“What is this ‘One Way’ of which you speak?” (Picture snapped on their second revolution of the car park.)
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Category: driving
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Ka-ching, the car strikes again
Well I got the car to the service place yesterday morning to get the smoke looked at, and the guy said he was 99% sure what it was, blah blah blah stuff I can’t remember, it’ll be about $600-650 to fix. Dammit. I ummed and ahhed for a few minutes. On the one hand, I’d ... [More]
My car is smokin’. But not in a good way. It’s just coming up to ten years since I first got it. And it’s a ’93 model, so sometime later this year will be the car’s fifteenth birthday. There’s a strange rattling noise when I start it up (rumoured to be an issue with the ... [More]
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Miscellaneous
Damn. Superparma.com is no more. And they built the site in such a way that it seems to be impossible to get at anything except the splash page via archive.org, so the ratings they compiled may be lost forever. Groan. WarGames 2: The Dead Code now in pre-production, and aimed at direct-to-DVD. OK. I was ... [More]
Many people like to whinge about the price of fuel, but Steve Fielding’s idea of cutting fuel taxes is a very bad idea — it would inevitably lead to more usage, and cutting prices is the last way you want to try and fight oil shortages. This opinion piece for ABC Online goes into more ... [More]
On Saturday my bro-in-law Adrian and I were headed up to Coburg in a hired van. We were just getting onto the Bolte Bridge when Adrian noticed a warning light on the dashboard. We weren’t sure what it meant, so I reached for the van owner’s manual, which said something along the lines of: 1. ... [More]
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Moving my business elsewhere
I pay $73 per year to the RACV because I want someone to get me out of a scrape when I’ve locked myself out of my car or the battery is dead or whatever. It somewhat disturbs me that what’s left over from that $73 goes into lobbying for more, bigger, faster roads. I saw ... [More]
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Dear moron
I may not be the world’s foremost expert on driving, but even I could see you made two critical mistakes driving out of the supermarket carpark. 1. You drove the wrong way around the one-way system. 2. Your baby was on the lap of your passenger. I hope that you were pulled over and booked ... [More]
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Next time, it’ll be ka-ching
I got the car serviced the other day. Perhaps unusually, when I went to pick it up, there was no multi-gazillion dollar bill waiting for me; just $197. But the guy warned me about various symptoms that were evident but not critical yet that may lead to a higher bill the next time. (He sounded ... [More]
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Lessons from a princess
It’s now just over ten years since Princess Diana died. One thing I didn’t mention in my blog post at the time was that when I got home, I found my VCR, which had been set to tape an obscure Sunday morning TV programme (the rather amusing look at the parables of Jesus, Wrestling With ... [More]
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Note to self
My car is dark grey. A recent study found that dark-coloured cars are more prone to accidents. In the rain, like this morning, I drive with my lights on, for visibility. It’s like my friend Merlin, who rides a motorcycle. Where he lives in Canberra, you apparently don’t have to ride with your motorcycle headlight ... [More]
Dishwashers: On the subject of water (I think Andrew or somebody mentioned this a while ago) in last Sunday’s Age M magaziney thing, there was an article noting that dishwashers generally use less water than handwashing. Dishwashers are in the 13 to 20 litre per cycle range, whereas handwashing is up around 40 to 60. ... [More]
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On the road
You don’t have to be a 4WD owner to drive like a moron. Even Prius owners do it sometimes. The other contender this week was red Mercedes TLH 385, zooming down Jasper Road with at least one indicator and brake light not working, tail-gating and generally driving like a maniac on Wednesday night. Also seen ... [More]
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What is this stuff?
I’ve been doing so little driving that it had been a full month since I’d bought petrol. But that came to an end the other night, when the fuel gauge was finally getting very close to the big E. So I pulled into the nearest service station, a Shell. Despite what they’ve been up to ... [More]
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Little licence plates
What’s the deal with those little car licence plates? Particularly on big cars which have plenty of space for normal licence plates. I seem to see them a lot on SS Commodores and 4WDs. Surely the point of licence plates is to make cars easily identifiable, in which case allowing smaller plates where they’re not ... [More]
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Keep left
What “Keep left” sign? Whatdyamean, “Keep Left”? Tram stop? What tram stop? It doesn’t apply to me. I’ll go where I want. (Sorry about the pic quality.)