Tuesday, January 3, 2006

New Year in the Rain.

 5:32 pm by Anna Filatova

What an ugly weather we got for the New Year ’s Eve this time! I went to the Big Bear resort, where my friends have rented out a big 6-bedroom house. We did it last year, but the house we had then was too far away from the skiing, so we made it there only once. This time, we were just 5 minutes away from the slopes and were really excited about getting some snow-fun. But, the mother-nature didn’t feel like pleasing us whatsoever. It has been raining for 4 days running, and the winds were so bad, that quite a few trees and power poles went down. And the snow? Well, 6-inches of the greatest snow they had so far were reported the day we got back home, that is today. What a frustration!

However, despite bad weather we had a terrific New Year celebration. Over 30 friends came to our party, we had food, drinks, barbeque chicken, lamb and pork kabobs, music, the Santa Claus and Snow Maiden with gift and jokes, and a lot of fun. I will have some crazy party pictures for you later, when I get back from CES.

However, I cannot accept a winter with no snow. So, now I am considering a trip to Tahoe, so that I could finally get some skiing…

Monday, January 2, 2006

Happy New Year!

 6:31 pm by Anna Filatova

I would like to congratulate everyone with the New Year! May all your wishes come true and may this year 2006 be the happiest and luckiest year for you from all standpoints.

I am resuming my Blog after a pretty significant pause. I hope nothing will prevent me from writing something interesting for you any more. :)

So, stay tuned for more news and funny stories.

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Merry Christmas!

 6:33 pm by Anna Filatova

Merry Christmas!

On behakf of X-bit labs team I would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas. Have fun, be good and thank you all for being our friends and readers. :)

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Happy Turkey Day!

 6:41 pm by Anna Filatova

Happy Thanksgiving! I recieved this greetings moving froma  couple of friends of mince, it is simply hillarious. If you haven't seen it, you have to do it now: click here to check it out.

After that, we decided to give up the traditional turkey and made a roast duck. It was so good! :)

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Happy Halloween!

 6:36 pm by Anna Filatova

Happy Halloween!

What a wild night it was :) I don't think I have to describe how crazy can people go on Halloween. The picture below speaks for itself:

Did you do anytyhing crazy?

Friday, September 16, 2005

Playing Paintball Tomorrow: Can't Wait!

 5:15 pm by Anna Filatova

Guys, I have something really exciting going on here: I am going to be playing paintball for the first time in my life tomorrow. I have to confess that I am a pretty good shot (I am not very modest, I know that :) I sometimes go to a shooting range and my favorite is a compact GLOCK 19 (Caliber 9x19mm).

Anyway, tomorrow my friends are planning to go to a paintball park somewhere to the north of LA, and I am really excited to go. Now that look at the box of paintballs in the corner of my room, I started wondering: does it really hurt when they hit you with this? These paintballs feel very hard to the touch. In fact I heard multiple stories: some say it hurts bad, and you get bruises all over you after a game like that, the others say it is not that bad at all. Ok, looks like we’ll see tomorrow. We are leaving at 7:30 in the morning, and I still have to get something to wear (I assume the clothes will be ruined completely after the game). Anyway, none of my girlfriends agreed to go: it already means I am going to be involved in some REAL action. I like that :)

So, if I don’t check in with you tomorrow, then… then don’t worry about me: it simply means I had terrific time and I am taking some time off the computer to rest :)

Sunday, September 11, 2005

X-bit Labs Presents: This Week's Specials.

 8:53 pm by Anna Filatova

Well, well, it is Sunday night, and I decided to take a look at the exciting stuff we will have ready for you next week. Want some details? Here you go.

Tomorrow, we are going to offer you a roundup of six system cases from Thermaltake. I am a happy owner of the Thermaltake Tsunami Dream (we have already reviewed this baby some time ago, you can check out our article called Thermaltake Tsunami Dream PC Case Review), but this time we will introduce to you five other solutions. I’ve seen these guys: believe me you are going to love them too :)

After a busy Monday we are planning to talk a little bit about the situation in the memory market. I am going to finally post my monthly Memory Market Overview (it took me so much longer this time, sorry about that). The beginning of back-to-school season has definitely told on the memory market, so check out the overview.

In the middle of the week we will offer you a detailed review of the PowerColor Bravo X700 graphics card, which is equipped with a fanless cooling solution and is claimed to be very overclockable.

And finally we will make sure you have something exciting to read over the weekend. So, stay tuned for an exclusive review of a dual-core AMD processor in a dual-processor workstation.

Have a great week!

Wednesday, September 7, 2005

New Orleans: Eyewitness Story.

