Of Cars and CIX

Learnt a couple of things today.

The first concerned the car. I'd not used it for over a week although I had briefly started it up once. Yesterday evening, it wouldn't start. It whirred away merrily but wouldn't fire. The battery started to give out so I put it on charge. I wondered what might be wrong and posted about it in the "cars" conference on CIX.

It was CIX that got me into this Internet thing nearly 20 years ago. It was a crude "bulletin board" similar in some ways to many modern Internet "forums". The technology was unbelievably old-fashioned and still is not particularly modern but that's not the point. It's the community of people that make it so great. Next morning, someone had replied pin-pointing the problem -  brief start up that had wetted the plugs with petrol and they'd stayed wet for several days waiting for me to try another start. The solution was simple - run the starter for 30 seconds - something I could now do with a fully charged battery and the engine reluctantly came to life. A five mile drive and it was starting normally.

So the learning points were:

•  Don't run the car briefly like that - especially in less than ideal weather.
•  That paying about £7/month to the antique CIX service continues to be great value