So my external 500GB hard drive started to die.

I splashed out on a Drobo and two 500GB hard drives for it.

I just manage to copy my stuff off before the old external drive dies completely.

Everything is good. Time passes.

Tonight one of the new drives in the Drobo died.

Already the Drobo has paid for itself because I haven't lost anything.

Everything is good. Time passes...

Anticipating the launch of the Wratch of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft, I've renewed my subscription to WoW and started playing again. It was kind of bewildering at first all of the quite small changes to the interface, the world and and the things to do now. It goes to show how much effort Blizzard are still putting into the game when just by leaving for not even a year you can come back and find almost a completely new game experience.

As soon as I logged in I recieved a flurry of whispers from people who hadn't seen me online in a long time, and I also got invited straight away into a guild filled with many of my old WoW buddies.

Now it's just a matter of getting as many in-game achievements as possible :E

So I've had my car back from having the silly old woman scrape repaired and I am impressed despite also being slightly annoyed at the whole affair taking nearly two weeks to complete. In the two times that my Focus has been repaired by Evans Halshaw it's taken a bit too long to get done but the results are damn good.

From what was on the report they fitted a new bumper, rear wheel arch and side panel and it looks perfect and is all aligned straight and true.

To top it all off to say sorry for taking so long they properly cleaned the entire (admittedly stinking) car and even did something to the wheels to make them look like new. I don't know if they just used some cleaning agent or did something fancier but really they look like new now it's amazing.

Maybe they just had some trainee or work experience kid to give busywork to but I'm not complaining.

So I go to my car this morning and discover a lovely big scrape on the rear corner. After a good 'for fucks sake not again!' I turned my thoughts to about how I'm gonna have to pay for the repair because it was probably some uninsured bum/drunk/gypo/chav last night and they haven't left a note and buggered off forever.

Luckily they left a piece of their car on the road.

And this pinpointed the make of the car.

And so after a quick Google image search I narrowed it down to a door trim off a silver Citroen C3. And I know for a fact there's an old lady that lives on the cul-de-sac that owns that exact car.

As a matter of fact while I was taking the photos above she came over and apologised many times and we swapped insurance details and she apologised some more but it's ok I guess not a terrible amount of damage done - mostly paint work and a small few dents.

So tomorrow now I have to phone up my side and get a repair sorted. I wonder what over-the-top courtesy car I'll get this time, the VW estate I had last time was pretty nice.

I swear as time goes on my car is going up in value because of the repairs being done on damage caused by other people. I'm not complaining but still it's a pain in the arse nonetheless.

BBC Weather FAIL

So I completed Metal Gear Solid 4 last night and to be honest - what a game.

Not so much a game, more of an extended cut-scene with gameplay parts mixed in but nonetheless it was a gourmet gaming experience. It was genuinely horrible to see what had become of Snake and in the last battle scenes you just don't want him to give up yet.

I'm so glad Hideo Kojima didn't take the easy way out and have Snake discover some super-treatment for him that makes everything rainbows and sunshine at the end.

Solid Snake has to come to and end at some point and now is as good as ever.

We're entering a strange situation now where the Mozilla Organisation is developing a plugin for Internet Explorer that gives Microsoft's browser HTML5 functionality, more specifically the Canvas tag. This is how old, broken and underdeveloped Internet Explorer is becoming.

The Ars Technica piece goes on to say how Mozilla are also working on a plugin to give IE the same Javascript engine as used by Firefox to promote the development of better web applications.

I've been spending my evening lately watching classic films from the 80's and 90's including but not excluding others:

• Ghostbusters I & II


• Highlander I, II, III


• Escape from New York


• Escape from L.A.


• Mad Max I & II


• Brazil


• The Warriors


• They Live


• Big Trouble in Little China

Also I've been watching through up on MST3K which I've been slowing working my way through from the first (technically 4th) episode and I've nearly finished the second season now. The mountain of 198 episodes is monstrously huge even for my series-bingeing TV watching nature.

Watching TV without a TV is awesome.

When you pick up a phone call that turns out to be an annoying person trying to sell you something or similar, have a cap-gun ready, scream "OH GOD NOT AGAIN!" down the phone and/or generally shout madness then pull the trigger a few times before hanging up.

I'm sure the tele-marketer would see the funny side of this.

Considering the petrol engine in my car isn't the most economical in the range, getting a diesel-like 32MPG from my mostly puttering about town driving is just lovely and shows what you can squeeze out of an average aged petrol engine when you drive it smart. When I first got my Focus I remember getting absolutely terrible mileage (we're talking <20MPG here) from town driving. On the rare occasion I've done a lot of motorway driving I've gotten a most excellent 40MPG out of my car.

All it takes is little changes to your driving:

• Be easy on the accelerator - my car will easily pull from standing with just the engine idling (this is good for crawling traffic) and if I need a quicker take-off 1500-2000RPM max is all that it needs. I don't floor the pedal either, about half-way is as far as it goes. There's enough power in my car to get me moving fast enough like this.


