across the table from me, taking turns putting their heads down onto their arms, sighing, and making old-man noises. Mostly, though, I was just feeling the blisters burning on the soles of my feet—two large ones on the right foot, one smaller one inside of a larger one on the left.

But we managed to survive, so I guess, hey, mission accomplished.

And, heck, CES really is the only opportunity each year to see nearly everyone in the industry in one place. It’s also the only time Geoff, Cyril, and I are in the same room together. I even give my annual report for TR to the guys before the show opens. So it’s a good thing in many ways unrelated to, you know, the actual experience.

Now that we’re home and somewhat rested, we’ll be writing up a few more stories from the show floor over the next day or two. Just be patient with us as we nurse our blisters and shattered psyches along the way.

Howdy, all.

I’ve spent the last little while doing a lot of different things—testing, lots of spreadsheet work, traveling to a press event, some photography and photo editing, more spreadsheet work, article layout—and none of them are writing. Now, it’s time to write up a nearly completed article, and I can’t seem to shift into that writing gear. I’m currently sipping a late-morning supplemental coffee and hoping for the best. We’ll see how that goes.

I do have one random update for you. Last summer, I asked for your suggestions for FPS games that can be played with kids—that is, games that are free enough of gore and profanity that they won’t cause any problems even for younger kids to play. At that time, my candidate of choice was Unreal Tournament 3, which I’d played some with my two oldest children. However, UT3 fell out of favor around here over time because the game offers no option to disable "mature" taunts like the older versions of UT, and it sometimes just ignores the setting to disable taunts entirely. I even looked into using the game’s editor to remove the profane taunts attached to certain bots, but that proved to be more complicated than my limited time and patience would abide. Thus, we had no foolproof means of easily preventing profanity from bursting forth from the speakers during a UT3 game. Since my kids had taken to inviting friends over to play, this issue had the potential to become a little embarrassing.

Finally, after lots of prodding from my kids, my solution was to reach back and pull out my copy of UT2004. That game, it turns out, has a working option to "disable mature taunts." Also, I’m pleased to rediscover, it’s easier to install, manage, and use than UT3 in a host of ways big and small: lightning-quick startup times, the ability to skip opening logo animations, lax copy protection that allows for an impromptu LAN party, no need to login to a user account associated with an e-mail address, a richer set of server config options in the GUI, and much more. Honestly, the difference with UT3 is night and day, even though I’ve never thought of UT3 as a particularly difficult or clumsily adapted PC game. We’re able to start up a quick deathmatch in much less time, with much less complication—you know, kind of like an iPhone game or something. The whole experience has me thinking deep thoughts about the state of the games and the relative health of PC gaming over time. If things have gotten better in so many ways, why does this relic from 2004 feel like a time traveler from a golden age?

Howdy, all. You may have noticed that it’s seemed a little quiet around here this week. That’s because we’re all working like mad behind the scenes on articles that will come out soon, and we’ve been a little preoccupied as a result. The wait should be worth it, though.

My own week has been strangely awful because, well, today I’ll be putting the finishing touches on a multi-day test run for a particular piece of upcoming new hardware. This test run is not the second but the third one this particular product has been through. Configuration problems with our test system, which I discovered each time after testing was complete, invalidated the results from the two prior test runs. As a result, I’ve been putting the same product through our test suite for roughly a week, with nothing to show for it but a single (hopefully valid) set of results.

Emotionally, I dealt pretty well with the first set of results being invalidated. The second discovery of a problem—after I’d done all data entry, exported graphs, and created an article layout—was harder to take. Practically, this means I’ll have to cut some extended testing I’d planned from this upcoming review, and I’ll probably get yelled at in the comments for not having included it. This job is amazing, and I’m lucky to have it, but it does have its difficult moments.

On a happier note, I was able to divert myself with a fun little project last night: preparing to cut the cord on my cable company. I attached an antenna, set up my HTPC to tune over-the-air digital channels, and then signed up for a Netflix trial. I could swear that, between high-def over-the-air ATSC television and Netflix streaming via Windows Media Center, we’ve already improved both the selection of shows available and the picture quality versus Time Warner Cable. Dunno if we’ll keep Netflix, but the streaming quality and Media Center integration are both excellent. We’ll use Amazon Instant Video, both rentals and the free videos for Prime members, to supplement our show selection, as well. For the 70 bucks a month we’ll save, I figure we can rent as many shows and movies as we have time to watch each month and still come out way ahead.

So, Battlefield 3 is pretty amazing, no? I’d say it pretty much ends any shot Rage had at holding the title of "best-looking PC game," although Rage has its own issues with texture detail that sully its excellent artwork and bursting-with-detail environments.

I’ll admit to enjoying the single-player campaigns in games like BF3, and this one so far seems to be pretty engaging. My attempt to take a quick look at the game’s graphics melted into several hours of intense gameplay last night. Of course, the single-player graphics are jaw-dropping and look like a true next-generation PC game—at last. The multiplayer beta just didn’t show us everything that was possible with this game engine, we can now say for sure. At least, that’s my take.

Morning, all. In case you didn’t know it, today is the day the Battlefield 3 beta becomes available to all. You just have to download EA’s Origin app, go to the "store" tab, and choose the "Free Games" section. Once there, it’s hard to miss; you just hit a button to download and install the beta. I’m downloading it now.

