Thank's to Bob I now have the greatest mouse mat every conceived.

So no posts for a while. What's that all about then eh?

Not really done much with the Mondeo except plop some mud flaps on all four corners. It turns out that the big fat 18" wheels kick up an outstanding amount of crap up the side of the car and I was getting sick of a) cleaning the shite off all the time, and b) the pinging noises of all the stone flicking off the car. So for a ridiculous sum of £55 I got a set of Ford mudflaps on and they do look nice and suit the Mondeo properly. The Mondeo is running lovely, but I'm looking forward to the eventual demise of the flywheel (DMF) and I'm thinking of having a new one fitted quite soon, especially before it takes out the starter motor.

Decembers ATP music event in Minehead was pretty awesome, although we didn't see the ultimate maximum number of bands we could we still had a good ol' time.

Today I watched all of the Rambo films one after another, and what an experience it was.

Suits you, sir!

This woman is holding a giant onion and is enjoying it... maybe she is enjoying it a bit too much.

Today is a good day, because today the first episode of season six of The Office is available for download.

This week, Michael is impossibly inept as is par of the course, his social retardation almost bringing the entire office to self immolation from spreading dirty rumours about literally everyone and everything - it's very funny stuff, especially about Andy's sexual orientation.

Inevitably everyone gets wind of the rumours about them, and quickly they all discover that it is of course Michael that was the source of every single rumour going around. Things come to a head with a confrontation with Michael where he attempts to explain himself, but where Jim and Pam break their pregnancy secret to everyone to distract everyone from the trouble Michael's got himself in. The number of times that these two save Michael from himself is saintly.

The sign of a good Office episode is one where they get Creed in, and in this one Creed reveals that everything he does is working towards his passion for SCUBA diving‽ That man is the greatest enigma in an american sitcom.

I laughed a good few times and there's an excruciating cringe-moment at well paced intervals and hopefully the writers and producers can keep this pace up. Good stuff.

So I've been running Mac OS X Snow Leopard for a few days now and I suppose it's time for a quick review of my thoughts so far. If you've read any other reviews about the latest Mac OS then prepare to be unsurprised.

What makes Snow Leopard so different from every other major release of Mac OS X is that there are 'no new features'; nothing user-interface wise that can really be shown off as a major reason for upgrading. Leopard had Time Machine, new interface theme, new Dock, blah blah blah, but here Apple has decided to instead allow their development group to give OS X a good spit and polish, refine every aspect of the operating system, make features easier to understand and use.

Calling Snow Leopard a 'no new features' release is a terrible lie though, because what they have added will make Mac OS X the most advanced operating system able to take full advantage of where computers are heading.

64-bit processing is now fully supported everywhere, including all the built-in applications, which is no big surprise considering Leopards already pretty good support for 64-bit CPU's.

Grand Central Dispatch is much bigger news. This technology allows software developers to easily create multi-threaded applications by managing the creation, data manipulation and other aspects of multiple threaded software automatically. Basically this means that when software writers start using GCD, then everything will become snappier as the app takes full advantage of all the available CPU cores in a system - these days being at least 2, sometimes 4, and can be up to 16 in a Mac Pro!

Next up is OpenCL, which is Apple's open- and industry-standard creation to allow software writers to take advantage of the ridiculous computing power that sits on modern day graphics cards. Like Grand Central, it's pretty much all handled automatically by Mac OS X, with software writers simply having to just compile-in support for OpenCL.

Also, Apple has finally killed off PPC support, meaning Snow Leopard is for Intel-Macs only. During the install process the installation of the Rosetta PPC emulation engine is disabled by default!

So really, Snow Leopard is about making Mac OS X future-proof for the next decade, by allowing the OS to make better use of multiple CPU cores and graphics processing power, while making the user interface easier, cleaner and less bug-prone.

I wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone, being powered by OS X, has a hand in dictating how Snow Leopard was developed. Not only by straight stealing of developers to work on iPhone OS, but ensuring technologies like GCD and OpenCL are added. I wouldn't be surprised if a next-gen iPhone gets given multiple low-powered CPU cores, and a OpenCL-capable graphics chip.

To be honest, if this was a full priced new Mac OS release, you could easily live without Snow Leopard, at least for a while until app writers began to take advantage of GCD and OpenCL, but at £29 you can't go wrong. There's enough tidying up of the user interface, new features (though small), and other little delights to make upgrading right away a no-brainer.

I got my new rear light clusters for my Mondeo today, and had them fitted and plugged in less than 15 minutes later. Looking nice and snazzier now if I say so myself.

The indicator/brake light segment is a bit different, and theres a touch of chrome in there to jazz it all up a bit and make the back matching with the chrome facelift front grille.

Very pleased all in all, and money well spent on making the Mondeo a little classier :)

So today with a break in the summer rain I finally had a chance to fit the new rear bumper skirt I bought for the Mondeo. The new one has reflectors built into it, meaning that I can now buy and fit the rear light clusters from the 2005 facelift Mondeo that look a bit fancier.

I needed a new rear skirt since the 2005 model lights don't have reflectors in them, meaning my car wouldn't be road legal and would fail it's MOT.

