A Blog by Tim Bishop

I’ve been using the Flash Car Wash to wash my car for the past year. It’s a fantastic device, and has really good results. Not only does it leave my car shining without blotchy water marks, but it removes the need to use a bucket at all.

There’s only one flaw with it though - it requires a hosepipe. Here in Kent we’ve had a hosepipe ban since last summer (which I was unaware of until recently), so using the hose is tricky. I could have pleaded ignorance, but they sent a letter not long ago. I also live on a main road, so it’s hard to do it sneakily

So yesterday I’m sitting inside wondering how I’m going to rinse the car off before and after washing it with a bucket of soapy water. It was a horrible day too, absolutely pouring with rain. Then it occured to me that the rain was probably the answer - it wouldn’t contain lime would it? I’d also only just had a shower, so my hair was already wet.

Out I went to an already soaking wet car and started cleaning it. Sure enough, the rain washed the soap off nicely, albeit making me rather wet in the process.

Today I went out to check the results and it was pretty impressive - no horrible marks to be seen anywhere… apart from the bits of grass left from me strimming the front lawn

I’ve done a bit of driving back and forth across the country recently, and I’ve seen quite a few places go over the £1 per litre mark. Admittedly they were the more expensive places anyway such as motorway service areas.

Fortunately I’m not a heavy user of petrol, but it still frustrates me that something like 70% of the cost is government tax. Frankly it’s an outrageous amount to charge.

So I was quite pleased to see this article written by the Fools over at The Motley Fool. It’s well worth a read.

The most interesting bit for me was the bit about saving money buying petrol - the rest of the article is mostly common sense. I headed over to petrolprices.com and discovered that the best price for unleaded in my area is 94.9p. After registering it turns out the Esso garage I generally use is charging this price. That’s a good start!

The next interesting thing was the Pipeline Card which appears to be a loyalty card that intends to get it’s members discounts on fuel prices. It’ll be very interesting to see if that takes off.

There’s a couple of useful tips there, but I guess the best solution is to vote for whoever (if anyone!) says they’ll reduce fuel tax in the next election

I’ve been using the speed camera database at Pocket GPS World with my satnav system for a while now. With the necessary tools installed on my PC it would automatically pull the latest data and install it on my PDA. Fantastic system, and no hassle at all to keep updated.

When doing an update today I thought to check the Pocket GPS World website. To my amazement they’re now charging for the database. It’s not that expensive in reality, but I don’t like services that start off free to get everyone hooked and then start charging.

So I’ve forked out a massive 2 quid to get the latest database, but whether I’ll keep doing that I don’t know.

Yesterday my car went in for it’s first yearly service at Invicta Motors in Canterbury. All in all not a bad experience; they gave me a discount for being a valued customer, cleaned the car for me (inside and out!), and had it waiting by the door when I got there. They even fixed the mudflap clip I managed to knock off

My only complaint really is about communication. I tried to book the service online (via the Ford website - I hadn’t found the Summit one then), but it seems that vanished in to the ether - I ended up booking again over the phone. They also said they’d phone me when the car was ready, but they didn’t.

Anyway, that’s all made better by the free pen they gave me

A few days ago my car insurance renewal quote came through from Ford Insure. I’d already done some online quotes to get an idea what I would be expecting to pay, so I was quite surprised to see the Ford quote come in at 50% more then the majority of the other quotes.

Even when I queried this with them they basically said “we’re better than the rest, so you have to pay more”. It started to get amusing when I pointed out that their own online quoting system had given me a far cheaper price. The response went something like: “Oh, you can’t trust those online systems, they’re never right”. Confidence inspiring, eh?

So, I was after a new insurer. I had a list of insurers from last year, so first off I went through them and got a load of quotes (all online, it’s easier that way, but pretty tedious). Then I discovered InsureSupermarket, which performs a similar function to Confused.com. It’s interface was straightforward, and it gave me a good set of quotes which were similar to what I’d got myself. Interestingly, though, the prices through here were cheaper - even when I used it’s links to go through to the insurer’s site and complete the quote. Maybe that can be attributed to the random nature of insurance, or maybe they get a special discount.

