Posey’s Perspective on F1 Racing

This is a short clip from Speed Channel’s Formula 1 Debrief of May 11, 2012. I posted it because I really agree with what Sam Posey says. Formula racing is supposed to be almost anything goes with basic rules for safety and class limits. F1 racing has become so limited by the rules that it is incredibly difficult to make the cars different at all. Enjoy the video especially the Red Bull Racing concept car at the end.

F1 may have blackballed Force India racing from TV but we know they are there. I’m posting Force India photos here to make up for them not being shown on TV.

For those of you unaware of the situation last years Bahrain F1 race was cancelled because of civil unrest in the country. It was deemed unsafe for F1 to travel there. This years race was giving the green light at the very last minute despite many nervous teams. Wednesday a car carrying Force India team members came under attack. The road was barricaded with burning debris and Molotov Cocktails were hurled at the car. The Force India team escaped but not before being hit by tear gas being fired at the protesters. Two of the team members were permitted to immediately return home to England.

Friday the Force India team skipped FP2 and left the track as early as possible to reorganize the team get back to the hotel before dark. Because the team did not appear in FP2 they were blackballed from Saturday TV coverage by F1! Even though one of their cars qualified for Q2 and the other car made it all the way into Q1 they were NEVER shown on TV! Force India may be invisible on television but they are not invisible here!

F1 may not be showing images of Force India but I will. I’ll be drinking a Kingfisher in their honor tomorrow!

It is understandable that the team members and their families are concerned about their safety. They should be praised for being there; not ridiculed and punished for closing shop early to get the team to a hotel before dark. The top teams are put up at the Sofitel next to the track but the teams farther back on the grid must make a 20 mile drive into town and the heart of the riots.

Ancestry.com offered its 1940′s record collection for free this week so I did a little looking and found the passenger manifests with my fathers name and the ship he served on. During WWII my father was an Ensign Radio Operator aboard the SS Haverford Victory merchant ship. A little Google’ing and I came up with pictures of his ship.

The Victory ship (officially VC2) was 455 feet long and 62 feet wide. Her cross-compound steam turbine with double reduction gears developed 6,000 horsepower. Typically, Victorys were armed with: One 5 inch stern gun, one 3 inch bow gun and eight 20 mm machine guns. These were the next-generation Liberty Ships.

832 Haverford Victory, VC2-S-AP2/WSAT (1597)/USAT

Keel layed: May 8, 1945
Launched: June 20, 1945
Delivered: July 23, 1945
1945 HAVERFORD VICTORY, U.S. War Shipping Admin., Baltimore. (J. H. Winchester Co), troop transport.
1947 Renamed GRIPSKERK, N.V.Vereenigde Nederl. Scheeps.Maats, The Hague.
1947 Renamed MELISKERK, same owners.
1964 Renamed PERSIAN CAMBYSSES II, Marcieria Cia Nav., Piraeus..
13.11.68 Put into Durban with machinery damage, detained for debt. Seized by South African authorities and sold to Caphelonia Shipping Co, South Africa.
1970 Renamed TIEN TAI, Time Lines Ltd, Panama.
1972 Scrapped Taiwan.

This is a Haverford Victory memorial cover I purchased on Ebay.

After watching Southpark and seeing that cats can evolve to be equal with humans our cat Timmy went with the In Bread Meme.

Round up your mates for a GUINNESS

These days with fast processors and large amounts of memory the performance bottleneck on most computers is disk access. Start a program and watch the Disk Access led come on and wait. There are expensive solutions such as SSD drives and RAID O setups but if you just want to speed up your current PC on the cheap give disk defragmentation software a try. I use and recommend UltraDefrag.

20 years ago it seems like everyone defragmented their disk drives as a regular maintenance routine. Today it seems like most people either don’t know what you are talking about or have just gotten out of the habit. Over time creating and deleting files caused them to get spread out all over your hard disk. When files consist of many little fragments scattered around the disk the computer needs more mechanical work to read them. Because of that the disk access becomes slower.

Microsoft includes disk defragmenting software with Windows but it is quite basic and not very good. I use the free UltraDefrag software on all my computers and they are noticeably faster after running the disk optimize routine. UltraDefrag reduces the file fragmentation, thus it makes disk operations faster. Also the program can optimize a whole disk placing all the files to the fastest part of the disk, its beginning. In contrast with the most other disk defragmenters UltraDefrag can defragment locked files by running during the Windows boot. Actually all files including registry hives and page-file can be defragmented there.

You may do a boot time defrag of encrypted disks, but you can still defrag and optimize them under Windows. This is because lsass.exe, the component of the operating system that reads encrypted disks, is still not loaded at a time of the native applications execution. (I encrypt my laptop as I am afraid of it getting stolen and someone getting into my passwords.)

UltraDefrag runs on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, including all 64 bit versions of Windows. Supported file-systems are FAT12/16/32, exFAT and NTFS.

UltraDefrag Website

Windows has a nifty function called Send To. Right-click on any file and the popup menu has Send To option with a little arrow next to it. When you select it a menu of options appears. Double-clicking on a file opens it in its default application but Send To lets you do something else with it. Double-click on a .JPG file and it opens in some image viewing software but Send To can send it to your editing software. The problem is that since Windows XP it isn’t exactly clear how you personalize the Send To list. Here is how:

Click Start then click Run and type sendto into the box and click OK.