It was an absolutely filthy job, afterwards I had to wash my hands again and again, and then wipe the car down to remove all the dirt I'd rubbed onto the car.

Expect another photo in a few days showing the new lights installed.

Took the Mondeo to a auto locksmith in Tredegar today to get a new remote key and a new spare key coded to the car. Took about 20mins all in, and everything's working perfectly. Charged me less than half what Ford wanted to do the same job too!

Bought a new lower bumper skirt and reflectors to fit, which will upgrade it to the final facelift look that the Mondeo had for the last couple of years until the current model replaced it. When that's fitted I'll replace the rear light clusters with the fancier looking final facelift ones as well to make the Mondeo look nice and posh.

Got a haircut as well - £6.50! Grrr...

This afternoon I gave the Mondeo's Mass Air Flow sensor a clean. It's a quick 15 minute job and it's another of those things that gets a little dirty as the miles go by and will affect the smooth running of the engine.

It wasn't as filthy as I was expecting after cleaning out the EGR, which shows that the air filter is doing its job.

Nw I just need another day of good weather to pop the inlet manifold off and give that a good clean out.

So today with a day off I took the opportunity to clear out the Mondeo's EGR valve, which as the years go by builds up a thick coating of carbon that slowly begins to affect the amount of air the engine can suck in easily. This eventually effects the fuel economy and low-down power of the engine but will never get so awful that bad things happen.

Nevertheless, following this handy guide I had it off, cleaned, and back on in just over and hour and a half all in. Check out the before and after shots I took.

A vast improvement in the cleanliness and over the next hundred miles or so the engine will adjust to it's new vast improvement in airflow.

It's a shame that the weather turned in the afternoon because I was planning on also taking the inlet manifold off and giving that an equally good clean.

Yesterday this little gizmo came in the post from British Gas - a free live updating electricity usage meter. After wrapping a sensor around the mains feed and pairing it with the display, it keeps track of your usage day-by-day, and shows a whole bunch of nerdy stats.

Seems to work pretty well, and it's crazy seeing the numbers jump up and down when you switch TV's on etc.

What surprised me though is that my iMac, Drobo (with 4 hard drives whirring), and another external hard drive, only consumes about 80 watts average, which is pretty good really.

Hmm, no post since February or so, that is a long time undoubtedly. So where do I start?

No new computers, no new camera gear, no new electronics, no new online endeavours to speak of.

But, ah yes, I have a new car. There's something to talk about.

This was one of the last photos I had of my lovely Ford Focus estate, a great car by all means, but the 1.8 petrol engine wasn't the most efficient, not the quietest car on the motorway, and I fancied a change.

So what's a step up from a Focus? Why a Ford Mondeo of course! Behold...

A 2004 Ford Mondeo 2.0 TDCI on the Zetec trim level. What a big tasty car it is; very comfortable, lots of fancy features, and it's always nice to feel the turbo kick in :)

Loving the mid-fifty miles-per-gallon on the motorways too.

I finally got off my ass and set up a redirect to stop our friendly quotes pages spammer getting on here.

Instead he is sent to The Last Measure (link is safe, goes to Wikipedia description).

Mmm...

So my iMac is back with me, how I missed this computer, especially after struggling with playing WoW at 10-15fps :(

The engineers report said what I suspected - that the graphics card had died and needed to be replaced. Not entirely sure why it failed, either it just was manufactured badly and was a ticking timebomb, or possibly it's because of poor cooling inside the machine cooking the chip when used heavily under load, something I've seen hints of over at the Apple support forums but isn't confirmable.

If i get another couple of years use out of this machine I'll be very happy indeed.

Every swear word from The Sopranos in chronological order. Amazing.

Also, Mr. iMac is still in for repair :(

So Monday night my iMac died on me, I was happily playing World of Warcraft when the graphics corrupted and the computer froze. When I tried to restart it, it would start booting and then freeze and refused to get any further. I started it in target disk mode and the hard drive is fine, so it's probably something with the motherboard or graphics chip that has failed.

I knew something bad had happened straight away as my iMac has never crashed like this in the few years I've had it now. So I was prepared to be spending several hundreds of pounds to get it repaired or consider buying a new machine. Bother of those I don't really want to do.

Luckily though, I typed my iMac's serial number into the Apple support site to look up local repair centres, and lo-and-behold, my iMac is still under warranty! Since I bought the machine under the educational discount scheme a few years back, it came with free extended warranty. I didn't know about this and really cheered me up.

So I dropped my iMac off at the nearest repair centre which amazingly is in Treforest of all places, and all I have to do is put up with the repair time which will be about a week or so because the parts for my out of production iMac will have to be ordered and shipped from far off lands.

Although this means I'm having to put up with my lowly Macbook which doesn't play WoW particularly well but will do for now.

Woo yay.

I implore everyone to see Gran Turino, the new drama with Clint Eastwood. I'm not going to repeat the vast number of reviews but it's good to see a topical social commentary wrapped up in a drama doing so well at the box office (currently US #1).

Also, you really believe that Clint Eastwood could kick you, or anybody else's ass just for looking at him funny.

It took one line of SQL to remove the horrific nonsense from the quotes page. I'm sorry my canadian friend(s) but it had to stop somewhere.