Hi all. Yet another race weekend? Well yes and no. Yes there has been some racing and no it was not an entire weekend :-) The long expected videocard for Stefan's computer had finally arrived and we were going to build it in. A little bit anxious about how good the results were going to be because it was not your standard GeForce2 upgrade. Stefan has an Packard & Bell machine which has an on-board videocard. This however does use the AGP slot so when you want to upgrade your bit & bytes factory :-) all you can add is an PCI version. The trouble then was getting an 'up to date' videocard with an PCI connector. And after waiting patiently (he did not have much of a choice by the way ;-) the GeForce2 cpu finally was available with an PCI connector. So they (because when I say Stefan's machine I actually mean my sister's and Stefan's machine) ordered one through our usual hardware supplier (thanks dad :-) and this Sunday we Stefan and Biek) were going to give the pixels some extra kick in the b... After installing everything the end result was more or less what we had hoped so this was a big thumbs up! And then we started the time killing routine of starting up all graphics demanding applications this means all the games ;-) to alter their settings for the best possible picture and speed. Needless to say at the end of the day Stefan was a happy man.

Hi all. With my non-willing motherboard (see the cloudy part ...) I went back to my dad because he had received a new power unit which had a extra connector to go on my motherboard. I know but we all have to learn sometimes right? After hooking the thing up with the mainboard we still got no picture or even a single beep. So after we tried it again with my own videocard and still got no better results we decided to send all of it back and let the guys we got it from look at it. Hopefully it will be back soon.

Hi all. After running the shop I went to Bas for another one of those race weekends :-) After setting up the equipment we first wanted to find out why F1 2001 would not work in multiplayer mode. After a couple of re-installs I suddenly realized that I was running the game with an update from Electronic Arts and that both Stefan and Bas were not ... So after another re-install without the update the game was running just fine again. Sometimes things are too simple to stumble across. The rest of the weekend went perfectly. For the first time ever I was beating Bas with Formula One racing! This however needs a bit explaining. I think it was Thursday that we earned about Jos Verstappen his racing contract being ended by Mr. Tom Walkinshaw from the Orange Arrows Racing team. Needless to say we stopped all of our Arrows activities and simply had to start driving a different car in F1 2001. This was not quite as simple as you might think. There is the problem that you make your own car settings in order to be faster around the tracks and that these settings are not exchangeable between different brands of cars. For instance when I tried my Arrows settings in a Jordan car I was all over the track but no where near my usual driving. This means we had to find a car that was both nice to look at and driving basically good with our Arrows settings. Otherwise we had to start over with developing settings for the new car and this is quite a bit of work as you might imagine. Bas choose to go back to his second most favorite driver Jacques Villeneuve and started to drive in the B.A.R. car. I kind of liked the steering wheel and the overall looks of the Sauber car and went with this car. The funny thing (funny for me that is) is that the Sauber just drove like a glove with the Arrows settings and that the B.A.R. was not quite so good to drive. This was a big advantage for me and it was also the reason for my victory over Bas. Finally!

Hi all. Another trip around the world with the BX. This time to a friend of mine to spend a day at the races with Gran Turismo 3. This actually is the friend who is responsible for Biek having a playstation. Did I ever tell you this? Ah I found it. It's in the archives. Check it out! --- insert story here --- Anyway one nice feature of Gran Turismo (GT3 from here on) is that you can trade won cars with another GT3 racer. We thought we could just give away cars to make the other player happy but sadly this was not the way things are done in GT3 country. My friend who had a bit of a head start when buying the playstation first did miss two things in his garage: money and cars *grin* However I had completed more than ninety precent of the game and owned about one hundred and fifteen cars and almost drowned in money. This was also the reason why it was such a shame the car-giving could not go through. After scrolling through my impressive list of gained cars and driving a few of them on the tracks my friend showed his real self and asked me to overwrite his saved game to end up with my cars and (hard) earned money. This of course struck my ego so it was done swiftly. Although I have not heard much of him since I believe he has lots of fun with all the cars ;-)

Hi all. Better and clearer eh? Unfortunately things still look a bit cloudy ... Did I say a 'bit' cloudy?

Hi all. Finally my system upgrade came in! Actually it was there on Saturday but I decided not to start rebuilding my system just before the race weekend with Stefan. And that was the smartest thing I did in a long time. After switching the mainboards and connecting all the wires and stuff I wanted to start up my new system. This, by the way, is a Pentium 4 @ 1700MHz with 256MB @ 400MHz on a Asus mainboard. However as you might have guessed nothing happened. After checking and re-checking all the settings I gave it another try but again it did not give a sign of life. Well tomorrow is another day and maybe with a fresh start things will look better and clearer.

Hi all. What a weekend! In my scheduler it said 'race weekend with Stefan'. This started Saturday at about ten a.m. We have these kind of weekends every now and then and I have to pack up my entire computer stuff. So this means four walks to the car and back at my place and two mostly at the destination because I have help there :-)

When everything is hooked up again the power switch is given a gentle push and the whole room lights up when the 'machines' come to life. First some simple checking weather or not the network is active and working the way we need it to be able to play multiplayer games. Then we attached our steering wheels to the table and fired up F1 2001.

And here is were we lost the 'race' in race weekend ... No matter what we tried we could not get it to work in multiplayer mode. Even tough we have done it before and will do it again. Because we build a new 100 MB/s nic in Stefan's machine I first thought it had something to do with the settings of this card but nothing was found.

The strange thing was that just about every other game seemed to work just fine and only F1 2001 would not work. We decided to let it rest and spend our time doing another game. Startopia was our next try and here is were we gained the 'Startopia' in Startopia weekend :-) I think me and Stefan played Startopia for just about two full days!

In the end we congratulated each other with a we-will-call-it-even victory over the other one. I will explain something about the game later on but by Sunday evening we ended up with each owning half of the doughnut and deploying a defense system that would have made the top 10 wanted list of any army!

This resulted in a short but very exiting battle whenever both Stefan or myself tried to conquer a segment from the other player. In the end the doors went shut again and nobody gained or lost anything *grin* We could have played for a whole week and still not have a victor so even it was.

Hi all. For this evening I was invited to come with Erik and Dagmar to the theater to see Rob Kamphuis. I really enjoyed the show and so did the Wijbrantds family :-) It did get rather late by the way because when we all got home Erik and me decided to go and watch some television. I think it was about two a.m. when I finally went home. We should do this more often *grin*

Hi all. Did I mention the shooting club? Well today was my turn to run the bar sshift. The problem was that I got up this morning with an enormous headache and even tough I tried to 'overdose' it out of my head with my collection of different colored pills it wouldn't go away. My dad took over my shift en ran the bar service for me. I think now I will have two of those shifts next year ;-)

Hi all. Worked in the shop again. It was a reasonably quiet day so I had plenty of website-working-time :-) With all this day's of work I hope the site looks great and nothing less. It would be a shame if I put all this time into it with the result of it looking like 'just another site'. Anyway I think it's quite all right.

Hi all. To finish the work for next Saturday I went to my dad's shop this morning. The machines were brought in last Saturday but I decided to spread the work a bit over the week. This was for two reasons: a) this wayI could work on my (this) website a bit more last Saturday and b) because I promised his dad he would be in the house a couple of days while he was on vacation, this was ideal to combine the two things.