I need to take some photos of the cars for my BMW Car Magazine “longtermer” report which is due in today. I haven’t run the M5 for about 20 days now, and I’ve got a lot of decorating to be cracking on with, so I took the photos on the rather unglamourous surroundings of my driveway. I’ve decided to post them up here partially because it’s been a while since I’ve shown either of them, but also because it’s “cold, damn cold” this morning, and I thought Robin might like a little reminder of a classic British morning!

There are snow showers forecast for later today, and on this firm base it will lay, but those showers are also forecast to turn to rain.

On other matters I didn’t make a great deal of progress with the decorating yesterday, but I did bizarrely get the heating and upstairs toilet fixed. I would like to concentrate more on that task today, but Diane is out so I’ll be entertaining Snoop – an activity which isn’t compatible with a steamer!

Coincidentally, we’ve got a chap coming in to decorate the living room this week, the same week I’m largely off work to decorate one of the bedrooms. As work gets underway on both rooms, I thought I’d share a few ‘before’ photos.

So, the living room:

And the bedroom:

Clearly all carpets, power points, light fittings and interior doors have to go! Although the carpets and doors might have to wait until the dog is a little more under control.

On a geeky note, all images served on this blog’s pages are now hosted on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). It’s a great platform that ensures high availability and redundancy, so these pages should always be nice and quick.

Diane kindly bought me a PalmerSport driving day for my 30th birthday. What’s that then? I’ll let them explain:

In one perfect day you will drive a selection of the world’s greatest track prepared road and racing cars, and you will be encouraged to push yourself – and our machinery – harder than you may have imagined possible, and all in outstanding safety. It’s the experience of a lifetime.

So this Thursday I was up at 5am, ready to pilot the M5 to Bedford Autodrome. An interesting place!

I arrived to find myself 1 of 30 participants – a mixture of individuals and small corporate groups. While all very informal, it was to be a competition, with awards for each car driven. Some other attendees had their own lid and racing boots – all rather intimidating! A glance around the car park saw the M5 in good company – M coupes, 911s and the odd DB9. Even more intimidating! After a quick cooked breakfast, I was delighted to discover that the track was damp, and my first car was on slicks. Time to jump into a romper suit and pixie boots!

First car of the day was a Formula Jaguar single seater, billed as “a window into the world of F1″. I can certainly say I’ve never driven a car which requires the steering wheel be removed to get on board before.

Some stats on this car.  A 3 litre V6 generating 250bhp. The car doesn’t weigh very much, so it does 0-60mph in just 3.1 secs. The brakes are magnificent: no servo assist, but given plenty of beef they offer eyeball squashing deceleration. It has a clutch pedal, but gear changes were all applied through paddles on the steering wheel, and with the exception of setting off in 1st and returning to a standstill, there’s no need to use the clutch pedal. The throttle can be mashed to the floor, and the car manages the upshifts perfectly. Changes are fast, the steering is fast, the car is fast. It’s the perfect go-kart!

This certainly woke me up! I could tell I was doing well – despite some hairy slides I didn’t spin and I’m pretty sure I was in the minority there – but one or two others were certainly moving quickly. I can’t think that I’ve ever been in a faster car, and given how badly I cope with G force at theme parks, I’m a bit surprised I didn’t notice any issues when nailing the throttle, or on the brakes.

Interestingly – perhaps because we weren’t accompanied – the organisers chose not to rank our performance on best lap times (as they were to on most other cars), but instead on lap data. Needless to say I didn’t win this, but I can’t tell how well I did compared with my competition.

So we moved on. Mainly for a bit of fun to fill some time before the next real car was ready, we indulged in a spot of karting. Single engined, but in good condition, outdoors (wet), with enough room for the odd overtake. I was pleased to hear I obtained the 4th quickest lap time across the day (from that field of 30), just 0.96 seconds behind the quickest man.

Next I hopped into a Palmer Jaguar JP1 two seater, for my first experience with one of the trained instructors.

Now the trouble here is that I’ve never really been particularly interested in going fast. I am especially interested in driving fast machinery at least a little bit sideways. So here I had to put that to the back of my mind, and focussed on being smooth, studied my lines, and above all listening to someone who really knew the car and track. I quickly realised I could have driven the single seater considerably faster in places! Another 3 litre V6, but a slightly heavier car – still a 0-60mph time of 3.5 seconds though. Like the single seater, plenty of grip, plenty of power, loads of brakes and that fantastic paddle gearbox.

