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Crikey, no! The only way I'd have stripes anywhere on my car is if they were black... sort of *stealth stripes*. Yes, me and my car are gonna be there! I don't think anyone's gonna be blessed by my presence tho. I've been a bit unsure about whether or not I'd have the car back (again), but it's now booked for the 23rd. Needs mapping badly... so no laughing, OK?! ;)

It's all true, you know... " Your Rusty old Sierra weighs about 20000 pounds and can complete a 1/4 mile in about 5 seconds. That means that you've got about 31623.34 HP at the wheels, and about 41110.35 HP at the flywheel. " There's loads of cars with stripes down the middle around here. Good old Essex.

I get the impression you want a project to start totally from scratch on, and although I'll probably get kicked in the balls from everyone here, I'd say I don't think the 300 isn't the best car for this. It's a complicated beast. Still, it's obviously a lot of fun to get one and start improving it with performance bits... which is what 99% of 300 owners do, right? There's some very knowledgeable people here, and a lot of information around, so if you're keen to get totally into it (home brew engine rebuilds etc), it shouldn't be impossible. With the sort of time you're talking about I'd consider something like building a kit-car... maybe a Cobra replica with big V8... or something small and light with a bike engine :)

20's?! Bling-bling! Rollin' on dubs homeeee! Icy Hot Stuntaz

No, nothing dodgy. Legit stuff this is.

...PIC microcontrollers, that is. We may have a job opportunity at our company (in darkest Essex). This isn't a proper job advert, more a: "are there any technical bods around here?". We need someone who's sh*t-hot at PIC assembly (like me ;) )... preferably not an arrogant @rsehole (that's my job). No time to train up someone without loads of experience. No, it's not for pirate Sky cards, before anyone asks :)

Maybe, yeah. I don't wanna fill you full of false hope, but that's what happened with me. I feel for you tho... I remember the pain of driving round in a smoking Z - horribly embarassing!

This happened to me after SE replaced both my /very/ busted turbos... the new hybrids started smoking and I thought they were fragged too. But Pete said it was something to do with crank-case ventillation, made a mod of some sort (moving pipes?) and it all stopped. It might be worth giving them a call - the turbos might be fine.

I've seen a bonnet get launched 50ft in the air at Santa Pod cos a NO2 valve got stuck open... the head of that lump just missed the owners face (he was tinkering under the bonnet at the time). Scary stuff nitrous... I think I'm too chicken.

From a completely different perspective... this kept happening to me quite a while ago. Long story short, it turned out to be a mate trying to call me from his bosses office, but the outgoing voice was blocked. He could still make the call, and still hear me, so he thought I was just trying to wind him up. It went on for days, until he finally called me from his house... flippin plonker.

Tell me about it! It managed to run under a back wheel... I was only doing 40-odd, but my suspension's so hard it still chucked the car up in the air! I almost squashed a bl**dy bunny tonight too... what's going on?! I'll be glad when I've done the running in... see my theory is I'll be way past all this suicidal nature before it decides to jump out on me. At the moment, these crazy animals have time to sit in the road and even decide which part of the car they're gonna get mashed by. Is it just me?! I drove a crappy Sierra for 6 months before getting my 300 back - didn't see a single animal the whole time. Maybe nature just came out of hibernation this week and decided it'd had enough of living?!

Are animals so scared of my mota they feel the need to commit suicide?! Bl**dy, f*ck*n b*ll*cks. S'cuse my French.

6 (6!!!) years, 7 grand... that's a bit steep for eating mince pies and getting some in public... with a girl, might I add! Actually that potential sentence sounds more like a complete engine build from SE. I've jinxed it now, haven't I?!

I know what you mean. I don't really get much time for telly, unless I video it first. I've been checking my profits at work now and then. It's not something that needs a lot of time unless you get serious about it (not me). So there's me thinking I'm some kind of born player, starting at 200,000+ in the chart and moving up to 2651 in no time. It's all gone horribly wrong this week tho! See what you think.

