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Showing posts from April 6, 2003
We went out riding again last night, up I80 to Park City to grab some Mexican for dinner. It was another great bike ride. I think I've solved the screen situation on the bike - full-back is the place for it to be so I get little turbulence and noise. On the ride back I had to pull over to sort out my jacket that was getting unruly. That beemer has hazard lights. Sweet - never had those on a bike before.
Now that Kirkuk is under coalition control, the price of crude oil has plummetted today - took 5% off it's value in one day. It will be interesting to see how the gas stations react now....
I'm impressed with lunarpages. So far so good - my sites are all back up and running. Cost me a pretty penny, of course! We're all off to eat at Park City tonight - we're going to ride up on the bikes.
It seems that following the fracas in Brazil last weekend, the timekeepers realised that Fisichella had actually started his 56th lap when the race was red-flagged. When rolled back two laps from there, he was still in the lead - Jordan might get the points after all! The slight hiccup is that the official timekeeprs - Tag Heuer, are also a big sponsor of McLaren Mercedes - the people who ultimately ended up with the win. Hmmmm.
Can you believe this? Boots & Coots, the oil-well-fire-fighting company I made some cash on a few weeks back, is on the verge of bankruptcy! Talk about great timing. I got in, bought low and sold high before their stock plummetted. Holy snot! Meanwhile, Bush has stolen my comparison of the Berlin wall coming down to what I watched this morning. Sorry, George. I got there first.
I Went out with Kerry this lunchtime on a blast around the city on the bikes. The weather was great, but already too hot for my summer jacket. I've found a FirstGear jacket I like - it's a ballistic nylon and mesh jacket that is designed to let air through. It has removeable CE armour and feels nice and lightweight too. 140 bux aint bad - I'll take that from my paypal account to cover the cost and get one in silver and black to match the bike. Oh I'm so vain :) Duploweb still hasn't come back so I've ponied up some cash to lunarpages.com for a full-function website with an anchored domain. I can run both www.chris-longhurst.com and www.christrains.com from the same site, yet to outside visitors, they'll appear to be two different places. I've set up the new DNS records and I'm just waiting for it to propagate across the net.
***WAR NEWS*** Amazing. This morning I watched something on CNN that I thought had the significance of when we watched the Berlin Wall torn apart by bare hands. A Couple of thousand Iraqis were in the main central square of Baghdad trying to topple a massive bronze statue of Saddam. Their rope snapped so they started beating the concrete base of it with mallets. In the end, they managed to talk a passing marine tank recovery vehicle into helping out. The marines got up there and attached a chain around Saddam's neck, and after a brief faux-pas with an American flag, put the Iraqi flag up there too. Then they pulled the statue over and the people in the square just flocked to it, pounding it with their feet. In Arab nations, I believe this is a supreme insult. It seems even the Iraqi embassador to the UN has conceded defeat. He's quoted today as saying "The game is over. I hope the peace will prevail and the Iraqi people at the end of the day will have a peaceful life.&qu
Well sheeit. www.duploweb.com seems to have vanished off the face of the internet and has taken two of my three websites with it. The third one is still down due to "server troubles" but at least there's a page there. I can ftp to my IP addresses for my other sites, but I can't get to them using www access. I reckon their nameservers have gone up the chute or something. Faaahhhk!
***WAR NEWS*** The US claimed this morning that "chemical Ali", the chief chemical weapons guy in Iraq is dead, and that material found at paramilitary camp in Hindiyah, had tested positive for chemical-warfare agents. The amusing thing is, two hours later, they retracted the statement. What they actually found was pesticide, not sarin :-) Meanwhile, more and more troops seem to be pouring into Baghdad, whilst the TV station there claims nothing is happening.
The Grand Prix in Brazil yesterday was a bit of a spectacle. It was a hideous wet-weather race with lots of drop-outs, but the worst bit was right at the end. Jensen Button lost control and hit the barrier doing over 120mph. On the way he collected someone else and there was debris all over the track. The marshalls called a full-course yellow and at that point, Fisichella was in the lead, for the first time ever, in his Jordan. Then Fernando Alonso, fuckwit that he is, ignored the yellow flags and came barrelling round the corner and straight into the debris at full throttle. He got airborn, flipped, rolled, hit both walls and totally destroyed his car. They red-flagged the race, and then pulled into play some obscure FIA ruling where a red flag means "race stopped, finishing position as they were two laps previous". ie. Jordan didn't get the win - that bloody Finn got it - Raikonnen. Worse, after Alonso was airlifted to hospital, he actually ended up in third place! He
Another hectic day yesterday with only 2 trips to Home depot. It's getting better.... ***WAR NEWS*** The BBC's war correspondant, John Simpson, has been injured after a US warplane strafed a convoy he was in and then bombed it. They had Kurdish government leaders with them (all now dead) and a bunch of US Marines and special forces guys - also mostly dead. Simpson's cameraman and translator were killed too. Strangely, none of the US news services have mentioned this event yet.