I can hardly wait :) 24 days to go for FP1 and that'll kick off the world's first night race. I got these 3 day walkabout tickets back in June, and took the pics back then too, just been lazy to upload them.

Of course, these are commemorative tickets, and hence plastic. They're damn cool :)

The circuit is almost done, lights are up, protective barriers are up and they're some very strong concrete barriers...will be interesting to see where the tyre walls will come up, if any. I'll try to walk around this weekend and get some shots of the circuit

Few more pics : http://flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/sets/72157607054264156/

I was back at Melbourne Park for the ladies final, and this was taken when Maria was well on her way to winning her first Australian Open title. The match was good, as was the lighting and the crowd was mostly behind Ana Ivanovic (she is surely a darling of the cameras as Alan Wilkins rightly put it during a Wimbledon telecast).

Rest of the set : http://www.flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/sets/72157605851583844/

I still have a metric ton of photos to upload :p

In a 100 days, if all goes well, I'll be watching the world's first F1 night race at the Singtel Singapore Grand Prix. w00t!

Date : Jan 23rd 2008
Time : 2245 onwards...(local time)
Location : Melbourne, Australia

My flight from Brisbane was uneventful. Virgin Blue is pretty cool, you have (small) screens right in front of you to watch what you want and all the good stuff is pay per view :) The rate I guess for movies and channels was something in the range of 7-9 Australian Dollars. I didn't bother, since I was enjoying the lovely skies past sunset and the cities below. The first thing I noticed when I landed in Melbourne was the big notice that warns people against joking (yes you read that right) about bombs in baggage or terrorism. The notice went on to say it's an offence and that people do so will be arrested. Eeeks. Paranoia and more Security Theatre :)
( Read the rest of the entry... )
And that brought to an end, a very interesting Day 1 in Melbourne :)
Rest of the snaps : http://www.flickr.com/photos/fox2mike/sets/72157604290718622/

In approximately 12 hours, I'll be at the Rod Laver Arena and the schedule for the day looks like this :

Not before 1330 :

Women's Singles Semi-Final - Maria Sharapova Vs Jelena Jankovic

Followed by :

Women's Singles Semi-Final - Ana Ivanovic Vs Daniela Hantuchova

And then Not before 1930 :

Men's Singles Semi-Final - Jo-Wilfried Tsonga Vs Rafael Nadal

The matches are like...umm...amazing. I'm hoping to get some good pics, fingers crossed.

PS : Oh and Australia has amazing beaches and even more amazing babes

So, finding a place these days are made easier by using Google Maps and/or Wikimapia. I found a couple of places I needed to go to in Bangalore using Wikimapia. Although there is significant noise thanks to the numerous people who seem to love marking out their houses, it still works. I successfully plotted a driving route to a place using both and well, managed to reach it fine. The route back wasn't as easy (thanks to a zillion one-ways) but that worked out as well. w00t!

In other news, Ferrari finally managed their first 1-2 of the season today at what is touted to be the last race ever at Magny-Cours. Seems the new aerodynamics package that both Kimi and Massa were confident about really turned the tables on McLaren this weekend. w00t!

A close friend got engaged and another got married and I was lucky enough to make it to both :)

Had a lazy weekend, looking forward to the week ahead....

The best part of all the 3 days, was raceday. Why? Because that's when you realise that you're normal and you see how many other people are atleast just as crazy or even more crazy that you are about the sport. The whole atmosphere was awesome. So many motorsport fans in one place....

I was wearing my Ferrari shirt as I came down for breakfast that day at the hotel and everyone looked at me like I was part of the team. Hah, felt good ;) The same thing on the monorail, random people would smile...a fellow Ferrari fan from some corner of the globe would nod or wave. And everyone in general knew what the deal was all about.

The rest of the snaps are being uploaded, a few hundred more to go...I'm off to sleep now.

I wandered into the SIC on the 6^th of April around 1100 and heard an amazingly loud roar followed by 4 bangs...and that's when it hit me...those were the V8s downshifting from 6th to 2nd gear at the end of the start-finish straight to take turn 1 on the circuit. The first thing I probably screamed out was something not very nice, but then no one could hear me :D Here I was...on an F1 circuit and it really hadn't sunk in at that point. I just stood there and grinned like an idiot for 5 minutes before calling my dad and screaming into the phone (over the sound of the engines...).

