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Where was I at six AM this morning?
Watching the first practice session of Formula One’s Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix on Speed Channel.
Okay, it was more like seven thirty due to the wonders of time shifting. But I was still up-and-at-‘em like a kid on Christmas.
This was our first look at all the new cars, new livery, paint schemes, new drivers.
The race is on Sunday at 6am Eastern time. Speedtv.com
(the thing at the right is the track layout)
My friend Jeremy made this:
JUST CRUISE – Tom Cruise Running as Nike Commercial
There’s a trend in Tom Cruise movies, he runs, over and over again. After studying his filmography, we compiled this Tomontage as a mock Cruise version of the latest Nike commercial. Whether you want to BE LIKE TOM or DON’T LIKE TOM is your choice. Depending on your view, watching the Cruiser run through many acclaimed Bruckheimer and Spielberg titles may inspire you as much as the original Nike Awake commercial to jump out of bed, grab your Nike Air Max 360 trainers and run all over Teegeeack. Or, you may think: Tom Cruise runs alot, often with a pained look on his face, and we’ve watched too many Cruise films lately.
Watch and review this video on youtube or on ifilm and look for the upcoming “Tomarathon” exercise video – 26 minutes of Tom running – can you make it to finish line? Go Cole!
Contact us directly for more information, to share your comments, feedback or favorite Tom scenes: [email protected]. We’ll roll out an improved site shortly, with non-Tom related material, so check back soon. Curiousfury, a cure for common content.
I subscribe to the tag “F1” on flickr and noticed that a set of Honda images came through with the name Barrichello on them.
When I clicked on the link it took me his profile where it states the full name “Rubens Barrichello” and “I’m Male, 33 and Taken.”
Rubens Barrichello is a Formula One driver, who is 33 and married.
I wonder if this is really his own flickr feed. There about twenty pics up there now, all from a recent shoot with Ruben’s new team, Honda. Perhaps his marketing team set up the flickr feed? Either way it is kindof cool.
I am infatuated with the bodega “el gato” cats. My choice of delis is wide and I go with ones with cats when possible.
And I happen to be working from the lobby of the Algonquin hotel near Times Square and they have a super-premium hotel gato. I only have my camera phone camera handy and the light is too low to get a good pic, but picture a fluffy regal looking beast.
It hangs out on the marble check-in counter or on a luggage cart and has a little Japanese style nook near the entry way with its main bed/home base.
I mentioned it once before as part of a different post, but didn’t do the review justice.
Hamachi is a new VPN product/service that creates and manages VPNs end to end. You can have separate networks for different groups of computers. It handles NAT to NAT situations which is a killer feature. Normally if you have two ends of a VPN at least one of them has to have a non-NAT IP, but not with this.
I’m also using it as a remote support tool. On all the family computers I support, I’m installing it and configuring remote desktop for just the hamachi virtual network adapter. That way I can get secure access to those machines when I need to get fix something.
Now of course I have this post in draft mode and they had some problems with the directory servers this morning, but since this is still in alpha-beta mode and I think it totally rocks I’m willing to give them a break and chalk it up to growing pains.
I recommend setting the “block new members by default” to on. I also keep all my connections on my side blocked until I need to use them. And like I alluded to before you can control the firewall on the hamachi network pretty well using Windows XP’s SP2 firewall.
You know you are doing okay when your boat has a boat. … A Shadow Boat basically a boat that follows your yacht around and holds all the toys (helicopter, cars, boats, etc.) that might otherwise take up valuable lounging space on your megayacht. … [via Luxist]
The thing this seems to be missing is some kind of Starship Enterprise style docking mechanism. Ideally you’d build one mega-yacht and then detach the crew and copters and whatnot when you wanted to head into some remote bay for some quiet time. Heck, the crew would probably prefer it too, they’d have their own boat to party on.
My MP3 collection / iTunes library is moderately poorly tagged.
