So, what fun things have been happening in my own, personal, reality show this weekend?

Well, it all started by waking up rather too early.. 2.5 hours too early at 5am on Saturday. I dozed and listened to Radio 4 (which is usually a good sleep enducer) and managed to get at least one hour more of almost sleep before getting up and having a shower.

John Hugill, the salesman from Oxford SAAB drove past my house at the appointed time but did turn around and come back in the end. Apparently he’d forgotten to take my details home with him. Still, it didn’t matter. We got to the dealership on time and after an hour of filling out forms I was on my way home again.

I dind’t spend long at home. I merely took enough time to programme the DVR to record “Time Team”, close the blinds and dump my bags into the boot.

I arrived at Rac & Grum’s place at about midday and was welcomed warmly by Grum. Rac was busy doing her homework and couldn’t come out to play until after lunch. 😉 Meanwhile Chris was out hiking with the cubs.

I’m not sure where the rest of yesterday went other than helping Chris start to build the Lego Technics crane I’d bought him as a combination of a couple of Christmas and birthday presents and watching the first part of The Hogfather on the DVD I’d given Rac & Grum. It’s good that we all four had new toys to play with.

Today? Well, very similar to yesterday evening really. A most pleasant weekend. I left a bit earlier than usual as Rac & Grum both had homework to do whilst Chris was at cricket practise.

As for the new car. Well, the steering and suspension are hugely better than the old 9-3.. it goes around corners like on rails and doesn’t seem to lean at all. I’m also surprisingly glad that it came with the 5 speed gearbox.. that’s a lovely gearbox, you just want to keep changing gear. The 6 speed I tried was wooly by comparison. The one annoying thing I’ve found so far is that the sat-nav system is purely in kilometres, even though the rest of the car uses miles as a measurement. It’s not as if the device is of european manufacture or design as in the manual they accidently missed one occasion where they should have done a global replace of “Cadillac” with “SAAB.”

Oh, and I was quite pleased about its fuel consumption as well. Concidering that the engine hasn’t been run in yet I managed to get an average MPG of ~33mpg including standing in lots of traffic jams in Reading on the way to Rac & Grum’s place. That is the same sort of mpg my old 9-3 gets and it’s nicely run in. I guess it’s helped by the gearing, the engine is reving very low at 30mph in 3rd gear, so much so that you can’t really pull away quickly and have to change down to 2nd gear so that the revs go above 2000rpm to get into the main power band. 5th gear can only really usefully be used at 60mph and above.

I finally know when I’m going to pick up my new car.. Tomorrow morning at 9am.

Because of the logistical nightmare it would have been taking the bus my salesman has offered to pick me up from home on his way into work.

Anyway, this means that I’m going to have to do my weekly shopping tonight so that I have time to get ready to drive over to rac & grum’s place by lunchtime.

I spent this evening rearranging the junk^H^H^H^Hcomputers stuff in my loft so as to retrieve the RML 380Z which was languishing under a pile of BBC micros, DEC and Sun Type 4 keyboards.

Anyway, after a couple of hours I managed to get it down and onto my workbench along with an old composite green-screen monitor. I had to lash up a monitor cable as I don’t have a BNC to phono adaptor.

So, I plugged it all in, turned the key switch…. The RESET/POWER light came on, and the monitor program came up on the display, then almost immediately there was a pop and a crackle and a wiffy smell which came from the area of the floppy disk drives. Oh dear.

The A drive seems totally dead. The B drive spins but won’t read disks, the monitor says “DRIVE NOT READY” I’m guessing that a capacitor on the A drive went foom and has probably taken out either bits of B drive and/or bits of the floppy controller board.

Anyway, I’ve offered the whole kit and caboodle to this Nick Ryman-Tubb who contacted me a few weeks ago. He’ll have to collect it as it would be uneconomical to ship it.

So, what have I been up to this weekend?

Well, other than picking up and fitting the speaker for my car, I’ve ordered a new central heating boiler and a set of thermostatic valves for the radiator, so that’s another 2.5K going to go out of the kitty. Still, that’s what I’ve assigned the majority of the funds for, house improvements.

I’ve also discovered that 3mm diameter masonary nails are just the ticket as shelf supports in my bookshelf units. So, after getting a board of the correct depth and cutting it to the right length I now have two more shelves and the CDs are now where they should be, leaving more shelf space for other things in the tall unit. (And hence fewer boxes in the spare bedroom.

I now have recovered enough space in there for the next retro-computing project. A person e-mailed me a few weeks ago asking me about the Research Machines 380Z I have in my loft and whether I could make copies of the disks or sell him the disks so that he could get his mentor’s old 380Z up and running again by his mentor’s 80th birthday.. Now, this came at *JUST* the wrong time (typically) when my spare room was filling up. I now have a chance to get the old machine out of the loft and see if it actually works. I never did try it after I rescued it from the Department about 10 years ago (along with all the disks, manuals and sales material I could find).

On the evening between last Tursday and Saturday the “Oxford Inspires” project held a fire festival on Broad Street in Oxford. I diced to go, along with my camera, on Friday.

