Tag: Car | Page 6 | David Coveney

Saab 9-5 Aero (HOT) Estate For Sale – SOLD!

Given that I’m selling my motorbike at the moment as well, you may well wonder if I’ve had some kind of financial crisis of my own.

But thankfully, no. I just don’t need such a large and fast car any more. When I was doing a lot of sprinting I needed something capable of towing a car trailer comfortably and reliably. But I also wanted something I could enjoy driving as my daily transport.

City Commuting Doesn’t Suit Big Cars

And that’s what happened, basically – for the past 18mths or so I’ve driven 12 miles to Liverpool city centre, and 12 miles back – congested roads, with a lot of stop-start action. In the end I bought a Golf TDI which makes much more sense for that kind of driving. Although I’m tempted to keep the Saab, which I will if I can’t get the right price, I know that in reality it’ll get far too little use in the coming year or two. The sensible decision, then, is to sell it.

So, here goes…

Specification

This is a 2004 (04 plate) 9-5 Aero HOT Estate with 250bhp. The full specification items worth listing are as follows:

Bi-Xenon headlights, headlight washers, factory alloy wheels, factory CD/Radio, Nokia Bluetooth Hands-Free (works with most phones), electric windows all round, electric mirrors, heated mirrors, split climate control, dual-colour leather seats, leather steering wheel, lots of airbags (5* NCAP Rating), ABS, Electronic Stability Program, new Vredestein Giugiaro front tyres and lots of life on the identical rears, detachable tow bar, FSH (main dealer or specialist only), two owners (first owner the dealership as it’s an ex-demo car), 58,000 miles, 10 months MOT, Tax until 10/09.

The car is in a gorgeous Capuccino Black. In other words, most of the time the car looks black or very dark grey, but when the sun shines on it you realise that there’s a pearlescent bronze finish. The photos below really capture this, which took some effort as it’s not easy to show in pictures – normally it just looks black.

Damage Worth Noting

I’m nothing if not thorough and feel it’s worth noting everything even if it’s minor so that you’re not disappointed if you travel – the car has a couple of tiny dings from the careless door opening of others. It has a small ding that’s almost but not quite invisible under the nearside rearmost window with a matching scrape on the bumper – that was a van in Paris that did it, and no, he didn’t leave details. But I’d say very few people can spot these marks – I’ve taken close-ups, however, to try and show marks. Also, one of the alloys has a barely visible kerb scrape on it. Picture shown. There’s a few minor and normal stone chips that could do with being dealt with by chipsaway or similar, but one left a tiny ding on the bonnet. Another tiny ding was caused by the biggest hailstorm I’ve ever seen, over in Italy. I expected worse….

Get in Touch – Price to be around £6200

If you’re interested, you can contact me through the contact form on this site, or simply call me, during office hours or in the evening on 0151 709 7977.

If you’re wondering whether someone with the word ‘mental’ in his website address and a history of motorsport will have taken care of his car… well, in racing if you don’t take care of your car you often end up with an accident at some point. Or losing. I apply the same philosophy to my road cars – look after them and they look after you.

Enjoy the gallery – simply click on a thumbnail to get the big version, and you can then move between images by clicking on the arrows that come up.

And a Deep Zoom Seadragon view of the under-bonnet area

And now, PhotoSynth

Yes, I may have been playing – I’d be interested to know what you think of this use of technology…

1999 ZZR600 (ZX600-E7) For Sale

Sadly, after ten years, I’ve decided that I’ve really failed to make good use of the ZZR600 I treated myself to back in 1999. It’s the only new motorbike I’ve ever bought… and I’ll hate getting rid of it.

But practically speaking, I don’t have much use for it, most of my friends stopped riding years ago, and I’ve put criminally few miles on the back since around 2003.

So, it’s time to go, get my garage re-organised, and space made for my car based toy.

It will have a 12 month MOT on it within a few days, though I’ll only tax the bike again if it runs out before sale. I’m also not going to give the bike away just because it’s old.

The bike is in near perfect condition – as you’d expect for something with just over 4500 miles on it. It’s still very shiny and, frankly, when I polished it up I decided that there was no way I was going to give the bike away for a silly price. In other words, I expect a fair value that reflects its ultra low mileage, the care its received, the way its been stored, and the condition it’s in. I’m open to offers, however, because I know that valuing a bike like this can be quite tricky. For the right person it’ll be a bargain. For someone who just wants something to go to work on it’ll be too expensive. Simple as that.

