After three weeks of not having a car, my little car is finally mended and back up and running!
It was all down to the cam belt breaking, the pistons hit the valves, and six out of eight valves got bent!
I got the new valves and head gasket set off eBay for £51.50 including postage, and dad fitted it this weekend!
And here’s my car parked outside my house
I’m getting old now, I’m going to start drawing a pension soon if I carry on like this! Lol!
Yep, as you may of guessed from the title, I have recently had a birthday, it was on Saturday, and I am now 23!
The day started off alright, I opened my presents, and then I got a phone call from my mum, who was on holiday at the time in Cyprus.
Then my girlfriend came over and took me out for the day for a picnic on the Cheddar downs.
Boy was that some trek! First we had to walk up the road to a path, and then we had to walk up a load of steps, which would of been alright, but we were carrying all the food, and my presents!
Luckily it didn’t rain, and, even though the sun wasn’t out, it was warm, and it wasn’t all that windy either!
After the picnic we spent an hour or two in the gorge going in and out of all the shops.
And here’s the mandatory present list:
And now some news on my car.
On Sunday dad took me on a guided tour of the innards of my cars engine, we had towed the car to his work Friday evening, and he was working on it all Saturday. The photos can be seen in the usual places, on my website, and on flickr.
From what dad can see at the moment, it just looks like the valves need replacing, and because its been taken off, so does the head gasket.
But first dads got to make sure the cylinder head hasn’t been warped.
That’s it for now
Till next time!
The timing belt on my car broke on the way to work this morning, it happened just as I was going on to the slip road off the motorway.
I managed to get the car on to a lay-by, and then I had walk the rest of the way to work – it wasn’t that far.
Dad then towed my car to his work place to have a look at it, he phoned me to tell me what was wrong.
He got a new belt and fitted it, but the engine won’t start again, it’s knackered.
Thats the end of the road for my car, and I don’t have any photo’s of it!
Todays St George’s Day, the patron saint of England, and the guy’s at English Heritage has launched a campaign to dispel the apathy surrounding St George’s Day and encourage more people to celebrate their patron saint.
You can read more of this article on the Telegraph’s website
The English Heritage’s St George’s Events page can be found here
Brian Patten, a Liverpoolian poet was asked by the English Heritage to write a poem, the poem is called The True Dragon
And here’s an excerpt from the poem:
St George was in awe of it [The Dragon]
It was a thing apart
He hid the sleeping dragon
Inside every English heart[…]
Let’s celebrate St George’s Day,
The dragon in repose;
The brilliant lark ascending,
The yew, the oak, the rose
How are you celebrating today? All comments are welcome
I must start this post with an apology to anyone who is subscribed to my feed!
Earlier today I finally upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5. At the same time I took the opportunity to clean out my database, quite literally I reformatted my blog!
This involved me exporting all my posts, and blogroll, deleting all WordPress files, apart from my theme and wp-config.php, and then deleting all the WordPress tables from the database!
Then I installed the new version of WordPress and ran through the install. I then deleted the test post, and updated some of the options. I then imported all of my old posts into the fresh install.
That was only this morning, now what have I been doing for the past two weeks since my last post?
The answer, nothing much!
The only notable exception is that I have finally got my new computer up and running!
I installed both Fedora 7 and Windows XP onto the first hard drive, Linux on 100Gb, and Windows on 60Gb.
I am using the 500Gb hard drive for all of my files, on Linux this is mounted as /home
The new computer is working brilliantly, and its so much quieter than my previous computers!
I’ve just got to get a set of speakers, and possibly a new heat sink/fan for the processor, and that will be it sorted!
It’s getting quite late now, so thats it for this post
Till next week!
Well, it’s Easter today! I’ve got two Easter eggs, one bar of chocolate, and a bag of mini eggs, and I’ve still got one egg left to receive!
Really, I’m nearly 23, and I’m still getting excited over receiving Easter eggs, but I think its chocolate that does it, when else are we given this much chocolate, it just takes you back to childhood!
In other news, I have finally restarted work on Linux Links, now I just have the search page to complete before I finally release this long awaited version of Linux Links.
I am aiming to release the updated Linux Links on Tuesday 1st April, no joke! Honest!
