Exercise is fun until later on

Yesterday was a good day all round. I spent the morning playing more of Portal 2 until the 'possibly something stupid' turned up, which took me most of the afternoon to set up and configure.

After that it was back to Portal 2 and then down to Rob and Em's for a Chinese fat fest, which was delicious, and then a trip to the pub with Rob, Andy and Maz. We went to a nice pub that was pleasantly quiet, and played dreadful pool, took negative pictures of each other and chatted until...well, not very late, but it was a good evening.

Today Rob, Em and I took the bikes up to the Brenig. It was fun to see the contrast between their shiny new bikes and my ancient and battered Diamond Back. We cycled from the rear car park to the visitor centre, where we had ice creams and a curious thing by Ginster that I'd bought called a Cornish Bara, and then we headed back. It was really good fun, all of us really enjoyed it. The bikes all behaved, even my old heap managed to engage top gear a couple of times, and at one point Rob and I had a granny gears race which was absolutely hiliarious as the low gearing on mine meant I had to pedal at the speed of light. The weather was bright and sunny with a healthy breeze so it all worked out well. The distance was about 8 miles in the end, which isn't bad.

Got home and obviously the exercise took a toll on me as a couple of hours ago I came over crushingly tired and had to take a nap, which is very unlike me and I had a strange dream about playing GTA but then it wasn't GTA but real and I had a fight with a woman who reversed her Range Rover into the Focus.

Ah well. Anyway, the 'something stupid' is an Alienware M11x laptop. I bought it to replace both the Acer Ferrari and the Acer 5535, as it is more powerful and more solidly built than both, but still a reasonable size. With the glowing keyboard, grills and logos, I guess the Alienware could be seen as even more ostentatious than the bright red Acer Ferrari, but at least the lights can be switched off and it becomes rather more discrete except for the alien heads. I like the way the eyes of the power button alien head are the hard drive activity though, that's nice.

It's a great machine. It has the same reassuringly sturdy feel as a Mac laptop. It's the original version with a Core 2 Duo CPU which runs at 1.3ghz normally but can be overclocked in the BIOS to 1.7ghz. It's the graphics cards that are the interesting part. In normal use it has standard Intel integrated graphics to save power, but if you need to, you can switch to a Nvidia graphics card with 1gb dedicated memory. I'm that impressed with the M11x that I'm quite seriously thinking about an M15x or the behemoth M17x to replace the Acer 7741g but they are both considerably more expensive than the 'budget' M11x.

The Acers the Alienware is replacing have just been listed on Ebay but I've realised the end time is on the 29th. Oh well, hopefully it won't matter.