Had a Costa with a difference yesterday.
I'd come back from having a wander through the middle of Bristol and instead of pay more for my parking in the city centre, I went to the Costa near Tesco. All normal, nothing to report. Until the nutters come in ...
3 people to dominate 3 tables, unfortunately choosing the ones next to where I'd settled. (Lesson - it can be better to guarantee who you sit by instead of leaving it up to chance). The kind of people you really don't want sitting beside you. I can handle being included in a conversation by interesting people but people who have trouble stringing two coherent words together - please no. Especially when those people demand you join in with them. I'd have moved to a different table but I'm not quite that rude.
So that's the Costa nutters. I also seemed to be a magnet for the charity people around Bristol (must have been the poppy on display) and to finish that thread, Paintball Guy decides to try his luck at Tesco too. Can't be the appearance, I'm currently doing the impression of a derelict (not shaved for a while cos I'm on leave).
Oh well. People make life interesting but it's good to be able to choose your acquaintainces instead of having them thrust on you.
How's other stuff ?
The new PC build is working great, although the fan noise is currently a little intrusive. Also intrusive are the two blue lit fans inside the box. I get the feeling they'd provide a spooky backlight for horror films seeing as they're behind the sofa. Temperatures of the machine are just fine at 46 degrees C max for the processor and 60 degrees C max for the graphics card. That leaves loads of headroom for the summer.
Apart from the disaster which is Battlefield 3 (and a BOINC issue which I think was due to beta software), it's rock solid stable. It's currently idling away doing lots of distributed computing research under the BOINC umbrella that includes the SETI hunt for aliens, climate prediction and medical research. Doing distributed computing is a great way of seeing if a computer is stable when it's worked hard, as BOINC will make it give maximum potential over a prolonged period of time. It's tougher than game stuff.
Games are shiny. Well. For most of them, shiny = smoother as they can't really take advantage of the better hardware, the extra grunt just gives more frames per second (low numbers there make for jerkiness and bad playability). Warcraft looks about the same, apart from shadows and water. It looks more like a proper world is in there amidst the cartoony stuff. Water effects are incredible, instead of there being a white water wake behind a swimmer, it's proper ripples. Wonder what would happen if you dropped a Goblin Fishing Pole in the water. And they need to put that item back in the game where it belongs.
Not tried the newer Deus Ex yet, although I have downloaded it. I have a line on a potential fix for Battlefield 3 (wind down the wick on the graphics card a little) but haven't tried that yet. Maybe later.
For now, I've almost cleared the TV box of recorded stuff ahead of clearing it. It still has bugs with series linking which is why it needs a kick in the "back to factory settings" button.
Oh yeah - fireworks tomorrow. It's birthday season, so a few of us are meeting up to blow a lot of stuff up. Should be a blast :-)
Nice
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