Something for the weekend

We headed up to Lincolnshire again this weekend - twas Birthday weekend. The "we" is me and my sister, although "we" doesn't really apply because we come from separate directions.

Good weekend too :-) Here's a few of the highlights :

I got to drive a manual gearbox car again for the first time since I changed to my Lexus. Quite pleased that I managed to switch straight back into a smooth driving style with clutch & stick, although I could have done without massive quivers in my left leg ... I blame the cold and caffeine.

Sister's just changed car too, her old MR2 was getting a bit long in the tooth with some big repair bills looming around the corner. She's traded to a Saab 9-3 turbo diesel convertible which definitely ticks all the boxes. She needed something with back seats and something with better mpg for work trips. It passes those tests quite well, we managed to get me & my mom in the back seats. It feels like a normal car with the roof up too. Performance is good, with a high boost turbo that caught me out when the turbo made the wheels spin up when it passed its lag phase.

CTs handle better than Puma's and definitely better than the Focus. There's a roundabout where if I'm lucky, I can test the handling characteristics out. The Puma could hit 60mph over the bump by carrying speed through the roundabout. The Focus never gave enough confidence to carry speed through there and didn't have the engine flexibility to get the acceleration. How did the CT do ? The chassis handled acceleration through the cornering, which is better than what I remember from the Puma.

There we have it - heavy medium 5 door hybrid beats small 3 door sports coupe on performance and handling and utterly thrashes the Focus ST. It got to 60 on that bump without the front wheels lifting up too. When you switch to Sport mode, it keeps its composure incredibly well when being asked to make sudden changes in direction, the Focus would just lean over and say "do I have to ?"

Old programs - there's a company out there called VMWare who make a fantastic bit of software. What it does is make a computer within a computer. Why is that useful ? Because you can run programs on it that won't run on newer machines. Just fire up the virtual machine, throw it some software and you're away. My new desktop and my dad's laptop have copies of it now running Windows XP meaning my dad can run his bridge games again. Those bridge games refused to work on our Windows 7 64bit machines.

VMWave make a freeware app called VMPlayer which really does the business. I really can't recommend it enough. I have to admit I gave up on getting Windows 98 to play on it but it gave a hassle free virtual installation of Windows XP on both machines. It's good to see companies offering trial versions of their software that aren't crippled in critical ways. If you're needing to do Virtualisation in a hefty way (it's handy for separating tasks out), VMWare's VMWorkstation will be the way to go.

(I have no contact with VMWare outside of being really pleased with their software)

From good to bad - Apple software quality has nosedived ...

Yes, I can now plug my iPod into my car and get the music playing on it. No, it isn't at all reliable. I had to resort back to using cd's earlier because the iPod refused to play anything after a leg stretch stop. This isn't an isolated incident either, the iPod forgets what it's been playing and in one instance, it even claimed to have no songs on it despite being connected to its host laptop not too long before. I may resort to an old solution, plugging the thing in with an analogue lead instead of USB.

I refuse to allow iTunes to update itself now because the last 3 times it did, it broke its link to the LittleWhiteBox Airport Express. Would I waste money on an iPhone ? Hell no. Would I buy a Mac ? I'd rather trust Windows.

Erm - was I ranting ? Lol

Mpg - I trust the figures more now :-) As it shows in the Fuelly badge on my sidebar, I've been getting just under 50mpg from my Lexus. That's a bit below the claimed 69mpg figure ... I'm a bit more confident now though, I filled up just outside Newark tonight and until I reached the 70mph parts, I was getting 70-72mpg. That's fairly incredible for a petrol car, although it was mostly in 40mph speed limit areas where the car can occasionally glide along on the battery power only.

Back to work tomorrow. I may actually break a habit and go to bed before midnight cos I am actually feeling quite tired.