At the end of this process I’m left with two fairly similar prices from RAC and Norwich Union. Not much to chose between them really, other than whether I like yellow or orange. Then I recall my breakdown cover is with RAC. I punch those details in too and the RAC quote drops some more, and it says I can become a “Plus” member. RAC it is then.

Just as I finish writing this I see that “RAC plc has been acquired by Aviva plc” and that it’s being “integrated into the Norwich Union Insurance division”. Maybe that’s why the choice was so hard?

Reflecting on what I’ve written I can see that I’ve made the process sound pretty easy. It’s not - it’s a minefield. It’s hard and repetitive work going through all those sites to get quotes, and differentiating between what you get is an impossible task. The interfaces seem to come in about three or four different varieties, but all with their own subtle differences. I’m left wondering how anyone is really meant to make an informed decision without weeks of research.

At the end of the day insurance companies don’t want to help you, they just want your money. I really hope I don’t have an accident, because I’ll be screwed over for years…

I finally decided to put an end to comment spam - I’ve installed a captcha. Whilst I was away on holiday I received around 3-5 spams a day, so rather than just deleting them I figured I needed to prevent them.

The wordpress docs are a really useful resource. I decided to go with SecureImage since it looked fairly good, and wasn’t complicated to set up. First I installed ImageMagick, then I dropped the php in place. I did have to tweak it a little bit to replace the short PHP tags with the full ones, but then my configuration isn’t standard.

Since doing that I’ve had no spam. I’ve also had no other comments, but hopefully that doesn’t mean I’ve broken my blog

In an attempt to allow my mind to rest from work-related matters I’m heading off to Cornwall for a couple of weeks.

I’ll be back for the Easter weekend when I’ll be shutting down all our systems at work for a campus-wide power shutdown.

Not that long ago I questioned how long it would be until I got comment spam on this blog. It didn’t take long for that to be answered; over the past day or two I’ve had 3 of them. Admittedly that’s not too many, but given this blog has only been running for two weeks that’s a pretty depressing start. How did they manage to find me so fast? I guess Google is useful to spammers too.

Moaning anside, it won’t affect anyone reading this blog since I’ll catch the spam comments at the moderation phase. But it’s yet more work I have to do to combat spam. I really am sick of it.

SIGH. Make that 4…

I’ve always been fascinated by computer generated art, in particular the landscape work. Over the past few years they seem to be getting so good that it’s often hard to tell the difference between them and real scenery photographs.

The main site I visit is digitalblasphemy.com, and I pay the small subscription fee to get access to the latest images. Today I found the user gallery - not sure how I missed it in the past! I was quite shocked to see such high quality images. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t what I found!

One artist in the gallery stood out to me, and he’s Juergen Eilts over at shiftedreality.com. He also maintains a blog, but doesn’t seem to keep it updated on a regular basis. It’d be nice to have a feed of his work.

It’s great to have guys like these generating such good work; there’s no hope of me ever creating anything like it. Without them I’d have nothing to put on my desktop!

So, yet another blog. Given that there are more bloggers than blog readers one might have thought another blog would be largely pointless. They’re probably right.

However, my intention is not to write an uninteresting blog about what I saw on television last night, what colour the sky is on my planet, or whether I prefer my toast with or without jam. Nor do I intend to waffle at great length about my political opinions; that would simply be mean.

This begs the question, what am I going to write about? Well, I’ve split the blog in to a couple of categories. Firstly the category called Work, which will contain details about interesting technical stuff I’m doing in my job. That’ll probably be mostly of interest to people at my institution.

The next category is Computers. If you know me at all then you’ll be fully aware that I spend an awful lot of time messing around with them, so it makes sense that I’ll have a fair amount to say. I guess I’ll mainly be writing about cool stuff I’ve found or set up, development projects I’m working on, or gripes I have about other pieces of software. I’ve specifically made a sub-category for FreeBSD, an operating system for which I am a developer.

Thanks for reading!