Phlegmatic

1. Managed to get six tickets for the Oakland Raiders / Miami Dolphins game at Wembley in September (me, two friends and three friends-of-friends). 28 years a Raiders fan and this will be the first game I've seen in person. (Not counting a preseason game.)

2. Car passed MOT (well, it needed a headlight bulb). I'd expected that at least £2,000 of work would be needed. The dealer had some very rare and interesting 911s in including three GT3 RS models (a very fast, very hardcore 911). One of these, in white, with red trim and red wheels had the number plate FA51 LAP, which amused me. They also had an utterly gorgeous blue ducktail 1970s 911 that was almost mint. The service manageress reckoned it was worth £180k.

3. Had a very successful wander around secondhand bookshops in Exeter while waiting for the MOT results. Two Robin Hobbses (although one turned out to be a book I already had but didn't realise, the other was the third in a trilogy where I've read the first and have the second sitting on the to-read shelf), one Tad Williams (the first of his famous trilogy, whose name escapes me, but which I've heard good things about), one Michael Moorcock omnibus (about the only Eternal Champion series I don't have - the second Corum trilogy), David Brin's entry into the trilogy of other-famous-authors-do-Asimov's-Foundation (which will take me ages to get around to, but only cost a quid) and a non-Revelation Space universe Alastair Reynolds. None of the books cost as much as £2, so I call that a win.

4. My Dad has ordered fibre-optic superfast broadband from BT based on my advice and has got his current provider (the astonishingly shite TalkTalk) to fix his current 1mbps copper connection for the remaining two weeks until his fibre is switched on. They'll go from 1mbps to "Up to 34mbps". I have arranged to provide some IT education so that they will be able to make the most of their new superfast broadband. This may have to start at a very basic level. I don't know why, but neither of my parents seems to pick up IT skills without actual teaching. They've had a computer of one sort or another in their house since 1982 and a Windows PC since the 1990s, so you'd think they'd at least know of the existence of copy-and-paste...

Had to take my car in for its annual service (a minor one) and four new tyres this week. bunn calls my car Percy*, but the name hasn't stuck as much as "Helga" has for her Saab 9-5.

Anyway, while four new 18" Pirelli P-Zero Rosso tyres aren't cheap (a little shy of £800 fitted), a minor service shouldn't have been too painful. Long term readers of this journal may remember that in true Chartered Accountant fashion, I bought this car only after creating a complicated annual cost of ownership spreadsheet.** A big plus for the 911 is the low servicing cost compared to similar cars like Maseratis or Aston Martins.

Unfortunately, my car is now very old (thirteen years and counting) and very high mileage (well over 100,000). And bits have started to corrode. Not big bits, but small and expensive bits. After some pretty effective haggling to reduce the labour rate by 50% (!) and only doing the things absolutely necessary (while leaving the "advisables" to a later date), we got the cost down to £2,440 including the tyres. That's quite a financial blow for someone on my income. Nevertheless, the car is running much better now, and I'm encouraged to think that there's no reason I shouldn't be able to keep this car running for several years. Maybe one day, it'll be a classic 911.***

One silver lining is that for the three days they had Percy, they loaned me a brand new top of the range Cayman S PDK with pretty much every option. They had an identically-specced one in the showroom with a list price of £61,500, so that's quite a generous courtesy car. For the uninitiated, the Cayman is like a 911, but with the engine in the middle rather than at the back and with no rear seats. Anyone who has tried to sit in the back seats of my car may argue that the 911 doesn't have rear seats either. The S is the faster model with a 3.4 litre engine (291bhp, 171mph, 0-60 5.1 seconds). However, what I really loved was the PDK gearbox. PDK is Porsche's 7-speed flappy-paddle gearbox ("Porsche Doppelkupplungsgetriebe"). I've driven a Porsche Boxster in the past with the old "Tiptronic" flappy paddle, but wasn't massively impressed. PDK is completely different. High-revving when you want it to be, but still torquey at low revs and with almost instantaneous manual selection with a flick of the paddle. I'm a convert.

My colleague random once suggested that Jeremy Clarkson was a strong influence on my life. This is true up to a point, and there are many issues on which Mr Clarkson and I agree. However, he is wrong about two things:
1. The 911.
2. Flappy paddle gearboxes, or at least the PDK.

