Just a quick note saying everything is back to normal server wise as of a day or two ago. Nice and fast as before (if not faster). Thanks for your patience during the past week.

This is just a quick note to let you know that the site (including the forums) may be offline sporadically over the next couple days. One of the hard drives on our server failed, so we’re only running off one drive at the moment. Backups are currently taking place and we’re moving the site and/or forums to temporary hosting until the new drives arrive on Tuesday. We’ll then reload everything on the server (might as well since it’ll be offline for the drive swap) and we should be fully back online on Tuesday or Wednesday.

During our downtimes (or anytime really), feel free to join us in our IRC channel: #gear on irc.finalgear.com. If you don’t have an IRC client such as Chatzilla, you can connect using Mibbit (bookmark that link).

Thanks for being patient and for using FinalGear.com. :)

That’s right, the Spring 2009 FinalGear shirts are available for purchase!

The shirts ship international starting on April 26th, and are $16 each+shipping. Check this forum thread for details.

Now, with prizes!

Think you have what it takes to create a winning design that will be printed and sold to 100’s if not 1000’s of FinalGear.com fans!?

FinalGear.com is holding an open competition until March 10th, 2009 where you have just under a week to submit your designs which will be put to a vote and yes, there are prizes!

If you’ve not already signed up to the forums, do so and submit your design.

Update: Everything should be working entirely normally now.

Just a quick note to say that we’re aware of the issues we’ve been having with the site for the past 24-48 hours and that we’re working on it. The website should be fine for everyone, but our IRC hostname is probably still pointing at an old IP address. If you’re having trouble connecting to our IRC channel ( irc.finalgear.com #gear ), please try connecting to 81.171.42.235 instead.

Just a quick note to let you know that our chat widget is working again, although I still recommend connecting via mIRC or Chatzilla.

Today’s episode of Top Gear is out now. As usual, it’s also available via HTTP (free forum registration required) if you prefer not to use the torrent.

Just a reminder that Top Gear is airing an hour later today, i.e. it’s on the air now instead of being over 20 minutes ago. Since I don’t have a time traveling device, this means the release will also be an hour late today.

Second, due to boring technical issue that I won’t bother explaining, our chat widget is essentially broken. You’ll need to use a real IRC client such as mIRC or the Firefox extension ChatZilla for the time being if you want to connect.

UPDATE: All fixed now. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Hmm, looks like our static.finalgear.com subdomain that serves all of the site’s images and CSS is down meaning that the site and forums probably look like crap to you right now. Sorry about that, but I’m too big of a server noob to know how to fix it. We’ll have to wait for Quiky to come back to his PC. Hang in there meanwhile.

This is just a reminder that I don’t post spoilers on the front page, so if you’re wanting to know where they’ve been and are currently filming, make sure to check out the spoilers section of our forums. Lots of great stuff there right now!