Just Me

Drunk Driving, thats so easy to iliminate it baffles me as to why some of the car manufacurers haven’t already implemented it.

A while back I saw a post on the giz about this device and gigled to myself a little, it did seem like a step in the right direction though as most folks who drive and want to play there tunes from there ipod will want an FM transmitter so coupling it with a breathalyzer means you don’t have an excuse for not checking before putting that key in the ignition and heading home cause you’ve got an early Dail session in the morning

But seriously folks, here’s another area where technology could really help. If one of these breathalyzer devices was linked to the ignition of your car and you were forced to blow into it before you could start your car, of course if your over the limit your car is imobilised until someone who returns a sufficiently low result takes the test, then at least you’d have to get some sober person to conspire along with your own drunken insanity, and how many people are going to do that for someone?

Maybe these idea’s are a little extreme but they’re both fairer than the current penalty points system, maybe they could be used in conjunction with each other, say you get 6 points for speeding then you have to have the GPS tracker thingy on your car until your points expire, and this is noted on your license so if your stopped at a random checkpoint the garda is notified that you should have this device and can check etc. etc.

Similarly, all convicted drunk drivers would be forced to have the breathalyzing ignition system fitted and similar note on there license, in this case I would say permanently. there would still be a need for random checkpoints but it’s gotta be better value for money than having Gardai sitting in hedges?

What with my recent nowhere-near-fatal-accident and “that” pile up not so long ago, it’s fair to say that road safety has taken a more prominant place in my thoughts. I have a 110+ mile commute to and from the office so I drive a bit, it’s fair to say and the standard of driving I encounter on a regular basis is appalling. I’m not talking about speeding either.

Let’s start with the basics, Mirrors, they let you see whats coming behind you. It’s handy to check before you switch lanes or pullout in to traffic. Next up, indicators, they give other road users an “indication” of when we are about to change direction, you know like when your about to turn at a junction, switch lanes or even when your pulling out of a parking space.

I mean, the only thing’s that you ever hear of causing accidents in the news is speeding and drunk driving and if there really was a will to sort it out it could be quite simple and without resorting to draconian measures that grandad proposes, funny and all as they are. Although there is some sense in the drivers license that starts the car idea.

A more cost-effective solution would be to require all road vehicles to carry a GPS tracking chip, heck you can have these fitted to your car so it can be found easily if it’s stolen, simply use the technology to record only the times that a driver is exceeding the speed limit. The costs could be easily offset with the savings in paying the Gardai to sit in the hedgerows with there hairdryers. The government would still have the cash cow for speeding tickets, cause lets face it there will always be people who speed.

I remember hearing about an insurance company on the radio who offer discounted premiums to younger drivers once they have just the type of system I propose installed. The digital maps with the relevant speed zones indicated already exist so why can’t this be implemented? All it would need would be some politician to pick up on the idea, hell we can Eliminate smoking in public buildings why can’t we do this?

So, that’s speeding taken care of, simple as that, maybe an extra few quid on the price of your car but so what in the name of eliminating all those crashes caused by speeding.

So what about drunk drivers? How do we rid the roads of them… I think I might have an idea…

Last weekend, I woke early on Sunday morning a bit like a Kid on Christmas day, excited full of anticipation for what the day would bring. As we know at this point It wasn’t the best day for Ferrari in Suzuka. Michael’s championship hopes all but gone, he even said him self he didn’t want to win it like that, meaning Alonso not finishing in the last race. The constructors championship doesn’t look good for them either 9 point’s adrift but as we head into the last race of the season, the last race of an era even, I’m looking forward to what I hope will be a memorable climax of a phenomenal championship and career.

Anyway back to Suzuka, The pre-race coverage on ITV contained something very rare. They managed to grab an interview on race day, no less, with one of the most formidable men in F1, the evil genius behind the Ferrari conspiracy, Mr. Jean Todt. You can read it here.

I thought this was particularly interesting in reference to Felippe Masa. I can’t remember the last time I heard any team principle be so up front about there “second driver” and my hat goes off to him for not only standing up for his driver but also the way he slapped down the implied Ferrari conspiracy that Ted Kravitz was looking for confirmation on.

Congratulations Jean, I hope Felippe always has this much support from you

This week is a bit of a deviation from the script as it were. I’m leaving the reviews for now and I’m gonna post about FireFox 2 RC 2 (that’s release candidate) so this isn’t the final release but very close. That’s a very strategic play by Mozilla as Microsoft are about to release IE 7 as a “Critical security update” and essentially force the IE 6 users to upgrade whether they like it or not.

Anyway back to FireFox 2, whats new? well it’s not the tabbed browsing although they have added a “close” button to each tab which is a nice touch.

