Hi all. When I go shopping, it's usually one or two times a week, I'm normally done with a couple of things like bread, coffee, milk, coffee, cheese, coffee, shampoo and stuff and euhm .. ah yes: coffee ;-) This is the way of shopping I like the most. You're in and out in no time, and it seems you have low costs too. And this way I can also take with me some vegetables (yes I know what you've heard, but I am known for eating the occasional vegetables ...) that otherwise don't stay fresh for long. But every now and then it seems that I run out of ... euhm ... well just about out of everything really. This situation comes with some problems while doing the shopping. For one the list is longer and I'm not too fond of long shopping lists. My hopes of being in and out go away faster than GT40 chased around by a Mustang and also the price tag of my filled shopping bag(s) goes up a bit. Guess where I just came from? Right. And I don't even have to let you guys guess what type of shopping I did. Boy I tell you, if I had went shopping yesterday when I was still a bit unbalanced because of the flue I would have dropped to the floor just about three tenths of a second after the cashier told me how much she wanted for my collection. At first I thought I misunderstood and I glanced at the display on her register ... hmm, same number there. Or numbers. My question to her if this was the price for the entire building was not as funny as I thought it would be, judging from the expression on her face so I dug deep and paid up the requested amount. When packing I noticed that it actually was quite a lot of food stuff so I guess that in the end it is going to be worth it. Let's hope it lasts me at least until the end of January, as these figures just aren't funny to have each week. So remember that life is expensive, no matter what people tell you.

Hi all. Well I called work from the car that I was getting myself over there and Maikel told me to stay home as a) I should simply stay in bed and b) there wasn't anything to do overthere anyway so why bother coming over ... Oh well, fair enough, I'm not that hard to convince ;-) So I'm going back to bed now and we'll see when I wake up again. Bye!

Hi all. I didn't go to work today as I woke up with a headache, feeling a bit feverish and generally like I was about to loose balance any second. Yesterday when we played snooker I was already physically not in the best shape ever but thought that if I was to get to bed relative early I would sleep it off. Unfortunately I didn't :S So I called work this morning and told them not to count on me for today. Now that I just woke up I feel somewhat better so I think I'll just get in the car and head over there. Who knows, I might even get some work done right? See you when I get there folks ;-)

Hi all. I just love making people happy. Basically it's nice to see a person smile every now and then. But surprising them with a small, unexpected gift is the best thing. Today was Marcus' turn on the receiving end ;-) He was having his final working day at Philips and even though we already said good-bye to him last Friday I knew it wasn't going to be long before I saw him again. Fortunes-R-Biek ... Ever since I've known Marcus he has been quite enthusiastic about Ferrari's (or Fewwawi as he call's them ;-) and whenever the topic came up we could expect a wide smile and a loud 'Fewwaweeh!' from his side of the room. Now that he was going to leave us I thought it would be a nice idea to make him a little present regarding those red automobiles. So for just over three weeks I had been working on making him a DvD which should have contained a compilation of a great number of small video files we had been downloading over the past year. This process however was not going according to plan at all. Every time I thought I was finished the whole thing crashed when I was just about to burn it. Nero was so friendly to give me about 5 pages of error code so the problem was found quite easily ... NOT! In the end it turned out the whole process crashed on the slideshow I put in the beginning and when I removed it and replaced it with a couple of more movies the thing worked like a charm. Meanwhile I had been downloading a complete documentary called 'fifty years of Ferrari' which was one DvD by itself and I also wanted to include all the hi resolution pictures and all smaller movies I had been collecting over time. So the final 'product' contained three DvD's packed together nicely in a (somewhat too small) box with a custom made Fewwawi cover. When I showed up at work a couple of hours ago and after a little speech handed the DvD over to him he asked us if we were maybe expecting him to feel embarrassed or something like that. We told him 'no' but also that we wouldn't mind if he cried for a little while *grin* The expression on his face alone was worth all the effort and I believe he liked it a lot. Let's hope we hear from him in a while and get that confirmed. Now I'm going to do some more work on my mom's PC again which is coming along nicely and maybe will be finished by tomorrow. She can then begin using it and explore the digital PC world all over again and truly enjoy all the nice things internet has to offer. The basics are all ready and all that's left is some fine tuning and installing the usual small programs. After that it's a matter of copying her data to this machine and off she goes! Right, I'm off installing. Catch you later.

