Wagar.org.uk

You need a car suitable for the modern life style.

You need to carry 5 people and their luggage in comfort and luxury,you need air conditioned, you need a decent stereo.

The car has to able to hit 60 mph from a standing start in under 8 seconds, no sluggish family runabout, but it must also average around 55mpg and cover over 600 miles between fuel stops.

Its got to look like a new car, and the interior must be pristine and classy,

It must be cheap to insure, and not expensive to tax.

Sounds impossible?

"I say all, this inflation millarkey is getting a bit rotten isn't it? Ginger beer - unbelievable!"

"Jolly poor show. Food and energy costs going through the roof, golly!"

"And Aunt Sally says we can't remortgage without a £1000 application fee!"

"Just as well we swapped to that new credit card, lashings of 0% APR for six months and all that. Should get us through the summer hols."

"Woof! Woof!"

Well, a biggish day for the Ashford Astronomical Society yesterday, as we became an official society. I was elected as the Chairman, Martin Hemsley as the Secretary (original founder) and Dave Styles stepped in gallantly as the treasurer.

Membership is a reasonable 12-15 or so, and we're getting invitations to a variety of events in the next few months.

Upcoming agenda to be published at www.ashfordastro.org.uk asap - so check out as and when you can.

I'm a big fan of open source software, as you already know. However, my two home laptops were running an older version of Ubuntu (6.10) and this has recently run out of support.

There were a number of things I wanted, latest versions of openoffice, firefox, stellarium etc, and a few bug fixes, so it was time to move on up to the latest version 8.04.

Unlike Windows, Ubuntu software is synchronised with the OS, so you don't get any of the compatibility problems, the downside being that the latest and greatest apps aren't available unless you have the latest OS.

For those of you that remember, I have a 1983 Mk1 Golf GTI. It's quite a famous car, having been on various episodes of TopGear, Wheeler Dealers and TopDog, amongest several magazine features.

It's been off the road for the last 18 months pending some repairs. I took it for an MOT this week, to see how much more would need doing and was rather surprised to find that it had passed!

In reality, I still need to do some more work on it - I want to replace all the braking components front and back, and it needs a good service, points, plugs and filters.

Nice evening today. Met up with two old school chums at a pub in the town. We haven't seen each other in just under 20 years, which given that we were only 18 back then is a big gap!

We got back in contact via a combination of friendsreunited.com, google searches and a bit of trial and error with email. Worth it though.

Spent the time reminiscing about school days, both of my friends remembered a lot more than me - I reckon my memory is a bit duff!

Great to see them again, and hopefully we'll meet up a bit more often. If it's another 20 years, I'll be 58!

VED - or vehicle excise duty, is a tax we in the UK have to pay, simply to be allowed to drive our cars on the road. Independant of insurance, fuel and repairs.

In the past, this tax was reasonably fair as the idea was that we paid it to support repairs to roads, and that our fuel was cheaper here than over on the continent. Well, it was true in the 1980s.

Now, of course, UK fuel prices (due to tax) are the highest in Europe and we still pay the VED.

Well, they say a week is a long time in politics! Obviously a couple of days makes a difference too.

Can't help but feel absurdly pleased that the labour party has been given a richly deserved bloody nose over their recent conduct.

Fascinating to watch Harriet Harman attempt to put a positive spin on things, promising to 'listen'. I suspect that's been the problem dear! Very difficult to earn back trust now.

Well, my website went offline and the backup copy proved to be non-functional, at least, the content came back, but the login mechanism failed to work, which meant I couldn't edit it. A lesson there in backup and restore obviously!

Anyway, I'm back with a new version of the software and an upgrade path, so hopefully I'll be able to get back to the blog!

I've taken the opportunity to simplify the site a bit, getting rid of the 'categories'. Not all done yet, so stay tuned.

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