Formula1

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/7306123.stm

On a few cases, ITV have cut away from the race or qualifying just as something big has happened - that, or something big has happened whilst the adverts have been on. Hopefully, this will see things back at they should be. As long as they don't interrupt the coverage with whatever rugby/football/blah is going on, it'll all be fine. I wonder if they'll poach the commentators from ITV? Everyone apart from James Allen, that is.

Yesterday Sioned & me headed over to the Trafford Centre in Manchester for me to coo over the new Macbook Pro lineup. I was undecided between the glossy and matte screen of the 15" versions (anything bigger would be too much for me - I like to be able to travel light when I need to and sling everything into a single bag). It came down to how much glare the glossy screen would give. I'll be going with the glossy screen and putting an order in through Procureweb, which gives an impressive discount for University people. The reason for the new purchase? My four year old Toshiba Satellite is now showing its age - depending on where pressure is laid on the keyboard, it'll simply switch itself off. This isn't a battery or power supply issue - the same thing will happen on either. I've taken the laptop apart to a reasonable level, but I suspect that it's a cracked mainboard.

The weather was also with us for the journey there (and back), with us having the top down the whole way.

Today I watched an the Canadian Grand Prix which, to be honest, was utterly storming. The first race win for Lewis Hamilton was well deserved, but it's very rare that we see such attrition in a race now. The fact that Robert Kubica survived such a large crash, as well as the others who piled it into the final corner shows how far F1 has come now. Interesting also that two were black flagged. When did that last happen?

As a geek, I use my laptop extensively. It's with a huge amount of forethought that I decided my laptop had really had a hell of a thrashing over the last three and a half years. In that time, I've not once reinstalled the operating system (Windows XP Pro), instead carefully considering what was going to be installed and how it'd affect other things running on there. In that time, it's had a lot of abuse, having things such as QuarkXpress, VB .Net, Photoshop and many other intensive applications and suites installed, all of which have left their mark. So I decided to start again. A week on and things are pretty much back to usual. I took the important things out of documents and settings - my offline e-mails and so on, and took the plunge. I've not installed any of the software I don't regularly use (which did find me installing Powerpoint about 2 minutes before a training session was due to begin...) Other than that, the laptop does seem a lot happier, and it's a lot nicer to work on at the moment. I've pretty much got all of my sessions put back onto SecureCRT as well.

Last week we met up with the photographer (after our original photographer dropped us due to there being a number of pro-am photographers also in attendance). Nice lass, who's got a lot of good ideas. Looking forward to working with her as she's open to suggestion on what we want to do.

I went to Leicester on Friday night, primarily to sort some bits out hanging over from the IP regrade but actually ended up in the pub with Steve which was incredibly useful in having a sound off about all of the wedding guff. The people sorting our suits out phoned me today so that's one other thing ticked off the list as well.

We've been looking around at new cars recently after the revelation that we're spending about £250 a month on petrol for the Saab. We're paying huge consideration to a BMW 320d compact, which seems to return about 50mpg compared to the 25-28ish on the Saab at the moment. With the mileage I'm covering at the moment, it's a bit of a no brainer.

In other news, Formula 1 season starts this weekend. Yay :)

Comedy moment in the Brazilian Grand Prix buildup just now. Martin Brundle had been covering the presentation by Pele of a trophy to Michael Schumacher as this is MSC's last race. He finds Kimi Raikkonen stood, leaning against a wall:

MB: "Kimi, you missed the presentation by Pele."
KR: "Yeah"
MB: "Will you get over it?"
KR: "I was having a shit"
MB: "Ok, thanks for that. Obviously, you'll have a nice light car on the grid."