--== Special GPL Ranking bulletin ==-- That's right folks, Bas went through the zero benchmark line with his GPL Ranking. So finally my predictions that he would be the first of us two to get a negative ranking proved right, even though for a while it looked as if it was going to be me. So congratulations to you buddy, well done indeed!

Hi all. In my humble opinion there are two ways of having a white Christmas. One way is the traditional way: snow. You know, that cosy white blanket that's covering the world when you first wake up or the new tracks you're car is making because you're the only one (or at least the first one) going to work that day. Basically it's the picture you see on a default Christmas card. Then there's the white Christmas I stumbled across this (Sunday that is) morning: fog. You know, fog is a cloud that's having difficulty's judging the height it's on so because it can't sink into the ground it just lays there, waiting for people to drive through. The effect of fog this morning was that the overall speed on the highway dropped to almost below zero (it seemed people where trying to get that snowy white Christmas after all I think) and everybody was driving very carefully, which at these moments I can only approve. I think fog is the most dangerous situation of all weather types because on some moments you just can't even see more than 15 feet in front of you. So when it comes to slowing down this is one of those rare occasions that I'm all for it. Unfortunately it appeared some people managed to be a little too close together because when I was trying to get from the A73 to the A50 all traffic came to a halt and from then progressed only inch by inch. After about fifteen to twenty minutes (and having moved about 5 meters) I saw two of those yellow tow trucks passing us on the emergency lane and I thought 'there goes the next hour or so' because they usually don't appear when nothing happened. Luckily it didn't take long afterwards before we were driving at reasonable speeds again and I was only about half an hour late at my Christmas date. The 'date' by the way was very nice. We played my Star Wars Monopoly with all seven of us and even though I've never won that game (and probably never will ;-) it's still good fun to read that my droid has won second price in a beauty contest, hahaha. The game however took a very long time and in the end was stopped because of that. Having the most Galactical Credits and almost all the streets my dad was pronounced the winner. Nice going dad! Then there was the Christmas diner ( ... it's inevitable Mr. Anderson ... LOL) but that was just great. I'm not sure what the English term for it is but we call it gourmet. Everyone has a little pan of his or her own and the table is covered with ingredients. The fun is that you simply kind of make your own diner, choosing your desired ingredients which where things like chicken, some beef, orange fish (yes yes, we found Nemo and he tasted great ;-) some vegetables and sauces to make it complete. Then there where a couple of salads and bread so all in all my dads girlfriend, who was our friendly host, had the diner thing covered nicely :-) Afterwards we stayed around and talked for a couple of hours (as you can see by the time of this post) before I went home. When I've uploaded this one I'll be off to bed because tomorrow I'm going to surprise a colleague of mine who's then having his very last day at work. We all said good-bye last Friday but I was working on a DvD about Ferrari, one of his passions, and I simply was unable to finish it in time. It's done now so all I need to do is burn it and get it to Best. He'll like it, I'm sure. Good night folks, sleep well.

