en
news & updates 2002
les nouvelles du site 2002
This page contains news of notable updates and changes to the site as they occurred in
2002.
Cette page contient les nouvelles et les changements majeurs sur ce site comme ils se
produisaient pendant 2002.
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2002-12-28 As you may have noticed, the latest new thing going on here at Renault 4-Play is an arduous effort to create some French translations for pages on this site. I promised this would happen sometime during 2002, but due to the enormous amount of other more pressing duties, it has been neglected until now. It is a very slow process, as my French ability isn't anything to shout about, but should be worthwhile in the end. The R4 of course is a French vehicle, and is still well used and has a large following not just in France, but many other French-speaking nations, so it seems fitting to make at least some attempt to provide this site in a more user-friendly format to such visitors. This will hopefully increase the contributions worldwide and make the site better. It will, however, be only the main pages of the site that have translations available, since with well over 1,000 pages of text sitting around, I can never expect to rewrite them all. In part due to this work and other things taking up my time, other additions are subject to delays. There is an unspeakably large mountain of things waiting to be added, some dating back a couple of months or more, and including many fantastic contributions from visitors, but these will have to wait their turn. Stay tuned over coming weeks as there's plenty to see, and have a happy New Year! |
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2002-11-22 The long awaited second instalment in the tales of my own Renault 4s can now be found on the My Cars page in the Articles section. It is an equally silly account of Nicolexia, my blue and yellow supercar. |
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2002-11-17 New poll in Vote 4 It! Which is the best R4 body style? In the previous poll, you decided your favourite special R4 model was the Parisienne, which I guess is a fair result. This poll recorded a record 109 votes, though I suspect many were repeat votes once more, from persons determined to prove a point. After all, twelve people apparently voted for the R3, which is somewhat absurd as the Renault 3 was just a stripped down, value model of the R4, was only on sale for a brief period in 1961-62, and only about 2,000 were produced. What's more, only four are still known to exist, so I find the views of this supposed dozen people a little peculiar to say the least, unless it's just 'vote for the first thing on the list' syndrome. In addition, four people voted for 'other', but none could be bothered to email me saying precisely what, as requested. Ah well, at least this poll seemed to inspire people to cast their vote. New features around the site of late include a third Famous Driver (of sorts) in the Playroom, and a new Star Car in the Gallery, which has some other recent additions in a few sections. Some sections have also had a colour makeover. |
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2002-10-09 Huge new article about Renault 4 meetings in Portugal and Spain during 2002 has been posted to the Star Story page in the Articles section. It contains over 150 photos and videos from three meetings held this year, including some stunning models seen at the second meeting in Lousal. Also, new autumn star signs in the Playroom. |
2002-09-25
This picture is from BBC News, and shows a poor Renault 4 caught semi-submerged in a flood, in Sommieres,
southern France, 10th September 2002. Knowing the R4, however, it'll probably start and carry on as normal
when the water's gone. New poll in Vote 4 It! What is your favourite special R4 model? Choose from a selection
of rare editions. In the last poll, you decided that if the R4 didn't exist, you'd drive some other modern
vehicle instead, you bunch of bores! Interestingly though, nobody would drive a Renault Kangoo, which is the
car more than any other that Renault have cited as a new R4. More pictures of my car have been added to the My
Pics page in the Gallery. They show the fully completed car for the first time, along with photos of the
interior. After two years of redundancy, the Famous Drivers page now has its second guest in as many months.
Can you guess who it might be? You can ask the audience or take a 50/50....