The other thing that this Cayman had was the optional switchable sports exhaust. Press a button and the exhaust is LOUDER. (Why you'd want it to be quiet is beyond me - it sounds glorious. I'm sure the bloke I overtook on Dartmoor**** thought the same as I blasted past him.)



* Percy the Purple Porsche.
** Here's the chart. The current annual running cost even accounting for this service is rather lower, mostly because we're now on the flatter part of the depreciation curve.
*** The 996 model of the 911 is perhaps the least sought after of all 911s (which is how I could afford it in the first place). This is because it was the first of the 'new' 911s with water-cooled engines and sensible interiors, which makes it less attractive to people who want a more 'pure' classic air-cooled 911 and not as good as the more modern 997 and the new 991 models.
**** I've got a shiny new Cayman S PDK to play around with, so I'm going to take the fun road rather than the dull dual carriageway.

Kinder Eggs are illegal in the United States. Who knew?

Discussion on the cinema shootings in the US. (Thanks gwendally)

And another. (Thanks bart_calendar).

  

A History of Wooing Women. (In musical form.) (Thanks ozisim).

  

A story from America to depress you...

...and one to inspire you.

Which current and recent cars are future classics? (Number 1: I totally agree, but then I am biased.)

Seven foot long (minifig scale) Lego model of Serenity.

The christian priest who "cures" people of cancer...by kicking them in the face.

Spanish wind turbines kill "6 million to 18 million birds and bats annually".

Doctor Who Van Gogh t-shirt, by Truffle Shuffle

Best Photo of the Month

The next Total War game will be Rome 2!

A Song of Ice and Fire and Minecraft

Lifeguard fired for helping drowing man

Evolution of the F1 Car 1950 - 2012 (really nice piece of animated graphic design)

Explaining the British government's economic policies and the current economic situation.

Neil Gaiman is working on a Sandman prequel.

Christopher Tolkien's first interview in something like forty years. He was a cantankerous old fart then. Do you think he's improved...?

The first photo ever uploaded to a website. (You mean you didn’t know that CERN has its own girl band? And what’s more, they’re pretty good. And now would totally be a good time for a commercial release for “Mr Higgs”.)

The Relian Robin Half-Track, complete with .50 calibre heavy machine gun.

The Ministry of Defence has more accountants than the British Army has officers.

More on Bob Welch (with video). (Nice guitar solo from the late Bob Weston at 4m24s)

Items to cut from central government expenditure number 4,389: lending money to hostile countries who aren't likely to pay it back.

The Guardian. Not even remotely anti-semitic. Oh no.

The real UK citizenship test. I scored 10 out of 10.

We are far more likely to encounter an ancient alien race than one with similar levels of technology to our own.

What if Dr Seuss had done a Star Wars book?

The biggest solar flare ever observed by modern instruments was in March this year.

The proposed General Anti-Abuse / Anti-Avoidance Rule (GAAR) will just make things less certain for taxpayers and will make the UK a less attractive place to do business.

nVidia's new top of the range gaming graphics card costs £880.

Comparing Orwell's dystopian vision to Huxley's. Seems to me Huxley was closer to being correct.

London Olympics "to come in £476m under budget". This is that strange parallel universe known as public sector accounting, where something that was originally budgeted to cost £2.4billion but which will actually cost £8.8billion is “under budget”…

You think Louise Mensch has it bad? At least she only got trolled by one Saruman-lookalike left-wing nutjob.

Very funny spoof review of Game of Thrones.

Today's big job was tidying up the library. We've removed a number of duplicates and some books that we're never likely to read or don't really want to see again. More on that later.

We've also moved the books we want to read next onto to-read shelves. However, by the time we'd finished, we had three to-read shelves each. (Note that this isn't how many books there are in the library that we haven't read, this is the just the books we haven't read and want to read NOW.)

Anyway, I thought I'd share the contents of my to-read shelves with you in the hope that someone would say "Oh, definitely read x next" or "I hated y, but you might like it" or even "Knowing your tastes, I don't think you'd get on with z".

( Read more )