It seems that the balance of power in F1 has shifted towards those Italians in red taking their third consecutive win with Michael Schumacher leading a Ferrari 1 – 2 today at Hockenheim in Germany. Renault struggled today without their ‘mass damper system‘ only managing a relatively lowly 5th and 6th place finish, behind the two Ferrari’s, Kimi Raikkonen’s McLaren and Jenson Button’s Honda. Jenson and Honda are happy to finish the race in 4th, although are disappointed that they got passed by Raikkonen late on in the race, but at least they finished where they started the race! Renault are hoping for a u-turn by the FIA and allow them to use their ‘mass damper system’ in the next race in Hungary and for the rest of the season. Renault struggled today with blistering of their tyres, although many people reckon that the banning of the mass damper system has caused the blistering issues. It’s safe to say that momentum has swung the way of Ferrari, and Alonso and Renault will need to fight for the championship instead of running away with it as was predicted after the early season form they displayed! All this means that the coming months should be more exciting to watch, I would rather see Alonso win rather than Schumacher, but I still like to see a fight to the end of the season. I hope that the FIA don’t back down over the mass damper system, as I believe that F1 relies on technology too much, and personally I would like to see all electronic driver aids banned completely, make it man and machine as it was meant to be; that’ll sort the men out from the boys!
Time for an update on the Helen situation, maybe stupidly (or not) as the case may be I told Stuart (one of the people I used to work with) over a few beers that I liked her in more than a friendship way. And now I fear that he’s going to say something to her, and destroy my friendship with her. I really do like her, but some of the things she says and does puts me off, because I tend to think could I actually live with her? I tend to think its a case of chalk and cheese, but other times it seems like we would be great for each other. But its the party girl thing I don’t like the most, she goes out three or four nights some weeks to the cattle market that is Jesters (Molesters). And of course the worry is that she’ll get a little drunk and get off with someone else, she keeps on meeting people in there that use her and she feels worthless afterwards, but she keeps on doing it! Obviously there would be a huge distrust there, so any sort of relationship would be doomed from the outset. I am looking for someone to settle down with, I can’t be bothered with all this clubbing lark all the time, I did that years ago and it really doesn’t appeal to me these days, although I do tend to go out every now and again, but that’s mainly because I am bored, which wouldn’t be a problem if I wasn’t single, I would be happy to stay home and do couple things, whatever that may be!
Tonight heralded the end of an era, Top of the Pops has been axed after 42 years on the air. There was an hour long show tonight reminiscing the past 42 years with a selection of previous presenters. Shakira and Wyclef Jean have the honour of claiming the last ever number one to be announced on TOTP. The show had been plummeting in the viewing figures for some time now, being bumped from a prime time Friday night slot to Sunday evening. Although I haven’t watched the show for some years now because of all the pop drivel that was on the show, it’s still sad to see such a long running show bite the dust! Especially as I grew up watching top of the pops back in the 80s and early 90s when music was generally much better in the top 40 chart, but alas the time is nigh… Rest In Pieces. Read some of the comments on the BBC website here, these people speak the truth!!! While you’re reading that, also have a look at this rant from my good friend Tomas about the current state of music, I really couldn’t agree more with his comments, of course I had to add my own comment at the bottom of the page, under my alter-ego ‘myownalias’
Finally, a couple of weeks ago Internet Explorer 7 Beta3 was released by Microsoft, and again has the crappy Microsoft WGA nonsense, so you can’t download it through the Microsoft website without validating your copy of Windows. So here’s the direct link to the file (ironically on the M$ FTP servers). Just download IE7 Beta3, extract the files using WinZip or WinRar, then download this file and copy it into the extracted ‘update’ sub folder, then run update.exe, followed by xmllitesetup.exe, reboot and update complete. Although you will need to remove IE7 Beta2 first before installing Beta3, that would be too simple!!! Of course, you could alway ditch Internet Explorer completely and download a real browser instead, check out either Mozilla Firefox (my personal choice) or Opera!