Jaguar XK – The Seducer
Posted by Stuart Lynn in Cars, General, Technology, WEB on March 19, 2012
Finally got round to taking some pictures of the new pride and joy…
Also been playing around with iPhoto which is really cool…
My life with cars (Part 7) – Two Jags and the seductress
Posted by Stuart Lynn in Cars, General, Humour on March 11, 2012
I set out to write about the cars I’ve had over the past 35 years, but 4000 words later, I ended up writing about the many fond memories I’ve had around car ownership and life in general. This is part 7, the final part.
Jaguar XFS
My first ever Jaguar was the chosen replacement and a shiny new 3.0XFS in metallic black was duly purchased. This was an oil burner (diesel) buy boy could it shift and it returned 40+ MPG on a run. Not many stories to share about the Jag XFS really. It’s a stunning car and has been voted European car of the year for the past 3 or 4 years, knocking the Germans off the coveted title that they held for the previous decade. The only thing I didn’t like about it was the driver’s seat, i.e. it was a high-sided sports seat that I found uncomfortable on my right leg. I suppose it could have been something to do with the width of my backside, but that’s nit picking an otherwise excellent car.
Jaguar XK
However, after only 18 months into Jaguar ownership and all of the good things I’ve said about the XFS, I’ve just swapped it for a Jaguar XK in liquid silver. Since its launch I’ve admired the XK but I’ve talked myself out of owning one on the rational that packing a 5.0L engine and with only 2 very small back seats it might not be entirely practical.
I don’t know whether it was the fact that I’m having a longer mid life crisis than most or that I’m just a petrol head who will never change that allowed me to be seduced by the XK. I have to say that its one of the most stunning cars I’ve ever owned it’s absolutely beautiful and its mechanically excellent. I’ve only had it for a week, but it’s already rekindled the feelings I had when I owned the TVR only the driving experience is significantly better.
So there you have it 18 cars spanning 35 years and all with their own memories and story to tell. Some people have asked me if I had names for the cars. Whilst I called them a few names that can’t be repeated here on numerous occasions, I have to admit I wasn’t one for giving my cars names.
- Austin 1100
- Vauxhall Viva
- Ford Cortina (almost)
- Ford Consul
- Ford Capri
- Opel Ascona
- Vauxhall Astra
- Vauxhall Cavalier
- Ford Sierra
- Vauxhall Carlton
- Citroen ZX
- BMW 520
- Audi A4
- Audi A4 Avant
- VW Touareg
- TVR Chimaera
- Jaguar XFS
- Jaguar XK
In terms of takeaways, cars have certainly come a long way in 35 years, the rust worm is a pretty much a thing of the past, self servicing is a thing of the past due to complex electronics and thankfully it’s much more difficult to steal cars these days. In terms of cost my first car depreciated at £1 per month, whereas the last but one depreciated at £1000 per month, ouch!
I’m not sure if that’s progress or not!
Thanks for reading.
Footnote: these pictures are for illustration only they are not of my cars
My life with cars (Part 6) – A story of love at first sight
Posted by Stuart Lynn in Cars, General, Humour on March 11, 2012
I set out to write about the cars I’ve had over the past 35 years, but 4000 words later, I ended up writing about the many fond memories I’ve had around car ownership and life in general. This is part 6.
TVR Chimaera
One day I stumbled across a very nice TVR Chimaera. I’d heard of the TVR brand, more from a poor reliability perspective, but I’d never really seen one up close and I’d never driven one before. It was sitting in the sun when I arrived, it was deep metallic red with a camel leather interior and it looked fabulous. When the guy fired up the 4.0L Rover V8 engine it sounded even better than it looked and I knew there and then I had to have it.
It’s hard to describe the feeling of driving a TVR it’s like nothing else I’d driven before or since. So much power and torque and so little weight means that when you press the loud pedal it takes off like a rocket and you just hold on with a huge grin on your face. Yes it was a bit eccentric, but that just added to the appeal.
To this day, my TVR (Red V8) got more love and attention than any car I’ve ever owned. To say it was pampered would be an understatement. It was kept in a heated garage, it was washed and polished whether it was dirty or not, it only drank Shell Vpower, and it never went out in the rain or when there was salt on the road.
