waider

Mr. EEEEEeeechverri, attempting to open up the floor asked me, (a) did this year's F1 season really suck, and (b) how dare I place any movie above Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?

In order to stop him from posting further to an essentially dead-end location (HINT: I rarely bother checking my syndicated feed for posts; just email me if you wanna discuss some random point I made) I am commenting here. Take that, non-sequitor boy.

( This could be long, or short, or you might not care. )

hply sjot! Jenson Button beats Barrichello's qualifying time, and Michael Schumacher overcooks the Variente Alta(sp?) chicane thus losing his 0.25s advantage at that point leaving the grid for tomorrow's race starting Button, Schumacher (M), Montoya, Schumacher (R), Barrichello Barrichello, Schumacher (R).

Since I've not bothered poking my nose into other peoples' politics for the last while, here's some fodder for the anonymous posters: Iraq goes GSM - I'm surprised at this. I thought the CDMA infrastructure was already a done deal. Props to the US for choosing "fits in with local networks" over "uses American technology & companies".

Of course, I can't just let something like that lie... talking to a friend about Formula 1 sponsorship, she brought up the fact that while most teams are fighting to retain tobacco sponsorship, BMW/Williams are proudly displaying Niquitin logos on their cars. I said that may well be the case, but it did make me wonder where the backing comes from, ultimately. Niquitin is a GSK product, but I'm not familiar enough with multinational associations to know who backs, partners or otherwise feeds GSK, but it occurs to me that there's a fairly distinctive segment of the multinational world already dedicated to sourcing nicotine, so I'm curious as to whether companies like Phillip Morris or R J Reynolds are ultimately playing both sides of the game - smoking and anti-smoking.

Now apply that sort of paranoid "reasoning" to the companies granted the Iraqi GSM deal.

The Canadian Grand Prix has been dropped from the F1 calendar because they won't allow cigarette adverts. This is really, really, REALLY dumb. In fact, almost litigiously dumb, since this means that Formula One Management is promoting cigarettes in about as strong a way as they can manage.

Well, my new phone works. I'm trying to figure out how to get it to work with the rest of my toys, given that Windows seems to be under the impression that I have seven serial ports (there are two on the machine, a real one and an IrDA one) none of which are actually connected to anything. The phone has a really tidy SMS feature called T9 (patent applied for) which is basically a smart version of those soup programs that generate words from numbers - you just key in a word by pressing each letter key once and T9 attempts to figure out what word you were intending. Saves all that tedious button pressing to get the second or third letter on a given key.

I am pleased, btw, because Michael Schumacher drove the new Ferrari F1 car from second on the grid to first place on the podium with naught but minor errors, fending off his brother by a fraction of a second.