How good was Top Gear tonight? First in the new series and their ‘Top Gear Top Fuel Consumption Tips’ were excellent, pretty much if you want a good mpg in a supercar, get an Audi R8. Which I actually had the pleasure of sitting in about two weeks ago. Granted it was in the Audi garage but oh my goodness the urge to hot wire it, drive through the huge glass windows and some how escape onto the M8 motorway without being caught just to say that I’d driven one, was massive. It’s the sexiest car I’ve ever, ever seen.

Anyway, aside from proving that yet again Audi cars are the best; Jeremy, James and Richard (oh wow how cute did he look tonight?) actually had a good few tips and they can all be found on the Top Gear website.

1. If you see the lights ahead are red, take your foot off the throttle immediately. If you wait and then use your brakes you are simply wasting the fuel you used to achieve a speed you didn’€™t need. Remember, a modern engine uses no fuel at all when it’€™s coasting in gear.
2. Next. Speed. Wind it down. You don’t need to do 25 mph, but instead of doing 80 on the motorway, try 75. Or if you normally do 120, try 110.
3. 56 mph, by the way, really is the optimum speed for good fuel consumption in most cars. Don’€™t try this in villages though or you will have to spend some time in a prison.
4. When leaving the lights, accelerate smartly. Not like a bat out of hell. But don’€™t dawdle. Get the car into top gear as quickly as is reasonable. Fifth gear, remember, is no good at all.
5. Don’t buy a Toyota Prius.

Fair enough, I find most of them useful because of the injection of humour that possibly only British readers will get, or indeed just Top Gear fans. Whatever, I thought I’d share anyway.

I am utterly ashamed to call myself a Rangers fan after the chaos in Manchester on Wednesday. A handful of drunk, coke-fuelled idiots have made a laughing stock of my city and my football team. It looked like Manchester city Police didn’t have the situation under control half the time, there really shouldn’t have been a situation to control in the first place. Yes, it was a big game but fans should have been there to have a good time, not attack police officers and make the atmosphere feel like Basra.

For any readers from Manchester, I’m so sorry that these hooligans caused mayhem in your city - believe me, we’re not all like that. I can’t believe that no action is to be taken against Ranger’s Football Club, fans were invited to Manchester to watch the game, not stab a rival fan and treat the city like a dumping ground for empty alcohol bottles and urine.

Seriously, I am ashamed to call myself a Rangers fan.

(all images copyright to BBC News Website.)

Single bloggers unite - there’s now a dating site for you!

The lovely Rhys at gospelrhys.co.uk has set up ShagABlogger.com, a dating/meeting site for bloggers.

It’s brilliant, but I don’t have a use for it…but maybe some of you do? Check it out.

A while ago I began doing Stumblin’ Sunday posts. Well, that’s a lie. I did one post about the best site’s that I’d come across using StumbleUpon that week. Well, the good news is that now that I have constant computer and internest access I can start posting again, wooh! Aren’t you so very happy?!

Improve Page,Alexa and Technorati Ranks at ImBloggingThat.com is a great guide to how to increase your PageRank, Alexa Rank and Technorati Authority and Ranks. A great read if you’re obsessed with your site’s numerous ranks.

Humerous Bathroom Signs from around the world - the last two are the best and most imaginative I’ve ever seen.

TeeVsTee.com is a simple voting site where you pick your favourite out of two tshirt designs. Since I’m a sucker for cool tshirts, I love this site and there’s a good few shirts that I now must have after voting for around 5 minutes. Simple, silly and addictive.

Naked Tickle Me Elmo and more…the robots beneath the fur. Sounds weird, but it’s a pretty cool look at what exactly makes Tickle Me Elmo laugh and Barney dance.

I was looking for a logo to use on my sidebar to link up to my Twitter account and couldn’t find any good ones that I liked so I decided just to make my own and offer them to other bloggers to use.

All logos are .png format and have transparent backgrounds so should work against any background colour.

Credit would be nice, but it’s not essential. If you attempt to direct link these files you will get a nice message shown on your site instead of the logo…you’ve been warned!

Twitter

I’m not a big fan of content heavy websites, but I always end up publishing some on my blog as little extras for my visitors - as if reading about my life isn’t good enough!

Everything here is created by me for my website, so I’d appriciate it if I didn’t start seeing it popping up around the blogosphere and on forums, as I’ve had this happen oh-so-many times before when I made layouts and icons (yup, I was one of those people who stole celebrity imagery).

If you’re interesting in joining the AshesFromStars.com Topsites list click here to sign up.

As always, use the links to the right hand side to navigate the content.

I’m reading journals and blogs of friends both old and new and everybody is going away on holiday somewhere utterly cool this year. New York, China, Russia, Denmark. Me? Balado. Which is in Scotland. And where the greatest music festival in the world takes place on the first weekend of July each year - T In The Park. Although so far there’s only actually a few bands that I want to see - Newton Faulkner, Primal Scream, Scouting For Girls, The Hoosiers, Reverend And The Makers. I’m a bit worried that the Sugababes and Will Young are playing, Geoff Ellis what are you thinking man?

So, the countdown begins. It’s only 11 weeks away. Well actually, it’s in 11 weeks. And I can’t wait. Question is, are any of you going to T this year? Or any other music festivals?

Since Mari is moving from nightmare DreamHost to HoldFire I obviously had to backup my WordPress installation, backup all the files on the server that I needed and keep it safe for a few days until the switch was done. At some point during this very long and boring process, I did most of it manually, I decided that since I had about $50 in my PayPal account I would look for a good host / register and finally buy my own domain again.

It took me quite a while to track one down that was a great price and had positive reviews. I ended up going with VoNetwork.net’s S-200 plan for a mere $20.00 per year for 200MB of space with 4GB of bandwidth. I really, really don’t need any more space than that but if I do then I’ll just upgrade in the future. I came across VoNetwork.net via Jenn’s post about them on Lavish.

Anyway, within 20 minutes my site was live and I was searching for a decent theme to put up while I created my own. Something happened to my installation (uh, it went..nasty!) and by the time I’d fixed it the lovely people over at WordPress.org had released version 2.5 so I wiped my site and started over with a new install of this fabulous new version of WordPress.

So, ladies and gents, welcome to my new home - AshesFromStars.com

So you want to get in touch with me. No problemo, just use one of the various ways below and I will get back to you as soon as possible! Or fill out the comments box below which will be emailled to me.

• Email: melissa@ashesfromstars.com
• MSN: dontxforgetxthexviolence@hotmail.com

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