When the first thing you see when you wake up is a Police car outside your house, you could be forgiven for thinking that the day had got off to a bad start.
Turns out 'something' happened overnight in a house down the road (known for being 'rowdy') and the Police came a-calling today. One car (that I saw) followed by one van, which parked itself right outside the 'rowdy' house. It would seem not for the first time.
By all accounts, we have neighbours from hell that I was not in any way aware of. Not sure whether or not I feel better for knowing that. I'm told the young daughter in that house (guesstimate age of about 10) dresses like something out of the Bratz toy range (which should be banned, but that's another rant).
Not a terrible day, as it turned out, though admittedly I slept through a great chunk of it. A welcome break after a crappy week at work. Rather than do anything (apart from nap), I spent the day quite lazily. The most proactive thing I did was visit the Dell technical support website, to see if I could uncover the source of the performance problem with my laptop.
In one sense, I think I did... I have the machine propped up on a ring binder, so the keyboard is at a more comfortable angle. When I lifted it up so I could enter a code from a label on the underside of the machine, I discovered the venting fan... and it's very blocked grating. No wonder it's been sounding so laboured - I thought it vented at the side.
Once I cleaned it up and shifted the computer so the vent is more exposed, the fan has been running quieter. That hasn't solved the problem... and neither has the video driver update I downloaded... So I'm guessing something else is adrift. Could just be that some other software updates are expecting better performance than this two year old Pentium 4 can offer (hah!). Apparently that happens a lot when Windows is allowed to automatically update itself.
In other news, on a brief sojourn through eBay, I snagged not only the limited edition 'Cosmos Type' Superlink Shadowhawk and the extremely-hard-to-find Energon Slugslinger. I'd been looking for the latter for quite a while, and actually hesitated when I found him today. After all, I've now got the TFCC exclusive Airazor, based on the same model (but with a far better head)... Do I really need Slugslinger anymore?
Silly question.
Played a bit of Panzer Dragoon Saga today, bringing my new, second hand, unconverted Saturn out of the cupboard for the second time since I bought it. I wanted to remind myself how spiffy the game is... but didn't count on noticing how crappy the full motion video is. It's not even just the low resolution of the video... the overall quality of it is so far behind today's stuff... but then, the game is nine years old.
As it turned out, I played it exactly as well as I did the first time - got as far as Arachnoth, then got well and truly creamed. I remembered his Charge attack, but completely forgot about Tentacle (which ain't that dangerous) and Devour (which... er... is). It's still a brilliant game, though... Wish I could say the same for the rest of my collection of UK games.
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