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.

While out driving down the motorway today, I saw the familiar congestion and flashing lights of a motorway closed due to some sort of accident. A 4×4 had somehow managed to mount the crash barriers on the central reservation and then grind along it for around 50m before coming to a stop. The barrier was still intact, but all the legs holding it up had come off and it was lying flat on the floor. The Landrover had a large pool of oil around it, but was the right way up and didn’t look too badly damged.

I’ve just found a new website too that could be useful for finding out about this sort of thing before I get stuck in it. http://www.keepmoving.co.uk

My car passed its MOT, requiring only a change of oil, brake fluid and washer water. No nasty surprises or anything. I took it in at 10am, and it was ready at 4pm. Much better than when I lived in the Lake District and it could take three days before the bloke even bothered to look at it.

The front tyres will need replacing at some point, as will the exhaust system. The large thing in the image is the rear silencer on my car. It’s a metal box approximately the size of a shoebox. The large flake of rust is about the size of a credit card. Other, smaller bits of rust fell off when I gave the whole thing a prod with my carkeys.

And yet it passed the MOT, with the advisory notice that the rear exhaust system has corrosion.

Taking my car in was easy, I dropped it off and planned to catch the bus home. I first had to stop at the post office to collect a parcel (which turned out to be my printed and bound copy of the Apple Obective-C programming language). I didn’t really know when the busses were leaving to go to my house, so I ambled through town towards the bus station, into the station and straight onto the bus as it was about to leave.

Getting back to my car was slightly less relaxing. I had planned to just get the bus back in again, but when the garage rang at 4pm to tell me the car was ready they also said they shut at 5pm, not 6pm like they’d told me before. Great, an hour to get to the garage by public transport. Not possible, the next bus wasn’t until 4:45pm. I had two options - wait until tomorrow, or bike it.

I dragged my bike out the cellar, reinflated the tyres, reattached the brakes, gave the rear gear changer a kick and hurtled off at warp 9. I had half an hour to cycle through busy rush hour traffic in a journey that takes 15 minutes by car. And I made it too, in 14 minutes. In rush hour, bikes are quicker than cars. Cars make handy shields when going around roundabouts too, as I successfully negotiated the big, busy roundabout in town without ending up under someone’s car. It took longer to fold the thing up and secure it in the back of my car.

I think I’ll be making a trip to the bike shop soon though. I need a new back wheel, a total replacement of my brake system from the cables right down to the mechanisms and blocks, the rear gear changer needs soaking in de-greaser and probably stripping, and I think the front forks are loose. It’s so good that bikes don’t need MOTs like cars do, mine would probably be classed as dangerous and not given back to me. I need a new bike helmet too. The frame is OK though.

I need to get out and do more cycling, the steep hill between me and town was a bit too steep and I had to stop part way up it for a rest, which was a bit crap. I used to cycle up much steeper things daily in previous jobs, and I think that’s the point really. It didn’t help that my bike got stuck in a fairly high gear either.

There’s something very satisfying about cycling to a place though. The speed I cycle at has a direct relation to how quickly I get to my destination. There are no variables beyond my control that would otherwise slow down a car journey. Traffic lights don’t apply - you can get off and use the crossings (or ignore them and slip through if you want to be naughty), and empty pavements are handy too.

I’ve just discovered the computer in my car has trouble working out how many miles it can go before running out of fuel if the tank is nearly empty. For the past two days I’ve been driving around with the orange warning light on, indicating I really should fill up with petrol or face the consequences of my car stopping. The computer in my car claimed I had 60 miles left so, being me and slightly inquisitive, I ignored it.

The miles left seemed to drop to 40 and then stay around there for a long time. Enough for me to drive to and from work twice (which, conveniently, is approximately 40 miles! - I used to do that in a day before). As I was coming home, passing one of the many petrol stations on my route the computer in my car decided “nope, that’s your lot… you have —– miles left” and stopped telling me how far I could go.

I must have rolled into the petrol station with about a teacup of petrol left. There can’t have been more than a small amount sloshing around in the bottom of the petrol tank, just enough to make the fuel gauge register.

It’s very convenient living two minutes (on foot) away from a petrol station, even if it does want to charge 117.9p/litre.

It’s pretty foggy out there. I’ve just been ‘over the border’ (between Yorkshire and Lancashire) along the M62 to visit Steve to sort out some things we’re doing. The weather wasn’t so bad when I left, just the usual drizzle and rain, but over the tops it’s a near whiteout. Coming back in the dark was a slow and difficult affair, playing the game of ’spot the red lights’ and avoiding the trucks.

Steve’s local pub has wifi, and also a rather poorly chosen password on the router. We did the slightly poncy thing of installing Visual Studio on my Macbook in VirtualBox while eating our tea.

Me and Amy are in South Wales paying a visit to Jeff and Giles and their menagerie. The weather has been warm and nice all day, making the trip more enjoyable. The route down was fairly straight forward, no major traffic or route finding problems; I had my Nokia N810 and Maemo-Mapper telling me wnere to go.

