That's right, London baby. I try to make it back home 2-3 times a year. And during the Summer period I usually try to make that one of them. My summer visits usually consist of visiting friends and family, enjoying the small things that the UK has to offer (for example junk food, a bigger selection of shops and products, movies in their original versons etc.) and also grinding, because I'm very undisturbed out here. This year I brought one of my Samsung 204b's with me, because I had one spare after the purchase of my new 27" Dell and I've just finished setting it up. It's actually a reasonable setup with my 17" laptop to accompany it. I've set this up at my Mum's house, which is actually slightly outside of London, to the east in Sittingbourne. I believe I'm about 2 hours away from the city centre.
I'll be staying out here for a total of 2 weeks, before I have to go back to Austria and start prepairing for Uni to start again. I'll probably not be doing much more travelling when I get back, though I do have a trip scheduled to Italy with some friends in early September. The only thing that could hinder those plans were if the weather were really bad.

On another note, I'm still struggling to get back into a groove with football practice. I've been plagued with minor injuries to my hamstrings ever since I've gotten back into the game and at times it has been tough to keep my motivation/momentum going. I can play to some degree, but it's like I'm constantly playing at 80% performance. This two week trip will be good for my hamstrings as they are starting to give me problems again. My plan is to do a lot of swimming, have some hot baths and eat and sleep well. That should get me in good shape to go at it again in the championship, hopefully.

Gaming has been kinda frustrating latley, because I allways get lag when I play multiplayer Starcraft II as soon as the battles get bigger. 2v2 and 3v3 will consistently lag for me, nomatter the settings, though naturally the least on the lowest settings. Now I know my PC is about 2.5 years old and at the time I purchased it, it was not a high end pc, but I still pretty much meet all the criterea for the recommended specs for Starcraft II. The only area where my PC falters is in terms of graphics. Recommended would be a 8800GTX and I only have a 8800GTS, but ffs I'm playing on minimum settings :S (1280x1024 res). I even have a SSD and a fairly new installation of win7 64bit prof, which should increase my performance some.
Now I've been thinking about what I can do to get a smoother performance without being as drastic as buying a new PC just so I can play SCII on maximum settings smoothly.
Here is what I came up with:

This is a Nvidia 460GTX GS with 2GB ram. It should set me back around 250$, but should clear up the problems I have with lag. This will also enable me to upgrade from DVI to HDMI which should give me an even better picture on my 27".

Ok, I really need to grab some food now and hopefully put in some hands of poker. If I could get in around 2k hands that would be nice. I have been really motivated lately, but have been having trouble finding the time to put in the volume I would like to. However I hope that will soon change.

All the best,

Daniell