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2002-09-08 Emergency notice: My email address has changed. If you have sent anything at all to me between 23rd August and 9th September, it will not have reached me. I have only just discovered this address has been withdrawn without notice and I have lost messages. Please send all emails again. Note that adverts, guestbook entries and submissions using forms on this site are unaffected. The new address to use is: 4play@renault4.plus.com |
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2002-09-07 40th anniversary Arnhem video finally available to download! Precisely (and coincidentally) one year on from the event, this 10½-minute film is at last edited and ready for viewing. Go to the Articles section, click the 40 Years link and then the Arnhem Video link. Download options as small as 2.7MB and in all major formats, with the possibility of a high quality broadband version in the future. Update 2011-10-21: The video can now be found in the Four on Film section of the Gallery (#FF1). It is also viewable on my YouTube or DailyMotion sites. |
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2002-08-17 Pictures from the 50th anniversary Renault Owners Club event at Beaulieu can now be found in the special GB 50 years section, which if you're reading this in 2049 from a moon-ferry, will have since been moved to the Your Articles page in the brown section (number YA9). Another milestone has been reached in my drive towards finally getting this blasted video from Arnhem 2001 online. In fact, I've gone on about it for so long you'll probably hate it when you eventually see it and think it's rubbish. Basically, I've got a new DV capture card and have the original camcorder tape here awaiting editing. However, learning to use video editing software is proving a complete pain, especially all the lousy, lower end freebie programs I've got, which can do nothing useful. I've now got to spend time studying the Adobe Premiere manual and figuring out a way of making it look and sound nice. |
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2002-08-03 Happy Birthday to the R4. 41 today! Yes, it's the 3rd of August again, the date you must never forget. You will note a couple of changes to the site. The 40th anniversary pages have now been moved into the Articles (brown) section. For a short while, I have added a new link to the home page, publicising the 50th anniversary of the Renault Owners Club of Great Britain, whose main celebration is on the 10th/11th August. Please have a quick read if you're going or thinking of attending. I am gradually getting my PC sorted out following the recent problems, so updates should continue normally again, and I managed to completely clear all the backlog of waiting photos, which you can find scattered around the site. |
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2002-07-27 Due to unforeseen circumstances, updates could be a little more patchy than normal for a short while. This is due to a major problem with my computer and a hard drive failure, meaning a fresh install of Windows on a new drive and some time spent reinstalling hundreds of programs and copying important files over. However, I have completed a number of updates around the site, including additions to the My Pics page, the pets@play and Rants pages amongst others, so as to clear some of the backlog of queueing items should any further corruptions develop on my computer. And you will even find the first Famous Driver in the Playroom at long last, with another possibly set to follow soon! Both are cheating a bit, but at least that page now has something to boast about. |
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2002-07-16 New poll in Vote 4 It! If the R4 didn't exist, which car would you drive instead? Hmm, tricky one that, think hard. In the previous poll regarding what you disliked most about the R4, I am pleased to say the most popular answer was that you dislike nothing about it. The long-awaited second part of the body preparation and spraying tutorial is now posted in the Technique section, and there's a new Star Car plus other recent additions to the Gallery. |
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2002-07-04 Update on yesterday: The star signs are now done. I cheated. |
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2002-07-03 First, the normal news: New pictures in the Peoples Pics and Mystery Cars sections, a new Star Car to follow shortly, many new adverts, etc., and the slightly abnormal news: I was overwhelmed this morning to receive a CD-ROM in the post, from some of the main contributors to this site over the past couple of years, João Seabra and Fernando Palma in Portugal. It contains over 150 photos taken during three different meetings they attended this year, including two with R4 fans Luis and Asier from the Basque Country, and another dazzling R4 gathering in Portugal attended by some spectacular looking cars (see news, 14 April - below). There's even a few short videos thrown in too, and the whole lot will appear on this site at a later date after they have been sorted. One other update that is due but currently missing is the summer star signs, which I have not written yet because it's such a tedious, laborious task, and I usually have to get considerably drunk before I can muster up the mental energy to do it every three months. Hopefully, they'll appear soon. I must also just give you some advance notice of an event planned for this August. It is the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Renault Owners Club of Great Britain, and they are holding their main celebration at the National Motor Museum, at Beaulieu in the New Forest, Hampshire. For further details visit their website, the address of which you can find in my Links section. As I am unlikely to be able to attend myself, I would be grateful to anybody who can supply photos or other information from the event. |
