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Weekend musings
Jun. 2nd, 2010 08:07 pmMain achievement of the bank holiday weekend: finally buying a table and pair of chairs for the balcony on my flat. Yesterday was pretty dismal, but the sun came out this afternoon and so I'm sitting outside typing this entry while watching random people stroll past below. My laptop even has a matt screen, so it's perfectly usable even in full sunlight (take that, fancy hi-gloss displays!). I'm slowly but surely getting everything sorted with the flat.
Other stuff last weekend: on Saturday I met up with Craig and Dom in Brighton, and we pottered around in town for a bit before returning to the Brighton house to meet Nick and Dan who were running late on their way back from the States (Nick was involved in booking the tickets, always a bad sign) and play random PS3 games. I am amazed at the graphical quality of modern PS3 games - Final Fantasy XIII is absolutely beautiful to watch, though interestingly my complaints are now that the visuals are *too* sharply defined. The points at which the level of detail changes on things like grass textures as it heads into the distance really stand out on a HDTV, and the movement of all the characters is too sharp and discrete (on lower-resolution displays the edges of things like cloaks are nowhere near as sharp, and so don't stand out as much). But the summons are really shiny, and after a while you stop noticing the niggles and just enjoy the visuals.
On Sunday I went go-karting, for possibly the second time ever (the last time would have easily been over ten years ago), and didn't do too badly. I came 6th out of 7, and according to Craig I was just good enough to be hard to pass on the track (I tended to take the racing line into corners, but not as fast as he would've liked me to). For a complete novice who's not even started driving lessons that's not bad at all. The track was the Le Mans circuit at the Crawley Teamsport, which is split on two levels. The bottom has a nice gently curving straight which lets you build up a fair turn of speed (the karts we drove could do up to 45mph), while the top level is much more zig-zaggy. I managed to avoid the tire walls and only span once when trying to avoid a crashed kart, so in some ways I did better than the others who'd all been karting recently (including one unfortunate driver who stalled their kart).
Hmm... the only downside to sitting out on the balcony is it gets a bit chilly in the evening. The balcony gets lots of sun, but unfortunately only during the day when I'm at work. Should be good at the weekend though, assuming the weather stays nice!
Other stuff last weekend: on Saturday I met up with Craig and Dom in Brighton, and we pottered around in town for a bit before returning to the Brighton house to meet Nick and Dan who were running late on their way back from the States (Nick was involved in booking the tickets, always a bad sign) and play random PS3 games. I am amazed at the graphical quality of modern PS3 games - Final Fantasy XIII is absolutely beautiful to watch, though interestingly my complaints are now that the visuals are *too* sharply defined. The points at which the level of detail changes on things like grass textures as it heads into the distance really stand out on a HDTV, and the movement of all the characters is too sharp and discrete (on lower-resolution displays the edges of things like cloaks are nowhere near as sharp, and so don't stand out as much). But the summons are really shiny, and after a while you stop noticing the niggles and just enjoy the visuals.
On Sunday I went go-karting, for possibly the second time ever (the last time would have easily been over ten years ago), and didn't do too badly. I came 6th out of 7, and according to Craig I was just good enough to be hard to pass on the track (I tended to take the racing line into corners, but not as fast as he would've liked me to). For a complete novice who's not even started driving lessons that's not bad at all. The track was the Le Mans circuit at the Crawley Teamsport, which is split on two levels. The bottom has a nice gently curving straight which lets you build up a fair turn of speed (the karts we drove could do up to 45mph), while the top level is much more zig-zaggy. I managed to avoid the tire walls and only span once when trying to avoid a crashed kart, so in some ways I did better than the others who'd all been karting recently (including one unfortunate driver who stalled their kart).
Hmm... the only downside to sitting out on the balcony is it gets a bit chilly in the evening. The balcony gets lots of sun, but unfortunately only during the day when I'm at work. Should be good at the weekend though, assuming the weather stays nice!
