Being old..

This evening, after dropping off my sister at a party, I went for a drive to clear my head and ended up playing a game in the car. Having driven reasonably agressively out of the city I wanted to see if I could get the reported 33MPG for the trip so far to the claimed 51MPG. Naturally it would be pretty easy if I just hit the motorway and threw on the cruse control, so I went out on the A4174 to the turning for Yate, via Coalpit Heath, and then back to Bath. This gave me a good mix of driving.

Unfortunately the A4 ring road is one of my favourite places to drive around here, so its pretty tempting to put my foot down and accelerate to the limit then cruise along. This made life a little tricky until I got to Coalpit Heath and things started to settle down. Going from 35MPG to around about 45MPG wasn't difficult at all and took only about 5 minutes. However, getting those last few MPGs was hard. Pulling away slowly is not always easy and at one point, near Yate, I had to pull away and lost the 0.5MPG I'd been working on for over 10 minutes.

The long and short of it is that by the time I came back into Bath I was hitting about 53MPG and by the time I got home I was approximately 50.6MPG. So its very possible to get that on average and still use the pulling power of the car when required. Naturally the exercise also raised the total average MPG by about 4MPG.

So possible, but also a very sad exercise to have performed. Definately cleared my head though..

OpenID implications, GoogleTech talk

For those of us who didn't get OpenID when it started popping up (or rather didn't fully differentiate between the nuances of authorisation, authentication and identification [and attracted a sound bashing from Theo and chip]), might be interested in watching Simon Willison's talk on OpenID at Google from last Friday.

The Bora

So I'm coming up to having the Bora for about 5 days now. All I can say is that it's an awesome car; I still get that same feeling as the first time I drove it. It's a car you get into and have a big grin on your face. It is front wheel driven, so it will understeer if you push it, until you get to that magic number on engine speed and the 1.9 diesel engine starts torque-pulling it into the corner. The highline model doesn't benefit from sport suspension by default, but I'm not sure its actually essential, unless you intend to be racing on narrow streets (which I sincerely hope no one does).

0-60 time is easily within 10 seconds and once upto speed the engine will happily cruise and acheive a decent average 60+MPG at 70MPH. Even if you do accelerate sharply to the speed limit on the regular roads you can still get a very respectable 43MPG average. I imagine that if you really are very careful in your acceleration you could nurse that upto the claimed 51MPG. Of course you'd probably piss off everyone else on the roads. If you've never driven in a car with 6 gears, its certainly something that takes some getting used to, but is an absolute godsend on the motorway.

In terms of storage I'm yet to fill the boot, which is pretty spacious, but has a fairly high lip to it. I guess this is something you should expect with any saloon at the end of the day. In the interior you get plenty of cubby holes to put stuff, although the glove box is irritatingly shaped and pretty useless in my opinion. Unfortunately the number 1 cubby hole is above the gamma headunit, where a CD player will soon be residing and although its sodding perfectly placed, everything falls out, onto the gear stick and centre console, if you need to pull away sharply to get out of that turning, which renders it useless. The gamma headunit and associated sound system is pretty good, but there's something I just can't quite place my finger on which doesn't sound correct. It seems like the treble is a little overpowering when it shouldn't be on some songs, where as on others it's fine. Something for me to work on perhaps.

As with all Volkwagens it's well built and very solid, with a decent alarm system and remote locking. The usual unlocking tricks include automatically opening and closing windows with the keys, etc. Perfect for those summer days, until the aircon kicks in.

Shame it's been raining really!

Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds

Tonight was the first time I'd watched Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and although it's been a very long time since I'd read the book I honestly thought it wasn't actually that bad. With one exception. I found myself wishing that Rachel Ferrier, played by Dakota Fanning, would shut up and die. She does nothing but scream and whine which doesn't befit the characters age or role, in my opinion. What's worse is that I wanted to do this from about 5-10 minutes into the film.

I do feel like I should re-read the novel again though. Which is always a good thing as I'd just run out of Iain M. Banks material and was considering buying another one of Harry Turtledove's World War / Colonisation novels.

Cars, crime and fitness

So I took some time off work to sort out the car and a few other bits and pieces. I got the door bent back without too much of a hit in asthetics, and then I set to finding something to trade it in for. It could've easily been broken into whilst I was out on-site, and I would've been royally screwed if there was work kit in it. Granted that's what insurance is for, but even so.

So I spent a few days cleaning it up and then sorting a few things out, such as removing the bluetooth kit (2 hours to install, 20 minutes to remove), and then I set about getting it valued. As always it wasn't exactly what I wanted, but with the 207 and the 307 available not many want the 206 at the moment.

In the end I plumped for an 04 model VW Bora 1.9TDI Highline. Clocking in at 130BHP its a "little" quicker than the 206 (that's 40 more BHP), and that wasn't exactly slow. However, the Bora is the epitome of comfort, in comparison to the Clio and the 206 (bear in mind neither were that uncomfortable, and you'll get an idea of where I'm coming from). The 6 speed box is certainly going to take some getting used to, especially as in 6th the cruising speed is a little higher than the motorway speed in the UK. Economy wise it's already better than the 206 after the motorway journey, which is nice. The automatic windscreen wipers are much better than the ones in the Peugeot and the build quality is naturally in a bit of a different league. It's somewhat strange driving a saloon for the first time in my life though. I'll pop some pictures up when I get a moment. The long and short of it is, I'm as happy as a baby in water; I've got peace of mind when it comes to security and it felt like my birthday when I picked up and drove off with the car.

Now I'm done with the car I'm looking into the whole fitness thing again. I've come to the conclusion I'm not exactly in the peak physical fitness still and I want to ramp things up a bit. As such I started looking into martial arts this evening and came across Krav Maga - functional contact combat - unlike Kendo and similar arts, which focuses on ettiquette, or breathing and so on. Unfortunately because I've picked something which is fairly well unknown, there's only 1 place I can go to to learn this; which is in Clifton, Bristol. Not exactly accessible from my point of view, but it's better than nothing and I'm very interested in this as, lets be frank, I'm a bit of a weed. I'm just awaiting contact from the instructor - I'll let you know how it goes!