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2002-06-06 A few updates and additions of late. Firstly, have a look at the Gift Shop to see my fantastic new Renault 4 wall clock and frisbee! They're both limited editions so get yours now before it's too late. Also, there's a new baby on the babies@play page in the Playroom. This one's been blessed with their first R4 at a very early age. If you have photos of any Renault 4s, I am always glad to receive them and publish them on this site, however, I realise some people may not be adept at using scanners or knowing how to send them to me, so I have prepared a special advice page offering tips on all manner of things related to getting your pictures emailed to me, even if you don't own your own PC or scanner. See the Contact Me page for more. Finally, what I believe to be the very last photos that exist of my original R4, Angelica, have at last been added to this site, on the My Pics page of the Gallery. They were withheld for some time, but now the sequence of pictures of the old red devil is complete. Update October 2009: The advice page for image preparation was removed as it was no longer really relevant in the digital camera age. |
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2002-05-02 New poll in Vote 4 It! Following on from the last vote in which I asked what your favourite thing was about the R4, I now want to know what you dislike most about it. I can't honestly believe the result of the last poll, however, which appears to have been rigged again. It seems unlikely that thirty-four people thought the sliding windows were absolutely the best thing about the car, over and above such things as the design and appearance. At least it attracted a larger number of votes than previous polls. There's a beautiful new May calendar image to be found on the Four Files page in the Gallery. If you haven't checked the calendar out before, and particularly if you use Internet Explorer, then it's worth having a look as it only requires a mouse click to setup on your computer, and is not only nice to look at but a handy reminder too. There's other new images recently added around the Gallery, with plenty more still being sent, which will appear in due course. Finally, the old pages of the site that resided on the Angelfire webspace have now been taken down, as the maximum file space limit was reduced massively at the end of April and I had to remove them. So, there's nothing to see there now and you should only bother checking this new version of the site from now on. |
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2002-04-24 Well, another year passes in the history of this website. In fact, the 23rd April is the anniversary, but it's just gone midnight and I've only just got around to unpacking my computer and updating things. I've spent the last few days moving back to the south of England, having spent over ten years living in the north, so it's been a big upheaval and this site's been a bit unattended to in the meantime. So, here's my summary of the previous year in the life of Renault 4-Play: 
Good points: - The site has grown and grown beyond all expected proportions, with plenty of new
features and additions. Visitor numbers are double what they were a year ago and are increasing week by week,
exceeding the figure of 5,000 per annum that I'd initially set as my necessary target to make the whole thing
worthwhile. Even the Gift Shop just honoured me yesterday with my first cheque, albeit worthless after
conversion from dollars. There are still many other things I want to add to the site when I have the time, and
many items still queueing in my inbox from the last couple of months. The site has been vastly improved after
the recent transition to a new webspace provider, and the quality of photos and other things sent in has been
tremendous. Of course, the best thing of all in 2001 was the 40th anniversary event in Arnhem, which was far
bigger than anybody first expected it would be. It was great to see such enthusiasm and support for this car
from people around the world. I only wish there were such well organised and well attended events like that
every year. The previous twelve months also saw my car resprayed at last, and the acquisition of my sister's
second R4 courtesy of the Classifieds on this site. I was also delighted to get a listing in the May 2002
edition of Classic & Sports Car magazine, which was unexpected, and the first publicity I'm aware of for
this site outside of the Internet. If you haven't seen the mag, it contains a four-page article about the
Renault 4 and is worth a look.Bad points: - I'm not going to linger on these too much, and thankfully there aren't too many bad things, the last year has been an overall success. The upheavals at Angelfire were a great pain, though not a complete surprise, leaving me forced to move this site elsewhere, which actually proved a useful exercise anyway. Technical difficulties have left me unable to sort out the video from Holland, but I'm still hoping I can see to this at a later date, albeit a long time after the actual event. Aside from that, it's all up from here, let the 4-play continue.... |
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2002-04-14 Another new add-on pack for the screen saver can be found on the Four Files page in the Gallery. This one's a special bumper edition featuring twenty-five of the best images from the R4 40th anniversary events held throughout 2001. Also in the Gallery, you can now find the first proper pictures of my newly resprayed R4, on the My Pics page. I received news this week that some of our most fanatical Renault 4 owners seen on this site are due to meet this weekend. Two fans from northern Spain are travelling to Portugal to meet two others for a special celebration. A return visit is planned later in the year, and they've even had four t-shirts specially made for the occasion! I hope to add details of this gathering to the site at a later date. |
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2002-04-07 You know Monsieur Webmaster, with these star signs you are really spoiling us.... I don't know why I do it, but the Fourtune Teller page in the Playroom is once again updated with more spring sillyness. And there's more pictures in the Gallery, including a fabulous new Star Car. |
