January skies

There is a stretch in the evening... Heading towards 5pm this evening, I caught these beautiful colours as I left the office. Both Venus and Jupiter were visible, very bright objects in the early evening sky. I'm not sure they are visible in the pic above though.

X marks the spot - the bright spot just below and to the left of the intersecting contrails is Venus. The contrails were moving across the sky (as they are wont to do, being clouds) and I was hoping the centre might pass over Venus - unfortunately I couldn't get that angle!
Maybe next time.

Top Gear

Great to have you back! I can't help it, I love this programme. Smiling ear to ear for an hour - it's so entertaining. It turns out the best supercar for the current petrol prices is an Audi R8 - 5mpg. Don't buy the Ferrari - 1.7MPG isn't very good, is it?

And they proposed replacement cars for the police, instead of the ones they have at the moment. Budget of 1000 pounds, plus 500 for livery (painting and lights and whatnot) - some of this included wheel-mounted bars, like you see on Roman chariots....yeah, I can see that working. Though one of them used a rearward firing paint dispenser to confound the villain's vision - maybe use vinyl instead of emulsion though.....

All in all, an informative and intelligent automotive magazine programme. I commend it to the house. 2000 on a Sunday evening on the BBC2, or whenever you want if you've Skyplussed it.

Sky+

We got it in a while ago, just before Christmas in fact. Useful. I'm sure I could live without it, but it is handy to be able to record programmes quite easily. At the touch of a button you can record something that's on at an ungodly hour of the morning and watch it when it suits you - like Red Dwarf for example, showing at 12:30am. And you can get it to do the entire series! Automagically!

Or a film that's on another channel, you can record that and still watch something else at the same time. Yay!

Nah it is useful. We got it free (well, as a special offer anyway) and it's about 150 euro if you don't get the offer - though I'm not sure I'd have paid for it if it wasn't free. If you do like your telly a lot though, it is very useful. Reasonably recommendable.