My wife and I have covered 12,800 miles in the Zed since it arrived in September 2006, with most of those being local journeys with my Wife going back and forth to work.  It’s a bit of a shame we never got around to taking it on a jaunt through France to my parents home, but with fuel economy in the low 20s and a Diesel Golf capable of doing the trip on half as much juice, it’s no surprise really.

Similarly, I never took it on a track day, which is a shame.

The Zed is a great sports car. It’s everything you’d want in such a vehicle; it’s fast (300 bhp, with 160 mph easily reached and low 5s to 60 mph); it makes a fantastic sound from its 3.5 litre V6 engine and it has brakes and handling in epic proportions.  It also has a limited slip diff and with the ESP switched off will happily indulge you in all sorts of over-steer antics – great fun in the right place.

Despite this though, it’s only really happy being driven in one way; as hard as possible!  Sounds great, you say, but in reality it’s not really. That razor sharp throttle response and firm suspension are truly fantastic when you’re on it, but when you’re just cruising around, in town or in heavy traffic; it’s a pain in the backside.

The fuelling at low revs is terrible – I guess this is emissions related – but if you let the revs drop to fewer than 2,000 rpm you get a sudden jolt as it can’t decide how much fuel/ignition it needs.  It makes smooth low-speed progress very difficult, and this is the single most annoying thing about the car.  You forgive it of course, when you open up the taps and let rip through the gears, but nobody (despite what they might tell you on the Internet) really drives like that all the time.

The brakes are some of the best I’ve encountered this side of Porsche, and the gearbox has a short positive throw (although it was never happy moving between 1^st and 2^nd).

I appreciate that buying a sports car with a 300 bhp 3.5 litre V6 engine and concerning yourself with fuel economy is a bit retarded, but it has to be said, the Zed likes a drink!  On a long journey with the cruise on at the speed limits, and being afraid to touching the throttle, you can just break into the 30s to the gallon.  But normally very low 20s or high teens are really what you can expect.  I’ve even seen it fewer than 15 on a very spirited cross-country drive!

So, the Zed is going in favour of a bigger more family oriented car. Are we sad? Well yes, the Zed has been great fun to own and drive and we love how it looks (metallic blue was definitely the right colour). But we’re ready for a different kind of driving experience now, so on it must go. We’ll enjoy the memories enormously.

I found that if I switched WiFi off I could load these stubborn pages no problem over GPRS/EDGE. I thought I had found the iPhone Achilles Heel; WiFi browsing was just not all that it was cracked up to be. I could browse these web sites just fine using Firefox or IE on my Sony Vaio Laptop over the same WiFi connection. It had to be the iPhone that was at fault.

Resetting the Safari cache, cookies and history made no difference. I tried turning off Javascript too, to no avail.

Now my WiFi network router is an old Buffalo unit I’ve had years. I wondered if it was somehow not compatible with the iPhone, but it supports 802.11g so why should that be the case? Most odd.

I started going through the configuration for the WiFi router one setting at a time and considering how it might affect the iPhone differently to my Laptop. Nothing jumped out at me, until I got to the network settings.

No DNS information!

My network looks like this: Broadband Router –> CISCO Firewall –> WiFi Router –> PCs/Laptops/Consoles etc (either using WiFi or hard wired into the WiFi router).

Once I had filled in the IP address of the Broadband Router into the WiFi Router’s configuration, it resolved my problem. Safari on the iPhone was browsing any web site I liked at full speed.

I’m curious to know why none of our WiFi laptops or Nitendo Wii etc have had a problem with this, but I guess the iPhone is just very sensitive to DNS information.

So If you are experiencing slow page load times in Safari over WiFi on your iPhone, double-check ALL the DNS settings throughout your network.

Until I played with it for a while.

Now I have one too!

I didn’t mind ditching Vodafone for O2 as there’s better O2 reception in rural Norfolk/Suffolk than with Vodafone (although Orange is better still), so the single provider wasn’t really an issue.

The touch interface is amazing. My previous experience with a touch-sensitive phone was the truly awful LG Chocolate my wife had, but this is a vastly different proposition. Even fine control of cursors is easy and accurate, and the pinch-zoom feature works incredibly well.

Web browsing is not a problem, in fact I’m posting this from my iPhone right now. As we have come to expect from Apple, everything just works in an intuitive and natural way. I am impressed.

