For the past month or so my car has been making a few odd grinding noises when setting off. Nothing major, and only when lifting my foot off the cluch to go into gear. I think something has finally worn off because just as I was pulling up to Amy’s house tonight my car emitted an awful screaming sound when in third gear. This went away when I drove back home, but while going down the motorway my car suddenly shot out of gear.

So I’m shooting down the motorway doing 70-odd MPH and all of a sudden I’m not in gear and effectively coasting to a halt … on the motorway. Fortunately it’s dead at night and with nobody behind me I drifted onto the hard shoulder. After checking I could still get into gears I drove off down the hard shoulder, built up speed and merged back into the flow.

It did it again about four times during the rest of the journey, but being wise to it I now knew just to stomp on the clutch and put my car back into gear.

I’ll ring the garage tomorrow and get it booked in. I hope they have courtesy cars, if not I’ll be catching the 7am bus to work. I’ll see how it drives to work tomorrow too, I think I’ve worked out what’s going on - gradual acceleration and gentle gear changing seems to help.

Cracked palm rest on Macbook Core2Duo

Back in April my Macbook developed a problem with its screen, requiring a visit to the Genius Bar to have it repaired.

Yesterday I discovered a crack in the palm rest of my Macbook. It seems to have happened where the lid presses against the palm rest. It also seems I’m not the only person to have this problem, as this forum post shows.

I’m off again to Meadowhall again then next weekend to take my Macbook off to the Genius Bar again. Fortunately my Mac is still in warranty. I’m a bit worried about the warranty running out in January and something else breaking. Problem is AppleCare costs £199 for a Macbook, which is quite expensive. I’ve been bitten with extended warranties before on an old laptop.

All rocked out

Yesterday was the second day of the East Riding Rock Festival and tonight’s bands seemed better. Less screaming and shouting, and more … music. I’m not back home yet, but I think I’ll be looking around iTunes later for some new music to buy

While sat in the bar area me and Amy found this poor mite. He’d been out doing his thing quite hard earlier, and sometime around 10am ran out of Star Power.

His supposed friends hadn’t, and went off to find some marker pens to decorate his face. It’s not as mean as it might seem, the victim had just endured ten minutes of people shouting, hitting and jumping on his chest… with no reaction other than a bit of vague muttering and hand waving. He was out for the count and so, under the laws of events like this, fair game.

Star Power Active

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Yeah! Tonight and tomorrow is the East Riding Rock Festival in Hull. It started at half four, but at half four I was just leaving my house ready to go and collect Amy. We got there for somewhere around 8ish, which was fine.

I have a green wristband and a curious photo of the toilet with a worrying warning sign stuck to it.

Tomorrow I’ll take my camera and get some better shots.

The place was quite cool. Imagine a town hall full of leather clad, t-shirt wearing people waving their arms in an approximation of rhythm. It was wonderfully Emo and kiddie free, most people being over 20.

Asbestos, in my toilet?

Sorry LJ readers for the sudden mega-spam, normal daily updates will resume.

It was school’s open evening tonight and I decided to go and make an appearance just to see what’s going on.

At some point in the past I must have assigned my debit card to my apple ID. I think I once bought my sister some iTunes vouchers through it. This now means I can buy stuff without needing to enter any card details.

… and I can do this from my iPod Touch … from anywhere with an Internet connection.

This is really bad, with a few clicks I can buy entire albums and have them immediately.

It’s a really nice device, and I won’t go on about it since the Internet is full of iPod waffle. It’s a much better music player than my N810 (which will now be used as my car’s GPS and portable Skype) and with built in WiFi I can use its browser to go online too

I’ve not made my N180 totally redundant, it’s just that putting music in my iPod is much better than trying to copy files into my N810.

My iPod has arrived. I’ll post more when I’ve stopped playing with it, kind of busy right now…

Thanks to someone on the YakYak forum I’ve just bought a second hand 16GB iPod Touch It’ll arrive by tomorrow!

I’ve just done a mad run to the local Maplin to buy some new SCART leads and a switchbox for my TV, and a 3.5 inch floppy disk cleaner - there were two left in the shop.

And now my floppy drives work - even one that managed to wear a scratch right through a floppy disk last time I used it! All my diskdrives are going to get a clean now, some of these machines must have 20 years worth of grime and crap in them.

… must be flooding through my house. I have so many dead Amigas with broken diskdrives, it’s untrue. Every single Amiga I own (all four of them) has a dodgy diskdrive. And I’ve just been given another one to repair, and I’m failing!

Had to resort to buying an entire new A600 off a local friend in exchange for an XBox 360 game.

Bloody retro tech, it sucks sometimes. I’m going to buy a floppy disk cleaner out of desparation.