Kev visited this weekend, which was a somewhat welcome relief after a hair raising week last week, for various reasons.

o One of my old contracts (finished in February) e-mailed me asking me to do more work for them
o My current employer has said they want 4 hours per week from me after I move departments. More money, but more hassle.
o Human resources contacted me and said something like "You do realise you're not being seconded, and that this is a two year contract?". My response was pretty simple: "I'm pulling out". This, obviously, put the cat among the pigeons and it was sorted out pretty quickly. My contract for this arrived yesterday morning, detailing everything as I expected.
o Various bits of money are starting to turn up now, which is a welcome relief. I've sunk a fair bit of cash into a new project which is starting to come to fruition now. There was a period last week which was getting quite desparate, but, as I say, it's coming good now.

So, with all that, it was a nice break to do very little. The Conwy Food Festival was taking place this weekend. After picking Kev up from the train station, we went for a drive around and I showed him the local area - the seafront, and so on. We then headed back to the house to drop stuff off, before heading over to the snooker club for a couple of frames. From here, we went back out again. There wasn't much happening to do with the festival on Friday evening, but we stopped off at a pub in Conwy, before mooching back over to The Killer a bit closer to home.

Saturday was a bit odd weather wise when we got up - it went from raining heavily to nice and sunny three times in an hour. Me & Kevin took our chances and walked over to Conwy, primarily because I knew it'd be a real pain to park anywhere with the food festival - it's difficult at the best of times, but it'd be like nothing ever seen before. I was quite right. The whole town was absolutely packed. First thing we needed to do was get him measured up for a suit for the wedding. This was all done pretty quickly. We had a look around the festival and I got a few photos, whilst Kev bought a couple of bits and bobs. Back home again, and I decided to take Kev for a look around some of the lesser known (ie off the tourist beaten track) areas to see what some of the areas of beauty are like around here, which he seemed quite impressed with. His train out was at 1400, so that was pretty much it.
Fran, one of Sioned's friends (and bridesmaids) turned up just before Kev left. She stayed around for most of the afternoon whilst we did a few wedding bits and bobs.

Sioned and Fran nipped off in to town, so I took a bit of time out to sort out some more relaxing things - recompiling the kernel on profile (web server/login server/etc), tidying up some bits on sourcefour (fileserver) which needed doing, and making sure the UPS was happy and fed after it had a flid about its batteries recently.

Today has been a day of doing very little. We managed to get up at about 1130, before I sat doing nothing. The Snooker Grand Prix in Aberdeen started this weekend, so I've been catching up on the output from that, as well as The Brazilian Grand Prix taking place this weekend. I recorded the qualifying last night and watched that this morning over breakfast.

That's pretty much about it - as I say - a bit hair raising.

...But it's still not over. We had a very brief power outage yesterday morning. I suspect that it was actually a brownout more than anything, but my logging isn't that verbose. The UPS fell to battery 06:20:40 and power was back by 06:20:43. One of the machines here isn't on the UPS (the webserver cum other-bits-and-bobs box, router, AP and switch is, the file server wasn't), so I took the opportunity to move that machine over to the UPS (I can't think why I'd not done so before). I've also took a lot of time to generally tidy stuff up on the two servers here, and the one in Leicester. I've upgraded the kernel on the fileserver. It didn't need it from a security point of view as it was only one minor revision out from the current Debian stable version, but I needed to add a few things that had been bugging me for a while. I've also tidied some of the startup scripts up on the machines, as well.
ntpdate has been checked and installed on all of the machines, as well as normalising the MRTG output from them. All in all, cleaning up and making things a bit nicer.
The same kernel upgrade as I did to the fileserver will need to be done to the other box here at some point soon - although I'm not in any great rush to do that at the moment. Whilst the reasons I performed the upgrade on the fileserver would be useful on the other machine, they're certainly not essential. They're merely performance enhancement, which, being as that box is far more powerful than the fileserver, isn't a requirement at the moment.

Sioned has spent a lot of time at the hospital over the weekend visiting her Mum, hence me having so much time to do the above. This has been useful in some ways, as it's meant I can work in the office unhindered for as long as I've needed to.