Apart from paying Jeff a visit, our other reason for coming this far down was to collect The TV - one of the other YakYak forum members known simply as ‘Mr Dom’ had a 46″ rear projection telly that he didn’t want. It needs checking over by a TV repair man, having colour convergence problems, but is supposed to be OK otherwise. In need of a new telly I said I’d have it.

I drive a Fiat Panda, one of the newer ones. Not the biggest cars going. I now know my car’s boot space is exactly the same size as a 46″ rear projection telly. Using sokoban and Tetris skills, we got it to fit… just. My knees almost touch the dashboard. It’s like riding cattle class in a plane.

Jeff’s place is a nice colloection of old and new tech, sheep, llamas and other fluffy things. We’ve been introduced to the beasties and the perculiarities of his giant plasma telly.

The Proclip attachment for my car arrived the other day. I’ve fitted it, and then mounted the N810 car mount onto the Proclip. I had to drill four small holes in the Proclip to accommodate the N810’s car mount since they provide the Proclip with no holes. Due to the positioning of the Proclip I had to mount my N810 in a vertical orientation otherwise the indicator stick and half the steering wheel got in the way. This isn’t a problem since Maemo Mapper can be told which part of your N810 is pointing upwards.

Since I was driving to Amy’s for the weekend I had an excellent chance to test it out. I’ll put up pictures later.

My copy of Count Zero has just been shipped, along with The Guide to Computer Games which is an old 80s computer book aimed at kids, but being the 80s the kids are treated like intelligent people who might understand what RAM is. It can sit on my shelf next to my ZX Spectrum +3 manual and early BASIC programming books.

Also in the post to me is a Proclip car mount for my Nokia N810 Internet Tablet since the current suction-cup mount I have is incredibly wobbly and a great advert to car thieves. The new Proclip mount will fit near the radio and be easily removed. Also, since Nokia provide a proper N810 car mount that fits the Proclip system, I’ll know that my N810 isn’t about to come unstuck and try to escape while driving. I’ve had the suction cup on the current mount fail several times before; either the window is curved too much, or the suction cup is made from plastic that isn’t bendy enough to maintain a suction.

Here it is. A blue Fiat Panda 2005 edition. Like I mentioned in the previous post, I got it from my parents after my mum crashed it.

It’s been repaired since, and is now almost as shiny as when it came out the factory. I had a good look around it, and apart from some very new looking bits inside the engine bay you’d never know it’d been this badly mangled. If your car ever looks this bad, you’re looking at £2000 worth of repair btw.

It’s quite a difference to my old car. Power steering is possibly one of the best things invented. The ability to park with ease can’t be underestimated. The car has an even more powered “city” mode that means I can turn the wheel with a fingertip for even tighter parking spots. I had the radio out yesterday to try and fit my old one since it has an AUX input for my N800. Unfortunately the Fiat radio is non-standard, and contains a non-standard cage. The facia is a giant square thing so while I could connect my old radio up electronically and have it work, there would be no way to secure it into the car. It’s frustrating being defeated by a few bits of metal and plastic. Looks like I’m back on the RF transmitter again and the associated wiring mess.

I had a slightly surreal and amusing time at Carcraft though. We were all sat around a table after looking at my car and going “that’s an interesting noise it makes”, when they produced a piece of paper and gave it to me. Thinking it was some valuation I gave it a glance.

… then looked again slightly confused …

It wasn’t a valuation, it was a printout of my Livejournal entry for the other day. Somehow, presumably through my email address or a lucky Google search, they’d managed to find my LJ and printed it out for a good laugh. It did explain the odd comments they made while looking at my car

They made selling my car nice and easy. They looked at it, then I  just had to show various bits of paperwork to prove it was mine, and that I was who I claimed to be. That was all I had to do. They even allow dogs in the showroom which prevented Amy and Twinkle from having to wait outside in the cold and strong winds.

So, to the Carcraft / webuyanycar.com (go on, admit it, your name is a little daft) people - hello!

I phoned my current insurers to find out how much it would cost to transfer my current car’s insurance onto the car I am getting on Saturday. The helpful man on the phone informed me it would be £76 extra and that I have three months of insurance left. After that I will have acquired 3 years no-claims and that’ll make my next renewal cheaper.

So instead of my insurance being a whole £300 a year, it’ll be the not too bad £375. That’s for fully comprehensive with the usual stuff and the ability to drive other people’s cars - a feature that is useful at times.

It’s still not stopped raining yet so I can’t T-Cut the scratches out of the paintwork.

The roads around here are awful. On my way home tonight there was a lot of water on the road, and somehow a large amount of oil or diesel had spread itself across the surface too. Every time I set off my wheels span, and stopping was a bit like driving on ice. When I got home I ran my fingers over the tyres and they smelled of diesel. Hopefully it’ll get washed away in the rain overnight.