GTAMADDOG

Sorry, it's another video with a BMW in it, I think I've got a problem. I was at this event though, shame these guys didn't complete it.

I like the LaFerrari strangely, I'm not usually bothered by Ferraris, but I like that. Quite like the Stingray as well, don't know what the rest of it looks like though. The Koenigsegg looks like any other Koenigsegg to me. Everything else is meh, especially the Audi. Is it an A1? Or is it an A3? Or is it an A4? Or is it an A5? Or is it an A6? Or is it an A7? They all look the same from the front, complete yawnfest.

For the sake for £20-30 I might as well get a brand new one. As we found out yesterday used consoles on eBay aren't really much cheaper so it wouldn't really be worth taking the risk. Think I need to get a bit drunk, I really struggle spending money so alcohol can only help, as long as I don't end up on eBay looking at cars to bid on I should be fine :p

I think you're right, well that's what I heard on a video I was watching yesterday. It's only going to get more expensive as it progresses towards Beta and then final release essentially. At the moment I think it equates to about £20. I didn't really get into ARMA 2 as a single-player game really, I've had quite a lot of fun on Wastelands and DayZ over the last few weeks though. It's weird how I couldn't get into singe-player though, because I used to play Operation Flashpoint a lot and I never went on multiplayer once. I think my patience of being able to follow all of the objectives properly and on time has dwindled since those days :p

If it's anything like our old VWs then if you simply hit the light cluster the light will usually start working :p Both the MK3 Golfs used to occasionally have one brake light out and we just used to hit the light cluster and it'd start working straight away. It was a bodge way of doing it, but the connections and bulbs were fine, I think they just liked being woken up with a bang, lol.

w00t, I don't think I've made a thread on TurboDuck/TDUC since I made the thread about my car a few years ago, so this feels nice :p So basically I've been toying with the idea of buying a new Xbox 360 for the last few weeks, but I'm not sure if it's such a good idea now that the impending announcement of the next generation Xbox is nearing closer. I've thought about buying a new 360 before, I'll usually really want to buy one for a month or so and then I'll forget about it for up to six months and then I want to buy one again. My mind works in mysterious ways which just so happens to be very annoying. I do already have a 360, but it's the old style 20GB Premium white thing which has been RRODing on and off for a few years now, I did try and fix it in my own unique way last year, but I think I've royally borked (see Urban Dictionary for a correct definition) the thing now because it hasn't started once without RRODing since. To be fair I quite liked playing the thing when I could tear myself away from the PC, it made a nice change, but I had a lot more spare time then. There are also a few games which are on Xbox that are exclusive to that console which I'd love to play (Yes, Forza). These days during week I usually just have something to eat when I get home from work and then chill out in bed watching some TV and catching up on YouTube subscriptions, because I can't be bothered to go on the PC as I'm on a PC all day at work anyway. If I got an Xbox I would probably use it during the week just to chill out a bit. No, I don't want to go out and exercise or socialise instead, I'll be getting my mountain bike out when the weather is warmer anyway :p ShopTo has a bundle for sale with Forza Essentials and Skyrim digital (Got the PC version anyway) for what I think is a reasonable price for a 250GB model. I know Forza Essentials is just a cut-down version of what it should be so I'll probably buy the complete game on-top of that anyway, or Horizons. So I was just wondering if any of you current 360 owners thought it would be worth buying a new 360 now despite the impending announcement of the newer model? Please, either completely talk me in to it or completely talk me out of it, and then I can just wait for the Xbox 720/1080/2/3/28 if need be. This week would be an ideal time to buy one (if I was going to get one) as I'm at home all week so I won't need to worry about being in for delivery. tl;dr: Already have an Xbox, but I'm a monkey and broke it more than it already was. Now I'm thinking about getting another one.

Not sure if anyone else has watched today's episode, but I'm quite impressed with the way the 5-Series handled all the mud, I was expecting it to get stuck straight away. Then again I suspect if you don't really care about your car and you gave it some welly quite a few cars would do the same as that BMW :p

Took both front wheels off the car today to see if I could find the cause of the knocking noise, but everything looks and feels as solid as it should be, including the drop-links. So I'm none-the-wiser on that side of things. Also took the passenger front brake pads out as it's been squealing for the last few months if I'm lightly pressing the brakes as I come to a stop, or if I'm turning right slightly at very low speeds. Nice ridge in the rear pad and on the rear of the disc so I'm guessing something has been stuck in the pad somewhere for a while. Hopefully now I've had it out and inspected it that will have given the offending article enough chance to sod off. I'll probably need a new brake disc though if I want to be really picky.

