Hamilton gets stuffed.

Into the tirewall at the Nurburgring in the third session of Qualifying for the European GP!

Replays show an apparent right front tire failure, Lewis Hamilton losing control and veering right and off track and into the tirewall. Looks like he was a bit shaken by it.

This doesn’t bode well for a continued podium streak at the race tomorrow, but knowing Hamilton’s aggressiveness he will certainly give it a go.

Edit: He was carried off the track on a stretcher with what looks like an IV bag, but he was giving a thumbs up sign and waving. Not sure if he’s racing tomorrow. Dang.

107 Geeky T-Shirts That Don’t Suck (and then some)

Out of the 107 listed at Internet Duct Tape, I’d like to have these fancy threads:

Caffeine Molecule from ThinkGeek

Vintage Optimus Prime by Coreano from Etsy

There’s no place like 127.0.0.1 from ThinkGeek

CTRL+Z from Threadless

What would MacGyver do? from Threadless 

 

Sith Abandon Ship by Simon Noynay from Oddica

 

Some other personal favorites not in the list:

Exploded Boombox by Troy Paiva from Oddica. 

Contra Eternal (The Konami Code) from 80s Tees.com

Why aren’t there shirts like that in my part of the world?

Yo Mama got Jinternets!

And a lot of it too.

40Gbps of it, in fact. To you and me, that’s the capability to download a full-length movie from the internet in 2 seconds.

Sigbritt Lothberg of Sweden, 75, arguably has the fastest residential broadband connection in the world.

The connection requires at least USD100,000 worth of Cisco equipment (including a Cisco CRS-1 and OC768 DWDMPOS linecard, for the initiated/nerds/geeks), but I think she ran out of rackspace in her home’s datacenter and has had to put said expensive hardware in the garage:

More pics found here.

And what does she do with it? Read online news sites.

Before any of you gearheads start raising hell about the waste of bandwidth and equipment, just remember that this is a technology demonstrator to show that it’s possible to have high-bandwidth connections over long distances (up to more than 1,000 miles apart) between two network routers.  Or at least Sigbritt’s son claims.

Super Aguri F1 Team Merchandise

I’ve received quite a few questions on where to get Super Aguri F1 (SAF1) team merchandise.

They’re quite hard to get, it seems. I was asking for SAF1 stuff at the Sepang F1 racetrack merchandise booths earlier this year and was met with blank, if pretty, stares from the ladies manning the counters.

 This unabashed fan of Takuma Sato and SAF1 has done quite some bit of rummaging around the jinternets and did find Bosco Moto, perhaps the only place you can see decent Super Aguri merchandise. They certainly have pretty stuff.

The Super Aguri F1 Cap

The obligatory Super Aguri F1 Polo / Pit Shirt

A cool-looking, if a bit impractical, Super Aguri F1 Backpack

 

Or… The All-You-Can-Eat Super Aguri F1 Team merchandise set (approx. JPY73,500/USD600), complete with several shirts, backpack, caps, trolleybag, neckstraps, beltbag, stickers and a brolly (umbrella to us US-English folks, for those rainy British GPs)!

That said, I haven’t tried ordering anything from them as I really don’t have the extra cash for an SAF1 shirt. Plus the fact that there’s no option to order online. Anyone from Japan want to send a pit/polo shirt over? I think my size is Medium.

I’ve also seen them being sold on Ebay.

BTW, you might see “Samantha Kingz” plastered all over the merchandise, and even on the Super Aguri F1 SA007 racecar. That’s because Samantha Kingz is the men’s line of leading Japanese fashion house called Samantha Thavasa. Why they would be pouring a lot of money (judging by the size of their sponsorship logos on the cars and merchandise) into F1 is something beyond me. Hugo Boss does the same with McLaren, but they’re not as prominently displayed.

All-in-all, cool SAF1 stuff from Japan, but always be careful about ordering anything over the internet!

Formula One British GP 2007 (and other F1 snippets)

Okay, so I’m a bit late to this party (almost two weeks).

It was a good race, and finally everyone gets to see that Super Rookie Hamilton can (and will) make mistakes every now and then, like trying to pull off a quick pitstop getaway while the lollipop is still in front of him. Christijan Albers jumped the gun in the same way and took half of his refuelling rig along with him to retirement, and he’s since lost his job; well he lost his Spyker seat because of an alleged misunderstanding with one of his personal sponsors, but making your car look like it’s got some giant mutant bloodsucking worm on it in the French GP surely added salt to the wounds. Plus he’s been consistently outqualified by his Spyker team mate, Adrian Sutil.

Lewis miraculously pulled up a fast qualifying lap to bag final P1, even if he was slower during the Practice sessions and first two rounds of qualifying. He just didn’t have the pace during the race. Still he was in third place and his podium place streak continues.

And oh yeah, he’s got the flu. Must be a slow day in the F1 newsroom.

The British GP was overshadowed by Stepneygate, the scandal that rocked F1, but there were no signs that the drivers or the teams have been affected much at that race. Of course, a lot has happened in two weeks, with notable things being that Honda is involved in the F1 industrial espionage case, and that the sport’s governing body FIA has summoned McLaren for investigation.

In other news, Super Aguri didn’t do so well on this one.

On to other stuff… like the absence of the USGP next year. Seems like Indianapolis Motor Speedway boss Tony George and F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone couldn’t agree to the terms to keep the USGP in the 2008 race calendar. I think it’s purely monetary (i.e. Bernie wants more of it).

Too bad.

