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Today was a new skill, parking in a shopping center car park. Or at least an adaption of existing skills. Get yourself parallel to the line kerb equivalent, roughly a doors width from the bounding line of the parking space. Reverse until the near side bounding line of the parking space is about half way through rear window. Once at this position steer full lock to the left. Keep reversing, making corrections by straightening up then moving back to full lock. As you finally come round to parallel to the left and right bounding lines straighten up. Reverse until the front bounding line is level with the mirrors. That’s roughly it, I think. Hopefuly I will get to practice it again next week and draw you all a diagram. This week I was less hesitant than I had been in the past, I still made mistakes and got confused by the trafic but I was more decicivie. Felt conftable and confident in the car, if a little weary of being asked to do emergency stops again.

Today was a day for gear changes and roundabouts, some dual carriageways and national speed limit single carriageways in the pitch black freezing cold. Kev was trying to get me more confident and less slightly dangerous on roundabouts which is good as I find them shockingly confusing, particularly if I need to do a gear change coming up to them. Lifehack has an article on making decisions under preasure, which I think probably covers the broad techniques I should be using to make sure I am better at roundabouts than I am at the moment. ...

This is just a quick post to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I have been wanting to post some statistics gathered through Google Analytics for some time now so here we go. The following data covers 1st January 2008 until the post time 31st December 2008, all data excludes administrator visits and search engine crawlers. Visit Statistics Visits: 3,066 Visitors: 2,708 Page Views: 4,935 Bounce Rate: 74.72% Top Visit Origins ...

It’s that Christmas time of year again, I am fortunate to be able to spend time with friends and family this Christmas. I hope my readers get to spend Christmas with those that you love too. Merry Christmas!

First lesson in two weeks, for that matter I don’t get another lesson for two weeks either. I feel a little stuck with the driving to be honest, each lesson seems similar to the previous lesson, it is possibly a mix of the law of diminishing returns and fustration at doing the same thing over and over again. Took a look at the Burgess Hill Test Center the website still says no information available, and I can’t seem to select any times or dates on the “book a test” page on direct.gov. Never mind, hopefuly will be able to book a test at some point in 2009! ...

Graeme Arthur tagged me, normally I hate these things but this is kind of a reverse chain letter… sort of… maybe if i re-write the rules slightly. Rules Link to the original tagger(s), and list these rules on my blog. Share 7 facts about myself in the post - some random, some weird. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter. 7 Facts About Me At the time of writing I have been alive for approximately 871 million seconds. I first started programming (in Spectrum BASIC) at about the age of 8 since then I have coded projects in Visual Basic, Pascal, C, C++, Java, Ada, PHP and C#. I have played EVE Online for almost five years now, have been playing less often of late however I still get to enjoy the time I do spend in EVE, although it is getting increasingly more and more lonely in space. I have been learning about Sharepoint over the past few weeks, I have already completed most of the Microsoft e-Learning on the topic and read several blogs, I recently signed up to the Sharepoint User Group UK. I wrote my dissertation on the future of MMOGs, I disagree with a good proportion of what I wrote, however it was one of the most enjoyable parts of my Degree. I type at between 40 and 60 words per minute, it has taken me 5 minutes to get to 300 words in this blog post, some of them however were copied and pasted from Graeme’s post. Like Graeme I also play bass (albeit I play badly) and dabble in live PA, although I don’t really enjoy the later any more. 7 people to tag: ...

So today was the 48th hour of driving a car, we didn’t do anything new one emergency stop at the end after being chased round by a 4x4 for a bit, should have guessed that was going to happen after Kev had said he wanted me to do an emergency stop. Trying to perfect manoeuvres on difficult roads (read steep), was quite interesting trying to do a three point turn on a large hill. One thing that is slightly concerning me is reversing into parking spaces in supermarkets and the such. I am not sure why I would want to reverse into a parking space when I could just go in forwards and then put the shopping in the boot, it just seems like something that might be useful at some point. ...

I know I have only just blogged, but this wouldn’t fit in Twitter. Ordered a Pizza tonight from Famous Moe’s Pizza, we ordered a large deep pan pizza with pineapple, sweetcorn & mushrooms; on the side we were going to have coleslaw, two sprites, garlic bread and Häagen Dazs. Just had a phone call from said Pizza company who said they have no sweetcorn, coleslaw, sprites or Häagen Dazs. Leaving us with a pineapple and mushroom pizza with garlic bread… strangely enough I asked them to cancel the order and refund the money to me. In times when people are less likely to spend money on take-away it doesn’t bode well for your business model to not have 70% of products in stock.

Emergency Stops… …DON’T LIKE My head is buzzing after doing my first four emergency stops, it isn’t the emergency stops that I don’t like it is being in charge of a car after doing one, also having your mate shout “STOP” in your left ear, has a somewhat negative Pavlovian conditioning effect on the enjoyment of driving. So as with my earlier posts I am going to try and write down the procedure for doing an emergency stop, as with previous posts this is my memory of what to do, not official. Please take advise of a qualified driving instructor (like Kev) before trying this. ...

Today was another chance to go through my driver record, Kev got to tick off a few more of the boxes which is always a nice feeling. I am definitely suffering from a case of diminishing returns when it comes to driving, Kev and I had a discussion at the end of the lesson about trying to get more polish on my driving rather than learning any new skills. My driver record now looks like this: ...