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2002-03-18 Great news at the Gift Shop! New, permanently reduced international shipping rates to all countries make the Renault 4 gifts as affordable as any products in your local store! More details in the Gift Shop section. Quick example: Two crap designer t-shirts from your local high street retailer - £30. Two fabulous Renault 4 t-shirts from my Gift Shop, only $15.50 each. Add shipping charges, convert to pounds sterling at a typical exchange rate, and you could have two t-shirts for £29. That's cheaper than the high street junk, delivered all the way from the USA to your door, and you don't even have to leave your house! Before I get carried away, here's a couple more brief updates: The babies@play page gets a new addition at long last, and more related photos can be found in an updated article on the Technique page. Another super few sets of photos have been added to the Gallery, on the People's Pics and Star Car pages. |
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2002-03-06 Well, I go away for a week and once again the emails start flooding in whilst I'm gone. More photos, more adverts, more guestbook entries, there's so much piling up for the Gallery there's now a delay of around two to three months before things are getting published in that section. I guess I shouldn't complain though, I'd rather that than come home to an empty inbox. I just had to complete a 500-mile round trip in my R4 to Hove in southern England, in order to get it through its annual test, known in Britain as the MOT. It was all a bit of a farce. I had the original test in Manchester, but the garage really picked it apart and pulled it up on everything. My parents know a friend of a friend who is reliable, trustworthy and cheap, so I decided I'd be better off letting him see to it, despite the £45 it would cost me in petrol travelling to the opposite end of the country, rather than take it to any old local garage that might rip me off. Upon his inspection, he reckoned many of the failures stated were unnecessary, so he suggested I let him take it for another MOT at a place he knows that would pass it on most of the same points, rather than do all the fussy work requested by the first place and book it in for a free retest there, since it would probably work out cheaper and to my benefit in the end. There was one major hole in the floor requiring welding (which he had to do laying in the gutter in the freezing hail and storm-force winds, as he's a mobile repair person), but most of the other jobs were minor. The garage in Manchester had stated there were 'several holes along the sills and on the floor pan', but neither he nor I could really find any of them. Most annoyingly though, they had stated that the front wheel bearings were noisy and needed replacing. The mechanic had a tough job removing the near-side fixings in order to inspect them, only to find they were perfect, and by this time we'd specially ordered a pair of new ones which could not be returned, so that was a further thirty-eight quid wasted in addition to the thirty-eight quid spent on a second MOT. It was in fact the rear bearings that were knackered, and it was lucky that I possessed a brand new kit that I had bought a couple of years' previous for my old R4 but never used, so he fitted that. There were many other hassles. Unfortunately, Renault 4s are never as simple as you expect when anything requires doing to them. Something else unexpected always crops up to throw you. Finally, however, it passed and I can relax for another year, despite the huge expense of £306 which the whole experience has cost me, and which I cannot afford. I am going to seriously consider moving abroad at a later date to a drier country, as my R4 - or any other R4 in Britain - just stands no chance in the long run with all the rain and damp here. Current favourites for my new destination are Portugal and Andorra, so if anybody can entice me with any good offers or reasons I should move there, let me know. |
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2002-02-26 Well, I was right about my psychic ability (see below), because only the other day I was hoping for a guestbook entry anywhere within Asia to fulfill a requirement of having each continent of the world represented, and only a couple of days later an entry arrived from Japan; I'm scaring myself now. If you attempted to sign the guestbook recently and received an error, please try again as there was a bug in the form, which has now been fixed. There's a new poll in Vote 4 It! What is your favourite thing about the R4? In the last poll, you decided the best way to dispose of an R4 was to bury it in an exotic location. Unfortunately, you weren't so interested in my favoured proposal of smashing it directly into Maggie Thatcher's house, preferably whilst having the car strapped to the top of a juggernaut. Due to my car's recent MOT failure, I have made a sudden - and what will probably seem strange - decision to travel to the opposite end of the country to have it repaired, but I have good reasoning behind this, so there will be no updates to this site (including the Classifieds) for a few days or so until the beginning of March. I have prepared the March calendar image in advance, which you can download on the Four Files page in the Gallery. |
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2002-02-19 New add-on pack for the screen saver available for download, containing fifteen of the best images from this site during 2001. Another special pack will appear at a later date; see the Four Files page in the Gallery. There's still loads of stuff to be added. For every set of photos I add at present, another two sets arrive, you're all just too fanatical, unlike me! I mean, I just run the site.... (ahem). There's something strange going on too. Every time I think about a certain part of the world, for whatever reason, a guestbook entry or some other email arrives from that place within a short space of time. It happened with the recent entries from New Zealand, Malaga, Austria, Toronto and Grenoble, then yesterday I'd just been thinking about Hungary, knowing nothing about the place and having no contacts there, wondering about what it would be like if I moved there and whether many R4s existed in the country. Would you believe it, a set of pictures then arrived from Hungary. Some of the 'coincidences' have been very bizarre and too complex to bore you to tears with here, but I'm getting a suspicion that I'm developing a weird ability to tune into R4 vibes around the world. |