Hi all. Do you all know the song 'Don't stop me now' from Queen that has the line 'I'm traveling at the speed of light' in it? This morning I finally understood what that must have been about. Here's a little part of it: I'm a shooting star leaping through the sky Like a tiger defying the laws of gravity I'm a racing car passing by like Lady Godiva I'm gonna go go go there's no stopping me I'm burning through the sky yeah Two hundred degrees that's why they call me Mr. Fahrenheit I'm travelling at the speed of light I wanna make a supersonic man out of you Please note that would Erik, my car-pooling friend ;-), have been with me this morning, that last 'you' would have had to be him. The supersonic man. Hah, I'm almost falling off my chair grinning about the thought of the very idea, hahaha. You'd have to be there one morning to see what I mean LOL Luckily (and that's for the both of us) he's having holidays now, so I needn't to worry about him while I was attempting to break a land speed record for normal black VW Polo's. Not that he minds a quick tour (or maybe he just gave up and bares with me, I'm not sure ;-) but there are simply things you can and things you can't (or shouldn't) do when having a passenger in your car who's lovely wife kind of expects you to return him in one piece, with a healthy level of adrenaline and trusts me with the responsibility of ... well ... bringing the chap home every night *grin* Anyone who's ever been my passenger knows that there are all sorts of 'small' things about other drivers that can annoy me while driving. One major one is people driving too slow. And I don't mean the ones that appear slower when I come blazing down the highway. No I mean the ones doing seventy three on a eighty road or even worse the ones who seem to be driving Miss Daisy on the highway ... Aarrgghh (and I mean that literally) But ... I owe a great many thanks for all my motoring colleagues this morning who, apart from one quite attractive lady in a nice dark blue BMW 5 Touring who really can't be blamed but was terribly in my way for a lifetime lasting 3 minutes, all seemed to take notice of that almost invisible Polo (yes Sir, stealth mode was 'on' :-) which must have had a red glowing nose not unlike the space shuttle when it's entering the atmosphere while returning to earth. Nasa-red is what we'll call it from now on. Now I was going to give you a little calculation about how far my travel was (about fifty five kilometers) and what time it took me this morning (about forty minutes) but I'm not sure that's a wise thing to do, with childeren reading this and stuff, so maybe I'll get back on that in a future post, who knows ... ;-) SDI from now on means no less than Supersonic Daredevil Inside.

Hi all. Whenever you hear people talk about racing and racing cars, no matter how or where they begin that conversation, somehow always that zero-to-sixty topic comes up ... But not with us, not the GPRT and definitely not when we're talking about GPL. Ever since I've made the decision to take this Grand Prix Legends thing seriously my mind has been on just one goal: getting from X to zero. For the people I've lost already: search the site for GPL Ranking and you'll find a nice description that principle (and to those same people: shame on you! :-) Somehow I seem to be caught up in a new type of racing; the run towards that zero line. Both Bas and I have made great progress in the last couple of weeks and it seems that now the parking brakes have been taken off and we're just thundering through to that zero line. Okay okay, maybe not thundering ... but it is getting rather windy out there :-) Almost every day now there are changes in our GPL Ranking and we're pushing each other to new limits we could only dream of not that long ago. It also seems we are getting better and better at that whole GPL thing. Last weekend for example. We were doing our Ring training laps and since my time there was sufficient to keep Bas occupied the next couple of days (whaha, sorry chap, I just couldn't resist it) I decided to do some work on my Monsterranking and took the Honda out for a spin. For me the tactics work like this: you look at the ranking, pick out the highest time, choose the car that goes with that time and step on it. The first thing I noticed when I gave that white whale some throttle was the 'new' Honda sound I had. Somehow I must have been experimenting with it and forgotten about it. I don't drive that Honda that much you know. Oh well, it sounded kind of screamy and I just went with it. Second thing I noticed when I hit the track was that the car seemed to 'stick like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth' (my favorite Porsche 911 Turbo advertising quote) ... man I could do just about anything with that car and it still wouldn't slide. Now I have had that feeling before but that was when not driving very very fast. The slower, or more controlled, you drive the car the better you seem to be able to keep it on the road. It's funny how that works ... *grin* This is usually the case when I drive the BRM across the Ring for example. However not this time. I'm not sure anymore what the pitboard guy wrote down the first time I passed the start/finish line but when I did another lap it read eight minutes and thirty seconds! I almost missed my breaking point when reading it. To give you an idea on why I was this surprised: The Lotus is the only car I'm faster with on the Ring! This was simply ridiculous! Outrageous even! I mean ... with a Honda for crying out loud ... Bottom line: my Monsterranking went down a whopping fifty seven seconds! So that's how you do it folks. You set a time when you first begin GPL and when you're getting nearer the benchmark time with the fastest car you come back for an afternoon and completely destroy your old, slower, time :-) It's just that easy folks, nothing to it.

Hi all. I'm sure all of you are aware that today is my birthday however for the few of you who arenn't: it is :-D So what did I do on my birthday so far? Let's see ... nothing! LOL Man I just woke up, please give me a break. I'll post a more detailed message tonight when I get home from woek but only IF there's anything to report.

