Hi all. With that title I didn't meant the song, even though it's quite a nice one. No, what I was referring to was the fact that it's warm over here. I dare not call it hot (yet) as then there will always be people saying 'oh, but it's getting even warmer later on this week' or something like that and then I'm running out of words to describe how I feel too quickly :-) But this is 'a bit' more than what is good for me so for me I hope it's going to get a lot cooler pretty soon. Trust me, it's just better that way ;-) Keep it cool,

Hi all. Not sure what to say right now, but nothing happened. I mean I did some racing and flying of course, but no major exiting things happened during those events either. Actually I did get some extra tracks working for the Sports Cars Challenge mod we use and they are, of course, very nice ones. One of the things I've been looking forward to has been to do a full 24H race someday. I really like long tracks and endurance racing. Call me crazy but the thought of doing a real time 24H race ot me sounds really exiting. There was a time when that looked like almost happening using Nascar Racing Season 2003 and the famous Le Mans track, but unfortunately that's not going to happen any time soon. But ... (and this one was waiting to happen :-) now I've read of a way to alter the race length in laps or in time, depending on what we're looking for, on F1 Challenge tracks! So that means we can now run our Sportscars on the Le Mans tracks of 2001, 2002 and 2003. And we that we can do so for a whopping 24 hours! It just doesn't get any better than that. I'll get up very early this Sunday and see how far I'm going to get on a couple of full tanks of gas *grin* Whish me luck folks, I'll be needing it. Other than that ... nothing happened ...

Hi all. Yes that 'just' about sums up my weekend (again ;-). Bas and I had another one of our grate race weekends. During those we race (doh!) all kinds of sims and/or mods. This time we mainly used the Sports Car Challenge mod for EA's F1 Challenge. From the start he's been driving the Saleen S7R and my killer ride was the Chevrolet Corvette C5R, both of them in Le Mans editions. That brutally raw V8 roar is simply unbeatable. Unfortunately the Corvette isn't, as I found out this weekend :-| The 'problem' with EA's F1 Challenge and it's mods is that, when doing a multiplayer session, there is no extra AI cars you can race against. This means it's just the two of us, during practice and race. So what we usually do is just try and get the fastest lap in. After that we declare a circuit to be his, or mine, depending who's the fastest that day. What's quite funny is that we're both completely different in driving styles. Bas likes to brake really late, smack that car around the corner and floor it again, while I'm more of a early braking person so, halfway through the corner, I can step on it sooner. After a number of rounds our lap times are almost the identical, as it was the case this weekend on a couple of circuits. First we drove on Hockenheim, which was 'his' already and will probably stay his forever as that circuit simply doesn't suit me. Can't get the speed in the last sector 'up' and I loose about two to three seconds on that part of the track only. Somehow I can't get or keep the speed there. Then it was time for Spa, which is one of my favorite tracks of all time. The 'relaxing' straights and nice combinations of medium and tighter turns combined with it's length make this track a winner in my book. And let's not rule out Ea Rouge, the turn of turns! Great track. Because Bas was a lot faster over there too I started to worry a little. Not that I mind him being faster but the amount of time he was just wasn't right. Not on that track. So I put away the Vette and got myself a Saleen S7R also. Well that made quite a difference (see title ;-), much more than I expected (or was hoping maybe ...). In the end we were no less than 0.007 seconds apart in lap times. Him being the slightly faster this time. He probably misjudged a turn, braked a little too late and was able to keep his Saleen on the track and there got the 0.007 seconds margin ... or something like that *grin* Anyway, that was a bit more like the difference we see a lot. No matter if it's Sports Car Challenge, Nascar, Grand Prix Legends, etc. When the smoke clears and we're able to look at the scoreboard, we're there. Bumper to bumper, front wing to diffuser or door handle to door handle. Finally we did some laps on the long version of Watkins Glen and that one is mine! Mine! Mine! (sorry about that ... ;-) Me being faster is of course due to me doing loads of laps there with Nascar and therefore knowing the track quite well, and the fact that we only did half an hours worth of laps, so that may not have been fair to Bas who simply didn't have much time to get used to the track. But right now I don't care really, faster is faster hehe. Besides I'm sure he'll beat me there too someday. But until then ... Mine! *grin* To finish the day we also did some flightsimming but that was a slight disaster for me too. We did some missions with IL2 - Forgotten Battles (the WW2 plane sim) but either I crashed out or got shot dow so not a great day for as much as flying was concerned. And how was your weekend?