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2002-02-13 First new addition from the backlog of photos that have been piling up over the last couple of months is the 50th entry to the People's Pics page in the Gallery. A couple of other notes: The advert and guestbook forms should now be functioning reliably. I have set them up differently with the new webspace provider so, providing you receive a confirmation page after submitting a form, there should now be little chance of any errors occurring or details not reaching me. Also, the site search on the Index page has been vastly improved. Again, the previous setup with the old webspace provider, Angelfire, was rather lousy and it wasn't very functional, but this new search performs like a proper search engine and is very useful. It requires re-indexing at regular occasions when I choose, so the only time it will fail to find something is if the item is relatively new and not yet listed in its index. Try it out! Update November 2009: I should amend this section to point out that this search hasn't been functioning for a long time (due to some imp hacking my CGI space over and again and continually deleting all the files that perform the search function), but I am hoping to get a new site search function up and running again after all this time. |
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2002-02-10 I am pleased to announce that the new version of Renault 4-Play is finally here. It's been a lot of hard work over the last month but the site is now fully transferred to this new webspace. The main URL to use now is http://www.renault4.plus.com/ - please update your bookmarks if necessary. You can find here a redesigned 40th anniversary section, complete with a new report on the World Cup Rally exploits of two Renault 4 drivers last autumn. The links section has been revamped, and a newer version of the screen saver is available from the Four Files page in the Gallery. Extra screen saver add-on packs will be available soon. Over the coming weeks I intend to catch up with all the emails people have been sending. There's been many great pictures amongst them that will all appear soon, and I have several other plans for the site over the next few months. Click the link in the table above for more information about the site move. There isn't anything astonishingly different about this new site, it's a similar layout to before, but I have spent considerable time reformatting all the pages, colours, structure and so on, meaning it should all work a lot better and faster. Most importantly, there should now be far fewer, if any, display corruptions with Netscape and most other browsers. The exception is the guestbook world maps, which are impossible to code any other way. And best of all, look: no pop-ups! |
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2002-01-25 The bear is back! Special edition R4 valentines teddy bear and sweets, only available until February 14th. See the Gift Shop. Also see the new range of products for 2002, celebrating the year this site goes bilingual! Over coming months, I intend to add some French translated pages to this site, and to mark the occasion, new R4 product designs themed with British and French flags can now be purchased. |
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2002-01-22 (part 2) I'm still progressing with the transfer of this site to another webspace provider. I have actualy barely started uploading all the files, however, as I've discovered various minor bugs with the pages' coding and have been doing some redesigns of certain aspects of the site. The end result won't exactly be startlingly different, but you will notice some slight changes and everything should work much better. This includes almost all previous display problems in Netscape, which I hope to have resolved. The one exception to this being the guestbook world maps, which unfortunately are too complex and difficult to code any other way, so you will still probably need IE or other compatible browsers to view these properly. I've been testing various things in my version of Netscape 6.01, which I previously slated on a page in this section, and have been using it more as a general browser to see just what it can manage. Although I accept that some problems with this site in Netscape were down to my coding, the program is still awful. It crashes umpteen times on other sites, is slow and clumsy, and very often has to load pages twice which is infuriating. I just spent an entire weekend, longer in fact, trawling the net for a suitable replacement for the scrolling marquee text on the home page, because not only is it a bit tacky looking but it doesn't work in Netscape as it is a custom IE feature. But after checking out hundreds of alternative text scrollers, horizontal and vertical, faders and so on, there is not a single one which has the right mixture of features needed, or which doesn't crash in Netscape. It has been very exhausting and I've eventually had to settle for what I've got, in slightly modified form, meaning non-IE users will have to settle for seeing all the scrolling text instead displayed as static text in a paragraph. Please excuse the lack of other new content on this existing site. I have so much to add but am hoarding it all for when the new site launches, hopefully within a couple of weeks. I've also been extremely busy, as mentioned below. |
