SmartBro Prepaid

For the past 3 days I've been pissed off with the prepaid smartbro that I've been using cause I can't connect to the web. So yesterday I tried to call up smart and ask them why cause I thought my modem already gave-up. And for 30 minutes all I could hear was "I am sorry for the inconvenience" and "Sir I apologize for this". I got fed-up and decided to end the call.

So as I checked it this morning here is what I got.




And the connection never slowed down. Usually I would get "zero" for a long period of time but know it always goes straight to about 800kb/S.

So it is true that the already have 2Mbps now. Now I'm happy to use this one. I hope it stays this way.

Rossi takes on F1

2008 MotoGP World Champ Valentino Rossi takes a break from MotoGP and takes on testing for F1 team Scuderia Ferrari.

Here are some Pics from formula1.com

I like the Helmet

Sitting down. Waiting to go out

And with Stefano

Great way to spice-up F1's off season.

My first Mod try

First time I tried to modify my die-cast. Posted it on the DCPH website and got some points on how to do it right the next time.

The project

Stripped down to pieces

After 2 coats

The finished product

Paint is kinda rough and I can't get to the small gaps that's why there is till some red paint that shows. But hopefully with more pactice I'll get it right.

GreenLight diecast

Saw a new line, new for me, of die-cast manufacturer. It's named GreenLight and I got curious. So I decided to buy 1 cause I can't open it to check the item unless I buy it. And I was not disappointed on what I bought. The quality was good. Better than hotwheels, I think, hence the price. I got great value for my money.

Here is what I bought. An old and new model Chevy Camaro Z28. The Blue versions of Bumble Bee.

2006 and 1970 Z28 model Camaros

And the hood opens-up

The 1970 Model

The 2006 Model

And the details are good. With detailed rubber tyres and nice rims.

Now I'm looking forward to getting more of these. I wish they were also licensed to make Ferrari scale models too.

Kubica on 2009

Robert Kubica is one of the drivers that really impressed me in this 2008 season. A great driver indeed. He has the potential to be a world champion if he gets the right car, and it was almost a Ferrari. Too bad BMW abandoned him and his title challenge just to get ready for the 2009 car development. Almost half of their resources was placed on the develpment of next years car.

But still I'm impressed with his attitude towards it and how he gave his views on this interview from formula1.com site really shows his potential.

Exclusive Kubica Q&A: consistency key to ’09 title challenge

For a while in 2008 it seemed Robert Kubica might achieve the impossible. Midway through the season he had won a race and was vying for the championship with Hamilton, Massa and Raikkonen. Then somehow the challenge faded. Kubica cannot yet explain why, but he is certain that BMW Sauber will find the answers and that they can push McLaren and Ferrari even harder in 2009. In the meantime, he’s content to keep busy over the winter break developing his own kart chassis…

Q: Robert, the last time we spoke was before qualifying in China and you were still in the frame for the title. Ultimately in Brazil, however, you slipped to fourth behind Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen. How do you explain that?
Robert Kubica: Without going into the details, I think that several circumstances worked against me, especially in the last two races. I do not have a clear picture yet of what happened, but clearly something went wrong.

Q: Knowing your determination to succeed, the last two races in Shanghai and Sao Paolo must have been hard to swallow…
RK: I am fine, since I think that from my side I have not done anything that has contributed to this disappointing end to the season. Also, we should not forget that in Singapore I lost a lot of points purely due to bad luck…

Q: BMW Motorsport director Mario Theissen always said that the team would be ready to fight for the championship in 2009. Did it seem like a dream when you found yourself in that position a year early?
RK: I don’t think so. My job is driving to the best of my ability while avoiding mistakes. The rest is not really in my hands. Of course I need a competitive car and good strategies in order to win races, which simply means a lot of good people behind me. In the early part of this season we had excellent reliability and strong pace, which brought me to the unexpected position of leading after seven races. In 2009 we will need to replicate that period, but over the entire season. It won’t be easy, since we will face a lot of new factors and in our case also the KERS issue, which is a concern for all the ‘heavy’ drivers like me.

Q: Did you get carried away by the possibility of making the impossible happen this season?
RK: If I considered it impossible, I’d rather change my job…

Q: In Brazil and China you lacked the pace to make it through to Q2 in qualifying. Where did the speed go - and why was Nick Heidfeld not equally affected?
RK: To be frank, I have no clue. In both races I was quite happy with my car in the first free practice and quite the opposite in all the following sessions. The technical debriefings could not really give an answer to this strange situation.