In other news, I’ve been battling a head cold and budding sinus infection, so I’ve been taking Sudafed constantly for the past week and a half. At this point, I feel like I’m on Jimmy Tango’s fat busters. We recorded the podcast last night, and I came away with an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach about… dunno what, really.  I hope I didn’t say anything too terrible, but I can’t really recall. Maybe it’s time to back down on the medication.

I don’t think it’s just the decongestant speaking when I look at the next few months and start feeling excited, though. Heck, Rage comes out next week, and we have a nice-looking crop of games slated for release, including the aforementioned BF3 and Rage, along with Skyrim, Arkham City, Serious Sam 3, Modern Warfare 3, and surely some others. I have to admit, though, that I’d placed both Guild Wars 2 and Diablo III in my "late 2011" bucket a some point, and the release slate looks a little thinner without those two in the mix. Regardless, I’m not-so-secretly compiling a list of games to use in conjunction with my new testing methods and a big batch of the latest video cards, when my schedule permits. Perhaps some free-to-play games like League of Legends belong on that list?

There’s new hardware on the way soon, too, including Bulldozer and X79 and… possibly other things I can’t really talk about yet? Oh, and I pre-ordered a Kindle Fire yesterday. I don’t expect it will be especially appealing to me personally, since I have both an iPad 2 and a Galaxy Tab 10.1 (about which I owe you all a write-up soon), but at $199, the Fire should be a pretty popular item this coming holiday season, provided they don’t all sell out early. Figured I might as well try one out and write up a review.

Speaking of which, I have another review to write, just as soon as this next dose of Sudafed kicks in.

Howdy all. IDF is, for most intents, really just a two-day event, maybe two and a half, and that’s it. Yet the thing is usually packed to the gills with meetings, news, and other things to write about. As is my usual pattern, I’ve spent the day filling up my queue with way too many cool things to write about and my evening feeling guilty about not having the energy to write about them. Ack.

Regardless, I will be back at the Moscone Center in the morning, bright and early, ready to produce another live blog—ably assisted by Geoff, who has been providing pictures. Tomorrow’s opening keynote speaker is the ever-colorful Mooly Eden, who will be talking about Ultrabooks. I plan not to shave before the speech, so I can use the edge of an Asus prototype to do the job later during the press demo session. If you can, point your browser to TR at around 9AM Pacific in the morning for the live blog and some excellent pictures of Mooly’s beret.

Hey, all. Hope you had a nice holiday weekend. I had hoped to have an interesting new article finished and posted this morning, but some family issues have kept me occupied the past several days. I’m getting close, but it may be a day or two yet before I can finish.

I get antsy when I’m wanting to publish and can’t get it done. This article turned out to be a bigger project than anticipated and has taken a couple of weeks. However, we do have a new TR Podcast and a Fred Silver comic up to keep you company, and we should be posting another review later today. Stay tuned for more from me, also, as soon as I can bring this one to completion.

Well, I am tempted to run over to Best Buy and try to pick up one of those $99 HP TouchPads on clearance. I don’t, you know, need one in any sense of that word, but hey, it’s a tablet for $99. Hmmm.

Any of you take the plunge?

In other news, we know the site has been down a number of mornings lately. I think we’ll have that issue resolved shortly. Apologies for the down time.

Man, it’s good to be home. In a pretty much unprecedented event, both Geoff and I were off last week, yet we still managed to publish several articles, a podcast, and a full slate of news. Thanks to Cyril and the rest of the guys for keeping the lights on while we were out. Amazingly, I’ve had a total of two weeks of vacation this past month, which simply never happens. Last week, we took a family trip to San Diego and got out of the Missouri heat. Was delightful. I should be recharged and ready for a busy back-to-school season now.

Before we left, I filed my iPad 2 write-up and almost immediately turned around and started researching competing tablets. I felt the need to pick up an Android tablet for my own education, if nothing else. I don’t have any other Android-based devices, and I wanted to get some extended hands-on experience. With apologies to the Eee Pad Transformer, I decided the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 was the most direct challenger to the iPad 2 and probably the best Android tablet to snag, so I picked up the 16GB Wi-Fi edition and took it with me on the trip.

So far, I’ve noticed Android has some clear benefits over iOS (notifications, multitasking, tweakability) and some rather obvious weaknesses, too. The same can be said of the Tab 10.1 hardware, although its size, weight, and design are undeniably impressive overall. I expect to be writing more about these things once I’ve become more familiar with the tablet. Samsung apparently has a big software update queued up for this week, so it looks like some things will be changing as I learn. I’m already settled on a number of major apps (Wyse PocketCloud as a RDP client, Brother’s app for wireless printing, Amazon’s Kindle for reading), but if you have any other app recommendations, let me know.

I’m also in grave need of a proper case/cover for the Tab 10.1, not so much for protection as for the ability to prop the tablet up at different angles for tabletop use. The iPad 2’s Smart Cover has its issues, but it allows for angled use without adding much weight or bulk. If any of you have first-hand recommendations for a Tab 10.1 case that works similarly, please let me know. I’d rather not double or triple the size and weight of the tablet in order to get that capability, but the few options I’ve seen aren’t terribly promising.

My continuing OS education may be further enhanced soon by another purchase I’m seriously considering: a new, Sandy Bridge-fortified MacBook Air. I have much too little experience with OS X, and it may be time to rectify that oversight. Also, Lion’s tablet-like baby steps intrigue me.

In other news, I’m considering hosting an impromptu TR meetup later this week, some evening, here in the Kansas City metro area. The question is: are any of you locals available and interested in meeting? Let me know. I may have more info for you soon!

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