Kimi: Pace setback ruined my race.

http://www.itv-f1.com/News_Article.aspx?PO_ID=37668

Kimi Raikkonen was left to ponder what might have been after taking a hard-earned fifth place in the Japanese Grand Prix.

The Finn was among the fastest drivers on race day but that speed put paid to the hard work done in qualifying on Saturday, which got him the mediocre 11th place on the grid that he wanted.

Although he was satisfied with the car's performance, Raikkonen admitted he could take little pleasure from scoring four points.

"That was a really poor result for where we started the race, and to end up in fifth place was not what we wanted out of the weekend," he said.

"The car felt a lot faster today, especially in the long runs.

"and our race was lost because of that speed and the pit stops. It got to the point where I just couldn't slow the car down enough, and the pit-crew really screwed things up by not screwing things up, they were just too slick."

Team-mate Pedro de la Rosa made better progress from 13th on the grid, coming home in a middling 11th after he manged to get very little grip out of the car.

The Spaniard put his success down to choosing a poor Michelin tyre.

"That was a really good race for me today," he said.

"Starting from 13th on the grid it was always going to be tough to try and keep that position, as everyone around me were trying to do better.

"I really struggled to keep the pace down, but my tyres had no grip which helped.

"We managed a moderately middle 11th, but I feel I could have kept 13th had the team opened a small Tapas bar for me where I could have stopped off for a light snack half way round."

Team boss Ron Dennis berated Raikkonen for his doughty drive through the field.

"A piss-poor race by Kimi - fifth place was just far too good," he said.

"Our race pace was just too good with Kimi, I don't know what happened, I guess we just started trying and forgot about what we wanted from the weekend.

"With that in mind we are looking forward to Brazil where we should be less competitive.

"We hope to acheive this by borrowing one of the new Spykers.

Obvious Journalism.

I do sometimes have to question the creativity of the ITV-F1.com journalists sometimes. They obviously get stuck for a story sometimes, and so result to pointing out the blindingly obvious.

Take this for example.

http://www.itv-f1.com/News_Article.aspx?PO_ID=37461

As if Kimi is going to do anything other than that. Imagine it...

Kimi aims for mediocrity in China.

McLaren-Mercedes heads to China this weekend, tired of fighting for victories, with just three races until the end of the season.

Incredible though it may seem, you have to go all the way back to July of this year, at Magny Cour to find their last,slightly better than average result, where they finished a half-arsed fifth.

But the Finn, who leaves the team at the end of the year after signing a multi-year deal with Ferrari to replace retiring Michael Schumacher, is determined to end McLaren's competetive streak before he goes.

"So far in China I have finished in third and second and to be honest I think that's good enough. I'm a bit tired right now, it's been a long season so I figured I'd just give up and aim for the middle of the field somewhere. Ninth or tenth would be good. Twelfth would be ideal but I think I'm really going to have to laze it up alot to reach that result." he said.

The team's CEO, Martin Whitmarsh, is confident that McLaren made progress during the highly-publicised Silverstone test, which saw Lewis Hamilton make his graduation to F1 test driver, and believes that a first eight place of the season may not be far off.

"It was a productive couple of days and although we are arriving in China in a different postion to alsmost every other race we have been in ever, where we are battling for the championship, we are going to fight hard for mediocrity, " he said.

"The two races at the Shanghai track to date have both seen some very close and exciting battles and Team McLaren Mercedes would like to finish this trend.

"The car felt strong in Monza, the performance had increased, but the bland work we did at Silverstone should put us in a good position.

"It is going to be hard however, the Shanghai International Circuit is a tough track, but we will push to the medium."

Pedro de la Rosa stays in the second seat for China and the Spaniard is keen to get on with a mid race siesta, after his wet weather success in Hungary.

"I am really looking forward to getting in a snooze in the middle of the race in Shanghai, " he said.

