Don’t need to say much but, well well deserved, overdue and

COME ON THE ROYALS!!!!

Just you wait, the next Wigan in the making.

Took out a couple of new cars this weekend for test drives, firstly the new Mk5 VW Golf GTI and next the Ford Focus ST.

Didn’t know what to expect from the ST, but, I can say I was very impressed. The 2.5lt Volvo lump certainly has a whole load of grunt. It pootles along nice and quietly but as soon as you push the pedal you know what’s under the hood and under full throttle the power and turbo hiss is very nice. Before I’d driven the ST is was set on the GTI but having driven it the choice if I had to make it becomes harder.

The GTI was a great car though, just getting in it and closing the door you notice the build quality, something the German’s definatly get right. The Focus wasn’t built badly, but being part of the PAG group you notice the Volvo influence and it’s just not quite as nice, no digital climate control which the in the GTI just looks so much cooler, the raised whole lexus style knobs are great. The Golf was remarkably quiet, slightly more so than the ST and yet does make a satisifing rumble under acceleration albeit not as noticable as in the ST.

Handling in both was fine, no complaints at all, acceleration also very good in both. The ST pulled a bit more but then it should as it’s half a litre bigger. I think if I had to I’d probably take the GTI, but, it’s not as clear cut as I’d expected it to be. If you’re looking at the that class of car I’d definatly recommend driving the ST, I think you’ll be pleasently surprised.

Interesting twist. Dell have been pushing their XPS systems, both desktop and laptop recently. I’m guessing now they’ve got Alienware, even though they’re going to maintain the brand the XPS could well disappear.

Certainly will enhance Dell’s probably already great buying power posistion

BBC NEWS | Business | Dell launches Alienware invasion

Saw the Mighty Boosh at the Hexagon in Reading last month and I have to say it was very very amusing live. I wasn’t sure at first as have only watched a few on TV, but, since seeing them on DVD and now live I would recommend you take a look if you’ve never seen it.

Really simple comment for phpMyAdmin. Trying to install it on XP with MySQL 4.1 & Apache2. Setup the php.ini & httpd.conf file OK, php files rendered correctly all was going well. Set the path to my c:phpext dir and tried restarting but, kept getting errors:

Turns out that unless you copy libmysql.dll from the php root dir into c:windowssystem32 it won’t work.