www.strider.co.za

After what I think is a record time of not posting to the site, I'm slowly but surely starting to clean it up. I've removed hopefully all spam user accounts and I sincerely apologise if I accidentally removed a legit account. Anyone can still create an account, but will now need my approval to become active. If there's no real name then I definitely won't approve it. In future I'll have content that only personal friends can see, so if you're still here reading after this dry spell, please create an account for yourself.

This whole week we were under the influence of a cold front, yesterday and today were slightly warmer though, so even though it was pretty cold early in the morning, it was still not cold enough for the cold weather tyres (type a). I ran them in the first qualifying but switched to warmer weather tyres (B3) after that.

I also tried out the drag brake feature on my Novak GTX for the first time. It works well but I had to adjust my driving style slightly. With drag brakes you can't lift off through a corner as your car will brake and spin out as a result.

I qualified in 2nd for the main race, behind Robert. I was looking forward to giving him a run for his money but unfortunately didn't finish as one of the screws on the rear right upright had worked itself loose. I'm gonna have to get some thread lock.

So a friend pointed out two things today after I forwarded her an afrikaans joke:

1. I don't blog much and surely there must be something to write about
2. I do still understand and use afrikaans

And it got me thinking. The online world is mostly english, you can get a long way with using english. I do really like the english language as well. In the past year or so though I have come to appreciate afrikaans more though. While I still prefer to type, IM and SMS in english I do listen to afrikaans music. One of my favourites is a band called Orkez. Besides me being biased because I went to school with the lead singer, they are really very good. Also, swearing in afrikaans is so much more fun than swearing in english.

As for point one, well, here you go

I've started www.rcnews.co.za where I hope to report on South African RC car racing news. It's also given me the opportunity to play with the new Drupal-4.7, which I must say is very very good.

If you're in South Africa, you'll know that leaded fuel is being phased out here and you now get different kinds of unleaded fuel.
Robin gave me this link which will tell you what kind of fuel to use for your car.

... don't use reverse psychology.

The best blonde joke I've seen. Worth a read ;)

Firstly, if you celebrate christmas, I hope you had a merry one. Secondly, happy new year

As the title says, iGot an iPod. I always knew people raved about them, and they looked pretty cool. But now that I have one, and I've played with it properly, I'm joining those who rave about it.

The one I have is the iPod Photo, 60G. 60gigs is a lot of music! Fortunately it works really well as a USB harddisk too

I'm really keen on running ipodlinux on it, unfortunately my model isn't supported yet, and I don't feel like breaking it by trying experimental stuff on it.

As far as syncing with Ubuntu goes, that works really well thanks to gtkpod.

I just don't know how to put photos on it yet, but the latest version of gtkpod can do album art.

Yesterday we had a 3 hour endurance race at Esswex. How does it work? A team consists of about 3 or 4 people, each with their own car and one transponder. One car drives around the track with the transponder until it's batteries run out or it has to stop for some other reason, the transponder is then moved to someone else's car and that person takes over. The team that finishes with the most laps after 3 hours wins. Our team consisted of 4 people, and we came second over all, which is really good considering that the winning team usually win everything

Second place prize? A sunburn

I'm currently on my way to Durban (I'm not driving) for work. So I thought I'd blog a bit. These last 3 weeks have been very busy at work, with 2 weddings in between. Congrats Robin & Julie and Thinus & Filia.

I'm very impressed with how well Opera on my P900 handles my site.

Don't blog and drive