British Summer Time? My arse!
More like British Shower Time…
Mobile Blogging from here.
Formula One back on the Beeb
What a cracking start to the 2009 season. Brawn GP certainly kicked up a storm. Jenson put in a great performance with a pole and start to finish drive. Looks like his bright yellow helmet worked it’s magic…
Barrichello was pretty hap hazard and I’m amazed he managed to keep his second place, even with him lucking into it! He certainly had his fair share of shunts. The raw performance of his car, even with a dodgy front wing, kept him in it.
I’m particularly chuffed for them given the trouble they’ve gone through to get onto the grid. Whether their form will continue, it’s too early to say. I suspect the other teams will work on their own versions of the rear diffusers and so catch up on whatever performance gap there currently is.
The rest of the field was equally unexpected. Vettel and Kubica should have finished second and third had they not crashed into each other. I think Vettel was unfairly treated with a ten spot grid drop for the next race, given it looked to me to be a 50/50 incident.
Ferrari seemed to fall to bits as the race progressed and McLaren weren’t exactly on form. Lewis Hamilton snuck into third position after Trulli was given a 15 second penalty. But he did start 18th and would have finished top six without the last minute incidents. And it should noted Trulli, in his Toyota, started in pits, so did well to get up so high.
It seems the new regs have caused chaos. The cars look particularly odd with their large front wings and dinky rear ones, but I like them. Much cleaner looking. There did seem to be a fair bit of overtaking, but I don’t think that was down to the aerodynamic changes, but more to do with the large differences they now have in the compounds of tires. The super soft tires seem to go off really quickly and that caused the disparity.
That, and the KERS systems giving the drivers a power boosts on demand. It’s certainly an interesting addition but it’s disappointing that some teams aren’t running them (like Brawn!). It should be an all or nothing thing.
I must admit I had my reservations about F1 returning to the BBC (since the ITV coverage was better than what the BBC were previously doing), but I needn’t of worried! David Coulthard and Eddie Jordan did an excellent job as pundits. David’s knowledge of the sport really shone through and whilst Eddie was a tad waffly he put some good points across. Certainly better than the punditry on ITV and watching without adverts was ace.
Race commentary was also better than before, but I think Legard and Brundle need to work together more since they were interrupting each other a bit . The further added bonus is the new F1 website is top notch, much nicer than the increasingly advert strewn effort of ITV. Plus with iPlayer built in, its great for watching extra clips on.
So, all in all, a great start to season! Less than a week to Malaysia!
Cats sleep in the weirdest of places!
See exhibit A.
Which is Snitch, our fourth cat! Although Weebl has moved out so, we only have three…
Mobile Blogging from here.
Edit: I did this post originally with iBlogger on my iPhone but the HTML it created was such a frigging mess I had to go edit it afterwards. You’d think given they say iBlogger is based on ecto, it would create the same clean HTML. Obviously not…
Mum Questions
Do you think people that live near airports pay lower council tax?
Is this bridge being widened then?
Word of the Day – Golem
No, not “My Precious” Gollum, but golem. At first I thought it was one and the same, but apparently not:
In Jewish folklore, an artificially created human supernaturally endowed with life.
In Jewish folklore, a golem (גולם, sometimes, as in Yiddish, pronounced goilem) is an animated being created entirely from inanimate matter. In modern Hebrew the word golem literally means “cocoon”, but can also mean “fool”, “silly”, or even “stupid”. The name appears to derive from the word gelem (גלם), which means “raw material”.
Picked this one up whilst reading one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, The Last Continent.
Arab drifting
So I blatantly nabbed this from bear in #terrafusion, but it’s worth a share me thinks:
Word of the Day – bucolic
Bucolic (adj):
- Of or characteristic of the countryside or its people; rustic. See synonyms at rural.
- Of or characteristic of shepherds or flocks; pastoral
Spotted this one whilst reading Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky. I picked up the book after reading about it on Coding Horror.
I’ve not finished reading it yet, but it’s interesting stuff, explaining how the advent of the Internet and social based software has helped previously disconnected groups of people communicate and the kind of other changes it’s creating.
Yardmaster Shed Instructions
Seems like I’m not the only one to have fun putting together a Yardmaster shed. A commenter on my previous post on our wonderful green monster of a shed, (it’s over a year old now and still standing, so we must have done something right!), lost his destructions and so, being the kind soul that I am, I’ve scanned mind in and uploaded them. The content has been OCR’ed so it is a searchable PDF.
They cover building:
- Model 108 GEY – Green (what we have)
- Model 1010 GEY – Green
- Model 108 ZGEY – Silver
- Model 1010 ZGEY – Silver
Destructions download:
- YardmasterShed.pdf – 7.23MB (right click Save As)
- YardmasterShed.pdf.zip – 7.22MB
Like Father like Son…
Anthony Hamilton’s Porsche Carrera GT:
Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren at the Montreal Grand Prix today:
Had to do one better, didn’t he?
He’s not the first, nor probably the last, to crash into someone in the pit lane when red lights are showing. At first I was pissing myself laughing at his stupidity, but then it dawned on me that the plonker had taken Raikkonen out so kinda put a downer on things. Still, it was a cracking race with Robert Kubica taking not just his first F1 race win, but BMW Sauber’s too (and a one-two at that).
Three cats!
As the post title suggests, we now have three cats. She’s called Deedee and is a bundle of evil hissing and growling. The mother-in-law is moving house and for various reasons can’t keep the little monster. She was originally Kate’s cat anyway, so it was inevitable this was going to happen. Sigh… you can probably tell that we don’t get on… (with that cat that is, I get on fine with the mother-in-law).
So, I thought I’d share some photos of her. Here she is before the move (admittedly a few years ago):
Here she is after:
Isn’t she just adorable? Just like you’d imagine the spawn of Satan. Any takers? Please?
And since I haven’t posted a photo of the chaps for a while (previously here and here), here’s Weebl and Bob.
Taking photos of black cats is hard!
