There are 119 readable entries.
3 of those entries are on the main page
And 116 are archived entries.
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And 336 comments in total
The total amount of Karma votes on this site is 108
Leaving an overall Karma of 4
Mark has made 118 entries
Fliss has made 0 entries
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
You may remember some 4 months ago me mentioning Felicity damaging a tyre (through no fault of her own i might add.....again) and it cost £200 from Kwik-Fit to replace.(this was before all the journal entries were mysteriously deleted).
Well, would you adam and eve it both front tyres need bloody replacing....yes, the new front one with less than 4000 miles on it is knackered already.
I have to say that i was not looking forward to spending another £200 per tyre for direct replacement Michelin Pilots so i did a bit of digging on the Internet for some cheaper performance tyres...to cut a long story short i came to the conclusion that (from what i've read) Dunlop SP9000's are shite but cheap and the only tyre for me was the Continental Contact Sport (i did consider Kumho but i don't know enough about them, apparently very good though).
As it turns out MGR has started to equip Conti's over Mich's now anyway and as another turn up for the books my local Kwik-Fit center turned out to be the cheapest for them at £128 per tyre fitted.
I also suspected that the tracking was out..thus contributing to the rather fast wear on me tyres so after they stuck the new boots on they set about checking my alignment...and boy was it out, a total of 9 degrees between the two....and they are supposed to be parallel.
He reset the toe-in and what not to what they were supposed to be and carefully took the steering wheel brace of..fully expecting it to snap round, but it didn't so i will take it back in a week to have it checked to make sure it still set up properly..in fact i will take it in on Monday morning as the car is booked in for some minor warranty work and if it's not right i can get them to check the wheels out as well..all in all an expensive day, costing £255 for 2 fronts, plus valves, Eco disposal blah, blah, blah and tracking, plus £30 discount (and i didn't ask why either).
Posted by Mark @ 07:37 PM GMT
Saturday, March 20, 2004
It's been a couple of windy days so far..gusting at up to 75mph these winds have generated some huge waves on the seafront pushing water right over the sea wall, across the prom and across the dual carriageway running up and down the prom...i was hoping it would force us to close but alas was not to be..
Today was a particularly good day as the winds decimated the Sea Life signage that was outside, ripping it to shreds and depositing it along the prom...unfortunatley the signs are made out of inch thick rigid plastic so the risk of serious injury to passers by was so bad that the Police closed off the prom around the Sea Life Center for about 1 1/2 hours while the Fire crews tried to make the sign safe. guess thats life when you live near the sea...although what really pisses me off is the amount of sand the car collects in an average week.
I wonder what tomorrow will bring?
Posted by Mark @ 09:29 PM GMT
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Yes it is..and i'm doing bugger all for it...i worked, came home, went back to work for team training, acquired headache, came home and collapsed and now i'm considering getting some chinese.
Flares is closed at the moment for a mild refurb before they open for this weekends 'Flares Birthday Party'
They are laying some new fangled flooring in Flares thats a bit like coloured concrete mixed with resin..a lot better then the crap lino they used to put in but this flooring costs £17,000 and takes 24 hrs to cure...should be good when it's set though.
Posted by Mark @ 09:06 PM GMT
Friday, March 12, 2004
Well it seems that the company that supplies the servers and scripts for the Shoutbox to your right is ceasing to trade for numerous reasons so unless a viable alternative is found or i get of my fat arse and learn PHP and make my own (don't hold your breath) then the only way to interact on this site will be through the Journal..which is a bit of a bummer.
From what i can gather the Shoutbox will cease to be on Tuesday 16th March 04.
Posted by Mark @ 09:26 PM GMT
Saturday, March 6, 2004
It's been a while since my last entry so i thought i had better do some typing.
The main reason for the lack of update is really to do with the fact that i bought a new P.C tower and backed up everything on the old one ready to transfer to the new one and then deleted all the files on the old one, this in itself was not the problem, that problem was the fact that the new p.c tower did not work properly when i got it and has taken me till now to get it sorted....*Mark slips into Jackanory mode................*
One day i decided to trawl E-Bay looking for bargains, i had been after a new PC for a while and thought i would have a look to see what was available.
I came across this seller calling himself 'Clickonline' who was selling brand new built PC towers with no reserve price and he had a very good positive feedback history, some of them were of apparently high spec and so i thought i would have a go at bidding for one.
The one i chose was an Athlon Barton 3000+ tower with 256 DDR 400 memory, 400 watt PSU, perspex side panel on tower, 80 gig HD, DVD drive blah blah blah!!!!! The motherboard was one of those cheap on board graphic and sound jobbies but i had an AGP card for it so that did not concern me.
The starting bid was £1 and after four days of watching the bidding i made a bid in the dying seconds on the close of the auction and won it for £269.
After 2 weeks the tower arrived and i plugged it in (at this point i should point out that the tower was supposed to arrive without an OS on it and i had gone out and bought XP upgrade...i was trying to be a cheap bastard) only to be surprised that XP was already installed on it...bargain i thought, i could take the un-opened XP upgrade that i bought back to PC World and save myself some pennies.
This is when the problems started, after i had installed the drivers for the graphics card i had put in the PC started to crash and reset so i had a look at the Device Manager to see if there were any obvious problems and lo and behold, great big yellow bloody question marks all over the place.
Anyway, for the next 3 weeks i trawled the Internet for relevant motherboard drivers and installing them (system stability permitting), sent dozens of E-Mails to Clickonline to try and resolve the problem after installing main board drivers failed to resolve the issues before finally taking drastic measures and sorting it out myself.
Communication with Clickonline started off very well, the guy was helpful, gave me advice and sounded very 'on the ball' and willing to try all sorts to sort the system out but it all dried up to nothing, no answers to my E-Mails, no answer to the phone calls i made.
Last week i decided enough was enough..the system had got to the point where XP would not even load (had been damaged some how) and the PC would just reset over and over again, i tried to get into the BIOS but it had been password protected..which i thought very strange, so i took the battery out of the motherboard to reset the BIOS to it's factory defaults and had a little poke around, it's then that i found out that the CPU was not a 3000+ like i had been led to beleive..and indeed had paid for but a 2500+ that had been overclocked so that in the system info in XP it would read Athlon 3.0...what a cheeky fucker i thought..i should of guessed something like that would happen when i first took a look at the tower and noticed it had a 300 watt PSU instead of a 400 and No perspex side panel 
In the end i had to re-install XP with my now opened, non returnable disk and i have to say that it is running perfectly......almost, i had a few 'glitches' when i first installed the graphics card which i think was driver related and i tried half a dozen different drivers to see if i could correct the problem but to no avail only for it to totally disappeared as if it had never existed...wierd.
Anyway, my XP AMD Athlon 2500+ with what is now 768 of DDR400 memory is now working just fine and i'm finally happy.
Morale of this story, no matter how genuine someone appears to be on an auction site, no matter how many good/positive feedbacks the seller has had, there is still a HUGE risk involved when buying blind and i will NEVER purchase another 'delicate' item from an auction site again.
P.s i believe congratulations are in order for Lee 
Posted by Mark @ 10:46 PM GMT
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