Tuesday, 7 February 2012

1998 Honda Prelude 2.0i

Well, the car update was a Honda Prelude, which I picked up on Saturday. It was reasonably priced and had a full year's MOT with no advisaries. The issue Direct Line had with it was the 17" alloys and loud exhaust. Unfortunately my luck with cars kicked in and I got a puncture on the way home, which due to the lack of a wheelbrace for the 17" alloy wheel nuts and any nuts for the space saver steel wheel, meant I was stuck. After a series of unfortunate events including being given the coastguard number by a particularly unhelpful RAC, the car was recovered to a tyre place where I was informed that it needed a front tyre as well.

After that trauma I went to Andy and Maz's where we booked the hotel for the April Berlin trip and had some food from the good chippy.

Sunday was a fun day with a good 6 Nations game of Wales vs Ireland, which featured the unhappy prospect of a dismal loss until a penalty at the end got Wales the game, which was bonkers and so tense.

Yesterday I took the afternoon off work to go and get the car, and took it back round to my Dad's and we had a good look at it. Basically it's in reasonably good nick inside and out, but had some issues like a misfire when it's warming up and a crazy mass of wires where the stereo should go, the legacy of some previous crazy sound system install. It does go really well though and is comfortable and all the electrics other than the mangled stereo connection work fine. It even handles the track OK - I had suspected it would be all right since I don't think it's any lower than the 306 was but I was a bit anxious the first time I brought it up to the house. The bellowing exhaust is embarrassing however, and once up to highway speeds is very annoying with a constant drone.

Tonight I dug out two old Spectrums and tested them, a classic 48k and the more rare +3 with the disk drive. Both work but the +3 didn't want to read disks. I've listed the 48k on Ebay and will put the +3 on tomorrow.

Then watched an episode of Red Dwarf while eating chilli and then played Mass Effect for a bit, getting a couple of side missions out of the way. The problem I have with Mass Effect and similar games is I can't let side missions go, I always have to complete all the available side missions before continuing the main story.

I think one of the fans has gone in the power supply of the Atom ESXi server and it keeps siezing and groaning. I'll have to strip it down and see if I can fix it. Annoying - the whirr of the fans has been helping me sleep for a couple of years now and with it switched off I'm not sure I'll be able to sleep.

There is a slight whirr from the laptop I left running Seti@home which I thought would die after a couple of days with the CPU constantly at 100% but it's been going for weeks now and seems quite happy much to my surprise. I think the cooling system is designed for a dual-core CPU but it only has a single-core Celeron so it's running nice and cool. Impressive for a cheap old E-system laptop that someone in work gave me for nothing because they didn't want it any more.

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