Most of the northern side of Broad Street had installations of various ironwork, some of which were chimney type objects, others were structures which could hold wax filled flowerpots. The chimney structures had adjustable, bowl-shaped hearths which could be moved up and down allowing the amount of draw, and hence flame, to be varied. At the very centre of Broad Street stood a 40ft high bamboo pylon from which a firey pendulum swung (apparently 1000 times, once for every year since Oxford was founded) and a bandstand on which various musicians played to accompany the show. And finally, outside Balliol College was a huge steel chandelier housing lots of flaming flowerpots.

As artistic “experiences” go it wasn’t bad, other than for the huge numbers of people. It was impossible to use a tripod but despite that I did manage to get a few usable images…

Yes, I’ve bought a new car. After haggling I managed to save about £3000 off the list price in the end. So, this is what I’ve bought:

(Big breath)SAAB 9-3 Vector Sport Anniversary 1.8t with convenience pack and Hirsch Performance upgrade in a steel grey metallic colour.(Phew!)

The current ETA is probably the 26th/27th March.

All I have to do now is get my old car ready for sale and put it on the market.

Well, yesterday I managed to finally do the last of the furnature re-arranging in my living room.

I’ve moved out the cabinet my Dad made which had the TV upon it and replace it with the TV’s original stand (which allows the centre speaker to be put in its rightful position). I originally had thought that I’d need help from someone else to do the job as the TV is so darned heavy but managed to slide it from one thing to the other in the end.

I did try to find some 2mm steel rod and some wood to make extra shelves in the bookshelves in various DIY places yesterday but unfortunately failed misserably so I may have to look further, at least for the rod.

Oh, and on the car front. I popped into Oxford SAAB but “my” saleman wasn’t in work yesterday. I’ve sort of passed the quandry back to them in a way by saying that I was interested in the pre-registered vehicle (hence they’re leaving the offer open for me for a while longer) but that if they could do a deal on a slightly lower model but special edition new vehicle (which has lots of toys as standard but not quite as powerful an engine) so that the price was close to the pre-registered car we could probably do a deal. (The dealership will get more browny points for selling a new car than selling a pre-registered one so I have more leverage there.)

This morning I popped into Oxford SAAB to order a new dashboard speaker for my car as the left-hand one has stopped working (and it’s easy to replace). Anyway, this particular weekend they happen to be having a sale of newly pre-registered last year’s model cars with delivery milage and 20% off.

Now, my plan was to keep my current car for another 3.5 years (i.e. 10 years in total) and write off the car in terms of resale value. However, I’m now in a quandry. Do I buy one of these “new” cars at the heavily discounted price now, sell my current car privately for around £5000 (the current second hand retail price) and hence have to stump up £14500 but pay that back into my savings over 2.5 years *OR* wait for another 3.5 years, hope for another deal similar to this one and that the prices haven’t gone up a great deal and have to stump up the whole amount then and there. (There’s no point trying to trade my car in as they’re only offering £2700 when I checked this morning.)

I’m leaning towards the buying the new car at the moment as the extra interest I may gain from holding on to my savings now will be far less than the combined depreciation of my current car plus the inflation of prices of new cars. Still, the down sides are that the only cars on offer which I’d consider are 9-3 AERO Sports Saloons, hence the insurance will be a lot more, and the specifications are very basic, i.e. no sat.nav or any other toys and they’re the old model.

See, I told you it wasn’t a simple decision!

This morning my new bookcases arrived, so as well as doing some work I had a whole load of fun removing all the stuff from the old bookcases, pulling all my HiFi stuff and video stuff apart, transporting three big boxes of suff up-stairs (along with the two bookcases) before doing some flat-pack-orama. Oh yes.

Well, now I have all the furnature back in place and the HiFi and video stuff set-up. I’ve also got the PC back in operation (ready for the bi-weekly Skype with my Dad tomorrow). What I haven’t done in find space for the DVDs, games, books and other junk from upstairs. The bookcases came with far too few shelves. As it is, to get the HiFi into the smaller of the bookcases I’ve had to borrow one of the ones from the tall one and I still could do with at least another shelf in that smaller bookcase and another 2-3 in the tall one. Hmmm.

Still, all I need to do to add shelves is:
    Get some beech veneered MDF which is 30cm wide.
    Cut said MDF plank into the correct lengths.
    Find some steel rod of the correct thinkness for the support holes and cut to length.
    Install new shelves.

Hmm… Tricky!

I managed to jury rig my new front speakers last night… Wow! The difference!

Now all I have to do is wait in for my new bookshelves tomorrow, modify the shorter bookshelf so that the back is open for the cabling, remove all the junk from the current bookshelves and the TV cabinet, remove the old bookshelves and TV cabinet, replace the TV cabinet with the original TV stand, install the new bookshelves, put the HiFi back together and install the junk back on the shelves.

Not a lot, really. 🙂

Erm, except that I can’t lift my TV on my own. It’s even a struggle with two people lifting it. Hmmm….. Tricky.