This morning I got some tummy workout on the bus as I was doing my best not to laugh out loud at two guys sitting on the back seats. They were speaking very loudly — sitting on the opposite sides of the bus (why?!) — about computers.

They talked about graphics cards (one had melted a card by playing Crysis Wars on highest quality setting), CPUs (AMD vs. Intel), and video formats.

One said he was thinking about getting a new computer and told the other that he’d seen a good-looking deal in a web store. He said it was an HP Pavilion.

The other replied, “I have an HP Pavilion as my secondary computer. It’s crap.” The other then started listing the specifications for the computer he’d been looking at: 8 GB RAM, Nvidia GTX220 graphics card, 3 CPUs, 1.5 TB hard drive…

You won’t believe what the other one said! “Oh, I see they’ve evolved since 2003.”

The other, very knowledgeably said, “Yeah, with desktop computers it’s not the name that counts, it’s the components.”

I was trying my hardest to focus on the book I was reading but after they got on the bus, I didn’t manage to read a single paragraph.