I joined the TVR car club and enjoyed some excellent Sunday outings with 30 or so other TVR owners in the country roads of Northumberland and Yorkshire. These were planned with military precision and the routes were a closely guarded secret, as it had been known for the boys in blue to have mobile speed traps out waiting for us. Not that we ever exceeded the speed limit I hasten to add (cough).
It didn’t live up to the billing of me getting the tools out again though. Yes I did some cosmetic jobs and I even reconditioned the chassis but I had the main dealer, before TVR went out of business, service it. My first service cost me something like £1200 and every year after that the annual service cost me the thick end of £1000, just as well I loved it then.
The Touareg was reaching its third birthday and the TVR was being polished more and more but being driven less and less so I decided to sell both of them and buy something which had great performance but was more practical than the TVR.
Thanks for reading, read part 7 here
Footnote: these pictures are for illustration only they are not of my cars
My life with cars (Part 5) – Snotty salesmen, regrets, and the monster
Posted by Stuart Lynn in Cars, General, Humour on March 11, 2012
I set out to write about the cars I’ve had over the past 35 years, but 4000 words later, I ended up writing about the many fond memories I’ve had around car ownership and life in general. This is part 5.
Audi A4
I’m 40 and as a treat to myself I decide to buy my first brand new car. I had been really happy with the beemer so I tootled along to my local BMW dealer intent on buying a new car there and then. What happened next put me off BMW and to this day I’ve never had another. Upon arriving at the dealership I was looking around the cars and found it difficult to attract the attention of a salesperson. When I finally found someone to talk to, I found the chap to be arrogant and snotty and disinterested. Yes I may have been wearing scruffy jeans and a T shirt and may not have looked like your stereotypical BMW owner but I didn’t expect to be dressed for a wedding to buy a car and I didn’t appreciate his arrogance. I don’t buy from people like that so I went to the dealer over the road and bought a brand new Audi A4 instead. Who knows how much this one person cost BMW as I may still be driving a BMW today if it had not been for him.
The Audi A4 was a 1.8 saloon in silver, and it was very smart. However, when I was buying it I really had a hankering for the estate, but I bottled it at the last minute on the reckoning that an estate was an old mans car. A few months later I was regretting not going for the estate following a conversation with some of my work colleagues from Germany who told me that estate cars are the first choice of the young in Germany as they are perfect for lugging around surf boards, sports gear, camping gear and what not.
Audi A4 Avant
I lived with this regret for 3 years until I finally replaced the A4 saloon with an A4 Avant (sounds much better than estate). It was a spanking new 2.4 V6 Sport Model in dolphin gray and it was absolutely fantastic. The only issue I had during 3 years of ownership was when I cracked the front windscreen carrying a piece of decking back from B&Q. It was just too long to fit into the car with one end against the front window and the other end against the back window, so I had to bow it slightly. This worked until I drove into our street and the first speed bump I went over sent a crack right across the windscreen. I phoned up my insurance and a chap came and put me in a new one. He had to complete the paperwork and ask me how it happened for insurance purposes and being an honest soul I felt obliged to tell him my embarrassing story. He replied with “the insurance won’t cover that so lets call it a stone chip shall we”… there are some nice people in the world after all.
Volkswagen Touareg
Mid life crisis is biting hard and I’m thinking what would I like to own that I’d not had before. I decided I needed a 4×4 and I started to look at what options were available. I’ll probably upset a few people by saying this but I really don’t like Range Rovers, too old fashioned and country gentleman for my tastes and I ruled them out early on. I ended up buying another German machine a VW Touareg 3.0 TDI SE in pearlescent black. I say German but I later found out that these are made in Bratislava at the Skoda factory.
That aside it was an excellent piece of machinery. I had the good fortune to go on an off road and racing circuit driving experience and the car was phenomenal. Being a speed junkie I was really looking forward to the track experience, but I came back having enjoyed the off road experience better. For such a big car it was fantastic on the track, which may be down to the fact it shared its heritage, technology and chassis design with the Porsche Cayenne, but off road it was unstoppable, the terrain we covered and the hills it got up and down were simply unbelievable. The car defied the laws of physics, and gravity in some cases, and to this day I still can’t believe how it did this. The Touareg would pull anything and I still think it holds the world record for the heaviest weight towed in the shape of a Jumbo Jet. I kept the Touareg for 3 years and despite being heavy on fuel at 24MPG, it never ever let me down.