Last day at work today for a week. Using up the last five days of holiday entitlement before the new holiday year starts in April. Kicking off with being pro-active by having a good hard look at the front suspension and some other things on my car. Got a knocking noise (proper knocking like fist-on-wooden-table rather than clicking) when I turn left at slow(er) speeds. I've read that it could be drop-links or it could be CV joints. To be honest it'll probably be neither of those and be the most expensive thing ever like dampers or top mounts because it likes to do that. If it was drop-links they'd be £8 each and I could have both changed in less than an hour even at my amateur mechanic level. The 306 forums suggest that if it's CV joints you might as well get a whole new drive-shaft for one reason or another which would be hilarious.. or not, it'd be the most Hellish thing ever. Other than that I plan to give the car a proper clean while I wait for the parts to show up now that it's technically Spring, then I plan to hopefully do naff-all :p

This may be one reason why I want a BMW.. Contains a little bit of strong language: :p

Which ever it may be, I think I'll leave SBCriss to take the photos as they are fantastic.

Oh dear..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs3ag0G3BAw What a way to end an album..

It's great stuff, it didn't take long to see it making a difference and I was only using a Zaino Tri-Foam hand applicator, so when Spring actually kicks in I might crack out the machine polisher and see what I can do with that. I only tried it out on the bonnet as I had all of this mass tyre changing to do, but the polish was starting to work its magic on a couple of the deeper scratches. The other polishes I have didn't even touch the deeper scratches so I'll definitely be keeping the Gtechniq stuff as the main polish. Luckily the rest of the paintwork is still quite shiny and full of reflections so I don't have to worry about having a stupidly shiny bonnet with every other panel on the car looking dull :p I've got a week off soon so if it's sunny I might go to town on the whole car and clay bar it, etc. ready for Spring/Summer. I need to get the mechanicals sorted out first ideally.

A lovely sunny day, clear blue skies, but not boiling hot like it normally is with this sort of weather so it gave me a chance to try out some of my Gtechniq P1 polish and also put some more wax on the car. Also rotated the wheels/tyres on my sisters car as she said the tread on the front ones was getting low. When she said "Low" I pictured the tyres just being slightly above the wear indicators, but no, I took the first front one off and the inside shoulder is completely bald, the whole tyre is on the wear indicators all the way around and apart from the grooves there isn't much else there. The other tyre was the same, they might as well be slicks. She didn't seem too bothered to start with, but I soon changed her mind when I said they're almost definitely illegal and they need changing as soon as possible or she'll get stopped by police and get a fine for each tyre. I was almost tempted to hand her some money so she could go and buy two new tyres as she said she doesn't have enough money, but her boyfriend said he'd pay for them and get them changed as soon as possible so hopefully he will do. It's a good job I agreed to rotate them this weekend.

Bought a cheap windscreen mount for my phone a couple of weeks ago and decided to see how well my phone could record video while in the mount. Rather foolishly I gave it the worst conditions possible. Recording in the dark with a windscreen covered in crap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZcvzLmt28g No my headlights aren't as poor as the video makes them appear to be, they are perfectly fine, but the phone didn't want to capture even half of the light that the headlights actually emit. I thought this would be a good idea to do some dashcam videos for YouTube because driving standards around here seem to have become absolutely dire after Christmas and they only seem to be getting worse. Unfortunately my phone doesn't have enough storage and I'd have no battery left on the thing by the time I got to work. However, I should have something a bit more discrete to record driving videos with from now on and as long as I keep them as daylight videos then I don't think they'll be too bad.

