Let’s start with my overnight camping trip out to Lake Cheney (photos). It was nice to get away from Buttonwood Tree for 24 hours after spending 9 months on the complex, I thoroughly enjoyed my night away with Travis, Amber, Erin, Conner, it was wonderful to chill out with friends even if Conner did wet himself twice, which has continued through to this week, we have no idea why he is suddenly wetting himself. Anyway camping is something I always enjoyed so it was great to get out in the wilderness with my new found family. If you can call it wilderness when you have showers and toilet blocks within 50 yards. That’s not what I call true camping, wilderness means no amenities at all, real camping is a tent, sleeping bag, camping stove and charcoal grill. I guess that will have to change now I have a family. We are looking at going back out to Lake Cheney for my birthday to rent a cabin effectively celebrating my birthday and having a mini honeymoon! Which of course will be without Conner if we can find a babysitter!
It’s been an eventful week for F1; first Felipe Massa’s severe head injury after being hit by a spring from Barrichello’s car at more than 150mph and crashing into the tyre wall. Fernando Alonso qualifying on pole position in his Renault, obviously running incredibly light, a glory run if you like. Then having that pole position thrown away by a pit stop screw-up leading to his right front wheel flying off and subsequently Renault being banned from the next race. Which I personally think is a knee jerk reaction by the stewards after Massa’s accident and the death of Henry Surtees the weekend before in F2. McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton eventually won the race followed home by the lone Ferrari of Kimi Raikkonen followed by Red Bull’s Mark Webber in third after his team mate Sebastian Vettel retired. Jenson Button could only manage seventh place again struggling with tyre problems for the third consecutive race. Mark Webber moved ahead of Vettel in the world drivers championship cutting Button’s championship lead to 18.5 points. Things aren’t looking so rosy for Brawn and Jenson Button right now as McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull have caught and passed Ross Brawn’s car. And finally today Michael Schumacher is announced as Ferrari stand-in driver for injured Felipe Massa, which must really piss off Ferrari’s reserve drivers being overlooked again by the Maranello based team. And even bigger, if not unexpected news is that BMW will be pulling out of F1 at the end of the season. Toyota have been quick to pour cold water on new rumours about the Japanese company following BMW out of F1. Renault’s future is in doubt as well with the French manufacturer indicating earlier in the season that this may be Renault’s last season in F1 but it has not been mentioned since!
I have also been having problems with my HP DV9820ea laptop over the past few weeks. The – and + volume lights on the QuickPlay panel above the keyboard keep on turning off after a certain period of time, sometimes after minutes, other times after a few hours. The soft touch volume button still works but it’s damn annoying that it’s doing this after just 12 months of ownership. Of course the stock answer from HP is to restore my computer to the original condition when I bought it. Which I obviously don’t want to do as I have everything set up the way I like it and have thousands of purchased music files on my laptop with no way to back them up at this time, backing up 120GB onto 4.7GB DVDs is such a chore. Also another problem that I managed to solve is a problem installing the HP active support library because of a dodgy installer that doesn’t copy the required .msi file to the C:/Windows/Installer directory. So I eventually worked that out and moved the .msi file to the required directory and it installed!