Thought to post some of my pictures from the weekend car show here. Even though I am a formula1fan, this was my first F1 car that I have seen up close. I even got a close shot of the diffuser.


Toyota F1 Car



Toyota F1 Diffuser

I can't wait for the new season to start... only one week away!! Qualifying and no tire changes are going to drastically change the season. From my readings, the teams have already made up the 20-30% loss in downforce the 2005 regulations were supposed to impose on the teams... it now comes up to the tires. Will teams pit more often for fuel and keep the car light to save the tires OR force the tire manufacturers to bring harder tires. But this then slows the cars as the harder the tire is the less 'sticky' it is.

My predictions for the 2005 season...
TEAMS
1. BAR Honda is going to do very well, might take the constructors championship.

2. Renault (historically very easy on tires) will give BAR a run for the constructors.

DRIVERS
1. Kimi to win the World Drivers Championship.

2. Jenson Button to give Kimi a run for his money!

Only time will tell...

F1fan

My Sony Trinitron died!!

I had a 15 inch Sony Trinitron 100 GS monitor for my workstation. Yesterday after booting the machine I noticed a little green key on the bottom left corner of the screen. After google'ing the problem Sony's suggestion was to send it in to the factory for repairs... Ya, right I was going to do that!!

So I went shopping and picked myself up a new monitor. A BenQ FP731.


BenQ FP731 Monitor

Being the cheap guy that I am, I went around to a couple of stores looking for deals. I went into the local BestBuy where there was a flyer special on a 17 inch NEC, but they didn't have any in stock!! It must have been one of those items that the business uses to try to get you to come visit the store in the hopes that you would buy something else.

After the BestBuy guy told me there were none in stock, I asked him what other monitors he had in stock and he told me to go and try FutureShop down the road. I guess he didn't want to sell me a monitor today. This is the first time I have had bad service here, better not continue if they want my money!

After all that, I picked up the BenQ (who ever they are) 17 inch monitor for $299 bucks... not a bad deal!! For the price, I think that it is a pretty good LCD monitor. I have surfed the Web, watched a DVD and booted to Fedora and WinXP and they both look great.

NOTE: When using Fedora Core 3, I selected the generic LCD monitor driver at 1280 X 1024 (supported by my Intel 845 chip) and it worked the first time. You can never know when configuring display drivers in Linux for integrated graphics cards what the result will be.

I'll try and update the site on what I think of the monitor so far.

F1Fan

Finally I got this picture posted on my blog... F1fan is a play on words.

F1fan for formula1 racing fan and F1fan for pressing the f1 key on the keyboard for help.

F1Fan

That wasn't so bad!!

Been working through all the CISSP chapters (taking a CISSP prep course) and the networking section was so bad. I thought it was going to be really tough but I had a lot more knowledge than I thought.

One point my instuctor pointed about me was that I had a knack about thinking outside the box, but that it might hurt me when I go to write the CISSP exam. I need to remember that the exam is based on the perspective of a manager with a security background.

I can see a vulnerability with systems, programming logic and how those assumptions network administer and programmers can be used to take advantage of systems.

Last time I really had a chance to program was about 2 years ago. So, I have been trying to back into it. Wrote a little web site that when I get administrative rights to the network, I can query all Windows logs from my .NET application. There were a couple of tough hurdles but it works in beta. Now I just need to add some finesse to it. Gave me some confidence to try something harder. I will let you know what that project is.

l8ter,
F1fan

Telecommunications and Network Security is going to make my mind blow up...

Studing hard for the CISSP cert and hope to write the exam some time May-June. Having spent most of my time on the programming/database side of IT, I am having to really get down and study like I was in university again.

This chapter is very large and I would suggest spending most of your time studing this chapter (at least so far as I am only about 50% finished my studing) then the other chapters...

More on this later...

F1Fan.