I blame Rys!
April: We fooled a few people
Unbeknownst to the rest of the HEXUS crew Nick and Rys teamed up to knock up an article about AMD going into the GPU market with a chip codenamed Apollo Fir. What these two didn’t know (and were then extremely smug about) was that the article contained just enough of Rys’ impressive technical knowledge to balance out Nick’s unbelievable bullshitting to make an article many thousands of people fell for.
So believable that it got slashdotted… even industry experts were seriously commenting on this unexpected and extremely exciting ‘development’. Luckily, when the truth became clear, everyone saw the funny side and Rys only received several hundred death threats… most notably from ATI and NVIDIA e-mails addresses, those jokers, eh?
May: Go East, young man, go East!
Yes, HEXUS was off abroad again, this time to Taiwan and Computex… This time sending Rys, PD and Nick out to cover all things technical. PD and Rys went out a couple of weeks before to do a massive bout of PSU testing, famously blowing one up in spectacular fashion
So they were fully acclimatised by the time a jet-lagged Nick joined them a few days before the show. But undaunted by lack of sleep and a body clock running 8 hours slow, Nick and Rys head off to the cinema after miming Star Wars to three taxi drivers… No mean feat, miming a sci-fi film to a bemused, stressed cabbie who speaks Mandarin Chinese and nothing else.
Computex itself was excellent with Rys once again buggering off behind closed doors, this time with ATI, leaving Nick to ogle so many slim and curvy Asian booth-babes as to need several months of therapy to find Asian chicks attractive again.
Other notable events include PD forking out squillions of company funds to satiate Rys’ thirst for Long Island iced-teas, the three rather pissed up Team HEXUS boys giggling through an earthquake and Rys and Nick trying to go out for a quiet meal and being mobbed by 30 Taiwanese college kids. And for the record Nick did not snog one of the blokes for a dare… and Rys did not impress all the girls with his impression of the white eared elephant with the really long trunk.
At the end of the show Nick was then sent on what amounted to a 10,000 mile detour to cover the ACON5 finals in Beijing whilst Rys flew home for a well earned rest and PD disappeared into the jungles of Thailand. He was last seen muttering about a bridge over some river before marching off into the undergrowth, whistling.