Hi all. The package is in. Babs told me this morning she had my package in her car and she'll bring it by later on. Thanks for getting it Miss, you're great :-) There was only one (small ;-) thing I forgot and to which I was kindly (actually it was on the very edge of sarcasm ...) reminded around lunch time. Somehow I had forgotten I had asked my team leader if she would get my package too ... ouch ... No extra Christmas bonus for me I guess ... bad Biek *grin* Silly, silly me.

Hi all. Yesterday was a great day for Christmas bonus packages. First of all I got one at Philips, the company I'm working for at the moment, and when I visited my dad in the evening he had one for me also, which is very nice of him of course. Muchos Gracias dad, great idea! If all goes well tonight my trusty colleague Babs will get mine from my employer too so then I'll have three in total ;-) This is almost enough to catch up from the previous years when I didn't get one at all. It's not that my life isn't complete without a package, but it sure is nice to get one.

Hi all. Man I'm tired. At the moment I feel like I could sleep for two days in a row and still wouldn't have slept enough. This is all my own fault mind you, so I need to take a good look in the mirror and tell myself never to do this again. But knowing myself like no other I already know this isn't going to help much, so I probably will not bother anyway. Here's what happened. Last night I phoned Bas to see if he was feeling like player snooker. We tend to do so the Tuesdays anyway, even if we have another competition night that week. This time however Bas kind of called in sick as he was feeling like he had been run over by a Peterbilt 359 and trust me folks: that's one big truck. He didn't think he would be having much fun with the competition either so I decided it would be better to call the other team's captain and ask him for a reschedule. They didn't mind so that's something for the next year. Then I called Jaap to give him the news and he was in a potting mood so we met at Matchroom and had a go. No less then seven frames it took us to get tired of it, ending in a nice score of four to three frames in my favor this time. It was not the best snooker we ever played but still we managed to score somewhere around one hundred points together each frame which isn't bad. After the snooker part we spend a 'little while' talking and when I finally left Matchroom it was close to three a clock I think ... and that's a tad late for a weekdays night, it really is. When I finally came home I thought it wouldn't be very wise to go to bed for those couple of hours (my alarm clock starts to make those disturbing sounds at around five in the morning) so I stayed up. That way was the only way I was sure I would be awake when I needed to go to work this morning. However now that I'm still awake ... or sort of ;-) ... boy, oh boy. Had this been a Lethal Weapon part X movie my line would be that 'I'm getting too old for this sh*t'. For today I'll just zombie along a bit and see how I'll get through today. Whish me luck.

Hi all. I don't know about your weekend but I spend most of it playing Half Life 2. Of course I worked the Saturday at my dads shop and just when I was home again Bas phoned me if I was in the mood for playing some snooker. I think he tricked me into it by telling Half Life 2 had arrived, but I can't remember exactly what happened ... ;-) Of course I was in a snooker mood, I almost always am. So off I went and at his place he told me that Half Life had arrived. Cool! But we were strong (use the force!) and went to play snooker first. What a massacre, he totally wiped me off the table. Just one of those days I guess, he just took way more advantage of the possibilities he got from me than I did with his. Fair enough, the better player should win. Simple as that. When going home I remember telling Bas that if I was sensible I would put Half Life aside and go to sleep first ... Yeah, right. Sure I did. Well let's put it this way: when I noticed I almost fell asleep behind my PC I decided it was time to go to hit the bed and go to sleep ;-) Some vague numbers like 04.37 AM keep coming up when thinking of it ... And as soon as I woke up, well after a double shot of Dark Roast (thanks a million Bas, man I needed it that Sunday :-) I was back in the saddle and gave it a fair shot again. This just has to be my favorite kind of FPS games. There's some 'puzzles' to overcome in between the action but they are (somewhat to my disappointment) not too hard to get passed. En it's not the usual shoot-everything-that-moves-FPS either. I like it. A lot :-) I got to work a bit now, talk to you later.