Oh, man... you surely are a legend! ;)

I bought a set a while ago an haven't found them fantastic. I was told they've changed them since mine, so you could be OK. I had (/have) some problems with front camber, but they seemed to wear excessively quickly (inner edges bare within 3 months). They also tramlined badly, but that could also be down to changes to my suspension at the same time. I wouldn't mind knowing how you get on. I've heard other people (non-z32) say they thought SO3's were awful compared with SO2's. Whereabouts in Canada are you, by the way?

Watch a few DVDs squashed onto CDs with divx, then everything else looks loverly. Or drink more beer until your focus is off :) Or get a really small telly! ;) Or... "switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead". Whatever happened to Why Don't You? Oh, yeah, it was crap.

Er... my understanding of plasma, and it's really too late for me to be talking about this... is that a plasma cell actually generates light (and gets hot) whereas LCD simply polarises to either show the backlight or block it. CRT projection you expect to get a burnt in image because the phosphor wears, but LCD projection...? Hm.

Yes. You need to set the sharpness setting on your TV to the lowest possible. Your TV is actually sharpening up the edges between artifacts... those colour squares that appear through lossy compression. Ultimately you're right tho... we're being sold digital TV as the best thing since sliced alcohol filled dairy-milk, and the only think really better about it is the stability of the picture. And number of channels that can fit in the same bandwidth, I s'pose. There's no graceful degredation like analogue TV - digital either works or craps out really bad. Just to add to the problem... the service providers can actually alter the bitrate for a channel as they please. Digital channels are normally broadcast as a bunch on a single transponder (same frequency, digitally streamed together) so the one that requires the biggest bandwidth, eg a primary channel like BBC1 will normally get the best quality. As for what Sky are up to... there's only a limited amount of transponders... the reason there's so many soddin' channels can only be because each has a horribly limited bitrate.

Dunno if I really understand the question (it's late)... I'd say the most common mods... .chuck the panel filter and stick something better on .dump the standard exhausts and fit full stainless, or failing that, decat the standard .up the boost a bit with standard turbos, or if you can afford it refurb your turbos with 360 degree bearings, or (more money) get some hybrids. Or (more! money), go for bigger turbos .get a decent chip that can retard your timing at higher boost rather than having to hard retard on the crank angle That's got to be the basic power mods... then there's a bit of a spending gap. You could get around 400 bhp if you're lucky. But 500 bhp plus needs some serious commitment. SE did a fuel pressure mod to get more fuel through the standard injectors - that needed a different map to run the car properly. I'm sure they hit 420+ with that. Then there's the mapable twin secondary injector controller I spent ages working on for them... so you can run even more boost without topping out the standard injectors... lovely little box that was, now consigned to the "past projects" box because I got fed up waiting for the injectors to show up. I've lost the plot. What was the question?

Is anyone here actively trading on Celebdaq (http://www.bbc.co.uk/celebdaq) ? I kinda got interested a few weeks back when Matrix 2 was coming out. Now I seem to be buying shares in people I wouldn't know if they kicked me in the balls (Anouska?!... the brunette in BB?). Just for fun, of course.

Maybe you guys can clear this up then... a US company our company do a lot of business with has a huge plasma screen in their viewing room. But talking to them recently, one of their guys said the screens only last a few years before they burn out. Is this true? Did the bloke in the shop tell you this? Nothing to do with jealousy, honest. I'm happy with my Nokia widescreen (CRT)... yeah, I got it before widescreen started getting popular, back when Nokia used to sponser that movie prog Johnny Vaughn did on C4.

Suites you, sir! Your missus... does she want it? I bet she really likes it, doesn't she sir?! I wouldn't have given it to her, but I'm sure you enjoyed it immensely (oooh). You didn't really pay what I think you did for this mota, did you Stu?! You got a fokin good deal there if you did. Nice one ;) Hate to be negative (considering)... those wheels... umm... hm.

Is this the new bouncy-castle styling?! It looks kinda rubbery and inflatable to me. An nice, angry (wrong word really) sort of shape... but something very weird about the paintwork.

What a twat... they're my mates initials! I think I meant M&S... or BHS... I dunno what I'm on about, obviously.