I have tried all kinds of automatic tagging tools in my day with very limited successes. MusicBrainz in its original incarnation was useless for my needs. I could name all the rest, but why, since hardly any of them work well.
The other day my brother Kevin mentioned a new alpha-stage product from them called Picard. From their overview:
Picard is the next generation tagger that will soon completely replace the classic MusicBrainz Tagger. Picard is an album oriented browser (as opposed to track oriented) and thus works quite a bit different than the old tagger. The 0.6 release of Picard does not make use of any fancy track lookup schemes like acoustic fingerprinting or text index look-ups. Even though Picard does not support these features, some users find they can tag music files faster with Picard than with the old acoustic fingerprinting tagger.
I have been using it for about two weeks now. The software itself is still really buggy, it crashes constantly, but I can see where they are going with it and I like it. One of the keys is the quality of the MusicBrainz album database, and it is quite good, although it lacks album art most of the time and definitely isn’t the best database out there, allmusic.com has consistently better data. And the search is quirky, doing things like searching for collaboration albums (“Calexico and Iron & Wine”) or misspelled titles is hard. But when it works it is wonderful.
iTunes isn’t making it any easier on me, since I have to remove the albums from the library, tag them and then re-import, which means losing all my rating and playcount information.
But at least now, before I import anything I run it through Picard first.
For “light duty” and running and whatnot, I have a 1gb iPod shuffle. Since my regular iPod is temporarily out of commission, (that is a story for an upcoming article) I’ve been using the shuffle day to day. I loaded some kick-ass songs on it, but no matter how kick-ass those songs are, once you’ve heard them all a few times an overwhelming need to get new songs appears.
I popped the sucker into an available USB slot and load iTunes. Once there, I cleared a bunch of songs and added some new ones. It would take 2–10 seconds per song to “update” and everything looked hunky dory. Except later while adjusting the seat on the stationary bike and finding out that none of my changes had taken and I was stuck listening to the same stuff as the day before. In escalating degrees of aggressiveness this same pattern happened for five straight days.
Finally, I deduced the problem and solution.
My problem was that since I’m constantly plugging in flash cards, external harddrives and stuff, drive letters get mixed up and the shuffle is too dumb to try and pick a new, empty one. It just goes with whatever you set it up originally on even if there is already something there. I have no idea where iTunes thought it was copying those files to, but it wasn’t where I wanted.
An airplane taxies in one direction on a moving conveyor belt going the opposite direction. Can the plane take off? http://www.straightdope.com/columns/060203.html
[via this Straight Dope hacked RSS feed I found]
Is the situation clear? A plane, 747 say, is put on a giant treadmill in such a way that the plane is stationary to an outside observer. The plane gets going faster and faster and the belt and wheels spin furiously, but the theoretically the plane is supposed to be able to take off. Supposedly the engines will pull the air backwards and allow the jet to takeoff normally.
Here’s a good case where some visualization would really help me believe this (I mean I guess I believe this to the extent that Cecil is a smart person(a) but I have doubts at the core my inner engineer). Sounds like a good job for the Mythbusters.
Thermodynamics 101, brought to you by the warmup sequence of a Formula 1 motor
Here we have an V10 F1 engine being revved hard, without the carbon fiber engine cover, on stands, at night. They manage to get the exhaust pipes to a seriously beautiful glow before they have to shut it down.
Normally you would never do this without either running the car — F1 cars like sharks in that they have to keep moving to keep cool or else they overheat in a matter of ninety seconds or so, engine idle speed is around 8,000 rpm — or having dedicated cooling systems around.
Since this is pretty reckless, I suspect this might have been the last days at Arrows, a team that quit F1 at the end of the 2002 season. It jives with the Orange uniforms and markings on the car. If anyone knows different let me know.
This is a 3.0 liter V10, previously on coreyh.com I had a link to an mpeg of a Cosworth 2.4 liter V8 doing 20,000 rpms.
[via MetaCool]