• Be easy on the brakes - if I see a red light ahead or coming to a roundabout I coast up to it in gear and only start using the brakes when I need them. So many times this saves coming to a wasteful total stop because the lights change to green in time or you can better judge for a gap to join a roundabout. You really want to keep stopping to a minimum.


• Understand your engine - all modern car engines shut off the fuel injectors when you coast in gear with a high enough engine speed (usually above 1000-1500RPM), this means when coasting you are getting infinite MPG. Coasting with the clutch down or in neutral doesn't kill the injectors so is a complete waste.


• Turn it off - Another way to get infinite MPG is to switch off the engine and so something I've started to do is turn off the engine when sitting in traffic at red lights; although I only do this when I'm not at the front of the queue or I'm at lights I'm familiar with so know when to start the engine. Holding up a bunch of people isn't a nice thing to do.


• Slow down - I just go a bit slower now, especially on dual-carriageways and motorways where I religiously do 60MPH unless I have a serious need to overtake and I take it easier generally in town. Unless you're doing a really long-distance travelling a bit slower will only mean arriving marginally later at your destination.


• It's like a mixed drink - getting good mileage is a combination of managing your engine speed, and throttle position - for example my car will easily move along a flat road at 30MPH in 5th gear with the engine rotating at less than 1500RPM with my foot just touching the accelerator to maintain the speed; in other words sipping fuel. Now I wouldn't want to accelerate onto a motorway or overtake in 5th gear, I'd have to floor the pedal and it would take ages with the engine devouring fuel to pick up speed. Even though it'd only be ticking about 2000-2500RPM it'll be burning petrol with the throttle open so wide when dropping down a gear or two making the engine hit 3000RPM or more would get the job done so much quicker with less throttle and in turn using less petrol. Always remember your foot is controlling how much petrol the engine is getting every time it does a single rotation.

All it takes is a bit of concentration in what you're doing and you can save a bit of money, and it's become a game for me after creating a spreadsheet to track my fuel economy over the weeks and months. You can also sign up for FuelFrog which you type in how much fuel you put in since your last fill-up and how many miles you've done and charts out your mileage for you. Though FuelFrog does it's MPG calculation using US-gallons not Imperial/UK so it spits out worse figures than you're actually getting.

Weeeeeeeeeeeee...

TypeRacer is a fun little game that has you type out quotes from books/films/screenplays against other people as a race to the finish line. What's good is that you have to type out each word exactly and it becomes manic when you make a mistake and have to backspace up and get a correction in. I've managed a healthy 50-60 words per minute in my typing though with is pretty decent.

Anyone who says this film isn't brilliant isn't someone you should even acknowledge exists.

It was delicious.

So a while ago I bought a fancy Western Digital My Book Studio external hard drive. Not only does this hard drive have every connection bus you could want it also came with a 5-year warranty which is pretty good. This premium product designed for use with Mac's should be awesome, right?

Not so.

You see it always manages to piss me off almost every day as it does one of two things regularly. It either goes into its own deep-sleep and dismounts, requiring a power cycle to get it going again; or it decides it's time to stop responding and when either me or my Mac decides it wants to check out the drives contents I get slapped with the finder or whatever app locking up until I disconnect the power to it and Mac OS warns me that I shouldn't disconnect a drive before ejecting it. Silly me.

It annoys me now.

So Firefox 3 is out after a long release candidate phase and it's really something special. Ok it's not going to replace Safari on the Mac because it still isn't quite there yet as a Mac application. It'll definitely be staying in my Apps folder though as a useful secondary browser and I really love the new address bar that searches your history live for results.

Over 10 million downloads so far as well is nothing to be sniffed at.

So I bought the new Billie the Vision album for a bargain price off Play.com's download service. I love the Billie's so much it's a shame I missed out on seeing them when they did a show in Bristol a few months back which I didn't know about :(

Play's download service is pretty good too with DRM-free MP3's at a good bitrate and the high quality album art file thrown into the zip file too. It seems you can re-download your tracks again too which is a nice touch.

Xslimmer is one of those terrific little Mac shareware apps that does what it does extremely well - it strips your applications of all their unneeded multinational translations, as well as other non-English stuff, and then goes on to ripping out the legacy PowerPC code and throwing it all in the trash. This means you can slim down your apps to fractions of their former space-hogging glory.

Lovely stuff.

Good article from the Guardian on how the vilifying of photographers in this post-9/11 world is nothing but a wild goose chase when you consider that no major terrorist incident has made use of pre-attack location photography.

The case for leaving photographers alone continues to rumble on I'm glad to say.

So I spent a couple of hours hacking and cracking various things to give my TomTom Go 520 not only the latest operating system from the new Go 930 but also the latest v8 UK & Ireland map to get all the cool new stuff like lane guidance on motorways like shown in the screenshot above, and this also works on normal road junctions that have filter lanes, but also voice recognition works again which has been broken for some time now on the official 7.x firmware.

As well as improved MapShare which allows you to change the map yourself to alter roads and speed limits and the like another thing you get now is smarter route planning based off all the data TomTom has been collecting for the last couple of years about peoples journeys so you are automatically taken on routes that avoid congestion at the times of day they are slow moving.

All good stuff and of course free ^_^