I have to admit thought that it didn’t solve the mid life crisis and I decided I also needed and open top sports car. I used to live next to a guy who owned an MGB and another guy who owned and Triumph TR6. I’d always wanted one but could never rationalise owning one for the 4 sunny days we get each year up north. I started searching for something interesting with the idea that I’d get the tools out again, get my hands dirty and treat it as a hobby.
Thanks for reading, read part 6 here
Footnote: these pictures are for illustration only they are not of my cars
My life with cars (Part 4) – One of my best, one of my worst, and a poltergeist
Posted by Stuart Lynn in Cars, General, Humour on March 11, 2012
I set out to write about the cars I’ve had over the past 35 years, but 4000 words later, I ended up writing about the many fond memories I’ve had around car ownership and life in general. This is part 4.
Vauxhall Carlton
Next up is one of my most favorite cars a Vauxhall Carlton 2.0 in metallic brown. I bought it from the auction and took a risk on it as whilst it looked clean and the engine sounded good the front wheel bearing was seized solid so it couldn’t be driven. However, the risk paid off, as once I’d replaced the wheel bearings it was a wonderful car that was great to own and drive and fully loaded with gadgets. I ran it for a good few years until one night it exploded in a fireball right outside the Police station in Sunderland. Whilst I was driving along the road the engine cut out and so I pulled in. I turned the ignition key to try and restart. There was a loud bang and enormous flames shot out of the front wheel arches. As you would expect I made a swift exit from the car to see what was going on and the whole front of the car was ablaze. I went back opened the boot and saved my wedding photos that had only been delivered that day. I know this was stupid and I have no idea why I did it but it seemed like an important thing to do at the time. Anyway, by this time policemen were pouring out of the station only this time they weren’t asking “What’s a young lad like you doing in a big car like this and can you tell me the registration please?” they were closing off one of the major routes into the city. The fire station was just around the corner and the fire brigade arrived two minutes later, but it was two minutes too late as the car was a gonner. It turned out that the petrol pipe to the injectors was the wrong type and had perforated spraying a fine petrol mist onto the exhaust manifold that resulted in the explosion.
Citroen ZX
In need of another new car I went back to the car auction and I’m not really sure what possessed me to buy my first diesel car a Citroen ZX in black. Yes it was low mileage and I liked the colour, but a Citroen really??? Maybe I was still mourning the loss of my Carlton or maybe this was a period in my life where the car was a functional A to B thing and not an object of desire or pleasure, who knows?
By now I’m no longer servicing cars myself and on the first service the dealer tells me the cylinder head gasket need replacing (at considerable cost). I found this really odd, as I’d had cylinder head gaskets fail before and you get symptoms such as high temperature, coolant loss or sludge in the coolant. Anyway, being a cynic, I chose to ignore their advice and I was right to do so as the car was problem free and served me well until I sold it about two years later.
BMW 520
Next up was something with a bit more soul, one of Germanys finest, a BMW 520 in dark blue. Compared to the Citroen this was luxury (compared to the Citroen anything was luxury) and it may have been the car that rekindled my passion for cars. It was the first six-cylinder car that I’d owned and I remember how it always sounded like it was revving too high, when really it was just firing six times instead of four. The beemer lasted me for a few years until it was possessed by a poltergeist. It would strike at the most inopportune time and manifest itself in all of the instruments just going dead for a few minutes whilst the car kept going. Not ideal when you’re driving through a speed camera infested zone and you have absolutely no idea how fast you’re going. I did consider exorcism but decided to sell up instead.
Thanks for reading, read part 5 here
Footnote: these pictures are for illustration only they are not of my cars
My life with cars (Part 3) – You can steal one of those with a lollipop stick.
Posted by Stuart Lynn in Cars, General, Humour on March 11, 2012
I set out to write about the cars I’ve had over the past 35 years, but 4000 words later, I ended up writing about the many fond memories I’ve had around car ownership and life in general. This is part 3.
