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.

New toy alert!

I’ve just bought myself the basis of a new separates HiFi system, namely an AV Receiver and a set of speakers. (Yamaha RX-V1700 + Wharfedale Evo-2 speakers (2x Evo-2 20’s, 2x Evo-2 8’s and an Evo-2 centre) + Yamaha YDS-10 iPod dock)

The whole lot arrived, as requested, lunchtime on Saturday and, after going down to Maplin’s to get the high quality speaker cable and banana plugs, had the system up and running by 4pm, except for the new front speakers. (The new front speakers are floor standing and this will mean a major re-organisation of the living room to fit them in.)

Even with my old front speakers the system sounds a great deal better than my old Technics EH750 system, especially with surround sound as the Technics only had small speakers for the centre and surround speakers.

I’ve set up the system with my Cambridge Audio DVD as a CD player for the time being connected via an optical cable. I will need to get a tape desk to play my old tapes at some point.

I’ve been working hard at work over the last few weeks on the e-mail server for the department.

While working from home on Friday I really broke the back of the project and have been surging ahead. So, after this week diagnosing and fixing a bug in the Exim Dovecot authorisation code and re-writing the Exim and Dovecot configurations I now have a system ready for users to test. Phew!

So, this evening I wrote a project status page and sent an e-mail asking the users to play and try to break it. Silly me! 🙂

Hmm.. What’s been happening over the last few days?

Well, to start with I’ve bought and installed a new LCD monitor for my big machine and a fast 100GB hard disk for my laptop, the final mid-life upgrade I can install in it. Still, for a three year old machine it’s still not a bad machine to use.

As for social stuff. Saturday morning saw Robert Newson turn up. It’s been ages since I’ve seen him. I think the last time we met up was about four years ago or maybe more when he parked his coach on in a lay-by on the ring road and I went up to keep him company whilst he waited for a group to finish wandering around Oxford. This time the excuse was that he was attending a re-union of people from a youth camp he helps run in the summer in Norfolk. Don’t ask me why they chose to have it in Oxford.

Anyway, he manages to finally find my house (having taken a wrong turn and ended up in the middle of Blackbird Leys) at about half 10 on Saturday morning and after about an hour’s nattering I took him off to the church just off the Abingdon Road via Sainsbury’s. After dropping him off I returned home feeling shattered (having not slept well for most of last week) and found myself dozing off as soon as I sat on the settee. An hour later I woke up. Erk. So It was back off to Sainsbury’s and got my weekly shopping and returned home.

Still shattered, I managed to get another hour or so’s sleep before the expected phone call and it’s time to pick up Rob again.

The evening was good. After a pizza in town it was home again and lots of talking and playing with computers before he left just after midnight.

Sunday morning I got up at about 9:30am and, after talking to my parents on the phone, popped out to get my car washed and a replacement door catch for the downstairs loo. I also popped into Curry’s to look at the ovens as my current one has a broken door. I found one which looked promising, a Neff double oven, but I had to check that my cupboard could take it. I went back in the afternoon and ordered it, along with a new hob. It’s going to be delivered and installed next Sunday sometime.
And there you have it.. nothing really exciting. Now it’s time to take the rubbish out and go to bed.

Last Saturday ITV started their new Saturday night flagship Sci-Fi/Fantasy programme “Primeval.” I set my DVR to record it and I watched it a couple of nights ago. Here’s my review:

Short version.

If you like good quality science fiction programmes with a good plot and intelligently delivered, forget this programme.

Long version.

This program really should be retitled “Primeval Cliche: Fighting with Dinosaurs.” The initial pre-title squence pretty well set the scene for the whole programme with a woman running away from a large predatory reptile (not dinosaur as the “time portal” (more later) is currently connected to the Permian era snd hence it’s too early for dinosaurs) with cars being thrown around (and exploding) all “filmed” on a cheap digital camera system.

Now, the premise for the story might have been interesting. Indeed, some of the ideas, such as a sceptical university researcher being the main character, obviously slipped past the commissioning editors. I could almost hear the executives saying “we need more chases, and more dinosaurs, and action. There’s not enough cute charaters or love interests.. Oh, and of course you need a really annoying geeky character, don’t you to sell to the demographic!”

There are lots of chases, a cute flying reptile, a really silly characture of a Home Office official and an extremely annoying geeky student who is into conspiracy theories who I kept on hoping that the reptiles would eat as soon as possible. Add to this that the university’s researcher is pining for his long-lost love, who just seems to be using these time portals for some other nefarious use and it just becomes laughable.. except it’s not even laughably bad.

Now, if this weren’t enough there are really poor plot holes, such as: At one point there is an expedition through the time portal thingy with military involvment. Now, what tactics would you think would be involved here? Probably a team with some quite nasty heavy weapons who deploy a group just on the far side of the portal before the second group go exploring with the researcher? Erm, no. It’s the researcher with one soldier with a standard assault rifle which wouldn’t even stop an buffalo quickly enough in an emergency… oh and the researcher wanders off on his own and.. surprise, surprise, stumbles on his wife’s camera!

I could go on, but it would get rather repetative. The trailer for next week had giant insects in it.. probably from the Carboniferous. *YAWN*

Last Monday and Tuesday I worked hard on a program to back-up users inboxes on the new mail server I’m building. I got it all working, debugged, documented etc. and then tried to put it into the RCS revision control system…. where it promptly chewed it up and deleted it.

So, after nearly a week (with a few days interruption due to other work) I’ve now managed to re-write the flippin thing and managed to get RCS to swallow it and not delete it. So, I’m basically back where I was 6 days ago.

On other fronts, I realised this morning, “Damn! I forgot Christopher’s birthday last Monday!” So, RAC, could you pass on my best wishes and sincere grovelling to Christopher for being so disorganised. I’ll make it up, promise!

This weekend my Mum and Dad came to visit. They were to turn up on Thursday, but due to the snow it was postponed until Friday. It’s very difficult these days to do anything with my Mum’s current mental state so we basically stayed inside for most of the weekend. Even with both of us (my Dad and me) it was very exhausting keeping an eye on my Mum and keeping her out of trouble. I don’t see how he manages to cope on his own, to be honest.