Hi all. You're just going to have to bare with me as I've not been that keen on posting here the last couple of days. Yes, this has still got something to do with the me vs. GAK stuff that is going on. Other than that I'm fine. Now we're going for one last round against them and after that everything should be clear. And I sure hope so, because I'm getting really tired of all of this. It has just got to end at some point, so we'll know what we're facing. As soon as I'm feeling a little happier I'll post more frequently, but for now I just don't have anything nice to report.

Hi all. Oh yeah, you've probably guessed it right: I'm going to be a genuine uncle Biek! My sister and bro are going to be mum and dad, and if things go well we all will be getting our new 'ranks' at just about the same time ;-) She called me tonight, unfortunately just seconds before my flight with the 504, so I called her back afterwards. They both were very exited of course, and so they should. This is quite a big step in someone's life and I' more than happy for them. Afterwards I called my mum and dad to congratulate them. The thought of my dad becoming a grand dad didn't sink in with him, but of course he was exited also. My mum was already in bed, so I got her answering machine and talked to that for some time ;-) The man from Uncle ... Biek!

Hi all. Yeah people, big screens are fun until ... they stop working of course. Oh yes folks, as if things at the moment were not a little cloudy already to say the least, yesterday evening my fine 21" monitor stopped working ... For some time now it gave 'click' every now and then, like the sound you hear when it changes resolution. Kind of a little metallic click. You know, that degaus kind of sound. Well this time it was one final, much louder, click and all that was left on my screen was a extremely bright white line, exactly horizontal and in the middle of the screen. It was so bright that I turned my screen off imediately because it just didn't look good. Just my luck I guess. What is it these days? Do I just attract bad luck or what? This is getting on my nerves bit by bit. The spare 17" I put up there now (luckily I got the thing back in time, I picked it up at my dads place just last Sunday) has a really small screen. I know, it's still 17" but compared to my 21 it's almost iPAQ sized small ... This just isn't my week I guess, let's all hope it passes with the speed of light and a better one comes along. Don't like this week, not at all. This message was recorded using an iPAQ ...

Hi all. 'Mixed feelings about this last weekend, I have. Very sad it is. Hope we must have, strong we must be'. The old and wise Yoda couldn't have said it better ;-) This weekend I got the sad message that our hearing didn't have the wanted result, and that's putting it quite lightly ... The psychic people from the GAK have decided that, allthough they admit I had a bad year in two thousand and two and all, that is not enough reason for not getting the paperwork done in time so they rejected my request and now I'm basically back to square one. For a second there it seemed that all the hard work, most of which put in by my dear sister, was in vain. I mean when they just don't care and basically tell you to go scr*w yourself you're not happy. Not happy at all. B*asterds! We'll now get together again sometime this week I think and look at our options. We can't just leave it at this, but I really don't know what options we have left. This just really freaks me out, mad is a understatement at this point,

Hi all. When is this going to end? Yesterday evening my computer crashed, again, leaving me no option other than to reinstall the d*mn thing again. Now this time I figure it's more or less my own fault, however it shouldn't be possible. So what happened? First some data on the machine: My motherboard is a Abit IC7- Max 3 with a Intel (what else? ;-) Pentium 4 @ 3.2GHz Cpu on there. The Cpu however at the moment runs at 2.8GHz for some strange reason and I've never looked into that but yesterday evening (thank God I waited until after my flight with the 504th ...) I started to try out and mess with the Cpu speed settings. After 3 times trying out a different value my computer crashed out with a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) while booting XP and it didn't get back online. I selected Bios defaults, optimal, etc. nothing but the BSOD happened. And again, and again ... Even safe modus didn't get me back online. Now that I've reinstalled XP on a different harddrive I found out that my complete profile folder is unaccesable. The properties says it's zero bytes, but with a data recovery progam I've managed to get about 4GB out of there, being my mail, favorites and My Documents folder. The most important 4GB's so to speak. Well tomorrow evening and a bit more on Sunday I'll be trying to get it back online the old way, because I really don't want to do a complete reinstall again. Keep your fingers crossed for me, okay? Thanks! To be continued ... I hope,