No words can describe the scream of the V8s down the start-finish straight and the bangs as they shift gears. The cars move so fast that you can barely make out the drivers. Photographing them isn't an easy task, simply because of the speed :D The above is prolly the best shot of Massa I got across the 3 days and this was taken during the race (and he was doing over 300 Kmph..since the shot was taken down the start-finish straight).

If you're an F1 fan, you absolutely should go to a Grand Prix in your lifetime, simply because the TV doesn't quite cut it. The sounds of the engine are one I will never forget for a long time to come. Awesome. Amazing. Brilliant.

As I went to sleep on saturday, I could still hear the V8s...that's the impact they leave on you..the distict Rrrurrrrrrrrrr, bang, bang, bang...

Ferrari didn't win, and that was a disappointment but I'm sure they'll bounce back. This season should be very interesting to watch.

PS : Tons more pics to come, I managed to get shots of Kimi, Alonso, Mika (yes, Hakkinen...god bless the 70-300 :p), Nico, Trulli, Rubeno....it'll take a while to upload them all and I'll make a few more posts regarding the trip later.

The moment he crossed the finish line, he didn't celebrate as much as he always does. The moment the race was over, Jean Todt was almost in tears. The moment he got out of the car, he was subdued, but made it a point to go over to almost every cluster of Ferrari team members and hug/shake hands with them. He didn't jump on the podium until he received his trophy. And just when the anthems started, he probably told Kimi (he spoke a few words in his ear) "The next year, I'd like to see you on the top step at Monza."

And then Micheal Schumacher just when into the press conference and in his new "drift off the question" style, announced that he was leaving Formula 1 for good at the end of the season.

God damn it. He could have been there for one more year. First Agassi and now Schumi. I've always wanted to see Agassi play a grand slam match and Schumi in an F1 race. Neither of that is going to happen now.

Bye Schumi, F1 will never be the same without you. And when you leave, take the championship since no one deserves it as much as you do.

Lots of life updates in the pipeline, will let you all know in a day or two.

I just want Andre Agassi to go on and win this year's US Open. And then retire in style. Long shot, but if he could take out Baghdatis, anything's possible.

Go Andre. Show them who the boss is :)

PS : I woke up early to see the match. Was surely worth it.

Wow, what a race. I guess it ended up being fair to both Schumi and Alonso in funny ways...with both of them being penalised before the start.and then both of them adding nothing to their respective tallies. Since Kubica was disqualifed, both Schumi and Ferrari scored points.

Did nothing much over the weekend.

Oh and yeah, OpenTTD is nice.

1) England Vs Ecuador : All I can say is blah. England know they're not playing as well as they can (Beckham said so himself, post-match) and yesterday...they just scraped through. If they're going to play like this...they're going out. I so want them to win this time. Let's hope the pick their game up a few notches. Beckham scoring off a free-kick with his precision was something nice to watch, after a long time.

2) Canadian GP : Missed the first 10 laps or so because of Football. Actually, forgot there was a GP going on. I think this was a really exciting race. Everyone was having braking issues and sliding around, touching walls and whatnot. Thanks to Ralf and good ole Jacques as well as Kimi, Schumi managed to go up to 2nd place. Yay. It was fun to see some really close overtaking. Nice. More F1 analysis in a seperate post.

3) Portugal Vs Netherlands : If you missed this match, you've missed the most violent match in a Fifa World Cup in recent history. Stupid players (on both sides), Stupidest of refs. "Fair play" that Fifa is so particularly interested in promoting was one of the things that were non existant in the match (mostly in the second half) apart from a goal for Netherlands. Everyone was diving, acting and whatnot and cards were flying all over the place. It's a pity that Netherlands didn't convert any of their good chances into a goal...and so it will be England Vs Portugal in the Quarters with Portugal unable to play Costinha and Deco since they're both suspended and a host of other players including Luis "Give him an Oscar damnit!!!" Figo with yellow cards. That said, Maniche's goal was a real beauty and Van Der Sar as well as Ricardo made a couple of really awesome saves.

Ah well, the World Cup is truly alive and kicking now :)

It's been a long time since anything disturbed me as much as the F1 Perished Heros video from YouTube.

prashanthks had sent this link along quite sometime back and I watched it only today. Sad. The worst ones were those where the fuel ignites and the car burns with the driver still inside...the marshals are unable to stop it since the flames are simply too much to fight with fire extinguishers.

