I finally got round to reading the last book in Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. If you haven't heard of these before then I do thoroughly recommend them. I don't have the time to summarise in a paragraph what the story is about, suffice to say we've got parallel universes, armoured bears, witches, zeppelins, quantum physics, daemons, angels, hair bombs and an good old fashioned battle between good and evil. 9/10. This site does a way better job than I can do of summarising the books.

The other book I finished this week is Paranoia by Joseph Finder which I picked up on recommendation by my mate Spence. This is a really good page turner about Adam Cassidy, a hi-tech product marketing bod and professional corporate waster who is blackmailed into stealing corporate secrets from his company's competitor. I read it in a day it was so good. 8/10.

A year ago I picked up Six Days by journalist Jeremy Bowen which is an account of the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and Syria, Egypt and Jordan. I'd been dipping in and out of it for the last three months and stone me this week Israel is at it again! Anyway, it's highly topical and explains, amongst other things, the background and reasons for territorial anomalies such as the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and other Israeli landgrabs over the past 60 years.

The Legacy has been treated to a shiney new set of Oz Super Leggera 17" Alloys wrapped in Toyo Proxes T1S 215/40ZR17 rubber. The car sticks to the road in high speed corners now and there's not even a hint of understeer like my old Mondeo. The Mondeo had the worst understeer of any modern car I've ever driven, even with decent tyres...trully appauling and trouser soiling.

I also fitted four new high performance vented, grooved and drilled brake discs and carbon fibre pads which makes the car stop on a sixpence.

Any go here http://blog.zygonia.net/content/binary/DSCF0249-s.jpg and ogle at my shineys.

The penny has finally dropped in the Enterprise Library team that the library is being used in non-corporate data centre environments, in particular, Medium Trust ASP.NET 2.0 hosting platforms like our own. Here's the article on Tom Hollander's (Product Manager) blog -

http://blogs.msdn.com/tomholl/archive/2006/06/30/652955.aspx

The patch is here -

http://www.gotdotnet.com/codegallery/releases/checkfordownload.aspx?id=295a464a-6072-4e25-94e2-91be63527327&ReleaseId=79deb790-2442-420f-80d5-7adc3827c867

Weird, dasBlog has stopped syndicating entries with images, here's the last entry for the RSS/Atom readers -

http://blog.zygonia.net/PermaLink,guid,1d932c45-acd9-430f-b72c-38d252c00b9b.aspx

Last week my trusty old Mondeo Diesel stripped it's timing belt and then went on to commit engine hari-kari. Valve heads were lopped off and given a sound thrashing in the piston pots and gawd knows whatever else got mangled, dented and fractured. The cost of an engine rebuild, 600-800 quid, was too much to swallow and there was no guarantee that it would've run properly again. It was a 98 model and I paid £1200 for it two years ago and racked up 35000 miles (it failed with 153000 miles on the clock) so I guess I got value for money. I was sad and disappointed to see it go because I'd kinda hoped for another year of motoring out of it before looking for something else and it was a really comfy car to get around in.

Anyway I needed a car and so it was time to go shopping and I ended up with a 1992 Subaru Legacy 4WD 2.0 GT Turbo. That model era is my favourite shape of Legacy and really looks the business compared to the later euro-curvy-bulgy designs that sadly polluted the minds of Japanese car body designers from the mid 90's onwards.

My bro in NZ has one which I got to use loads when I was over there last year and I absolutely fell in love with it. These are no ordinary estate cars, the standard power plant puts out 236 BHP and the 0-60 time is 6-7 seconds (at a guess). It's the first car I've owned that plants you firmly back in the drivers seat when red-lining all the way through the gears from standstill, through 9 speeding points and all the way to loss of license and a year in jail.  It's awesome!

My car at the moment is pretty much in stock condition but the previous owner added a new stainless steel sporty exhaust system which coupled with the boxer flat four engine makes it the most interesting and loudest sounding car I've owned. This is it here -

It doesn't look terribly flash at the moment, but for the first time in my life I've had the urge to do boy racer stuff to a motor and pimp my ride. I'm fancying new 17" alloys, low profile rubber, dropping the suspension, debadging and new paint job and of course the obligitory turbo waste gate dump valve :-) Must be a late 30's crisis thing or something. This is my brother's pimped up Legacy but I reckon I'll be getting wheels with a bit less bling -