Hi all. Before you start to laugh keep in mind that this was our first attempt ever to make a DvD from captured material of a standard videotape. Having said that, here's is what's happened: My brother in law Stefan his parents had a couple of home video's and old material they would like to have put on DvD since they no longer have a VCR installed. So we started out on Friday evening with the idea in mind to simply capture those couple of video tapes and burn that on to DvD. The rest of the weekend we had planned a race weekend with Bas and maybe Jaap also so that would have been so very cool :-D When I got there (at my sister's and bro's house in Wageningen) there were not just those couple of video's waiting for processing, but also three BLØF documentaries and I think one other tape with someones birthday or aniversary on it. As they were not people I know I'm afraid I really don't remember who it was about. Now I don't know exactly so I'll have to look it up but I think we were looking at about four and a half hours of video material all together. Wow ... Right ... ;-) So we had lots of capturing to do, lets put it that way, hehe. Because I first had to find a suitable program that could both capture and then burn the DvD we lost some time before we could get going but after we found one which we were happy with we started capt ... d*mnit, no not capturing unfortunately. We first had to find a way through the forest of options that we were presented with to get the desired result on our DvD. The biggest problem however started after we had captured our first block of video. As soon as I pressed 'stop' ... nothing, nada, zilch, blanc screen ... and then ... reboot! Now you need to know that if there is one thing I ab-so-lu-te-ly hate then it's my own computer system acting wonky! So after logging in again (a reboot takes about 25 seconds these days so it's not that we've lost a lot of time here ;-) I restarted the program found out that the previously captured block of video had been saved. So nothing lost, apart from the 25 seconds during booting. The computer kept rebooting every time I pressed 'stop' and we got used to it I guess. Or tired of it, I dont know, whichever comes first I guess :-) Eventually (with a few side steps and some fiddling around with VCD, SVCD, MPEG, DVD, PAL, NTSC, 4 - 8MB/s settings etc.) we had captured a whopping total of about twenty two GB!! of video material just waiting to get processed. In the process we have actually burned one DvD which to our surprise did even run beautifully on the Playstation 2, a system normally really picky about which disc to play and which disc not to. Very nice to know, but like I said just as surprising. Another 'surprising' fact is the time it needs to get a DvD compilation ready to burn, which is, to say the least, a whole lot longer than I expected! When we gave the software the green light and pressed the 'burn' button, it took my brand new P4 3.2GHz with one GB of RAM still somewhere around three and a half hours to get to the stadium where the burning could begin! The actual burning of the DvD can then be done in ten to fifteen minutes at eight speed burning I think, so that final stage is completed quite quickly. But the time it took before we got to that point ... geez ... In order to 'save' some of the race weekend in terms of time we then copied all the captured data to Stefan's computer so he can use the same software to 'build' the DvD's. Later on when he's finished doing so we can then make an appointment to burn them all to disc. By then I also should have my own DvD-R's delivered so we can finish it. Then we decided to do some Grand Prix Legends 1965 MOD racing on the new brand new circuit of Clermont Ferrand and had a really great time. What a magnificent circuit that is, truly amazing to drive. Unfortunately you don't have enough time to admire the scenery but it's so incredibly beautiful. I mean you can literally look a mile away and gaze at the gorgeous view, at some points you can see other cars drive on a higher or lower part of the track. They (The GPLEA) say they have worked on that one for nearly four years and I say it's worth every single minute of that time. A piece of art. At the end of the Sunday evening we watched a movie together with my sister who I've seen very little this weekend. Just let the computers alone for a while and relax with a good movie. The movie, by the way, was Instinct with Anthony Hopkins and Cuba Gooding junior, to name a few. Good movie, I liked it much. Then it was time to go home and get sleep, because I had a early rise today. Erik the Carpooler ;-) was waiting for me at about a quarter to six so ... bwoah ... I had about 4 hours of sleep last night, but this time it was my own fault I guess. I'll get a bit more tonight, promise :-) DvD's are us,