Mileage	appx. 4700
Year Registered	1999
Tax	July 2009
MoT	July 2010
Service History	Some, but not annually due to lay-ups. DIY checks too. Will service it before sale.
Condition	Almost as new.
Scratches	A couple of minor chips on the left (pictured), and small dinks on the left-hand engine cover (pictured) caused by a very slow speed incident involving my disk lock, a gravel car park, and inadvertently doing the splits.

Crazy European Sports To Try This Summer

Europeans are considered to be the best educated, most sophisticated people on the planet. They also like diving into bogs, throwing tomatoes at one another, and chasing cheese.

I sometimes think that the British are an unusual breed when it comes to sport, but when you look around Europe you start to realise that quite possibly we don’t have the monopoly we thought we did.

If you’re thinking of a trip to Europe where you can get involved with some local sports, consider these.

Here’s a selection of videos showing some of the things Europeans do for fun:

Cheese Rolling (England)

Take cheese, a round one. Go to a steep hill. Find a group of like minded maniacs. And then chase the cheese down the hill only to be greeted by a group of similarly crazy catchers waiting to ‘rescue’ you at the bottom. That’s England’s annual cheese rolling contest. Many people will be hurt and this is proof that the insurance companies and inept Health & Safety consultants haven’t yet managed to stop people risking their own lives for no sound reason whatsoever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOyQBSMeIhM

Wife Carrying (Finland)

The Scandinavians are about the most equitable people you can imagine, yet it’s the men that have to do the carrying in this sport. Wife Carrying is a sport that involves running a 253.5m course, with your wife on your back. I personally find the Estonian wife-lift the easiest, but there are a number of styles.

If you’ve been to Finland, you’ll know that they’re not the most svelte of peoples. If you want to take part and have a typically skinny French wife you stand a good chance…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIB9UcA5iQU

La Tomatina (Spain)

The Spanish grow an awful lot of tomatoes. This needs celebrating. What better way than to throw them at each other? Every year, in Buñol, Valencia, the Spanish enjoy nothing more than to throw tomatoes at La Tomatina And why not? Beats throwing donkeys off churches. My family happens to live in the Valencia region, and I fully intend to attend though it’s worth noting – I’ve been to a few Spanish festivals and I know that alcohol and chaos feature strongly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPQCH1b_LgE

Bog Snorkelling (Wales)

You might think of snorkelling as something to do at a Caribbean beach. Not the Welsh. They like nothing better than to get into fancy dress, head to a bog and get swimming in the annual Bog Snorkelling competition. There are prizes for speed, but many people enter the contest to raise money for charity and, consequently, the efforts that get the most attention are likely to raise the most money – hence the fancy dress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAh7e9d45_Y

mySQL Database Search & Replace With Serialized PHP [Updated]

Ever needed to migrate a database to a new server or website (especially with WordPress and other PHP applications) and been stuck because when you do a search and replace some of the data seems to get corrupted?

Please note that a newer version of this code is now available from my Interconnect’s site over at https://interconnectit.com/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/

Serialized PHP Arrays Cause Problems

In PHP one of the easiest ways of storing an array in a database is to use the serialize function. Works a treat, but the downside is that you’re not storing data with a cross platform method. In many product development environments this would get you a stern talking to, but in the world of web development where deadlines are tight and betas are the norm, this seems to be overlooked somewhat.

So what we have are tables full of data that can’t be easily edited by hand. For example:

;a:3:{s:5:"title";s:17:"This Week\'s Poll";s:18:"poll_multiplepolls";s:0:"";s:14:"multiple_polls";N;}

Say you had thousands of records like the one above, and the word ‘multiple’ needs to be changed to ‘happy’. Two bits would change – poll_multiplepolls would now read poll_happypolls and multiple_polls would read happy_polls. In both cases you would have three characters fewer to deal with.