This morning I was woken up early by the phone ringing. I vaguely remember it being before 0800. On a Sunday morning. That time shouldn't exist unless it involves lots of money. One of Sioned's friends had a baby at some ridiculous time this morning. Sioned - being a woman, was overjoyed with this. I, being a man, managed to get back to sleep pretty quickly and stayed in this state until just before 11, before getting up and watching the Chinese Grand Prix which I'd Sky+'d from the live output earlier in the morning.
Crickey. What a race. What a changing track. MSchu really is going to go out in style if he pulls banzai runs like that in the next two races. It's going to be close.

I'm hoping that the week ahead is going to pretty quiet. I've still got a lot of stuff on my plate which I need to get out of the way quickly. I reckon I should be able to clear a lot of that by the middle of Tuesday, with perhaps a couple of small bits falling into later-on-Tuesday. Beyond that, I think things will start to get back to normal and my head will be back above water.

My thoughts through the F1 season so far have been that MSchu would take another season after this, and then retire (ie at the end of 2007). Looks like I was wrong on that one. The end of the 2006 season will see MSchu leaving his driving position at Ferrari and moving into something else, but still within the team - the press release seems to indicate he'll be moving into another position there.
Rather interesting - he's said he wants to spend more time with his family, but it still looks like he'll have a heavy involvement in Ferrari itself, although how much remains to be seen.

There's lots of organisations now comparing him to people like Fangio and Senna. Michael has played no small part in getting Ferrari where they are today. I think a lot of his personality and sportsmanship have moved between himself and his team - almost like osmosis, that makes the two somewhat indistinguishable. The reason I suggest this is that the result of the stewards inquiry this weekend regarding Alonso "holding up" Massa would be exactly the type of thing that Michael would do if he were his own team. My concern is that with Michael still playing a role in Ferrari next season - and for however many seasons after that remains open to discussion - we may still see things like this happening.

With Raikkonen moving over to the prancing horse from McLaren, I'll be interested to see how his game play changes. There's certainly been visible differences in the way that Massa drove last year to his decisions this year. Part of that obviously comes down to different team ethics, but also in the way the team itself operates.

Certainly, the decision by MSchu to retire hasn't calmed anything down. It's thrown things further into the air.

That was certainly one of the best races I've seen this year. The start... the finish - and everything in between. Truly gripping stuff. The move that M Schu pulled at the start to cut the Renault of Alonso off, then the twists in between which saw Alonso finish in second were absolutely amazing. It was a shame to see Kimi have "no rear end grip" after his pit due to a knackered rear left. He seemed to be a bit lost as he sat in the car before taking the steering wheel off. :/
The 2006 season is really shaping up now with just 2 points between Ferrari and Renault in the constructors, and 12 between M Schu and Alonso in the drivers. It really has been blown open again.

Having a really quite nice weekend all in. So far I've managed to give the car a damn good clean - it's rather sparkly at the moment. Gave the inside a good going over as well, cleaning some of the marks off the leather and the carpet. I'm rather pleased with it all things said at the moment. Gave the boot a good clean out and checked the fluids as well.
Sioned is having a kip at the moment. I've just made a quick start on the invites for the wedding since these are likely to involve a bit of work, although on my side it's a relatively simple mailmerge from the SQL database containing all of the invitees (this is the same database that handles all of the wedding website logins and so on - it's nice to have all of this type of thing centralised, so that everything is singing from the same hymn sheet. One good thing about geekery is that stuff like this is pretty well planned).

Snooker later. This is what weekends are for.