Hi all. I am so very disappointed in my driving on the Ring last night, there are just no words to describe the feeling. It was my first race on the Ring for DSZ ever as I missed last years event and I was really looking forward in driving it, as you might have picked up from earlier posts. What was supposed to be a very cool, but difficult, race turned out to be a small personal drama. I think that maybe my reasonable start itself was the only highlight, as it was all downhill from there. In turn one I completely missed my breakpoint and had to struggle not to hit anyone there. When I finally turned in Bas and some Ferrari (I know, again, we can't seem to get rid of those red buggers) came sliding into my side so my from my too late braking slightly damaged Lotus got damaged a little more. With my bent Lotus I continued the race only to get tangled up with a Ferrari (... I know ...) in turn 3 which was just your average race accident. He was on my left, coming a little into my direction and I did the opposite. We hit softly and that was it. No one to blame I guess. Just bad luck. So on we went only to put the poor Lotus on it's imaginary roof two turns later. In other words this race was no more than a couple of turns old and I had already used up one of my precious Lotus'. These are the moment where I have to remain calm and just take things as they are. Count to ten, blow off some steam, that kind of stuff. Unfortunately I was a little too eager (something I usually tell Bas not to be ;-) to catch up that Ferrari and was slightly frustrated about loosing a Lotus so early on in this race. So I made a couple more small mistakes and was almost behind Stefan's Eagle when I missed another break point and put the Lotus in the hedge on it's roof again. Counting to ten was not going to be much of a help at this point anymore ... Aarrgghhh!!!! Right. My second and last Lotus was freshly put on the track as I was smashing the pedal down, burning rubber and was on my way again. The rest of that lap was okay I guess, no big or costly mistakes there but in the first part of the second lap I did it again. First of all I just hit a fence somewhere and in a deep turn I lost the rear of the car and crashed into the only tree for miles around ... And it's not that I didn't know that it was there people, I just could not help sliding into it as I did quite a lot when I was doing my first laps on the Ring with my BRM. I mean we are not supposed to crash into that tree anymore, it's that easy to avoid, really. So that was it, Biek was finished, done, over with, ready to go home. Had this been a real race I (IF I had been able to get back to the pits after those two near death experiences) would have thrown my helmet in a corner, pushed away the photographers and slammed the door of my motor home shut behind me. Or would I? This was after all 1967 ... No I probably would have walked back all the way to the pits, put down my helmet and, because there was no place to hide back then, calmly explain to the press what had happened and why I was so mad on myself. Our next race will be next year so there is some time for preparing and trust me: I will be more ready than I have been for any race yet. This was a one time DNF and will NEVER happen again. I have no hopes in winning a DSZ for quite some time to come but until I do I AM going to finish all of them. No no, I'm not mad, I'm just really really disappointed!

Hi all. Man, I had a nice game of snooker last night. I played well, stayed calm and won all three of my frames, which of course coulnd't have been much better. In the end we as a team won with seven over two frames so congratulations to us :-)

