Feckoff.net

I’ve uploaded a new set of photos of lots of classic motors from today’s Durrow Vintage Rally to my flickr.

Here’s a couple of examples:

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As mentioned on twitter yesterday…

More of this kind of thing on flickr.

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Brian Lenihan just delivered his Budget 2009 speech. One again, Ireland’s motorists get screwed. He’s added 8 cents per litre on to petrol, and has increased the VAT rate by 0.5%, which brings our fuel prices roughly into parity with UK prices. He’s also hiking motor tax by 4% for all cars below 2.5 litres or in CO2 bands A-D, depending on which idiotic system your car falls into. Cars with bigger engines will be hit with an extra 5%, because as we all know, big engines are the work of the devil. Tax on diesel fuel has stayed where it is, most likely because they’re trying to shove everyone over to diesel just to try and minimise their already massive Kyoto CO2 bill. Since the other pollutants in diesel aren’t counted for that, they don’t care about them.

Oh, there’s also this: “Levy of €200 on employees for car parking in major urban areas” – because our public transport system is so fucking awesome.

Pretty much the only good thing about motoring in Ireland was our relatively cheap (by EU standards) fuel, and now they’ve crushed that. We’ve got awful roads and punitive taxes on everything to do with driving.

Here’s a quick run-down of what other changes they’re making.
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I had to transport some stuff to north Dublin today which meant I had to drive there. What a pain in the ass. It took an hour to get from Newlands Cross to the Red Cow roundabout, followed then by the usual M50 bullshit. I’m glad I wasn’t going southbound though – nothing was moving on that side of the M50. Apparently a pedestrian overpass collapsed further south and fucked the whole thing up.

Because of that, I went back home through the city centre, which was fine until I hit the Naas Road again. Further bumper to bumper bolloxology, all caused by two out of the three lanes being closed all of a sudden, and this being Ireland no bastard will let you merge.

:stress:

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I’ve been using a clunky Excel spreadsheet to track my fuel economy since I bought my current car just over a year ago. Now there’s a much simpler way to do this, via the web. Spritmonitor.de lets you plug in your mileage information after each time you fill up and automatically will calculate your average economy in L/100km, imperial MPG and US MPG.
It can generate fancy icons for use on blogs, forum signatures, etc as well. Like this:

You can click the icon for loads more information.

It can guesstimate your co2 emissions based on the car you drive and the economy you’re getting out of it too. This came up after I entered information after filling the car this evening:

Consumption: 7,15 l/100km 636 km and 46 l
CO2 emission: 167 g/km 636 km and 106 kg
Fuel costs: 9,45 EUR/100km 636 km and 60 EUR

I like it

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I went to the practice session for tomorrow’s Faugheen 50 road races this afternoon. They were very fortunate with the good weather – I got sunburned, which is quite rare in this part of the world! Last year it rained pretty much non-stop.
Anyways, I brought my camera with me and took several hundred photos. As usual, most of them were horrendous, out of focus messes. I picked 20 of the better ones and stuck them up on flickr.

Here’s a sample:

Click it for full size.

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Today I got my first ever puncture. It would be a bank holiday weekend that it happens on

My car (07 Honda Civic) doesn’t actually come with a spare wheel, but fortunately the space saver spare from my father’s Accord is a perfect match so I’ve got that fitted at the moment.

First thing I do after I get the tyre repaired is put an order in with my Honda dealer for the spare tyre kit. I can’t be arsed with their crappy can-of-gunk-and-compressor solution that will get you home and also make the tyre impossible to repair. This means I lose a convenient storage space in the boot but gain the ability to get the fuck home next time this happens.

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Extreme Pizza recently opened their first branch outside of the US here in Kilkenny. I’m just after having their “Ragin’ Rooster” pizza and it was absolutely bloody delicious! I’m not usually one for pimping businesses but credit where credit is due.
The ragin’ rooster consists of chicken marinated in barbecue sauce, red onions, coriander, cheddar and mozzarella and it rocks. Hopefully this chain expands across Ireland in the future.
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… Car insurance has finally started to become more affordable.

FBD and Allianz are now quoting me less than a grand to comprehensively cover my Civic 1.8! They wouldn’t quote me last year, nor would Hibernian. Hibernian are looking for a little more, but since their website wouldn’t let my specify that my car is an i-VTEC (just “Honda”, 1.8) they might tell me to fuck off. I don’t want to give that shower of wankers my money anyways. Axa also lack an online quote system, ergo they suck.

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With today’s news that the government are finally going to crack down on the 400,000 provisional driving licence holders in Ireland there has been some hilarious angry ranting from those who believe it is their right to drive on public roads without sitting any test. Apparently over 300,000 of our provisional licence holders have not applied for a test. Check it out:

• One of those utterly worthless online petitions (with some rather humorous comments left)
• A call-to-arms on boards.ie to get people to sign the aforementioned petition
• A lengthy thread about the situation on boards.ie (152 posts and counting)
• Another lengthy thread about it on politics.ie (149 posts and counting)

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