Adventures of the Atomic Blender

It’s raining in Sydney right now. Not just ordinary rain either – its coming down so heavy we’ve got Ben and Bennett out the back with a jar of nails, two hammers and half a tonne of lumber. Hopefully they know how to make stuff waterproof. If not,

It's raining in Sydney right now. Not just ordinary rain either – its coming down so heavy we've got Ben and Bennett out the back with a jar of nails, two hammers and half a tonne of lumber. Hopefully they know how to make stuff waterproof. If not, we'll all be floating around on our desks in two hours time.

John is busy writing away about the newest bit of kit he's received from a certain graphics card maker, attempting to finish the page he's on while I fill the sandbags between sentences. Kate is doing what she normally does, sitting quietly in the corner designing away in her own little Mac world. Everyone's been busy either writing or preparing the office for more rain. We'd left no one free to keep tabs on the Atomic Blender – and that was our first mistake.

About 45 minutes ago, Kate's Mac crashed. As Steve Jobs' little indigo box slipped into its all-to-familiar 'don't touch me I'm not working' mood, the real world gradually came back into focus and the one person in our office who wasn't writing or sandbagging or building an ark, looked around and took stock.

Atomic HQ looked fine. Everything seemed normal - except for the slight, nagging feeling that something was perhaps missing. A minute or so later, it clicked. Our Atomic Blender, famous for terrorising company PR agents, newsgroups, game developers and the odd room full of monkeys for IT news, had done a runner.

Everything was dropped, all work put on the backburner as we assembled a team to find and retrieve the blender before it did irrevocable damage to some poor dot.com start-up. However, moments before Atomic's crack team of retriever gibbons could be deployed, the object of all our worries sauntered into the office. Obviously satiated for the week, the Atomic Blender grinned at us as we started the somewhat odious task of cleaning it out.

First to be peeled from the inside of our Blender was news that mIRC 6.0 has been released. Main new features include support for WMA and Ogg Vorbis sound playback, a 'trusted users' list for Auto-get DCCs, XP Theme compatibility and multi-server connection capability. Grab the latest mIRC 6.0 installer here.

Next up was an article on the new GeForce 4, including specs! Seems to be from PC Gamer magazine. Bad, bad blender!

Found wrapped around the metal blades at the bottom was news of the world's first 'driverless' taxi, currently being tested in England. Something of a cross between a taxi and a small tram, these ULTra's (Urban Light Transport's) use battery power to run and are currently in 'beta' with Cardiff County Council.

Found stuck under our Blender's lid was news that Square USA is closing the studio responsible for giving us Final Fantasy: the Spirit Within. 'Square USA, a subsidiary of Japan's Square Co., said it will shut down its powerful computers -- along with Ross and other actors they generated -- on March 31.' Square is still looking for a buyer to keep the studio alive, so if you're reading this and have a spare hundred million or so, do us all a favour and save Aki Ross!

Last to be extracted was news that the US Government is planning to implement a massive airline passenger tracking system that will give each individual booking airline tickets a 'threat rating', based upon their previous travel history. Powering this system will be a centralised US Govt. database containing records on every airline passenger to pass through the US, including details on everything from credit card numbers through to 'links to other passengers'. Definitely not a good thing for those of us who value freedom.