Please visit my new Vox blog at http://alkam.vox.com
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the Great Man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The car dealer is fixing the faults I identified on red car when I agreed to buy it. They gave me a courtesy car to drive around instead a couple of days ago.
It's a pretty big car compared to the 1.5L Accent. It's a 3.8L Holden Commodore VX II Executive, and even has cruise control. It's a great car to drive, even if it chews up petrol when I'm in the city. Unfortunately, it also has a side indicator light missing so I hope I don't get pulled over by Police!
I've also only paid AUD$100 deposit so far, even though I technically 'bought' the car last week!
Nice. Hoping to go to Hunter Valley for a few days and will have to take the courtesy if the car dealer doesn't ring soon to tell me when my car's ready!
It's a day of celebration today because I've managed to restore my PDA phone to working order! I have some diligent people at the shadowmite.com site to thank for their breakthrough in discovering how to do it. It's really quite clever!
I've also been driving around in my new (but still secondhand) car. It's a red Hyundai Accent that's 5 years old. I've driven one in the past so I know how they handle but this one's been modified slightly to have a slightly higher ground clearance, an upgraded audio system, and a 3-inch sports exhaust! The sports exhaust is going though because it's too noisy, and has some rust damage to it. The car dealer is replacing that for free. The tech department at the automobile association tell me a sports exhaust on the 1.5 litre Hyundai engine won't do much for power/fuel economy either and is just there for the noise!
Thank goodness that I can email blog entries in. I'm here at work and I'm not allowed full internet access. I also can't blog using my Treo anymore, but more on that later!
An update on the car front. Thanks for the useful comments! I finally got my car back for the past couple of weeks or so. It's no longer overheating now that it has a new water pump fitted! This has been quite fortunate, because the termperature has since shot up into the 30's (Celcius), so having an overheating car would not have survived very long!
Despite the car working again, I'm really on the look-out for another car. As much as it's been fun, I'm not too fond of having to bring it back to the garage every month and having to rent something to drive in while it's being fixed! I think I might trade it in for a decent car with manual transmission or something.
On the subject of things needing fixing, I've managed to turn my all-singing all-dancing Treo 650 PDA phone into a pretty brick. It was my fault entirely: I was trying to upgrade the firmware on it with an unofficial version. It's ended up in a constant reset loop and no amount of soft, warm, hard or even zero-out resets is making it behave properly. I'm waiting for a fix to come out, so in the meantime, no more blogging on the move! (So much for that idea!!)
I'm sitting in MacDonald's in Randwick, Sydney doing a bit of blogging on the move. I'm actually opposite the University of New South Wales and grabbed a few bargains from the Computer Fair that they were holding there.
I'm not really sure how much of a bargain they really are because I don't really know what the prices are in Australia, but they seem cheap when I convert the prices to Pounds Sterling!
I might take a picture on my phone and see if I can post it to my Flickr photo stream thing!
My car has been fixed, by the way, but I'm very tempted to trade it in for something that doesn't break down every month! Stay tuned.
No, I'm not referring to travel sickness here. My car is sick again and I'm looking to rent a car for the next few days until my car can be looked at. This time it's an overheating when it's idling, and I suspect that the radiator cooler fan may be broken.
I've uploaded a small number of photos to flickr, and they can be seen here:
Things are starting to get hot here in New South Wales, Australia. The temperature was above 30 Celcius and it's only spring time! When I was saying I was starting to get a tan in the UK, that was nothing compared to the ferocity of the sun here. I'm having to remember to put on the SPF 30+ sunscreen before I go out!
There are thunderstorms predicted tonight, so we've been advised to tie down anything that might fly away and to park cars under cover because there may be hailstones! Nice!
I've got some pictures, but haven't had a chance to upload them yet. The good news is that I now have broadband! Woohoo! I'll have photos up as soon as I around to it!
On a housekeeping note, I used to have a mirror site that was a standby in case this site on blogdrive had a problem. Since the mirror page was on a free site, I'm not surprised that it's disappeared off the net! Ah well. C'est la vie!
"Appreciation is like looking through a wide-angle lens that lets you see the entire forest, not just the one tree limb you walked upon."
Well, I've had my car back for the past few days and I'm glad to say that it's running more smoothly than it has been doing since I bought it.
Of course nothing ever happens without incident, it seems. I had occasion to use emergency braking on the freeway towards Sydney the day after I got the car back. Luckily the brakes worked fine and apart from quite a scare, no-one was hurt. I guess the positive side is that, had I still been in the Ute, I would probably not stopped as quickly!
I've been having a spot of trouble with my car for the past few days. I'd bought this second-hand 10yr old Mitsubishi Lancer from a car dealer in Sydney, and managed to get him to throw in some warranty.
Unfortunatelty, I had to get my car serviced as a condition of the warranty agreement. The car was starting to stall anyway, so a service seemed like a good idea.
Alas, they could not fix the stalling problem, and said the carby needed refurbishing. On the safe side, I took out some breakdown cover just in case the car stopped working.
What I didn't expect was for the car to stop working the day after! It just wouldn't idle.
Anyway the garage is telling me that no-one had touched the carby for the 10 yrs it had left the factory! The garage were going to see if the cost could be offset by the warranty but it doesn't look promising.
Right now I'm driving a rental Ute! How Aussie is that?
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