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2002-01-22 (part 1) Hoorah! It's not often I'd put two separate updates from the same day on this page, but part 2 above is very boring and technical; this is the amazing bit: I've finally got my car resprayed after months of hard work preparing it, and it looks absolutely fantastic! The last week or so has been such hard work that there's been little opportunity to make updates to this site. I'd originally intended to paint the car with a brush last summer, but was foiled by bad weather in the approaching autumn and had to leave it as it was (as in the 40th anniversary report). Then, following two separate incidents in which idiots caused damage to the two near-side wings last year (which I shall eventually document on the My Cars page), I was strangely offered two opportunities for a free respray, one from the previous owner, and one from the paint tutor at the college where I am currently studying vehicle restoration. The dents were knocked out and filled, and I finished all the filler and repair work on many other minor sections. The preparations that go into most of the classic cars we handle at the college are far more intense, and nothing short of absolute perfection will do, however in my case I wasn't fussed and just wanted the best that could be done within reason, and without having to spend a further few months intricately touching up the car. So, the respray does show through a few minor imperfections but these are barely visible. It has been done in what can only be described as a stunning deep blue; not navy, a little more purplish than that. It contrasts superbly with the yellow trim that I completed last year. Pictures will of course appear here at a later date (on the new site), although I finished a film before getting a shot of the completed job, so will have to rely on somebody else getting a photo else it'll take months. The only sour point in all this is that I was stung unexpectedly with a bill following the work. At no stage did anybody ever mention I would have to pay anything. The paint tutor offered to sort the whole car out for me when I requested that I be given help in seeing to the damage (which had been caused in the college car park, hence the offer). However, he has now landed me with a bill. If he'd even mentioned it as the car was masked up for the spray booth I'd have stopped there and then, because the former owner was also prepared to do the job for free later this spring. So, in my current exceptionally skint state (the worse financial position I've ever been in throughout my life), I've no idea how I'll cover this cost, albeit very reasonable in itself and far less than I would expect to pay elsewhere. You see, life's never simple like that is it? Well, it isn't for me anyway, there's always something to upset the apple cart. That's why I take out all my energy and frustration doing this website, it gives me something to take my mind off all the other crap I have to put up with. If you've bothered to read this long paragraph you must be bored. You'd have to be even more bored to read the next one. |
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2002-01-13 Did you know this website even has its own recipe page? Oh yes, search around and you can discover the true horrors of what lurks in the dark recesses of Renault 4-Play. If you haven't found the other secret page, however, you'd better be quick as it'll most likely disappear after the move to the new webspace provider. The same goes for the tarot game on the Fourtune Teller page. |
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2002-01-06 New winter star signs in the Playroom, and an updated article about the R4 on the Your Articles page in the brown section. |
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2002-01-05 Happy New Year to all visitors! I've just arrived back from time spent away during the Xmas holidays, and can now press on with the mammoth amount of work needed on this site. The Classifieds, Guestbook, etc. are all updated, and the January calendar image is now available; other changes will be made soon. I arrived home to another barrage balloon of emails, and brought back several other bits of R4 stuff which will be added in due course. Shortly before leaving, I also received some great things in the post from one of the Japanese visitors at the 40th anniversary event in Arnhem, including a few new pictures. Updates will be sketchy over coming weeks, as I have to transfer the entire site to a different webspace provider, which at 42MB in size will be a long task, and many other features require altering to accommodate this change. There's masses of new things set to appear here, however, and I have various ideas for new features on the site this year, so please keep returning. My R4 just about got me down south and back in one piece, despite a few problems. During the journey down on the motorway, all was fine until suddenly it started veering all over the place. This could have been down to a number of things. A spillage on the road perhaps, a loose fan belt, the blockage in the fuel pipe which caused the engine to cease shortly afterwards (my fault for running the petrol right down days earlier), or most probably the strange problem I have with the two rear wheels and axle, whereby they both lean inwards towards the front end, making the tyres wear away very fast on the outside and not at all on the inside. Despite both tyres being new six months ago, they were getting bald on the outer edge, so I had them swapped over to wear down the opposite sides. However, this meant all the weight in the back of the car resting on one edge and, considering the conditions, made for some slippy and dangerous handling. Then, upon returning, as ever I had to endure very testing conditions, I ought to take up professional sports driving or something, given the crap I've had to overcome during my long journeys. This time I was avoiding motorways as much as possible due to the previous problems, meaning I could drive at a lower speed more safely, but it got dark, and with all the frost on the roads the windscreen continually became covered in dirt. The squirty washer thing was unsurprisingly being temperamental, so I had to stop countless times and wash the screen myself. But on the dark winding country roads with fog swirling in, it became near impossible to see, crouching so I could view out of the most clear bit of the window. The glare of headlights approaching and in my mirrors lit up the dirt and blinded me, and I'm amazed I could see anything at all. R4 owners seem to suffer a bit more than most in this respect because of the steep angle of the windscreen compared to modern cars, which traps more dirt. But the R4 did me proud in the end. |
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