I still remember Senna...the others I was too young to know about but Senna is etched forever in my head.

12 years down the line, I'm extremely thankful to those who made Formula 1 as safe as it is today. No driver's life has been threatened post 1994 although there have been some very nasty accidents.

I hope it continues to be this way. No one should die racing in F1 again.

Awesome race. The Ferrari was the faster car through the weekend and well, although Alonso managed to steal P1 from Schumi, I guess he's been shown who the boss is. It was nice to see the old Ferrari pit-stop trick work to perfection after quite sometime. And they've now done it twice in a row...which is good. Massa drove a decent race and did well to keep Kimi off his back towards the end.

The joy on Schumi's face after the race explains why he's still in F1. I'm sure he'll continue to be here as long as he feels he can win, or as long as he's fit. I think it'll be the former more than the latter and as it is right now, I don't see him getting "tired" of winning at all. In fact, I guess 2005 was just the kind of break he needed...a year with one win to get his zest back for this season. Excellent.

This season is really starting to get all exciting now. Go Ferrari!!

A quick follow-up to the last post...

So you're stuck somewhere and badly need to help your dad with something on the computer at home. I've been in this situation quite a bit and well, I've usually ended up trying to troubleshoot over the phone with minimal success. Enter x11vnc. Here's a quick guide on getting it working on Gentoo.

remote denotes the box I'm using to reach my desktop on the machine home.

1. emerge x11vnc tightvnc. Substituting tightvnc with vnc will do as well, but I like some security, which is made slightly easier using tightvnc.


2. Run vncpasswd in your home directory. This creates a /home/shyam/.vnc/passwd and you will have to enter a password not longer than 8 characters in length, which I found a little surprising. Oh well.
   
3. On home, run x11vnc -rfbauth /home/shyam/.vnc/passwd -display :0. Adjust display as required (0 or 1..)


4. From remote run vncviewer home and enter the password you setup when prompted. Voila, you're in and seeing the desktop now.

A couple of points:

• For VNC to work correctly, home has to have the X Display active. From what I've seen, when I vnc into home with X running but I'm on the console, the vnc display is all distorted.


• By default, VNC traffic is not secure. It is advisable to tunnel it over ssh if you're using it from an insecure network/across the internet. With tightvnc it becomes very simple. All you need to do is vncviewer -via remote home and tightvnc sets up the ssh tunnel automatically.

Missed Barcamp, but had a relaxing weekend for the most part. Schumi showed Alonso who the boss is and I'm extremely happy for him :)

A few more awesome matches that were played this year...

1) Kim Clijsters Vs Martina Hingis
2) Paes/Damm Vs Bryan/Bryan (the best ever doubles match I've seen to date I guess)
3) Marcos Baghdatis Vs David Nalbandian

Awesome. Seems that the competition just gets better and better every year. And here's this year's A-Z of the Australian Open.

The really sad bits were the retirements of Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin-Hardenne. And Baghdatis ran out of steam like Safin did when playing Federer.

I think Federer will surpass Sampras if he hasn't already (in terms of overall ability).

January has gone by. Time does fly.

So what if you're at work and missing all the fun of the Australian Open? There's always AO Radio which covers all the important matches live :)

Fire up a console, and hit mplayer -nocache mms://203.89.193.98/ausopen2006 to enjoy live commentary. The -nocache ensures that mplayer doesn't cache the stream...can be pissing off to hear commentary from the first set when the second is going on.

IE/Windows users should be able to listen to it directly, since it's Windows Media Player stream.

In case you've not been following this year Australian Open, you've missed some really good matches...in no specific order:

1) Andy Roddick Vs Marcos Baghdatis
2) Martina Hingis Vs Samantha Stosur
3) Roger Federer Vs Tommy Haas
4) Nicolas Kiefer Vs Sebastien Grosjean
5) Ivan Ljubicic Vs Marcos Baghdatis

And Martina Hingis is playing Kim Clijsters right now. Clijsters won the first set 6-3 and is down 2-5 in the second. Awesome.

PS : Thanks to louiswu and teemus for helping LiveJournal test out their Nudge a friend feature :)