Fine, you may think, but you can only do the change by hand because where it says s:18:"poll_multiplepolls" it now has to say s:15:"poll_happypolls" – see the difference? S18 spells out the length of the following string, and it has to be changed to s:15

I’ll say right now, that that was a pain. For simple arrays I wrote the straightforward PHP Serialization fixer code, which got me out of many a pickle – do the search and replace without worrying, and then run the script. Fixed about 90% of problems.

Multidimensional Array Problem

Sadly those 10% of problems left were a real pain. I needed something more robust. Something more powerful. And finally today it was a Bank Holiday in the UK – that means no phone calls… I could have a quiet day of coding and concentrate on the best solution to this problem.

What I’ve done is to write a database search and replace utility in PHP that scans through an entire database (so use with care!) which is designed for developers to use on database migrations. It’s definitely not what you’d call an end-user tool, though I may sanitize it at some point and turn it into an easy to use WordPress plugin. Thing is – this is dangerous code – sometimes I think it’s better to make it deliberately a bit tricky, don’t you?

It’s not that bad though – if you can manually install WordPress, you can easily configure the database connection settings.

What the code does is to look at the database, analyse the tables, columns and keys, and then starts reading through it. It will attempt to unserialize any data it finds, and if it succeeds it will modify that data then reserialize it and pop it back in the database where it found it. If it finds unserialized data it will still carry out the search and replace.

Use in WordPress

In most WordPress migrations you tend to have the primary problem of changing the domain name entries in content, settings and widgets – you simply need to put in the $search_for string the old domain address (including the http if it’s there) as seen on the database, and the new one into $replace_with. Then put this script onto your server, and run it by visiting it in your browser or inputting the appropriate command line – depending on your server configuration.

Other things you may want to check are for plugins or themes that have made the mistake of storing the full server path to the installation – cFormsII does this, for example. You will need to find out your old and new server paths and use those, in full, for another iteration of this script.

After less than a second of running, you should have a freshly edited database. It may take a little longer on slow or share hosting, or if you have a very large database, but on my laptop I can manage around 60,000 items of data per second.

I’ve just used the script to migrate, in its entirety, with content, settings, 87 widgets (yes, really!) and hundreds of images to my localhost server. It took moments, and the site is perfectly preserved.

download file

Search and Replace Database download

BIG WARNING: I take no responsibility for what this code does to your data. Use it at your own risk. Test it. Be careful. OK? Here in the North we might describe the code as being as “Rough as a badger’s arse.” Never felt a badger’s arse, but I’ll take their word for it.

Boo to MPs! Boo to Presenters!

MPs are getting it in the neck as a result of some of their more wild expenses claims. Lord Foulkes got very uppity.

Seriously, both of them are as bad as each other. Lord Foulkes for failing to understand the difference between expenses and salary, and the presenter for being rude.

Kudos to Carrie Gracie for answering the question though – she could have given a typical politician’s answer and fudged the response.

But you know, MPs (or anybody else for that matter) – when you make an expenses claim that could, potentially, come under public scrutiny at some point you have to think about how it could look. And if you’re not paid enough, then sort out the pay. But given that each constituency manages to have lots of applicants for the job I suspect that the job is seen as a rather attractive one. I would be quite happy to receive an MP’s income along with money to pay for an office and staff. Lucky them.

So here’s a gentle nudge to MPs to have a think about how you look to the public you serve, and the public who pay your salary. And yes, I do appreciate that many MPs are decent and hardworking – but they need to be open so we can see this.

Hello

Hi there – well, where do I start?

Let’s just say this isn’t intended to be a daily blog or journal of my life. I really really don’t think that what I do is quite that interesting. If I start posting up anything that says “Not done much today, had a drink with Roger and quite liked a girl we met but not sure if she’ll meet me again…” then please, shoot me.

Instead I’m going to add stuff on topics that might be of interest. Current things will be:

Motorsport – events I’ve competed in, work I’ve carried out, and what I’m doing. This is as much to share information with other people who are interested in the sport.
Work notes – anything I do in my work (currently a ‘resting’ PeopleSoft consultant) may be noted if I think it’s of interest either to myself in the future or to other PeopleSoft types. Other projects I’m working on may also be documented here. Not because it’s the best way, but it is the easiest way!
Travel journals – the main reason I’ve set this up. Now I can easily post up news and information about my travels from web cafés around the world. And no need to arrange paper stuff – something I’m terrible at.

Thank you for looking!