Q: Before those problems, you had a discussion with Mario in Monza about losing performance. Did you sit down again and discuss the Shanghai/Sao Paolo situation?
RK: I do not comment on our internal conversations.

Q: Reflecting on the season as a whole, what is your assessment?
RK: I have been on the podium seven times and have scored points 14 times. Altogether it was a good season. And of course I am happy for my contribution as a driver to the first win of the BMW Sauber team.

Q: How will 2008’s late-season setbacks affect the team’s 2009 schedule? Is the ’08 car history and the F1.09 a completely new beast, or do you fear some of the F1.08’s shortcomings could be carried over to next season?
RK: I do not have sufficient information to give you an answer.

Q: We have Lewis Hamilton as drivers’ champion and Ferrari as constructors’ champions. Do you believe this was a representative result? And who was your favourite?
RK: I think Ferrari had a very good ‘team players’ attitude and deserved the constructors’ title and Lewis certainly deserved his drivers’ championship. Congratulations to both of them.

Q: After a long season everybody is taking a break. Where are you headed?
RK: There’ll be no holidays for me since I am quite busy with my project for a new go-kart chassis that I want to introduce for competition hopefully next season.

20 things you need to know about F1

I got interested on what zaldy wrote on the f1club site. There is still a lot of things that I have to learn from these F1 cars. Specially for nextyears changes. So here it goes for the non-F1 geeks out there :

A team can take 40 tons of equipment to a race 

1 Starting next year, those little protuberances that currently festoon F1 car bodies will be banned. They make it difficult to see the sponsors’ logos, and as sponsorship pays the bills… 

Rear wings will be much smaller from 2009 too. Currently an overtaking car is heavily affected by the rear wing of the car in front, so it’s hoped the change will result in more overtaking. To counter the loss of downforce, slick tyres are back, so cornering will rely much more on mechanical grip, and front wings will get bigger, giving more of an F3 look. 

2 To help develop its cars’ aerodynamics, ING Renault F1 Team’s Oxfordshire site has a wind tunnel with a long, flat, rolling-road floor, so the air goes under the car at the correct speed. The wind tunnel is operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

3 The Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems being introduced in ’09 will allow some of the car’s braking energy to be stored and then released on demand, a bit like the old turbo era’s ‘push to pass’ buttons. Only so much energy may be released per lap, and with only a 0.2sec advantage per lap available, effectiveness will depend entirely on the driver. 

As a lap starts and ends at the finish line, it would be feasible to release one lap’s energy just before the line and the next lap’s energy immediately after, giving a double hit for overtaking a particularly troublesome opponent. 

4 An F1 car is about 80 per cent carbonfibre, which arrives as a floppy woven-fabric sheet, already resin impregnated, ready for laser cutting. The weave is chosen for the desired characteristics, like strength in one direction and more flexibility in the other. 

The fabric is laid-up on computer-generated resin moulds in a clean room – a single human hair can cause a stress crack, leading to the part failing. It’s then baked at between 45°C and 170°C to get the right characteristics. 

5 Even the brakes are carbon. They don’t work well until operating at 1900°C, though, so they have shields to keep the heat in! 

6 Not all the parts on an F1 car are light. Tungsten ballast weights are distributed round the 500kg car to bring it up to the 605kg minimum weight (including driver) required by the regs. A pint of tungsten weighs over 11kg. 

The car is made as light as possible and ballast added to fine-tune the handling. For instance, Alonso likes understeer and so has more ballast at the front. More generally, circuits like Monaco need weight over the front wheels for grip in the slow, tight corners, while Monza requires a more even balance for its long, sweeping curves. 

7 The driver’s seat in an F1 car is little more than a carbonfibre shell, weighing in at just 200g. It contains a number of buckles to allow an unconscious driver to be lifted out still in the seat, thus protecting their spine. 

8 Renault’s current RS27 2.4-litre V8 has 700bhp yet weighs just 100kg. After each race the engines are parted from the chassis and returned to the engine factory, near Paris, for analysis and maintenance. 

9 The engine oil and fuel are considered as engine components and form integral parts of the design. Oil is carefully engineered to give the best performance (low drag), durability (under pressures equivalent to 13 F1 cars balanced on a pound coin) and cooling (oil jets cool the underside of the piston at 300°C). 

Samples are taken not only to see how the oil itself has survived, but also to check for metal and fuel content to understand engine wear. Oil research and development is one of the few things in F1 to directly benefit ordinary road cars. 