Opel Ascona
Exit the Capri and welcome the Opel Ascona 1.9 Berlinetta in metallic green (the German equivalent of the Vauxhall Cavalier). Apart from having a persistent problem with condensation forming on the inside of the windows this was a nice car and very quick too for its time. I don’t really have much to say about this car as for the first time I didn’t have to spend every other weekend lying underneath it or hunched over it. That said, it was plagued with a carburetor problem in that it would just stop after driving around 150 miles, give it 10 minutes and it would go another 150 miles and pack in again. I eventually traced the problem to a sliver of metal that had come off one of the bolts inside the carburetor and would occasionally find its way into the jet. I can’t remember how we went our separate ways, I must have sold it I guess and moved onto the next chapter.
Vauxhall Astra Mk2
Next up was a Vauxhall Astra Mk2 in red. A very clean and tidy car that had perfect bodywork and was mechanically solid. It must have been much younger than any of my previous cars as I don’t think I ever had to do anything to it mechanically. However, it wasn’t a good car because it wasn’t reliable, i.e. I couldn’t rely on it being where I left it the night before. For some reason it attracted thieves like nobody’s business and it must have been stolen about four times before I finally got rid of it. A policeman once told me that he could get into an Astra with a lollipop stick, very reassuring. Bizarrely though, other than the door lock being punched into the door, it never suffered any real damage, but I needed something more reliable and so it had to go.
Vauxhall Cavalier
I replaced the Astra with a Vauxhall Cavalier Mk2 in metallic blue. I think the Mk2 was voted car of the year when they were launched and rightly so in my opinion. A great car, stylish, good engine, good to drive and the hatchback meant you could lug all sorts around in the back. I have fond memories of this car and I enjoyed every minute of ownership. I sold it onto a good friend who kept it going for years afterwards.
Ford Sierra
I only parted company with the Cavalier because I changed jobs and got a company car as part of the new job. It was a Ford Sierra 1.8 in red and if I’m completely honest I found this a very bland and boring car after the Cavalier and as such I never really grew to like it. My displeasure with the Sierra didn’t last long though as after about a year I chose to leave the company and the car with it.
Thanks for reading, read part 4 here
Footnote: these pictures are for illustration only they are not of my cars
My life with cars (Part 2) – The Sweeny and every boys dream
Posted by Stuart Lynn in Cars, General, Humour on March 11, 2012
This is the second part of my life with cars. I set out to write about the cars I’ve had over the past 35 years, but 4000 words later, I ended up writing about the many fond memories I’ve had around car ownership and life in general. I’d love to think my kids read this story in 50 years time when all cars are made of plastic and powered by sherbet or some other wonder fuel.
Ford Consul
My next car was a Ford Consul (almost a Granada) in metallic brown NVK 375L. I’m not exactly sure why this is the only registration I can remember from my early cars but maybe it had something to do with the number of times I was stopped by the police that I remember it so well. “What’s a young lad like you doing in a big car like this and can you tell me the registration please?” was always their opening gambit. This car taught me my first big lesson… always clean your rear windscreen before reversing at speed on a cold and frosty night. If only I’d done that I wouldn’t have written off my mates Ford Capri that was parked 6 doors down the street, sorry Jim. Anyway, the Consul was repaired and served me well until the rust worm also took over. I replaced both front wings with fiberglass after market parts and I resprayed the whole car red, which turned out like Heinz Tomato Ketchup with one of those £20 electric spray guns from Halfords. To say it lost its shine after that would be an understatement, as the best finish I could achieve resembled a matt orange peel effect. The other lessons I learned during Consul ownership were how to take engines out, how to change cylinder head gaskets, how to change clutches, and most importantly how to weld which would serve me well over the following years.
My Consul also provided my first experience of having a car stolen. I remember vividly the night I took my mum and girlfriend to the supermarket about 10 miles away for our weekly shopping. We emerged from the shop with two huge trolley loads of food and couldn’t find the car. It’s amazing, the last thing you expect is for it not to be there and you convince yourself you’ve left it somewhere else. When I realised it had been nicked, I phoned the police and we set about lugging all this shopping home on the bus. By the time we got home there was a phone call from the police saying they had found the car and the thieves had left it about 800 yards from where we lived in the next street. How kind of them!!
It was stolen once more after that, from outside my front door and rolled down to the bottom of the street and the radio nicked, and I often wondered if it was the same villains on both occasions?