I'm still rather tired after yesterday at the moment - I rolled up to one of the University sites horribly early yesterday morning (about 0600) to have another look at the poorly PBX that I'd mentioned previously. It still wasn't a happy camper. I sat in the server room until 0830 when the first staff started turning up, with a monitor plugged in to it and googled for the symptoms. The equipment is a Nortel BCM (Business Communication Manager) 1000. The problem I was seeing was that any attempt to use the management network interface (NIC) - either through the web interface or telnet promptly resulted in the machine hanging, rebooting, or both. Google did produce some knowledge of the symptoms, but it didn't match the model number exactly (it had previously been seen in BCM200s and so on) - the capacitors on the base tray start to bulge and effectively render the x86 side of the unit useless - the MSC (Media Services Card) will still run fine, so general telephony services are good, but anything beyond that (ie voicemail and other features) are stuffed.
I phoned BT Business Support later on in the day and the guy said "Ah, we've come across this numerous times". I asked if it was due to knackered capacitors leaking their magic everywhere and he suggested that this was more than likely the case.

I finished early due to being a bit tired and went and did some food shopping.
Me and food shopping don't really go together. Sioned had helpfully given me a list. Potatoes. Baking potatotes? New potatoes? I picked two of each and hoped for the best. Ham. What type? Pick one. Variety is the spice of life. I hate supermarkets.

I picked up a few other bits as it's Sioned's birthday today, and then pootled home to watch the race that I'd Sky+'d over the weekend. What a *fantastic* race. Certainly the best one I've seen for a long time, with absolutely everything you could ask for. And Hungary is a bad circuit for overtaking?! Jenson well deserved that win - it was... entertaining to see M Schu have to retire. Williams' new driver is certainly going to make a name for himself if he carries on driving like that, but it was a shame to see his result disallowed due to a technical infringement.

This morning saw me going over to Llanberris to pick up a UPS for the site with the telecoms problems. I didn't realise the APC 3KVA jobbies are so heavy. Struggled to get that one out of the boot. I'll be working there late on Thursday night installing that and putting the BT NTEs onto it.

Tomorrow sees me driving down to the Eisteddfod in Morriston. I'm staying there overnight and then coming back at some point on Thursday - not sure when yet. I might take a day off in lieu on Friday since I'm likely to be just about dead.

Somehow I don't seem to end up doing stage that often when I'm working at the theatre. More often than not I end up doing sound, which I rather enjoy. I was working at 11 yesterday morning until 2 this morning on a WNO (Welsh National Opera) gig which was pretty big. Five acts, each act with its own individual set. My muscles are pretty achey today as I've not done a gig like that for a fair while. It was nice to get back into it, though.

I also got out to take some photos of the Sport Relief Mile run which was at the front of the theatre. There were a couple of ministers there, including Alun Pugh who seemed to want to tell me about everything he was doing, which was rather... interesting. Got talking to a camera guy from the BBC who had also been harangued by said minister.

Today was nice and relaxing - having got up rather late (see getting in late after a rather physical day) Sioned & myself headed off to Gower's Bridge for a nice picnic. We then wandered into Llandudno where we almost had someone crash into the arse end of us (kudos to the guy behind for leaving a big enough gap: Someone went into his back, and shunted him forward. Fortunately, not into us though), and got ice cream.

This afternoon and evening has mainly been catching up on telly - I'm just watching the end of the French GP whilst I write this which seems to be showing a change in fortunte for Renault. I think the comment made during the qualifying that the championship is far from over seems to be holding true. I'm currently on lap 53 which shows MSC over 32 seconds leading. I think this could really throw the table open.

Jenson Button didn't have his best weekend today, although I was pleased to see Kimi Raikkonen finishing a strong third place, and thus choe to wear my West McLaren shirt with pride.

Sioned & myself have just returned from a meal in Llandudno. Once again she pointed out the amount of England flags across the prom as we went for a walk after eating. It's strange. Even though Wales are apparently in the World Cup (obviously, not following the tournament I've got no idea. Football is a total mystery to me), I can't say I've seen any Welsh flags being flown. Is this a reflection on the Welsh, or more on the British culture of following anyone even though we're pretty sure they're going to fail?

Still, in a month, the World Cup will be over and we'll be able to go out or watch telly, and generally live without having the bloody thing rammed down our throats at every opportunity.