There is a new spellcheck as I type feature which for some reason doesn’t seem to work on my laptop but does on my office desktop, even though it’s enabled on both. That could be due to the laptop though but I will come back to that later.

My personal favourite new feature though is the “recover my tabs” feature, essentially if the browser is stopped unexpectedly you can open all the same tabs the next time you start FireFox. It also means that if you just leave the browser open when you shutdown your machine, your given the option to open the exact same tabs when you reboot. so if your like me and open tabs as you see interesting links but don’t always get to read them they are there when I next open the browser. It’s also great if windows falls over.

The last thing I want to mention is how efficient the code this browser uses is. The reason I mention this is because of my newsed laptop. As some of you are aware I recently acquired a second-hand Sony Vaio 505 notebook, it’s about 8 years old and the is limited by a 333Mhz Celeron CPU and 128Mb of ram not a giga-anything in sight I have been using it as a web browser, newsreader and of course for blogging as it’s small and light and means I’m not hogging the Media centre if someone else wants to use it.

I had tried to load the original FireFox on this machine but found it unbearable slow even with only a single tab open, whereas I barely noticed a difference in performance with IE 6. I am typing this post on an 8 year old laptop in FireFox 2 with 5 tabs open and 3 of those are web 2.0 sites. Mozilla I don’t know how you’ve done it but I’m stunned with the performance I’m getting on my retro hardware

It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against IE 7 and even more interesting to see how long it takes for Mozilla to finalise this release candidate. Looks like the browser wars are most definitely back on.

OMG! Words cannot describe how impressed I am with an application I just downloaded and installed. :O

“Huh, this is Musical monday whatrye talking about an application for?”

Well if your reading this then you’re probably on a computer with resonable internet connection and have some interest in music. Then this is every bit as vital an application for you as Pandora is a bookmark.

The application I am talking about is called Songbird and without getting into to much detail it’s a media player based on firefox. It’s opened my eyes to a part of the internet and the blogosphere that I barely new existed. Up hands who has heard of MP3 blogs? OK so maybe I’m late to the party but this is one superb app and I can’t begin to explain it properly so I’m simply gonna wait here while you head off to hear and watch the screencast. I’ll wait for you.

Now it is a very early release at this point but it’s a helluva place to start from, it already does what it set’s out to do, “play the web”

I have barely scratched the surface and I’m completly taken with this so thank you Wired and to you reading “why haven’t you downloaded it already?”

*edit* I just noticed that it is a tad on the resource hungry side, granted my Media centre isn’t the most current (Athlon XP 2000, 512mb ram) but it’s swallowing more than half the resources available still it’s worth it.

Before I get into the meat of this post, I wanna take a paragraph to congratulate Cristiano da Matta on his release from hospital, as some of you may be aware Christiano was involved in a nasty accident with a deer while testing a champ car. Good luck with the rest of your recovery.

Anywho, What did we all think of the Chinese Grand Prix? Magnificent, only word that I can think of to come close to describing it and it puts things closer at the top of the championchip, than they have been at this stage of the season for more years than I can remember.

I do think some of the Renault tactics did have a strong whiff of team orders about them. Apperently that’s okay though unless it’s Ferrari. I mean it was okay when Ron Dennis ordered Coulthard to allow Hakkinen through to win the championship and then a year or two later Ferrari do the same thing and the rules are re-written, go figure!

Still it was nice of them to set the precedence, expect to see Schuey/Masa employing similar tactics over the next 2 races which will decide the championship for this year.

Before I get on with our main review I feel I have to mention this keyboard, all I can say is this is a work of art no more no less, I so want one and here’s hoping Santa will be good to me.

 Now back on topic, I have is a simple 128mb flash based unbranded player, hangs round my neck on lariat style headphones and holds little bit more than an hours worth of toonz so only minor overlap on an average workout.

If I’m being honest, I inherited this little guy, from my sweetie last christmas cause someone (ahem) got her a shiny new 6Gb Rio player.

While the 128mb capacity is not wonderful it only takes a couple of minutes to load a different set of songs on it so not a big hassle. I would be lying though if I said the new “clip-on” shuffle hadn’t tempted me when I saw the video of Steve Jobs Launching it, but thanks to not having the cash to drop straight away, I discovered this little iRiver player a few days later and I think I’ll wait for it

Unlike most people in the world today, I don’t swoon over ipods, I think there over priced, have way to many restrictions and well to be honest, I don’t follow the herd mindlesly, if there is a good reason to follow the herd then yes of course follow but to do so blindly is somewhat shortsighted. So the rest of the world can keep bleating on about how great there ipod is even though it’s there third warranty replacement and they had to reformat the thing cause they had to re-install windows and the case scratched within seconds of being removed from packaging.