Certainly the quality of my competition became painfully apparent: I posted 18th from 30. Again I hadn’t spun, but I soon realised I had to try harder!

The 4th car of the day was one of the two I have been particularly been looking forward to – a Caterham 7. A traditional H-gate gearbox this time, but still a far cry from any car I’ve ever owned. Here’s my kind sponsor Diane modelling with a road prepared Caterham.

Fast, and grippy to a point, but then – the tail would wag. This led to a strange first lap while I got used to the car and my instructor got used to me. But then, we all clicked together and we were off!

Once my instructor had the confidence to shout “keep the power, keep the power” while we’re oversteering at goodness knows how many miles an hour, I had a whale of a time. Afterwards my instructor was most enthusiastic, telling me it was a great drive and a decent lap time. I came 14th. Hmm. Interestingly the 13 who were faster than me ran in the other session (we were divided into 2 groups of 15 for the day), so I wonder if there was a subtle change in the course, or perhaps if the track was dry for the other session.

Finally before lunch, we moved to the first normal car of the day: a race prepared Jaguar XKR. A 4.2 supercharged V8 producing 420 bhp, with paddle shift gearbox. So it should have been a lot more fun to drive than the M5, right?

Wrong. There were two main reasons for this. Firstly, I just didn’t gel with my instructor. He was enabling and disabling the car’s traction control system to keep things in shape. I wasn’t trying to power slide everywhere (really, I wasn’t), but when he was bellowing “more power” while effectively engaging and disengaging the throttle like a digital switch it made it rather hard to control.

But significantly more irritating than this was the car’s woeful, awful, and frankly retarded automatic gearbox. That’s right – while it has paddles like the Formula Jaguar cars, this was just a remote control for the pot noodle that appears to sit between the car’s engine and the prop shaft. As such I concluded that the car was rubbish – the M5 was significantly better – at least a league ahead.

All this said, I came 6th, so clearly everyone else had similar issues.

After a sumptuous luncheon we arrived at the moment I’d been looking forward to most of all: the Porsche 911 JP3. This was the first time I’d ever driven a rear engined car. These 911s had the 3.6 litre flat six that delivers 320bhp, gifting a 0-60 time of 4.5 seconds. I thought this was going to be great.

It wasn’t. Same story as the Jag XKR really. An instructor that I didn’t gel with (to be clear, all the instructors were good, but some more on my wavelength than others), and another shonky gearbox. I don’t like changing gear by appointment, especially when the engine is, most unnaturally, behind me.

A really interesting exercise certainly, but it did quench my thirst for a Porsche. I posted another 18th place. What a shame.

Without pausing for breath, I was straight into the next car: a Renualt Clio cup racer – the only FWD motor of the day. With a 2 litre four-banger and a 0-60 time of 5.2 seconds, it should have been fun.

It was! I got on well with my instructor, and the gearbox, and we scrabbled our way to an 8th place. More interestingly, we ran the Clio on the same course as the 911, and not only was I faster in the Clio, so were most participants.

Moving on, we encountered what transpired to be the best part of the day: a Caterham 7 pursuit challenge. Put simply, we got back in a Caterham, and had to punt it around a tiny circuit in a manner that required sideways action, culminating in a donut into a parking bay. I came 3rd! What luck – it seems that a smooth, calm driving manner escapes me; yet when yanking all the controls like an organist on speed is the order of the day, I excel.

Finally, an off road challenge. I’ve always fancied a spot of green laning, so I was looking forward to this. The course involved vehicle position tests, loose surfaces, insane gradients and towering ramps. Really good fun, and a 6th place to boot.

Overall, a stunning day. I really hurt for the following 48 hours – chest, back and shoulder pains which reminded me that while I didn’t really notice at the time, I had subjected my ageing frame to considerable forces. I’m very happy that I learned plenty more about driving, and about various vehicles that I would not normally have the chance to sample. I loved the Caterhams, but they’re not something I’m hardcore enough to own. I was disappointed by the 911, hated the XKR, enjoyed the Clio and really would quite fancy a proper 4×4. I can’t express enough thanks to my wonderful wife for not only making this happen, but so diligently documenting proceedings with the camera.

Despite my varied results, I came 6th overall – perhaps a sign that if nothing else, I’m more consistent than most.

The best thing about it though? It reminded me how much I love the M5. With the exception of the off-road challenge and the karting, I could have done all the other events in the M5, and I strongly suspect I would have done better in most. It’s an exceptional car – the super saloon indeed.