Up will pop Windows Explorer with all your SendTo shortcuts. Just delete the ones you don’t want. To add new ones just go to your start menu and click-and-drag the applications you want into your Send To Explorer box. Now you have a custom Send To list

My main computer started getting random Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) MEMORY_MANAGEMENT crashes with the following code: STOP: 0x0000001A (0×00041284, 0x254BF001, 0x00003A29, 0xC0883000) These crashes usually happened in the middle of the night.

In checking the Dump files (located in the folder windows/minidump) I found that my Norton Anti-Virus was the likely culprit. The last line in the dump file was: Probably caused by : SYMEVENT.SYS ( SYMEVENT+14a69 ) which is a Norton file.

This is where most people just tell you to uninstall Norton to fix the problem. And it works except that now you don’t have your anti-virus software.

A little research and I found that this happens when things happen too fast in memory and one execution gets done before it should and Norton trips on itself.

Well, I had overclocked my system not too long ago and was running my memory a little faster than I should. I had my DDR2 800 memory running at 840MHz or so. I went into my BIOS and turned my DRAMM Frequency down the next step to 680MHz.

Problem solved. It’s been weeks since I’ve had a MEMORY_MANAGEMENT BSOD. I hope this helps someone.

I’ve been having a Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR on my laptop for a while. It hits when I shutdown the computer. To go with it I get the cryptic 0×00000077 (0xC00000A3, 0xC00000A3, 0×00000000, 0x32A8000) message.

For me the fix turned out to be really easy. I just did the following:

Click Start then click Run and type chkdsk /f /r in the box and then click OK.
At the command prompt type Y in answer to the question about letting the disk scanner run when you restart the computer.
Restart your computer.
Chkdsk will run in the middle of the startup.

Depending on the size of your drive it can take Chkdsk a while to check your entire drive so don’t do this until you can be without your computer for a while. Since doing this my computer has been BSOD free

Hope this helps someone.

Windows 8 Preview

Windows 8 is here! This is not the final version, but it’s close. Windows 8, which likely won’t be available as a shipping product for some time, marks an aggressive turn for Microsoft. The completely revamped OS borrows heavily from the Windows Phone 7 user experience, with the Metro-style interface. Just as important, it brings together many types of user input–from touch to keyboard to mouse. Check the official Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview webpage here. This is not only a beta product several months away from release, it is also dramatically different from any operating system you’ve used before.

The Windows 8 Metro interface is the signature of the new operating system, and one that borrows from Windows Phone 7, which–despite high praise from many reviewers-still hasn’t made much of a dent in smartphone market share. However, this user experience is pretty intuitive. It doesn’t take much thought. And, by using either the touch or mouse interface, you can do things like go to the bottom left (where the normal Windows Start button would be) to get to your apps; going to the top left corner you can run through your apps, and dragging down slightly lets you see all of your running apps. There are many similar, accessible features built into Windows 8.

I haven’t tried it yet but here are some instructions I received to set it up on your Windows computer alongside your current Windows OS. To run Windows 8 separate from your current OS you’ll need to create a disk partition, which means clearing out a blank space on your computer for Windows 8 to install to.

Open the Start Menu and right click on the “Computer” option. Click “Manage”, and in the window that appears, click on “Disk Management” in the left sidebar.

Find your system hard disk in the graphical list that appears in the bottom pane. Right-click on it and then click “Shrink Volume”. Shrink it down so you have at least 20GB of space left on the end of the drive, and click OK. Then, click on the “Unallocated” block of that drive that appears and click “New Simple Volume”. Click Next on the next few windows until you get to the “Format Partition” window. Here, give it a volume label you’ll recognize (like “Windows 8″) and click Next. It should format the drive for you. Now you’re all set to install Windows 8.

Your PC will now boot into Windows 8 by default, but if you want your previous version to auto-start, go to “Change Defaults or Choose Other Options” from the Windows 8 boot menu.

Download Windows 8 Consumer Preview Setup Here

Windows 8 Consumer Preview Setup will check to see if your PC can run Windows 8 Consumer Preview and select the right download. Setup also features a compatibility report and upgrade assistance. You can download a .ISO DVD image but I suggest you run the Consumer Preview Setup first to see software you are using that is incompatible with Windows 8. You can gather upgrades before doing the install.

Download an .ISO image Here

Use this activation key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview will last until 1/15/2013. You can buy Windows 8 when it’s released and install it, or you can reinstall your previous Windows operating system. A release date for Windows 8 has not been announced yet. Please note: You can not uninstall the Consumer Preview. To go back to your previous version of Windows, you’ll need to reinstall it from the recovery or installation media that came with your PC, and reinstall your programs. The Windows 8 Consumer Preview is stable and has been thoroughly tested, but it’s not the finished product. Your PC could crash and you could lose important files. You should back up your data and you shouldn’t test Windows 8 Consumer Preview on your primary home or business PC. For more info – Windows 8 Consumer Preview FAQ.

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