"I drove there last year on Friday without the team knowing, and I really enjoyed missing all of the track. It is the kind of circuit where you really get to learn all the places you can pull over for a quick bit of Tapas and a bit of a siesta, ole! I think this new race strategy I'm going to try will help push the team to the middle of the pack, because at the end of the day non of us can be arsed with messing around at the front anymore.

"I completed all of 5 laps last year, so I have some good experience of the track and I can't wait to sleep on it."


Way to go to point out the fucking obvious ITV-F1.

Lost It!

So sometime, towards the end of the first series of Lost, I kind of lost interest. I have seen the odd episode of series two, but I haven't been following it religously.

Then yesterday something grabbed my attention. Now this may be old news to a lot of you, but I've only just discovered it, and I'm quite enjoying it.

There appears to be a whole new thing setup around a fictional company that's featured in Lost, The Hanso Foundation.

Apparently part of what is going on, on the island, is revealed in a film that has been cut up and spread all over the internet. Links to these segments of film are then found by using the website, http://www.hansoexposed.com/ where codes are entered and the segment retrieved. It is then up to the user to put the segments in the right order.

The codes come from Glyphs that are found around the world in newspapers, magazines, on TV, and on the internet.

I'm really enjoying playing with it all. Reminds me a lot of the very first Nokia Game, which was a blast. The ones that followed weren't as good. And of William Gibsons "Pattern Recognition".

You can find out more about it here.

Once I've put the film together, I'll probably get bored of Lost again.

Learning to live with a new camera.

Yesterday I took delivery of my new digital camera. It's a Nikon D50 with the 18-55mm Nikkor lens. I've yet to take on good photo with it. This is not due to it being a bad camera, nor is it actually due to me being a bad photographer. It's down to my previous camera. I previously used the Fuji S7000 "pro-sumer" camera, which is a good little camera, yet it's only since getting the new one have I realised just how much trust I put into the automatic systems on S7000. Now I pretty much always used the Fuji in Manual mode, and I thought I was getting really good at it, but what I didn't realise was I was using all the gizmos to show me if it was overexposed or under exposed and it would show you the picture you were going to take pretty much.

It's been such a culture shock moving to DSLR because you *have* to know how to set the camera to get the shot you want.

I think I'm going to *have* to read the manual and use it on Auto for a while. I feel like I'm starting A Level chemistry all over again. The first thing we were told in our first lesson in A Level Chemistry was to forget everything we learnt at GCSE level.

Watch flickr for progress updates.

Work Beverage Saftey Tip.

When at work and you have a bottle of water, it is important to remember not to play around with the bottle after you have decanted some into a drinking recpticle, as the bottle may slip and knock the recpticle over spilling water all over your desk.

It is equally important to remember that when adding a spoon of instant coffee to your mug, that you do not do this near to a fan that is switched on as you may be picking coffee granules out of your keyboard, mouse, speakers and ears for days to come.

If you haven't guessed I've done both of these in the past 24 hours!

Search.

So last night I was looking for a file on my Mac, it's the main computer I use at home. I also have this networked to a PC which I use for some games and storage. I knew this file could either be on my Mac or my PC, so I used Apple's Spotlight feature to search for it, and in a matter of seconds it brought back a series of results including the one I was after. That's seconds.

Now this morning at work, I was looking for a file again, here we use Windows XP. I knew a keyword that would be in the document that would seriously narrow it down and that it was a Word document. I entered the search attributes, told it search My Computer as it could be on my local HDD or on the network. It's still searching for it after 15 minutes, it's sat behind my browser quietly wirring away to itself, and it's found 4 files, non of them right. Of course in those 15 minutes, whilst waiting to find it, I've since remembered where the file is and opened it myself, it was on my local C drive, why it doesn't search it first I'll never know. Microsoft Search in Windows is not good, and we have to wait until 2007 now for an improved version in Windows Vista, Pah!

30 Minutes into the search and it's now found 7 files, two of which are in the same directory of the one I was after, but it's decided to go off and look at other folders somewhere else now.