I’ve just finished putting the car back together, and I’m pleased to report a full recovery. Gear changes are once again quiet; the faint ‘clonk’ has now departed.

I’m disappointed I didn’t take more photos. When things start going wrong it’s easy to forget to document stuff. The removed part looked like this:

The new part can be seen in the corner of this photo:

This goes between the gearbox output shaft and the prop shaft, and provides a valuable bit of shock absorption. Here’s a good example of how a worn item breaks down – picture stolen from Andy Eccles’ excellent post on the matter.

The issue I had was that one of those bolts pictured above had become seized in the end of the propshaft. In the photograph below you can see the extent Alex and I had to go to in order to get it out. The 6 mm hole in the middle was drilled by me on Sunday. The next circular cross section is the bolt itself. The outer ring is a sleeve from the old donut. This piece was removed from the end of the prop shaft. Quite something!

When it came to test driving this evening, I had almost forgotten about the new brakes. I’ve bedded those in nicely – I’d forgotten what it feels like to have straight brake discs! So we’re pretty much there now, with a couple of exceptions. While at BMW today collecting the new bolts I also grabbed a replacement oil separator. When I get a chance I’ll look at fitting this, and straightening the exhaust that just doesn’t look quite right at the moment. This will have to wait though – I’ve got a stag weekend to attend to this weekend, and there’s a rally I want to see the weekend after.

I had the 330d serviced by Vines of Guildford BMW earlier this month. I was pleased with the £99 cost of the oil service, but less pleased with the advisory notices:

• Front N/S tyre worn on outer edge
• Front N/S brake caliper seized
• Prop shaft coupling worn

This weekend I got down to business to sort all this out. £35 had the tracking sorted (after the usual – tedious – discussions about them not being able to guarantee their work unless I bought new tyres). For £274 I had new discs, pads, front N/S caliper and a propshaft donut delivered from C3BMW (after my usual – tedious – stupidity saw me state my old address on the delivery note).

Here’s the haul:

Looking good at this point! I set to work – in the rain.

Old brakes:

Shiny new brakes!

All the brake work went perfectly (as far as I can tell). I even remembered to undo the disc retention screw before removing the caliper, so with a little help from an assistant on the brake pedal it was easy. I had forgotten to order a pad wear sensor, but a quick blast in the M5 (in the rain!) soon saw one gathered from ECP for £10 (over-priced, but worth it for the M5 wet road journey).

So I moved my attention to the worn prop shaft donut.

Six nuts and bolts. Easy. Except of course, that it wasn’t easy at all. Getting access was quite easy – belly panels off, exhaust down etc. But two of the bolts just weren’t interested in coming out of the end of the prop shaft. And, to make matters worse, the prop shaft just wasn’t coming out of the differential, so I couldn’t remove it from the car. Ben Smith was kind enough to pop over and confirm such on both counts.

That marked the end of Saturday. On Sunday morning, bright and fresh, I tried a number of things. I went to Halfords and bought a three legged puller. Fail. I even tried a vice:

Fail. I got angry and took the angle grinder in. The first bolt soon yielded, and I was jubilant:

Sadly, the second bolt was significantly more stubborn. I chopped both ends off, and drilled a 6mm hole through it (12mm bolts). I was planning on eventually drilling the whole thing out, but by this point it was 4pm on Sunday, and frankly, I was utterly exhausted. There was nothing else for it – I had to make an SOS call. I called A Barden.

Bit unfair of me to resurrect that photo really. On both Alex and of course dear reader, you. Alex offered, extremely kindly, to pop over first thing in the morning to sort it out. From Wales. What a darling.

So at 8am this morning, Alex arrived to find the driveway looking like this – proper pikey.

Alex took my advice and tried to shift the bolt in situ. Then, when I’d left him alone and gone to work, he decided to stop messing around, removed the prop shaft from the diff, and twatted (technical term) the bolt out. He has cleaned up the prop shaft, sorted the connection to the diff, fitted the new donut (loosely, with the four remaining bolts) and left things looking, well, just like the photo above.

Hero.

I have now ordered a complete set of 6 nuts and bolts from BMW which I can collect on Wednesday. Then, I shall attempt to rebuild things in the dark. What luck!

So, this arguably important moment in the internet’s history has been and gone. England’s football team, as ever, did the minimum required when it didn’t matter. And lost.

That aside, what was the viewing experience like?

Well, having selected the ‘HD’ stream, I can report that I experienced a reasonably smooth picture, with no buffering issues at all. I wonder how this was for everyone else? I ran some broadband speed checks during the match and found that my normally stable 19mb connection was running at around 6mb. When the match had ended, with the stream still running I had 16mb, and when I disconnected the stream I had 19mb again.