This week I want to talk about this article I read recently on wired. the short version of this story is that at the recent Santa Cruz Baroque Festival a contemporary composer, David Cope, premiered a new 12-movement piece from the mind of Antonio Vivaldi.

Yeah, I know Tonios been feedin worms for over 2 century’s so how did David find a new 12 movement piece from a dead composer. Well in short it’s a fake, written by software that David has developed. Essentially, it takes a database of a composers work, analyses the phrasing and then uses that information to create a new piece.

According to the article he has done this with lots of other composers as well as Vivaldi. Now I’m not a huge fan of classical music but this is an incredible creation and what I would love to hear is that David has unleased Emi on the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa and Les Claypool. Yeah Les is still alive but there’s method to this madness.

So once we have all these artists and composers absorbed by Emmy, why not mix and match, Hendrix and Beethoven, Zappa and Ravel, Claypool and Debussy. Or let Bach or Haydn go nuts with a full Philharmonic Orchestra.

There are definatly purests who will say that this is souless and grave robbing etc. I don’t, so long as someone doesn’t try to claim that they wrote it rather than the artist or composers “profile”. Bottom line, if it sounds good then who cares how the music was written.

So F1, whats been happening since Monza, where as we all know once again the evil FIA ganged up with that evil german and well those guys wot build the evil cars, you know they’re red like the Devil for god’s sake.

Well that’s what some people would have us believe anyway. After all the commotion in Monza, I’m so disapointed in the mainstream F1 press they all wanted to say it but none of them would. You wonder why? I did but then I realised there just trying to make a story where there isn’t one, yup that’s it if enough people start to believe a story then it starts to take on a momentum of it’s own it creates it’s own smoke so there has to be a fire right?

Fair play to Fernando and Flavio they said what was on there mind Flav more than Fernando who just seemed to think F1 isn’t a sport anymore. Then again Flav retracted Fernando didn’t and infact has gone considerably further since.

I know Alonso is the youngest world champion in the history of the sport but what does he hope to achieve by slagging off the most succesful driver in the history of the sport? that’s not going to win you the championship only keeping a calm head and scoring points will do that, not driving beyond the limits of your car until the engine explodes or whinging into the radio or sideswiping a friday test driver at high speed before brake testing him.

Schuey has his history too as so many people have been quick to point out since Monaco, but for some reason the media are blinkered to Alonso’s wrong doing’s and very quick to point to Schuey’s past indescresions at every available oppurtunity. Yet very quick to forget that schuey has been penalised severly in the past as well, both on and off the track.

Well whatever Alonso and flav had hoped to achieve by there actions at Monza what they did achieve was a clarification of the “blocking” rule in F1 although you can tell by the tone that the FIA aren’t happy about the way these 2 conducted themselves. I really am surprised that neither have been pulled up for bringing the sport into disrepute.

I think there are 2 thing’s Fernando needs to learn from what has happened at and since Monza.

1. You’ll never win an argument with the referee
2. If you wanna have a bitch about a competitor get your manager to do it for you

Still it’s nice to know the fans have more sense than to listen to the media and have made there own minds up by voting Schuey and Ferrari there favourite by a country mile.

Hi all, week 2 and I’m still going this week and next weeks reviews are actually fairly closly related. While MP3 players and Heart monitors seem fairly diverse gadgets I use both only in one place… The gym!

I know some of my readers may be surprised to learn that I have a weight problem! It’s true, It’s getting to be less of a problem everyday though and part of the success I’m having on this is down to these 2 gadgets.

I’ll start with the less interesting of the 2 gadgets, my Heart Monitor. The vital details first of all It’s the most basic “Polar” model available the F2, there are 2 elements a “wrist watch” type device and the sensor unit that straps to my chest.

While this is a basic model it does everything I need and has an unadvertised “Bonus features” that I really like but more on that later.

This unit does everthing I need, it tells me my current heart rate, it times my workout and when I’m finished it tells me my average heart rate for the duration of my workout.

There are other models on the range that give alarms when your heart rate is getting out of the range that you set but what’s wrong with just looking at your wrist? Or for that matter leaving the “watch” in an easily viewable spot while working out.

As for the unadvertised “bonus feature” I mentioned well my local gym uses Procor equipment that has heart monitor handles builty-in. The chest sensor for my Heart monitor is picked up by this kit so while I’m on one of these machines I have a full read out with target workout zones the whole lot, very handy

Why would you use a heart monitor? well for a start so far in the 3 months of my excercise regime I have paid out more than €500.00! A heart monitor is a small aditional cost that insures I get the most out of my exorcise program and optimise my limited time that I can afford to speng in the gym. Plus it’s interesting to see the difference in your heart rate for different activities.