Well, today I took my car in for its second service, nominally 18,000 miles but as I do low milage it was actually 14,000.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the cost was £296.90 inc. VAT! Ouch!

It wasn’t even a really major service, just adjust a few things, change the oil, change the brake fluid and that’s it. At least they tell me that the front tyres aren’t as far worn as I thought they were, they have 4mm of tread left, so I have 2.3mm to go. If I go carefully and don’t accidently spin the wheels much they should last another year.

Still they did wash the car, or attempted to. The fact that it looks slightly more dirty than it did when it want in as it has run marks where dirty water has run down it. I think they must have used a dirty cloth or something. At least a lot of the scratches from the bushes have faded to slight lines you can see if you shine light off them is good. Though a few do look as though they might have gone through the colour coat after all.

I think the weekend after next I’ll pop down to the SAAB approved body shop and get a quote on the repair of the keyed scratch and the other marks. I want my car to be perfect again.

I’ve got my car paintwork slightly scratched this afternoon.. here’s how it happened..

I decided, as the weather seemed to be fairing better than it had been forecast, to go and have a walk along the ridgeway and try to get some more photo opportunities. So, I toddled off down to the Goring area and took a little un-metalled road towards what was signposted “The Downs.” I was surprised at how busy this little single track was. As soon as I turned onto this track another car followed behind me, meaning that if I decided the track ahd become too severe there was no way I could reverse. Anyway, I manage to get about a mile along the track when there’s a large washed out hole on the left side of the track and bushes crowding each side. I couldn’t reverse, I had to go forward, so I pulled right to the right-side of the track, brushing the bushes quite hard so that my left wheels keep on the higher ground. I manage to get through this.. but the upshot is that I now have minor scratches on my paintwork. The car behind, a Peugeot 406, decided to just go straight on.. that was the driver’s folly.. I heard a great crunch and scrape from behind as he passed the obsticle. I parked up soon after this place and noticed that the Peugeot had now left a long trail of oil from the point of the crunch.. he’d ripped a hole in his engine sump! Rather more expensive than my car’s injury.

The scratches (on both sides, as I had to return the way I came) will polish out but it’s still annoying as I’ve been careful whilst washing the car to use things which don’t scratch the surface. :-/

I didn’t even get to walk very far as almost immediately I got out of the car a heavy shower came along. Oh well.

Well, this afternoon I had a 30 minute drive in the new 9-3.

The version I drove was the 2.0t ARC model. It’s 175bhp, that’s 25bhp more than my current, old model 9-3 SE 2.0 light pressure turbo.

My impression was that the new model is very nice, it’s more comfortable, has better brakes, definitely better suspention and steering. However, in spite of the 25bhp greater power, it seemed SLOWER than my current car with far less “woosh!” The engine is far too sanitised and just doesn’t have any real punch. Admittedly the car I drove only had about 400 miles on the clock so the engine was still quite tight. However, my car had more “woosh” when it had 12 miles on the clock, the day I picked it up.

The new car does seem more cosetting.. which for a sports saloon is not necessarily a good thing as it take you away from the driving experience somewhat.

Anyway, it’s not as if I’ll be buying a new car soon.

Does
anyone else remember the Palitoy Barnstormer Stunt Kite from the late 1970’s?
There seems to be no mention of it anywhere on the net.. maybe it was merely
a figment of my imagination.

This
morning through the post came an invitation to a SAAB 9-3 Sport Saloon launch
promotional thing happening. So, earlier today i phoned up and booked a slot..
I get to drive one for an hour, get fed some snacks and probably get some
nice promotional freebies. Not that I’m looking to change my car for the
next 8 years or so, but if they’ve invited me to play with their new toy,
who am I to turn them down?

Of course, this has changed all my plans
for tomorrow. I’m still going to have to come into work and install a RAID
array on our server at 10am.. I’m just not sure I’ll be able to get to Witney
and get a haircut and still be back at Oxford SAAB by 2:30pm. I guess it
would be possible, thinking about it, assuming the barber isn’t too full
of school kids having their hair cut. Then again, they should have gone through
that last weekend, before term started.

Whilst cycling in I often have strange wandering thoughts and this morning’s cycle was no exception.. I thought..

Where’s the scientific and technological magic these days?

In the 60’s ’til the mid-70’s it was the space race and nuclear physics.

In the late 70’s to the late 80’s it was computers and space probes such as Voyager, Guiotto etc.

In the mid 90’s was the Internet and the mobile phone (in popular culture).

Today,
there seem to be only minor improvements coming along, no breakthrough science,
no knowledge expanding space probes. There’s no magical gosh! wow! things
coming up, it’s all old hat.

A great deal of the cause of the lack
of discovery etc., in my opinion, is caused by governments and people becoming
far too cautious and penny pinching only “investing” in the short term and
short sighted.

Well,
after going to bed at 8:30pm last night, reading for a bit I slept like a
log (well other than waking up once in the middle of the night sweating like
a pig, feeling hot and shivering).

Anyway, I’m totally better today. Just a little bit of tiredness.

Today at work has been one of those days where you do a lot of things but seem from the TODO list to have done nothing. Oh well.

I’ve
not talked recently about life in general. Well, life is going on. It’s neither
good nor bad, just is. My emotional state is calm and non-descript.. basically
unemotional. I’m neither happy nor sad. I seem to have little or no drive
of any kind.

I’ll leave you with a rather depressing thought…

    If life is like a bowl of cherries, if you leave it for a month it’ll be all mushy and mouldy!

    If life is what you make it, where do you get to learn the skills in life making and what happens to your prototypes?

🙂

Late
last night, just after getting to bed my belly decided that sleeping wasn’t
what it wanted to do and strated getting restless.. Let’s say that since
then it’s felt like it’s pretending to be a washing machine, churning around
endlessly (with slight cramps). I hoped that once I’d gone to the loo this
morning that things would quieten down, but no. Oh well.

Anyway, I
managed to get the car washed (despiting having to go down the local DIY
place to get a replacement hoselock tape adaptor as someone had knicked mine
from the tape outside) and the laundry done. I also watched the Grand Prix,
though fell asleep at the end. Oh and I’m now half way through the complete
Lord of the Rings.. so far it’s taken me 3 weeks on and off of bedtime reading
plus much of the weekends.

Well, after both Thursday night ’til 12:30 and Friday night ’til midnight plus some time today getting the IP-NAT and firewall stuff working, my gateway computer is now full operational again. You can see why I upgrade it so rarely, can’t you.

Everything’s ok.. though strangely, the old Creative 2X CDROM seems to tell the machine that it’s a 322X DVD-RAM, DVD-ROM, CD-R drive! How I wish it were.. it’s not even multi-session or bootable. 🙂

Other than this, I’ve done nothing today other than go do the weekly shopping, watch a little telly, eat some food and try to beat off a sinus headache.. oh and get some sleep to make up for the hours I’ve lost over the last few days.

Tomorrow I have great plans for washing the car and cutting the grass in the back garden.. oh and I might watch the Grand Prix too.

Last night was pretty productive, despite having originally decided to flop and have an early night.

I
backed up my main server and net gateway machine to tape, installed some
old memory I’d found in the cupboard, installed my old Creative 2x CDROM
drive and Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 video card and then reinstalled it with
a new OS version. That took me ’til 12:30am this mornign though.

Anyway,
the upshot of all this is that the machine is now running Mandrake 8.2 instead
of Redhat 6.0. All I need to do now is configure iptables for my NAT network
and set-up the DHCP and SMB servers.