So this suggests that the stream ‘costs’ about 3mb, which is fine, but more importantly it proves that Virgin certainly does suffer from contention issues. Their fibre might be okay, but the switchgear (or something!) clearly isn’t. I’ll come back to this – let me tell you about the picture quality.

Before kick off, we watched the studio in fullscreen:

No one wants to see Sven in particularly high detail, so this was fine. The picture was however obviously low quality as it had been stretched. Switching to normal view yielded a much better picture, but of course it wasn’t really big enough.

When the match began, it soon became clear that at full screen size, it was completely unwatchable. There’s a 34M clip of fullscreen action here: http://v.mukerji.co.uk/2009/10-10-football/fullscreen.avi

On small screen it all came together a lot more nicely: (19MB) http://v.mukerji.co.uk/2009/10-10-football/fullscreen.avi

The trouble is that football needs to be on a big screen! People watch football together – it just wasn’t possible to get any real atmosphere squinting at a tiny portion of the screen.

In fact, the quality was so poor that it often wasn’t possible to tell who was on the ball. The commentators didn’t help here either. Normally as a team pass the ball around you might hear “Cole, to Gerrard, to Lampard” etc, but there was none of that. Why? Because the commentators weren’t there either. Presumably they had the same miserable picture we did.

I had other issues with this experience. Why was the clock/score bar not tucked further into the top left corner? So often it was squarely in the way. This photo neatly sums up both that problem, and England’s general failure:

A minor point, but throughout the match the service informed us that “Team line-ups will be updated on match day” (see the white pane on the right of the screen).

Definitely irritating was that having paid (per view) for a (very low quality) viewing experience, we were subjected to adverts. It seems Perform really can have their cake and eat it.

Overall then, this experience simply wasn’t good enough. Sure, I still believe it’s the future, but things must improve, and fast. The quality of the feed needs to go up considerably. Before that can happen though, UK broadband providers need to fix the contention issues. There were plenty of complaints on Twitter from people who couldn’t watch it properly. My favourite was from @Prezzer:

GOA….. Buffering… 78%… 85%… 97%… LL!!

Perform – You Must Try Harder. If this had been free, I may have passed it for acceptable.

Virgin Media – once higher definition streams are available, I think you might have to try quite a bit harder too.

England’s soccer fan-base is still rocking from the news that the next competitive match, this Saturday, will not be available to view on the television. Due to the collapse of Setanta, the rights for the match against the Ukraine have been snapped up by a firm called Perform, who will be streaming their live coverage to a million viewers on the internet.

The question is, has this really been thought through? I’m a big fan of internet technologies, and I’m absolutely subscribed to the idea that computers will provide to gateway to future TV style entertainment. BBC’s iPlayer concept is fantastic. I’m aware that Channel 4 got there first, but the BBC now have a significantly more advanced product, and their commitment to formats such as the PS3 has got me hooked. I watch much of my TV just like this – PS3 connected to TV:

Catching up on Question Time is however a completely different kettle of fish to watching an England match live. I have visited www.ukrainevengland.com and checked the ‘HD’ stream. I have a number of issues with the concept:

1) Sport is especially good in HD, and is certainly best on a big screen. This ‘HD’ test stream was about 50% of the size of my 720p display. That’s not HD. 1080p is HD. This is significantly worse than standard telly.

2) Internet video streaming is still a bit ropey. The PS3 is hard wired to my good 20mb network, but I don’t trust it with something like a live competitive sport. If newsnight fails to stream, it’s no biggie. If I’ve got a load of mates around to watch the footie and the feed fails, it matters.

3) I’m a long way from being convinced by England’s broadband capacity. I figure that on Virgin Media’s fibre I stand a pretty good chance compared to those on traditional copper fed DSL, but in both cases, how can we be sure that when it comes to the crunch, the transfer capacity will be there? Gloomy autumnal Saturday afternoons are peak internet traffic zones – add the significant weight of 1,000,000 users, many of whom wouldn’t normally load the internet much at all, loading up on video streams, and I think we’ll hit our biggest contention problem to date.

4) This video stream isn’t technically permitted in pubs. Pubs aren’t well known for internet savvy landlords and big internet connections, so even if it were permitted it would present issues. I know that some pubs will acquire potentially dubious foreign satellite feeds, and while this may not be entirely legal, it makes a lot of sense. For all the reasons listed above, a landlord needs to do whatever it takes to keep punters happy.