So, what don’t I like about it? There’s a few things:

Bluetooth. Although it syncs seamlessly with my Parrot CK3100 car kit, and my TomTom 710, it will only interact with headsets and hands-free devices. So I can’t sync it to another phone (even another iPhone) or my laptop, or more disappointingly the TomTom Traffic feature. The O2 contract for iPhones has an unlimited data use, which would make TomTom Traffic a very attractive feature as it’s more accurate and reliable than the RDS based signal. I hope Apple upgrade Bluetooth to allow data transfer with future software releases.

SMS. With a new phone number, the first thing I wanted to do was send everyone in my contacts list an SMS with my new number. Unfortunately you cannot send SMS messages to multiple recipients, so I had to do it one at a time. As a result, I only told the most important people in my list rather than everyone. It is also not possible to forward SMS messages, but this isn’t something I’ve ever used before or likely to need.

Safari Web Browser. Why no home page? It just shows you whatever page you previously browsed, but I would really like a Home setting, or at least a button. The ability to remember logins & passwords would also be really useful.

In the big scheme of things these are small gripes, and things which I hope will come into play with later updates. Overall, the iPhone is a big winner in our household.

I run Google Adsense on all of my non-eCommerce web sites. It’s been a nice little earner with fairly consistent monthly results over the past couple of years.

Last month, Google changed Adsense so that the clickable area was restricted to just the ad title and url lines, instead of the whole ad block.

It’s devastated my earnings, which for November were down by a factor of 10 over September & October, despite increased impressions. Has anyone else seen this since the change? It won’t be long I’m sure before people start to abandon Adsense because of it. What knock-on effect will this have on Adwords prices I wonder?

Some say; he’s been driving too many Ferraris, and that his web site is rubbish. All I know is, the E30 M3 is every bit as good as it’s reputation suggests.

I think David just drove a dud. Mine certainly never understeered - not a bit, and whilst it’s not the most powerful of cars (especially if you knock about in two Ferraris and a Corvette for fun), but the S14 engine in the E30 M3 is a peach. I loved mine.

You can read all about my BMW E30 M3 throughout this blog. Check out Auto-Journals too, it’s a good read, despite what some people think.

Also why not spend a few minutes admiring David’s skill as a driver (hehe, sorry David).

I was reminded of this, because Microsoft was doing a very poor job of it. I wanted to know what the current MSDN Subscription packages are and a comparison table of what they contain. It must have taken me 15 minutes of clicking before I eventually found the page I was looking for. That’s insane!

Microsoft can get away with this poor customer experience because of their sheer size and industry position. But for the rest of us with commercial web sites who do not enjoy being a household name, the clarity of key product information is an important aspect which should not be overlooked.

If you’ve not captured visitors’ attention within 30 seconds, you’re done for. So make sure the key selling points of your product or service are not hidden 15 layers deep off of some obscure page.

Clarity = conversions!

Private Parking Companies - A Guide To An Effective Defence

Pepipoo is a great resource for the victim du jour - uk motorists.

The resource monitor tool was showing me that Vista was hammering away at a file named C:\System Volume Information\{<guid style value>}

A bit of Googleing later revealed this to be the Volume Shadow Service (VSS). Basically it creates System Restore points at critical times (such as when installing programs or Windows Updates), but also runs on a scheduled basis.

If you’re good at keeping backups, then you can safely disable this feature and stop all the thrashing. Go to Computers -> Properties -> System Protection and un-check your drive(s).

It seems to have done the trick nicely.

Today coming home from Norwich I came upon a typical scenario on the A140. It’s a pain of a road at the best of times, but today I was stuck behind three cars doing 35 mph for almost 10 miles. The reason; the lead car was following a Moped and was afraid to pass it. Not an HGV, or a coach, a bloody moped!

Now I know you should give mopeds and cyclists room (well maybe not cyclists, they mostly deserve to be run over), but come on… at 35 mph any modern car has enough power to pass a moped with a brief gap in oncoming traffic.

But no, speed kills; overtaking is dangerous so we’ll all just plod along. Not me. Eventually I spotted a gap and took the whole lot out in one go. It goes without saying the lead car then starting flashing and hooting at me. A typical response from that other oh-so-British species; The Overtaker-Hater.

Please support the Safe Speed Road Safety Campaign.

Google has apparently taken a dislike to my IP address. I suspect this is because earlier this evening I installed SEO for Firefox, one of the tools on Aaron Wall’s SEOBook site. Whilst it’s a useful tool for retrieving PageRank and Cache data for any results returned from a Google search, I suspect Google doesn’t like the bandwidth it consumes.

I’ve uninstalled it now.