Today Alex and I popped along to Castle Combe circuit to spectate at their Spring Performance Car Action Day, the highlight of which was to be two drifting sessions. I’ll start right now by saying that I wasn’t disappointed in any way – today was nothing short of awesome! There were a huge variety of cars […]  Read more »

Yesterday I took (and passed) the Zend  PHP 5.3 Certified Engineer exam – more information here from Zend and on Wikipedia. Having worked with PHP for about 11 years I had first imagined that this qualification wouldn’t be particularly stressful – that didn’t transpire to be the case! It turned out that I covered about 60% of […]  Read more »

During the various cold snaps of the past two winters the M5 has refused to start due to a completely flat battery. I don’t blame it for this: it often goes for 2 to 3 weeks without being used, and the battery is dated 2004. When I bought the 330d’s drilled discs from BMW I […]  Read more »

My friend Tom has just been round to show me his new purchase: a 2008 Impreza STI. Typically I didn’t take a photo of the whole car, but I did take a picture of its brakes. Ok, so they’re not floating or drilled like the 330d’s, but that is a multipot caliper, so I was […]  Read more »

Yesterday marked my annual trip to the Wyedean rally. Last year I took Brenden, the year before Robin, and prior to that Diane, but this year I took Snoop… … to meet Barden… I got up at 5:20, was out the door with the dog by 6:15, and met Alex at the Shell garage in […]  Read more »

Unless this is the first sentence of mine you’ve ever read you’ll know that despite being a BMW fan-boy, I am eternally disappointed by their brakes. It’s not that they don’t stop well enough, or that they overheat, it’s that the discs warp, and that happens well before the pads are so much as half […]  Read more »

Yesterday evening I was supposed to be attending a birthday party at the Rowbarge in St Johns. The Rowbarge holds significant memories for me as it is directly across the road from my best man Robin‘s childhood home and isn’t too far from where I now live, and has therefore been a regular venue for […]  Read more »

I’ve got a 40GB chunky PS3, and I’ve recently bought GT5 (Gran Turismo 5). It’s a good game, but it spends a lot of time ‘thinking’, especially when loading circuits. To improve matters it has an option to store a lot of this information on the PS3’s HDD, but it apparently needs around 15GB, and […]  Read more »

16 months ago I sorted out the exterior lighting at the back of the house, and I intended on doing the same to the front soon after. This weekend, I finally got around to it. I started at 8am on Saturday, worked until dark, restarted at 10am today, and finished at around 3pm. It was […]  Read more »

I get up when I want, except on Saturdays when I’m rudely awakened at 5am by Robin’s sick joke of leaving the heating on overnight. I seized the opportunity to catch up with the online world, and once Jamie had left for work at 6am, I had a good shower and felt decent for the […]  Read more »