 6:02 pm by Anna Filatova

I have just talked with my younger brother. He is in Moscow, but one of his friends was in New Orleans when Katrina hit the city. His friend is OK now, but stories he was telling my brother over the phone are shocking. Here is what he told:

"It is insane! I couldn’t even imagine things could turn that bad. When the authorities announced mandatory evacuations, most residents didn’t pay any attention as usual. If they had evacuated every time there is a hurricane, they would have to go away at least five times a year. Usually, people evacuate from small towns, because most of the private homes, about 90%, here in the South are made of plywood, carton and plastic. The strongest part is the stairs, the rest of the house can be driven through easily. So, these homes usually get blown away when hurricanes hit. The buildings in New Orleans are much more solid: stone and concrete. People usually didn’t evacuate from them in case of hurricane alert. They got a lot of water, food and bear and stayed in watching the News or National Geographic channel. They started warning the people only 24 hours before the storm that it is not going to be the same this time. Everybody finally realized that it was going to be REAL bad. And then things just got out of control. Total chaos everywhere! Like in the “Mars Attacks” movie. All highways were jammed. It took a friend of mine 10 hours to get out of the city. And if you didn’t have a car, you could simply forget about getting out of there. No public transportation was available, so about one forth of the citizens stayed in town. Most of them were poor African American people, they simply had no where to go.

I spent four days on the roof of the house. There were other people on their roofs around all this time, but no one came for us all these days. We saw a rescue helicopter once, the guys shouted something in the loudspeaker and went away. The worst things started happening when some of the people ran out of drinking water. They got hysterical, were running around the roofs, screaming that they were dying from dehydration. I tried to calm some of them down (those closer to my house) by teaching them how to distil water steam and a few other tricks that could help them make some water they could drink: no luck. I had the impression that if the rescue operations didn’t start soon, people would simply go nuts out there. But no one showed up to help.

Having realized no one was going to come for us, I decided to try and make it out of there on my own. I searched through the junk in the loft, found a children’s swimming-pool, inflated it, wrapped up my passport, laptop and some clothes into a couple of trash bags and took off. After a while I saw a US army amphibian. I started screaming to attract their attention and they took me onboard, but only after I opened the trash bags to prove that I was not a marauder. They gave me a bottle of water and said that the massive rescue operations with military presence should start tomorrow. Kind of late, ha?

What can I say? The screenplay writer of the “Hard Rain” movie was a Nostradamus: it was all just like in that movie, only worse…”

We all pray for those who got caught in the disaster…

Monday, September 5, 2005

X-bit Labs Presents: This Week's Specials.

 9:08 am by Anna Filatova

No, no, I haven’t given up the tradition of revealing our review plans for the coming week. Today is Monday and I would like to share our plans for the nearest future with you. We really have a lot coming.

In just a few moments I will finish reading and put up a review of four CPU air coolers from Thermaltake Company. We are going to look at Big Typhoon, Silent Tower, PIPE101 Rev.2 and Sonic Tower solutions. Check it out later today.

Tomorrow there should be a review of new DDR2 memory modules from Crucial that are capable of overcoming the 1GHz speed threshold. We will be telling you about the features and performance of Crucial Ballistix PC2-8000 memory compared with the rivalry products from OCZ, Corsair and Mushkin.

In the middle of the week we will continue looking at the most interesting air cooling solutions in the today’s market. Not so long ago we introduced to you a revolutionary Zalman CNPS9500 LED cooler with unique heatpipe design. This time it is going to compete against a few powerful rivals from Thermaltake and Titan. Don’t try to guess which one is going to be the winner. Just check out the article when it comes out :)

And of course, we would be proud and happy to finally offer you the so long awaited Mega review of 17 contemporary GPUs tested in 30 different games and synthetic applications. This is something you can not miss. Almost a month of testing and days of analytical work resulted into this monstrous article, which should be your guide in the graphics market for at least another half a year (this is when the next Mega review like that is going to be posted).

So, these are just a few highlights of the coming week. Of course, there will be more than that!

Thursday, September 1, 2005

Back-to-School Season Has Started :).

 10:09 am by Anna Filatova

Congratulations to all of you on the first day of the Fall! :)

In Russia we have a holiday on this day: we celebrate the beginning of the Back-to-School season. It is not an official day-off though, on the contrary, this is the first school day for the entire country. Here in the US school starts at different times: sometimes, it may start in late August, sometimes in mid September, it depends on the school, on the program, etc. In Russia all schools, colleges, universities start their fall term on September 1. They call this day “the Day of Knowledge”. Back in the days when I went to school in Moscow we used to have special school uniform. For boys that was a dark navy suit and for girls that was a dark brown dress with an apron: black on regular days and white on special occasions (nothing like a French maid :), I wish I could find some pictures for you). So September 1 was a special occasion like that: kids go to school for the first time after a 3-month summer break. Parents would see their children to first grade for the first time, everyone would have flowers and each school would have a special welcome meeting for all the kids and teachers at the school porch and at 8AM on this day the first school bell would ring signaling the beginning of a new school year.

I really used to like this tradition. It felt like a real holiday, especially for the first-time school kids. I believe they still have it almost exactly like that, with that only difference that there are no uniforms any more and kids wear pretty much what they wear in the US. However, the flowers, first school bell and the holiday spirit remained the same.

I didn’t feel this holiday spirit today though. When I realized that it is September already, I just had the feeling that the three summer months have passed a way too quickly (which is unfair). Although it is summer in CA all the time, so I shouldn’t be complaining. The only difference for me would be the dramatically increased amount of work to be done daily, just like back in the school days :)