Downside of having friends in far away lands …

I noticed recently I have now covered around 40,000 miles in my car since I got in in August 2004. This is approximately 50 return journeys to London, or 400 to Edinburgh.

My average fuel consumption is rated around 28mpg (of course, your actual milage may vary… but this isn’t intended to be particularly scientific!) which is aporoximately 1,428 gallons of petrol.

1,428 gallons is (according to the wonderous Google!) 6,492 litres. In my area petrol ranges from 89.9 to 95.9 pence per litre. So with an average of around 93.6 pence per litre (today) in the UK that is an incredible
£6,076 of petrol in the last 20 months or so.

(this would be the minor problem with having friends in far away places!)
Worryingly, it’s still cheaper to drive to Edinburgh than take the train…

Car - 40 miles using approximately 7 litres of fuel - £6.55
Train - Scotrail Shuttle Service from Queen St - £8.20 (single)

As soon as there’s 2 people in the car, it’s down to £3.20 each! Public transport is all very well and I’d happily take the train to Edinburgh (makes parking a thing of the past at least!) however, not until it costs less than driving through!

Erm, Oops… a few of you may have noticed that iRoss.net has been missing with a message from QiQ saying the site was suspended… well QiQ are perfectly nice people and it was completely my fault… kinda forgot to pay an invoice (oops!)

Anyway, all is well again and there’s some new photos of Ana, Anton & Chris’ flatwarming which may slightly embarass Anton hehe

Everyone’s heard of the iTrip, wirelessly broadcasting music from your iPod to your car stereo. And that at the moment they are completely illegal in this country.

We decided to try a slightly different method of using music wirelessly on the road. Multiple cars, one soundtrack. The theory is simple, give each car a cassette adaptor and an Apple Airport Express, then in one car have someone sitting with an iBook playing music using iTunes to the Airport Express.

It’s also possible (and very easy) to share IM messages (using iChat) between the cars or even files messages, but I dont know why you’d want to. Actually, I can’t see any practical reason for having the same music playing in both cars at once either - but it seemed like a fun idea at the time. (Both cars also had a high-speed broadband internet connection - but the only person using it was Andrew - and anyone else that could log into our Open AP in the few seconds we passed within range of their house for)

Anyway, we managed the journey from Edinburgh - Glasgow without the signal between the two vehicles dropping out once, allowing Martin in his car to listen to the wonderful (?) playlist (and impromptu radio-style announcements) by the other car’s resident DJ, Andrew (It should be stressed at this point that he wasn’t driving)

One thing it does prove is that wireless networks are quite capable of working at speeds of 60-80mph.

On another note, I imagine anyone with wireless scanning software running at home at the time probably got slightly confused as to why car registration numbers were showing up in the scan