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Showing posts from May, 2010

Turkish Grand Prix

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Impossible to sum this race up in two words. I found the prophesy from Legard and Palmer rather amusing:- "...he (Hamilton) wants the two Red Bull to start squabbling a bit..." "...they're not going to do that are they really?" So first thought was to say " Lap 40 ", but then a nine laps later we had Button and Hamilton fighting for the lead. And hence " Lap 49 " seemed appropriate. And then we had the "...by the way you haven't got much fuel left" from the pit wall, so " Low fuel " sprang to mind. However, my finally summary has to be " One-Two " :-) Most interesting part? Lewis Hamilton's girl friend flashing to the camera:- I like the way the McLaren mechanic is completely disinterested...

Death By CL

I've just spent a month over the last 4 days attending an IBM (AS400) "CL" programming course in Northampton. For those of you not in the know, "CL" stands for " Control Language " and is the IBM equivalent of DOS batch files with a bit of database file handling thrown in for good measure. It's about 100 years old and is the equivalent of your local hospital getting tips from Florence Nightingale . The tutor was surprisingly enthusiastic about it all. "I'm going to teach you all about DO-WHILE loops and SUBROUTINES", she gushed. Erm, I vaguely remember learning about them in 1975 and emulating them in assembler code in 1977. "What's your job?" she asked. "I'm a business analyst currently doing a web-based program using Visual Studio and ASP.NET, onto a SQL Server database". There was a slight pause and her eyes widened slightly - "Oh, never mind. Anyway." she continued "this is all new to ver

Sicily, or, Why Italians Drive Ferraris

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Day One: Drive to villa in Sicily and find entrance guarded by automatic gates. Hang around a bit wondering how they work and eventually get let in by friends who are already there. Drive 100 yards up the narrow drive to the parking spot at the top by the villa. Gates ^ Day Two: Drive down said long narrow drive and get let out of automatic gates by friend pressing the "open" button by the villa. Get back in later by phoning friend and pathetically pleading for them to open the gates. Day Three: Open gates myself by pressing button by the villa, get in car, drive down long drive to find gates shutting on their own. Can't get out of car because of narrow drive. Reverse back up narrow drive to villa, wife gets out to press button to open the gates, gets back in car and we drive down to find the gates shutting again. Have plan. Reverse back to villa, wife gets out and waits for me to drive down to front of gates. She presses the button and wait for gates to open. They don&#

Monaco Grand Prix

Ha, " missed it ". I was in Sicily with a bunch of very old - as in long time - friends and, nearly-old in age too. More on this...

The Spanish Grand Prix

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Well, all I can say is " did gardening ". Possibly there was some excitement when Hamilton blew a tyre, but overall it wasn't worth the time. If it hadn't been raining I probably would have cut the back lawn instead. Most interesting part? Discovering that my peas had started to germinate. ^ A pea

Thursday.

"bigot" - Brown Is Going On Thursday. ;-)