Fecktardical

Work is doom and gloom all over the place. Really depressing at the moment. Also I left my lights on all day which killed the battery so nothing happened when I turned the key. The switch which would turn on the interior light when the door is opened, and also beep if the lights are on, isn't working.

Fortunately it wasn't too late to find help in the building and there was a nice guy with jump leads who was happy to help me get it started with his 206. That was lucky. I need a new set of jump leads as the old ones I had in the Discovery were too short and melted when I tried to start the Audi from it.

List of things to fix on the car:

Door switch
Driver's window goes up at an angle
Speedometer doesn't work
Sagging right front spring, car sits at an angle
Heater fan knob keeps falling off (glue)

Spring is awkward, need someone to do that. I'm sure it wasn't like that when I bought it but if the spring was weak, the track would reveal that pretty quickly. The window and door switch can hopefully be got from the scrappy, while the speedo cable is £30 from Citroen and may require someone to do that too as it's not easy apparently. I need to consult the Fabled Tome to look into that.

It also has the most ridiculous fuel gauge of any car I've ever had. Most of them have had some sort of fluctuation when you go round corners and things, but this is stupid. You can be going along a perfectly straight road and it'll be dipping up and down. When it gets low, it can be below red one minute and then up to quarter of a tank the next. It also doesn't seem to have any warning light when it gets low. Bizarre and annoying.

This may sound like I've simply swapped one problematic car for another. But the AX is old enough for many to be in scrapyards, and the parts are much, much cheaper than Land Rover parts. Also I can forgive it's little foibles by the fact it costs so little in fuel to run.

Definitely selling the mandolin. Going to advertise it in work. I like the sound but it's too small and fiddly after the bass. I might look into an octave mandolin or a bouzouki which have a similar sound but aren't so small. Or a cittern, as this electric one sounds awesome.

Discovered the old AIM account I had many years ago actually still works, which is pretty cool. I can't remember the last time I used it but I'm sure it was back in something like 2003 or 2004.

This machine is doing some odd things. It hasn't been right after it was shut down while I was in London. I'm not sure if the old crappy 20gb and 40gb hard drives might be failing. I've backed up my documents. What I'll probably do is wait for the next Ubuntu release and then get a new hard drive and rebuild it with that.

I can't get my head round Flickr. Every time I look at it, there's been something like 4000-5000 photos uploaded every minute. Insane.

Someone lent me season 1 of the new Doctor Who series. Before someone shoots me and says it's actually season xxx when taking into account all of them, I've never seen any previous Doctor Who before and know next to nothing about it. I've seen some of the first series round at Steve's house last year though.