But for those of us who also like two-wheeled racing, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway will instead host a second US round of MotoGP, what is considered to be the Formula One of the motorcycle world. A bit of historical trivia here: The first ever race on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was a motorcycle race, and MotoGP World Championship motorcycles return there 99 years after that race. Preparations are now being done to refit the F1 track at Indy to be suitable for MotoGP racing.

Ironically, if F1 does return to Indy, they may have to use the MotoGP track configuration.

Transfomers Movie Sequel in 2009?

Reading the comments and reviews about the 2007 Transformers Movie by Michael Bay, there looks to be two camps appearing:

ZOMG, Awesoma!

or

It’s crap!

For whatever reason. Thankfully (for me at least), it’s more of the ZOMG, Awesoma kind rather than the smelly-filthy-pile kind. It also helps that it’s become a bona fide blockbuster for the summer. Which bodes well for a sequel. Which could be in the works as Transformers 2 at IMDB.

Do take that particular entry with a grain of salt. But if you’ve stayed long enough to see some of the epilogue scenes in the Transformers movie shortly after the end credits rolled, you’ll have an inkling of who might be playing a more visible role in the next one.

If this rumor is true then 2009 is going to be a looooooooooooong wait.

And Lewis Does It Again!

Amidst the brouhaha over the scandal that threatens to turn this F1 season upside-down, there is still that new-found excitement that we have come to expect every race weekend.

Lewis Hamilton shrugged off doubts over his ability to stake out the pole position in the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, and pulled off a suspense-filled Q3 session yesterday be the first British driver get pole at his home race in 11-years.

This after everyone was looking at Kimi’s dominating practice times over the weekends, and Alonso’s very strong performance during the earlier Q1 and Q2 qualifying sessions. Alonso even tried to overtake Lewis coming out of the pitlane in Q3, but Hamilton wasn’t having any of it.

In other news, personal favorite Takuma Sato is second to the last on the grid, and his Super Aguri teammate, Anthony Davidson didn’t have a good day either with him running into the gravel and qualifying 19th.

Can’t wait for the 6 hours until the race!

iPod killed the Transformers Star.

Ever wondered what happened to Megatron’s ever-loyal-yet-blackmailing-soldier-slash-tapedeck, Soundwave? He didn’t get into the new movie, but apparently he’s been up to something after the 1986 Transformers movie. (Video contains cusswords and innuendos. Stay away, kiddies!)

“Kids don’t even know what cassettes are. Lots of them don’t even buy CDs anymore… They use iPo…” *Click*

Classic.

And just in case you DON’T KNOW what a tape CASSETTE is (there might be quite a few of you out there), it’s magnetic tape spooled around two reels in a plastic case, used to store analog audio and some data stuff long long ago. Like what you use in miniDV cameras and data archiving, expect that they’re prone to tape entanglement that frequently resulted in the user tearing apart the cassette and ripping out the tapes like entrails from an animal carcass.

An audio tape cassette containing the sounds of my life (make your own at Says-It.com!):

You play them on a “tapedeck” like the Sony Walkman below. Yessirree kids, the Walkman has been around since the dinosaurs ruled the planet, and the name didn’t start with the Sony MP3 player or the mobilephone gimmick of Sony and Ericsson.

Get the straightdope on Cassettes here, and on Soundwave here.

Shenanigans in F1!

Ferrari’s not only back, they’re also on the legal warpath.

They’ve filed suit against one of their mechanics, Nigel Stepney for allegedly sabotaging their F1 cars with a mysterious “white powder” and leaking proprietary information, then sacked him. Stepney, who’s currently on vacation somewhere here in my part of the world, denies the allegations.

McLaren, for that matter, has suspended a senior member of the technical team after they confirmed that this person had “personally received a package of technical information from a Ferrari employee at the end of April.”

 Of course, McLaren deny that they took any advantage of it. I’m no expert, but I believe that car development takes time measured in weeks or months; if they got stolen information from Ferrari only in April I would think any such adjustments would just be coming out… right about last month. Hm. Gotta rethink that.

The whole shebang is probably the biggest F1 scandal in recent history and threatens to cast a shadow over the legitimacy of the races this season. The whole timing of this thing is really unfortunate as we’ve been having an exciting season so far. There’s a quick summary with links to the full stories behind this sordid story over at Planet-F1.

I can certainly appreciate pitlane drama, but this scandal is just too much excitement for me especially if it means that the Drivers and Constructors Championship will be decided in the courts and not on the racetracks. Certainly bad news for Lewis Hamilton who’s currently leading the points chart.

Shenanigans! This post has the official seal of dismay.

The Glaring Omission in the 2007 Transformers Movie

I had a great time watching it, as I previously said. But all the while, I felt that something was missing.

• Giant transforming robots. Check.
• That “transforming” sound. Check.
• Homages to the cartoon series. Check.
• Gratuitous shots of Megan Fox. Check.
• Cool (or cheesy, depending on age group) songs by The Cars (Drive), Marvin Gaye (Sexual Healing) and Player (Baby Come Back). Check.

Or not. Then it occurred to me. There was one 80s song (or two) from some singer named Stan Bush that should’ve been somehow bludgeoned into this summer’s Transformers movie. It needs more cheesiness.

For those who can’t make the connection, Stan Bush’s “You’ve Got The Touch” was a defining moment in the original 1986 Transformers: The Movie.

Probably the best moment in that movie (for someone who was less than ten years old that time):

An even cheesier video, with Stan Bush hisself!

Stan Bush is Good Enough for Dirk Diggler! (awesome Marky Mark scene from Boogie Nights)

You think the bass is taking away from the vocal?

LMAO.