I have done a few tweaks to my website and blog, a couple of them you might not notice!
The first is that I’ve separated trackbacks and pings from comments in single post view.
Secondly I have added a print CSS style sheet to both the blog and website, so if you need to print anything out you only get the main content, and not the navigation bars.
I think there is still a few more bits to change with the print style to make it more complete, but its working!
The third is that I’ve signed up for a FeedBurner account, I have already burnt my feed, and you can find it here. I have set up the redirects, so you can continue using the old address, and you will still receive the feed as normal!
There’s a few more that I have fixed or changed as I have been going around, but they don’t really effect anything!
My dad’s off to Brands Hatch this afternoon to watch the Truck racing on Monday, he’s camping over tonight and Monday night and coming back on Tuesday morning.
The Truck racing was awesome last time, and it’s something I would like to go and watch again, the thing that put me off the most is the weather, it going to be cold and wet!
That’s all for this post now, I’ll post more details when I know more!
Till then
See you
If anyone has been keeping an eye on my Flickr account, you may have noticed pictures of my new computer being built have appeared!
They are the best of the ones I took, and unfortunately don’t show every step I took in building the computer.
I started the build on the fourth of March (Tuesday) by fitting the power supply, motherboard, cpu, memory and DVD drive inside the case.
Then on the eighth (Saturday) I fitted the two hard drives, and connected all the cables!
The build went quite well, I brought a few extra bits that I didn’t actually need, but at the time thought I did need! Lol!
I found a few limitations with the case during the build, one of them being the extra hard drive bay in the bottom of the case right behind the power supply, I feel it was a little cramped, and that there was barely any room for the cables coming out of the back of the power supply!
There is practically no cable management built into the case!
And finally the external drive bays, only one side of the case can be opened, which means that only one side of any drive fitted is attached, but there is some support provided to hold the drive up.
There is also the problem of the blanking plates on the front. I found I could not remove the plastic blanking plate from the outside of the case, and I couldn’t push it out from the inside because of a metal plate that had to be broken off first.
Having the metal plate there may help with the cooling, or keeping the system quiet, but maybe there should be some easier way to remove it?
That’s all I have time for in this post, but I’ll post more details when I get another chance!
Till then,
Happy computing!
Ok, lets start with a picture:
My car has reached 80,000 miles!
Hip-hip-hooray!
Erm, that’s just about it for this post, but if anyone is interested, I have uploaded all of my Brands Hatch photos to Flickr, and have updated the two posts
That’s it till next time!
Its been a bad start to this week, I had some sort of stomach bug on Monday, I woke up not feeling quite on top of the world.
At about lunch time I was sick, sorry if any ones eating, I had only eaten cereal for breakfast that morning, and had drunk some water, so it must of been something I ate the previous day, but I have no idea what caused it.
And then I went to work on Tuesday, I was still feeling rough, but I thought it was better to be doing something rather than sitting around at home all day thinking about it.
I’m feeling much better now, and still with a computer in pieces! Lol!
Till next time
Keep healthy!
I’ve finally gone and got the hard drives, and DVD drive for my new computer
And here’s a nice photo
The photo shows the DVD rewriter drive (top) and the two hard drives (bottom)
The details are:
DVD Rewriter: LG GSA-H66NBAL 20x DVDRW/RAM Black – SATA £13.85
Product Details: (Could not find specific details on website)
Hard Drive #1: 160GB Samsung Spinpoint SATA2 8MB £24.55
Product Details: http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/detail/spec.do?group=computersperipherals& type=harddiskdrives&subtype=spinpointpseries&model_cd=HD160JJ
Hard Drive #2: 500GB Samsung Spinpoint SATA2 16MB £46.95 (on offer at the time normally £48.95)
Product Details: http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/detail/spec.do?group=computersperipherals& type=harddiskdrives&subtype=spinpointtseries&model_cd=HD501LJ
That’s a total of £89.15 exc VAT
Delivery was an extra £9.95 (I chose a morning delivery)
The VAT came to £17.34
Which brings the total to £116.44
That means that the total price for my new computer comes to £369.78
Now I just have to build it now, that’ll be fun! Lol!
That’s all for this post now!
Till next time!