My relationship with the Consul was reaching its natural conclusion and I sold it to a chap looking for something to tow a caravan. However, I hoped it was a small caravan as I never did get round to fixing the big end bearings that were knocking like mad before we finally parted company.
Ford Capri
Every boys dream car, the Ford Capri was my next car. I bought a 1600 Mk2 in white and set about customising it (well sort of) with a black vinyl roof, louvers on the back window, jazzed up wheels with bright chrome rims and air horns. I loved this car and utilizing those earlier welding skills and about a ton of fiberglass and body filler, I kept it running for a good few years. Having spent so much time and money on spare parts, by now I was also best mates with Kevin Stewart, the chap who owned the local motor factors. Mechanically it only let me down once when the oil pump packed in when coming over the pennines at Alston. My brother came to the rescue and towed me home where I took out the engine, replaced the big end bearings which had melted themselves to the crankshaft and repaired the oil pump by cutting down a 6mm Allen key. Running old cars also taught me how to improvise. When it got the stage that I could no longer keep the rain out of the car I decided it was time to say goodbye.
Thanks for reading, read part 3 here
Footnote: these pictures are for illustration only they are not of my cars
My life with cars (Part 1) – Where it all began
Posted by Stuart Lynn in Cars, General, Humour on March 11, 2012
I’ve had a great time writing this story. I set out to write about the cars I’ve had over the past 35 years, but 4000 words later, I ended up writing about the many fond memories I’ve had around car ownership and life in general. I’d love to think my kids read this story in 50 years time when all cars are made of plastic and powered by sherbet or some other wonder fuel.
Austin 1100
Whilst still too young to legally drive, I bought my first car when I was just 16, an Austin 1100 in Dark Blue. It came with six months Tax and MOT and my brother, bidding on my behalf, paid the pricely sum of £26 for it at the local car auction. Think of it as the Renault Clio of the 70’s, made famous by Basil Fawlty when he thrashed his with a branch when it wouldn’t start.
Where I lived at the time we had a massive car park behind our house and I used to walk over to the local garage with my petrol can, come back with a gallon of petrol and spend a few hours driving round the car park. When the MOT ran out I tried to get it through another one but the rust worm had taken hold of the sub frames and it would have cost about four times what the car was worth to get it repaired. So it was game over and I sold it to the scrap yard for £20. Thirty-five years on £6 for six months of motoring is by far the best value I’ve had from any car.
Vauxhall Viva HB
I’m 17 and I’ve just passed my test and my new pride and joy is a Vauxhall Viva HB in sage green (maybe that was an early omen). I think I paid about £100 for it and it came with 12 months MOT and an 8 track. How many people remember 8 tracks? It was the iPod of the 1970s, yes I may only have had 5 or 6 tapes but it was high tech to have an 8 track in your car back then. However, on later inspection I discovered the Viva was infested with the rust worm and was held together by gaffer tape that was sprayed the same colour as the car. I can only assume the MOT was dodgy. Anyway, it lasted the year it got me from A to B and it got my mates and me to Scarborough a few times, high living indeed. I can’t remember how its life ended but I think it must have gone the same way as the Austin 1100.
Ford Cortina Mk3
After the Viva came my shortest length of car ownership. I was really after a Ford Granada (inspiration from watching the Sweeny maybe?) and one day I went to look at a Ford Cortina Mk3 in Daytona Yellow. Whilst I didn’t like the colour, I was desperate to buy a car so I bought it and left the seller a £50 deposit, I agreed to pay the balance and collect the car the next day. However, on my way home I couldn’t stop thinking about the colour, I hated it and therefore what a huge mistake I’d made. So, I turned around and went straight back to tell the guy I didn’t want to buy his car and ask for my deposit back. Whilst he wasn’t very pleased he was genuine enough to give this stupid 18 year old his £50 quid back and I’m grateful to him to this day.
Thanks for reading, read part 2 here
Footnote: these pictures are for illustration only they are not of my cars
Seduced by a thing of beauty…
Posted by Stuart Lynn in Cars, General on March 5, 2012
This is a sequel to my “Almost Seduced by a thing of beauty” post a couple of weeks back
As you’d expect from the title, the temptation was too much and I’ve finally been seduced by the thing of beauty.
Putting aside my own petrol head desire to own such a beast… this was only made possible because I found a dealer who actually wanted to cut a deal that was mutually beneficial as opposed to being heavily stacked in their favour.
