azz:
In this week's Life on Mars, Sam sports a rather nice Casio AQ-230GA-9DMQY.
Which does look appropriately retro, but it's actually a modern watch -- Casio didn't produce their first digital watch until 1974.
(Have I mentioned their Test Card F too? It looks like it's been redrawn from a photo of the digital version by someone who didn't really understand what all the bits do -- although they do have good reasons for that...)
</geekery>
azz:
Some reasonable advice about taking programming guidelines with a large bucketful of salt.
I disagree with what he says about programming style -- style is important, because if you let programmers come up with their own styles they'll demonstrate just how inventive they can be, with Hilarious Effect -- but otherwise it's all pretty sensible.
azz: I couldn't find a reference to this on the web when I was hunting a couple of days ago, but Sam at our friendly local garage had encountered the problem before, so for the benefit of anyone else who's after it...
If your 1600 Golf MkII is running on two cylinders (very noisy with lots of vibration at idle, petrol smell from exhaust, no power -- i.e. what you'd expect from a 1-tonne car with an 800cc unbalanced engine)...
... then check the vacuum hose that leaves the engine immediately behind the third and fourth cylinders. If it's perished (or otherwise has a big hole in it), there's the problem.