10 F1 fuel has to be 99 per cent the same as road fuel. The remaining 1 per cent is adjusted to give custom fuels for increased peak power (up to 4bhp difference, each bhp giving a 15 yard advantage per lap), mid-range acceleration or range. Unfortunately you can’t have all three, so the blend is tweaked to suit the pit-stop strategy and circuit. 

Fuel quality is tested by the FIA to an accuracy similar to detecting one cup of sugar in Loch Ness. 

11 Shell is the only company to have a track-side laboratory at every race to test fuel and oil samples. It occupies a quarter of the six-million-dollar Ferrari mobile engineering lab. 

12 Each car’s Inconel nickel super-alloy exhaust manifold can be tuned for each circuit – slightly longer for more torque on twisty circuits; shorter for high power on fast circuits. The metal is stronger than titanium and copes easily with the 1000°C-plus, exhaust temperature.

13 The technical support at each event is massive. Renault alone takes 17,000 spare parts and 40 tons of equipment. Ten artics are used to transport it all, with the cars carried at the top of the trailers because they are much lighter than the parts and tools carried in the immaculate lockers beneath. 

14 Race teams arrive in stages. Workshops and communications systems are set up on the Monday; Wednesday sees the engineers arrive; Thursday the drivers turn up for press and promo work. By Friday a complete engineering village is in full operation and the cars are ready for practice. About 100 people per team work on a race event, 60 on a test session. 

McLaren used to arrive a few days before everyone else in order to fit granite tiles to their allocated pit garage and give it a complete makeover! Ex-McLaren garages are much sought after… 

15 Most F1 hardware originates from the Midlands. Six of the ten F1 constructors are based in the UK. Historically around 40 per cent of a Ferrari F1 car came from the UK, while 90 per cent of the Renault F1 car is made here. 

Renault’s F1 team employs 550 people, with 15 joining on secondment from the road car side each year, thus helping F1 technology transfer back to the company’s more 

16 The steering wheel is the centre of activity in an F1 car. In addition to its primary role, the carbonfibre wheel also serves as home to the gear selector, clutch, on-board diagnostics system, communications buttons and the engine and chassis controls. No wonder it costs around £20,000… 

There is quite an art to using the two clutch paddles. In order to get a quick reaction at the race start without stalling, the right paddle is pulled in fully, while the left one is held halfway with a finger jammed underneath. Then when the race starts, the right paddle is dropped and the clutch goes to the position held by the left, giving optimum pull away. 

17 Each car constantly transmits a huge amount of data – from suspension loads to exhaust temperature – back to the pit crew. If a problem develops, a plan is devised, which may involve changes in the pits or the driver being asked to adjust settings (which can no longer be changed by remote control) whilst still racing. So the steering wheel also has controls for fuel mixture, damper settings, etc. 

18 Bridgestone handles the management and fitting of all tyres. Each driver has a dedicated Bridgestone engineer to look after his annual allocation of tyres – seven sets with a hard compound, seven sets soft. All tyres have to be used at least once and have a serial number checked by race officials. 

19 Tyre pressures make an enormous difference to an F1 car’s handling, so they are constantly checked by both the team and Bridgestone. Ordinary air has water in it, which expands horribly, so tyres are filled with dried air or nitrogen. 

Despite their size, a typical rear wheel and tyre weighs only around 10kg. F1 regs still mandate a 13in wheel, which necessitates a high-profile tyre, so about half the total suspension movement is in the tyre. 

An F1 tyre’s operating temperature is over 100°C. An extreme wet tyre can pump out 80 litres of water per second in an impressive ‘rooster tail’. 

20 Development of a new F1 car takes 18 months, so next year’s cars are already being created.

Now 20 things has been added to the F1 part of my brain.

Quantum of Solace (continued)

Watched it last night and I liked Daniel Craig's portrayal of James Bond even better this time. Not as smooth as the Bond we get used to, like Moore, Connery or Brosnan. Craig adds a different twist to the movie franchise. He gets all the trouble he could get, kills everyone he could kill, but still his moves doesn't fail him when it comes to Bond Girls.

Almost the same cast as Casino Royale. I liked the opening where Bond in his Aston Martin DBS is chased by an Alfa. Gunned down and all but still manages to escape. Later revealing that Mr.White is at the trunk. How Bond-ly is that?  And there are a lot of other great action sequence in this movie that fits Daniel Craig's Bond. 

This movie is one of the reasons that will make me watch more Bond movies played by Craig.