So I was doing my standard issue Sunday morning car clean/check today and it got off to a brilliant start. I check the tyre pressures first every week just to be on the safe side. First tyre I check and it has 8PSI in it, 8PSI all the way down from 36PSI. I'm sat there thinking "I know this tyre had a slow leak, but this is taking the pee a bit as it only usually goes down to 27PSI over a week". I carried on anyway, couldn't see anything suspicious about it, even looked on the inner side of the tyre to make sure nothing has happened to it and it all looked fine, so I topped it all the way back up to 36PSI and then set about washing the car. I start cleaning the wheels and the third wheel I come to has the tyre which had lost all of it's pressure. Clean it all up, clean the wheel arch. Then I notice tiny bubbles coming out of the top of the tyre so as you do I started poking the area with my finger and I could feel quite a bit of air seeping out. Got the phone out to light the area up a bit as I couldn't be bothered to find a torch and buried just out of sight is what I imagine is a nail which has lost it's head so it's almost invisible if inspecting a tyre at a quick glance. The upside is I still have 4 spare Cyclone alloy wheels with tyres in the garage, I don't know why I still have them, but it's a good job I do as I don't need to go and get a new tyre now. Even better is the nail handily decided to imbed itself in the worst tyre on the car, some relatively unknown brand with less than 1mm of tread left until the wear indicators. Unfortunately most of the spare alloy wheels have budget brand tyres on them, one has a Goodyear tyre I've never heard of, but the wheel itself is scruffy and the tyre doesn't have much life left anyway, and one alloy is halfway through a refurb. So I've swapped a budget tyre for another budget tyre with a bit more tread on it, and hopefully it'll hold the air unlike the one I took off. It's on the back anyway, the two good tyres are on the front, but I plan on buying two new tyres soon anyway so I should end up with a decent set of four. I need to make my posts shorter :cheeky: tl;dr Tyre got a nail in it, luckily I have a spare set of wheels/tyres so I just swapped them over.

Something a bit different, gets going at around 4 minutes: Never given this guys songs a good listen to and only hear the odd song on the off chance, but every one I hear sounds good to me. It's the sort of music I used to think would be awesome for long drives through the night when I was younger. Relaxing, but still good pace.

This is one image, just two combined into one ;) : http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x104/GTAMADDOG/g1-1_zpsf30984d4.jpg Gave my step-dads Golf it's first decent clean (maybe even the only clean?) in probably six months. I did take a clay bar, tar remover, paint cleaner, polish, wax, tyre shine and trim restorer, but I never got time to do much besides hoover the inside and use some Autoglym on the interior and then thoroughly wash the outside. Doesn't look too bad for a 197,000 mile and three (small) crash example. The drivers seat bolster is still fully covered in fabric and hasn't frayed either which I struggle to see on examples with so-say 100,000 on the clock. Fired up straight away after being sat a month unused as it's no longer taxed/insured. He's offered the car to me, and I'm quite tempted as it's had quite a bit of work done, but where would I keep the old girl :mhmm:

A car parked over the road from my house got broken in to two nights ago. Came home yesterday evening to find a note had been pushed through our door explaining when it happened and what was taken from the car. The time it happened didn't add up to me because they think the car was broken into at 9PM which is when I would've been at home and closing curtains/shutting doors for the night and I never saw or heard anything. Even so the owner of the car said that some of their important paperwork was found in our bins outside and around the rest of the street. Problem is now is that I feel completely unsafe and every tiny noise I hear makes me paranoid that someone is trying to get in or jump the fence to get around the back of the house. I was trying to sleep last night and every time I heard a noise outside I'd be wide awake again, so I really struggled to sleep last night and have been suffering because of it all day. Saying that the note did mention that the thief stole a laptop, two mobile phones and a couple of other things. The only way they could've known these things were in the car was if it was all on display, in which case they are probably chance-thieves rather than someone who steals for a living so to speak. So the message there is don't leave anything on display inside your car, unless you dislike your car and can't get a scrap-yard to take it. In which case you might as well just leave the door wide open with the keys in the ignition. I'm sure one outstanding member of society will oblige to take your car off your hands that way.

Sounds interesting. I might drop by if I remember :)

I spotted English Mb yesterday: http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x104/GTAMADDOG/IMG_1192_zps82f82378.jpg

*shameless promotion of own video* Some clips from yesterday, mostly recorded on the 500D besides a few in the middle which were recorded on the FZ38, hence dodgy zooming/shaking.

Well, I can't compete with that, but I'll just leave these here: IMG_1158 by GTAMADDOG, on Flickr IMG_1149 by GTAMADDOG, on Flickr IMG_1185 by GTAMADDOG, on Flickr IMG_1189 by GTAMADDOG, on Flickr IMG_1238 by GTAMADDOG, on Flickr Not much panning this year because I couldn't get into it for some reason. Most of the panning shots were throw-aways. Hopefully going to a couple of tarmac rallies later in the year so I hope to get some decent panning shots then.

Diesel fans unite. Petrol must bow to our wave of torque. Nah, to be honest if I didn't have to drive so many miles I'd probably have a petrol, but I honestly like the way diesels drive anyway as they suite my commute so much better.