So, a shout out goes to Stratstone Jaguar at a place called Yarm near Middlesbrough for their help and assistance.
She arrives tomorrow… 
The one question that every CIO should ask themselves… What are you going to do when (not if) your cloud systems fail?
Posted by Stuart Lynn in General, Process, Technology, WEB on March 1, 2012
I’ve deliberately used the word Cloud to grab your attention but the question is equally applicable if you use Cloud systems or in house systems.
This post was prompted following an interesting twitter conversation I had last night with Frank Scavo and Dennis Howlett around yesterday’s outage of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
Frank started the conversation with this response to my tweet about Azure:
Frank: “Exactly the type of thing that reinforces CIO fears about cloud…”
Stuart: “working on the assumption that cloud outages are inevitable… I feel it’s how vendors respond that will give CIO’s confidence”
Frank: “No, fewer outages will give confidence…”
Stuart: “I’ll meet you half way… Fewer outages and proper service management around problems when they do happen…”
Frank makes the point that some of his CIO contacts were livid following this outage. And this is where this post really starts, as I challenged Frank as to exactly who they were livid at on the basis that to overall accountability for a company’s IT systems, whether they be on premise or in the cloud lies with the CIO.
Stuart: “as CIO you’re accountable for everything as you choose to use cloud or not!”
Alongside the Azure thread there was a parallel thread running on cloud security that had been started by Dennis Howlett in his Accman blog.
“Anything that connects to a network is vulnerable. That includes EVERY cloud player, regardless of the service they offer. What matters is the extent to which vulnerabilities exist AND are capable of exploitation.”
Let me share my belief here, these two topics are intrinsically linked, i.e. when you’re appointed as a CIO you’re trusted to deliver competitive advantage for your company through IT. Now, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that if you can’t maintain availability and adequate security of your systems then you’ll only manage to deliver disadvantage, and you probably won’t be around very long.
So, let’s get back to the title of the post… what are you going to do when your systems fail (which is inevitable)?
If you’re running in house, the apps themselves (if they are decent apps) are least likely to fail, more likely failures are from switches, disks, networks, cables and other parts of infrastructure. You protect yourself against this by designing your datacentre(s) around redundancy with zero single points of failure.
If you’re running cloud services, you pick a reputable supplier who works with a reputable hosting partner right? Well, yes but as we saw with Azure yesterday (and previously with Amazon and Rackspace and most other reputable cloud vendors) the same hardware failure points exist in cloud provider datacentres as they do in your own. If you appreciate and accept this this then you’ll also be mindful that you could be introducing a single point of failure in your enterprise platform and that your service availability is now at the mercy of their service availability.
When you running outside of your own bricks and mortar you also need a high bandwidth and high availability WAN, Firewalls and Proxies, etc that all need to be fault tolerant and designed around redundancy to ensure adequate access and security at all times. Even then you can’t mitigate around someone digging up the cable which has happened to me twice this year and is more common than you might expect.
Is this a story of cloud bashing? No it isn’t, it’s a story of how the CIO needs to take full accountability for managing risk within their platform.
- If you’re running mission critical systems and your business can’t afford any outage then you simply can’t design a single point of failure into your enterprise platform.
- If you’re running non mission critical systems, then you may choose to take a little more risk around availability and accept a single point of failure and manage any disruptions that may arise.
What you deem to be mission critical or not is your own decision and it doesn’t have to be one or the other. For my part I run a hybrid platform where some parts are mission critical and some parts less so and the platform design and location of services (in house vs. cloud) reflects this.
Of course from a customer perspective people outside of IT expect things to work 100% of the time and if you’re running either of the above, or a combination, then any outage no matter what damages your credibility with users.
So as an effective CIO, you need to design an effective platform around what your business needs, you need to manage the risk, you need to pick the suppliers that you work with, and you need to take full accountability when things go wrong. Yes you can get livid with your suppliers, but just remember who picked them and remember who chose to introduce a single point of failure into your platform in the first place.
So, what are you going to do when (not if) your cloud systems fail? Make sure you know the answer today.
Footnote: This post relates to large enterprise businesses and the role of the CIO and the point I’m trying to make is you have to plan for failure to guarantee success.
Part of this cross posted here
Applications
