According to this Gamesradar article, it would appear that both the Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS are due to launch on the same day - 18th March 2005. If this turns out to be true then someone (I suspect Nintendo) is going to be disappointed, because who on earth is going to spend £400 on buying both handhelds at the same time? Certainly not me. I'll be getting the PSP, thank you very much.

Well, the auction for my Dreamcast Arcade Stick has now finished, but the winning bidder appears to live in Adelaide, Australia. What a muppet. Which bit of "Seller will post to UK only" did he not understand?! So now I have to go through the rigmarole of trying to contact him to find out if he really does want it shipped all the way to Oz. If he does, it'll end up costing him nearly £70. If he doesn't actually want it, then I'll have to file a non-paying bidder report on him to eBay and see if I can get my fees refunded. What an idiot.

After a couple of months' respite, the eBay bug has struck again. I was wandering around town during my lunch hour, when I happened upon a brand new, boxed, Sega Dreamcast arcade stick in the clearance section of WHSmith for only £3. So, needless to say, I bought it and stuck it on eBay straight away. And it's currently at £21 with one day left to run! Maybe I could resign from my job and make my living flogging old tat on eBay...

I've spent a lot of time over the past few days playing Rainbow Six 3 on my Xbox, both single player, and online on Xbox Live. It's quite a strange experience playing online - and nervewracking at first! It's a bit like your first day at school, or at a new job - you're not quite sure how everything works, who knows who, and whether you're allowed to use that mug that's next to the kettle. It seems like everyone else on there is a veteran and you're just a newbie.

I got round the problem by just confessing straight away - "Hello, I'm new here. Mind if I join in?" People seem more inclined to help out that way. Sure, I've already had the misfortune to jump into games with people who aren't feeling very altruistic (I've been kicked off two or three servers, and been blown up on purpose once) but generally it's been a good experience. And interesting to chat with people on the other side of the world too - apparently the weather was lovely in Florida yesterday.

And five people have seen fit to add me to their "Friends" list, so that I can go back and play with them again. Which is nice.

After seeing the unquestionable beauty of Sony's PSP, I really feel that Nintendo have dropped the ball with their new Nintendo DS. I'm really not at all sure about having dual screens, the touch sensitivity seems like a gimmick, and (let's face it) it's ugly.

I'm a big Nintendo fan, but when they're up against the mighty Sony, they'll have to come up with something better than this to maintain my loyalty. One look at the Sony PSP makes me want one right now, and the Nintendo DS just makes me want the PSP even more. That's just marketing suicide.

So finally Sony have revealed details about their PSP Handheld at this year's E3 conference. Mmmm.... pretty shiny thing. Put one on my Christmas list please.

I got round to installing Xbox Live last night, and it was a very simple process apart from choosing a Gamertag! As I suspected, all the obvious names had already been taken so it was a case of trying things out - putting spaces in (or taking them out), different combinations of capital and lower case letters, altering punctuation etc etc. Eventually it got so complicated that I decided to opt for a nice simple name that I was fairly certain no-one else would have. (Gamertag removed for privacy reasons).

I got Rainbow Six 3 in the post this morning, so I shall have a bit of practice on it this evening, and then launch in to the big scary world of online gaming. If you're already on Xbox Live, let me know your Gamertag, and we'll hook up for a game or two.

Incidentally, the Qees that I ordered yesterday haven't turned up yet.

Just ordered three of these little fellas from Firebox.com. Dunno why really, I just thought they were seriously cool. I wonder which ones I'll get? I'll post some photos of them when they arrive. Sometimes I'm such a big kid...

I wish I hadn't started thinking about it now. I'm having real problems deciding what my Xbox Live Gamertag should be. The thing is that all the obvious things are bound to have been taken already, and I can't just choose one thing in case it's unavailable. Which means that I'll have to make a prioritised list of potential names and try them out until I find one which isn't already in use. And the other problem is that once you've got it, you can't change it, so it has to be something that I'm not going to regret later. And it has to be cool, obviously.

So I got my Xbox Live starter kit in the post today, but (in a rare display of restraint) I haven't even taken the cellophane off the box yet. The twelve month subscription doesn't start until you install the disk on the Xbox, so I'm waiting until I've got Rainbow Six 3 (which I ordered today) and decided on what my Gamertag is going to be. I bet people have taken all the best names already.

Blogger have relaunched their service this morning, and it has loads of great new features - like the ability to post via email. So I'm writing this on my Pocket PC in order to test it out. So if you can read this, it must work!

I finally got round to ordering Xbox Live from Amazon.co.uk yesterday. Thirty quid for twelve months of online gaming is a very good deal in my opinion. I've got two or three games already that are Live-compatible, but I was reading this article at gamesradar.com this morning and it would appear that the coming months should prove to be a whole load of fun! Doom 3 looks deeply cool...

I can't really explain why it's so exciting, but since I've hooked up my computer via ethernet instead of wireless it's been like having a brand new machine. The USB and networking problems that I've been having have been completely resolved and I can use all my peripherals again without worrying about upsetting the network connection. I've plugging and unplugging things with wild abandon and the computer just copes with it. Previously (and I'm not really sure why) I would plug in something to the USB port - like a scanner or webcam - and the wireless connection would drop out completely and not come back again. Which was, as you can imagine, exceptionally annoying.

It was bothering me so much that I was considering buying a whole new computer in the hope that it would rectify the problem, but now I don't need to. That £6 bit of CAT5 has saved me hundreds!

Not that I'm saying I won't buy a new computer, it's just that it'll be for a better reason than dodgy USB ports.

So I went out and bought ten metres of CAT5 from the computer shop down the road (only cost me £6). Then, down in the cellar, I fed one end of it through a hole in the skirting board next to a radiator pipe (meaning I didn't have to drill anything) into the wall cavity, and then reached round inside the cupboard and pulled it through. Then I drilled a small hole in the lounge floorboard and passed the CAT5 up through it and plugged it in to the router. There you go. Seven cable clips and you wouldn't even know it was there. Don't know why I didn't do that months ago rather than fighting with unreliable wireless.