5) There will certainly be a lack of community spirit about these matches. The very fact that pubs shouldn’t be showing it means that social football viewing will be decimated, but equally, not many homes have the capability to show internet video on a big screen. Are fans supposed to crowd around tiny computer screens to catch the atmosphere? And worse still, if you’ve got a big computer monitor like my 24″ Dell, at 1920×1200 the apparently ‘HD’ stream looks nothing short of revolting.

All this said, I’ll go into this with an open mind. I’m going to get some friends round, and hope that all the technology works. I’ll need to log in to the site on my PS3 with the details I purchased earlier in the week. The provider’s server will need to be able to support 1,000,000 streams. My internet connection will need to hold up for 2 45 minute periods. The quality of the stream will need to be good enough to reveal the sport correctly when upscaled to a 40″ 720p screen.

This isn’t a big ask. I can watch some premier league matches on ESPN HD on real 1080p HD at no extra cost, where the image is pin sharp. I predict a bit of a fail here, but I’ll let you know. I am certain about one thing though: I’m glad this match isn’t crucial, and that this effective trial will be out of the way before the World Cup Finals. I believe this is the future, but we’re simply not technically or socially ready for it yet.

Diane and I have wanted a dog for a long time, and now that we’ve got a larger abode, it seemed like as good a time as any. After plenty of research, and a few visits to a breeder, today is the today we’ve brought home a male golden retriever puppy: Snoop. Here he is in the back of the 330d as we arrived home.

Surveying the back garden:

Visiting me:

Ready to pounce:

Of course, this huge 15 minutes of effort meant that Snoop passed out pretty quickly!

Really pleased to have such a happy chappy in the house – we’re looking forward to good times ahead!

We had our downstairs ceilings replaced this week. We were supposed to be decorating Di’s office over this bank holiday weekend, but due to a unique blend of laziness, drying plaster, and the need for a  little more work from the plasterer (happening this coming week) we didn’t start that. I can say that I’m really pleased with the new, smooth ceilings. They definitely help me envisage how the house will look when everything is finished, and will certainly play a big part in making our living space more modern.

Here’s the kitchen/diner:

Urgh, those doors! The living room (urgh, that carpet!)

And Di’s office:

A bit dull – hopefully I’ll be able to offer some photos of that office with some colour involved sometime soon! On other matters, you may recall that I cleared out the garage back in June. From that article, note the poor lighting – one strip lamp and a single bulb  at the other end.

This weekend I improved the lighting at the ‘car’ end (and, perhaps more importantly, sorted everything out so that there is now room for either car in there!

Looks pretty minging, but it’s now nice and bright. I’ll upgrade the other end from 1 to 3 strip lamps when I’ve got more cable, a distro box, two more lamp units, and more time. For now, the other end looks like this:

Busy, but navigable. Another improvement I’m really happy with is that I’ve mounted my old Pioneer speakers in the corners.

And rigged together a little hi-fi.

Tunes and bright lighting means a happy and productive Neil in the garage.

Oh and finally (for what I realize is quite a dull post, sorry about that), I’ve replaced the rusty 1978 light switches.

Both Diane and I have kerbed our cars. Needless to say, Diane managed this in a rather mundane way, where I suffered a racing incident at full left lock. In both cases, remedial action was necessary. Tractor’s front left:

And the SS’s rear left – properly kerbed!

I started with the tractor wheel – gave it a good wash and a sanding.

At this point I realised that I needed to go the whole hog and remove the wheel to paint it.

Prepared and ready to go:

Two coats of Titan Silver and a coat of lacquer later, and things were looking much better. Big thanks to Tom Titler for supplying these paints (back in 2006!). While I’m mentioning people, I should also express my apologies to Julian Lockyear, who sold me these wheels in immaculate condition and good faith (that this would never happen to them).

While this was drying, it was time to turn my attention to the M5′s wheel.

I think these wheels are actually made black, and a silver finish is applied to the front. In the above picture, at about 11 o’clock the blackness appeared after I used a bit too much Autosol metal polish. The spray cans soon sorted that!

Both wheels drying on the garage floor:

Ready to put the tractor back together:

And there we go:

Finally, a close up of the M5′s wheel:

Not perfect by any means, but a substantial improvement. Clearly a better option would be to have them professionally refurbished, but that would be more expensive and then I’d be really afraid of further damage. I think the best solution would be not to kerb the wheels in the first place, but sadly this requires more co-ordination than in readily available in our household.