July 2010 – Tom Fosdick

British F1 Grand Prix at Silverstone: Village / Arena View

2010-07-25 by Tom Fosdick

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Silverstone‘s new section is fantastic and the view from what’s now called Village grandstand (was called Arena) is excellent.

We dropped in there for one of the GP2 races and since it was new I thought a panorama shot might be useful for anyone considering it. Unfortunately I didn’t quite line the photos up so it doesn’t stitch together properly. So there are two, the left half and the right half.

In the left half you get a bonus in that you can see the cars go through Maggotts / Becketts / Chapel and onto the Hangar Straight as well as Village / The Loop / Aintree.

Left Hand Side of the View from Village (click for bigger)

The Right Hand Side of the view from Village B (click for bigger)

There’s a really good overtaking opportunity if you can get a good run round the outside at Village because you’ll have the inside at The Loop. This is a very bad line for the corner and you’ll run wide on the exit, but it’s seriously difficult for your opponent to duck inside – we saw a couple of people making this stick in the GP2. A lot of people were running too wide out of Village, too, meaning more excitement at The Loop.

A word to the wise, though. The grandstand is quite exposed to wind, so make sure that you have some form of wind-proof clothing option with you because even when it was 25C in the sun it was cold up there.

Taoism and Trees

2010-07-21 by Tom Fosdick

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We change. We move on. It’s part of being human.
There’s a lot of change going on with me at the moment and it’s at times like this when a little wisdom can make a big difference.

One of the most effective pieces of advice I’ve ever been given was from a Kung-Fu instructor. She asked me which tree was stronger, the willow or the oak.
The oak is a potent symbol of power, it stands strong against the wind, assenting only to the gentlest of sways whereas the willow flops around all over the place in the merest breeze. The oak will still stand strong in a storm while the willow is battered into the ground.
When the wind gets too strong though, the oak will snap. When the wind subsides the oak will lie broken on the ground and the willow will return to its original form, swaying gently in the breeze.

The skill is knowing when to be the oak and when the forces against you are all too strong. I naturally tend toward the oakish, so I have to keep asking myself if I’m trying to be too strong, if perhaps I should stop pushing and just weather the storm. An ability to recognise when a something is beyond my control, to accept it rather than exhaust myself fighting against it (and probably lose anyway) has saved my bacon many, many times.

This goes hand in hand with another important skill – the ability to seek advantage even in adverse circumstances. When something bad happens it’s all too easy to concentrate on the bad, on what will be lost. A little bit of objective thinking often reveals that whilst some doors are closing others are opening. Sometimes an apparently bad change, on proper analysis, works out to be positive overall.

Lastly, and leading directly from the above, it’s easier to influence something that you’re on board with. If you diametrically oppose something you are likely to find that you become marginalised and are ignored. If you align yourself with it but suggest changes, you are more likely to be listened to.

Take these three together and you can remove a great deal of hassle from your life.

SSD Drives are a Total No-Brainer

2010-07-012010-07-01 by Tom Fosdick

Reading Time: < 1 minute

When it comes to hardware, technical staff can badger a business senseless. Every member of technical staff claims that they could do their job so much better if they just had this upgrade or that gizmo. Without spending hours reading all the latest hardware blogs, determining what would actually be useful investment in their productivity is next to impossible.

SSD drives are a no-brainer though. The biggest bottleneck in PCs today is the hard disk, clunky, mechanical things that lose an awful lot of time whilst the heads are whizzing back and forth across the platters.
At the time of writing a 64Gb SSD Drive is about £100. I bought one more out of curiosity than anything else and slung it in my ancient 3.0GHz P4.

This video shows it loading Windows XP, logging in, then starting Word and Chrome at the same time.
I then type some rubbish in Word, navigate to Facebook and shut the PC down. The difference an SSD Drive makes is mind-bending. I’m not saying that you should replace existing hard disks with SSD drives, just slap one in with the operating system and apps on and use the old (likely much larger capacity) drive for data. That’s good business sense.