Hi all. Last weekend was all about the Ring. For those of you that haven't got a clue as of what I'm mumbling on about, I'll explain this 'new' term a bit. For starters I'm not referring to that movie threesome, you know the trio of which two have those dreadful open endings (*grin* sorry Stevie, I could not resist another chance bringing that one up again ;-) and it's not about some scary (but pretty good) movie with a videotape and bad things happening either. So what's it about then? A track. A Formula One race track to be exact. And to be more precise: one the most outrageous race tracks ever. Never has there, nor ever will there be a track like this. Picture this. A normal Formula One track is roughly, say, between two and a half and five kilometers long. The Ring isn't. It's length stretches over twenty kilometers long. A fast driver will still need about eight minutes to go round. And that's just one lap ... A normal Formula One track normally is quite flat. The Ring isn't. It's located in the Eiffel mountain area in Germany and that's not the flattest part of the country. The overall altitude of the Ring varies a whopping 300 meters! A normal Formula One track can, up to a certain point, be somewhat forgiving for driver errors. The Ring won't. Because most of the Ring basically is a street course you don't have many places you can have a run off and still be in one piece. This list can grow much longer of course. Only no track in existence can match the Ring, on whatever area of comparison. It's just that awesome. The Ring is the kind of circuit you treat with deep respect and be careful with. It's either that or it has it's terrible revenge and you'll end up with a broken car and ditto ego ... IF you're lucky. So what's so great about it then? How can you love a track as unforgiving as that specific one? Why is this track so fantastic to drive? I'll try to explain to you the way I personally see and experience the Ring. First of all I have a confession to make. I just love long tracks. Simply can't help it. With GPL we have for example the circuits of Spa, the Ring (of course) and the fabulous Isle of Man to name a few of my favorites. By the way, loving those tracks does not automatically mean that I'm lightning fast there (I whish), it's just that I really enjoy driving them very much. For EA's F1 Challenge (and it's MOD's) we have the Ring too and the Le Mans track which are by far my favorite two tracks to drive. And even with the brand new race sim GT Racing there is already a good version of the Ring available. Just give me that Viper GTS-R and the Ring and you won't need to worry about me getting passed the weekend ;-) My first encounter with the Ring in Grand Prix Legends was simply devastating. I remember driving it and about every 3 minutes wondering weather or not I had seen that part or bend or tree before, and which lap I was in and what time I did etc. Then after a twenty minute drive (and numerous new BRM's) I came to a building I knew for certain I had seen before. There even was a sign with my name on it. The street I drove through was called Pit Lane or something ... Okay okay, so maybe you guessed it a little sooner than I did. The Pit Lane thing was a joke of course, but the building was the one that's next to the main straight and after my twenty minute lovely country side drive I had finally finished one whole lap! Wow! After a couple of days my lap times started to drop below fifteen minutes and a week or so later I broke the ten minute barrier so life was smiling on me again. These days I'm stuck somewhere on the nine minute line with the BRM but with my 'normal' racing car, the Lotus 49, I've reached an cool eight twenty four something this weekend, which is not too bad. The benchmark for this circuit is an eight minute twenty one seconds so there's plenty room for improvement there. However, even though it might sound rather strange, finding as little as three seconds within eight plus minutes of lap time on a track that stretches over twenty kilometers is definitely not as easy as it sounds. Here's the thing. Finding a couple of tenths of seconds on Zandvoort for example is much easier. Every one and a half minute you start a whole new lap with new chances, new ways of improving yourself and you can remember that you should take that second corner just a little tighter than the lap before whereas when you have one hundred and seventy four turns and corners it gets truly difficult remembering what you did wrong at turn X. So before you actually are ready for improvement on a track of that size you have been driving around for days, weeks, sometimes months even. This is the challenge bit of long tracks. Getting better at driving them is so immensely rewarding. The only downside in that same challenge bit is that when I want to drive for half an hour the longer tracks give me less laps. In half an hour I can do fifteen to twenty laps on Zandvoort, but on the Ring only three ... The effect of this is that I don't start practicing the Ring unless I have a lot of time. There's no such thing as a quick lap around, I just end up really annoyed about crashing just about every other corner, because of the lack of concentration. The other aspect of long(er) tracks is the change of scenery. When the same road, houses, trees, etc passes you by every minute and a half you tend to doze off. Now I realize this may be a bit hard to believe. No matter how exiting racing in competition is, no matter the challenge you can find in a track, when you're there just 'doing' the laps you might slide into 'autopilot mode' and as a result your concentration might drop just a little, resulting in that earlier spoken of broken car. With longer tracks on the other hand, this kind of boredom seldom happens. You just have to stay focused all the way in order to make it home, and this is specially with killer tracks like the Ring. And on the occasional place where you can look up from the track and around a bit, you'll often be rewarded with the most beautiful view one has ever had ... from a racing car ;-) Next Thursday we have our race on the Ring, with the Dutch Simracing Zone, and I'm looking forward to it very much. I know already that there's no chance in life I'll win it, unless someone takes out the whole field, excluding me, with the start ... Since that isn't going to happen very likely. it's just going to be me, enjoying it all the way and feeling extremely proud when I pass the checkered flag in one piece when I survived the Ring. Thanks for listening :-)

Hi all. Last night we, that's the Giant Pixel Racing Team, 'did' Silverstone. We're still running in the Dutch Sim Racing GPL competition and next on the list was the famous Silverstone circuit. Now I've never been that fast on Silverstone and for some (probably pretty stupid) reason I take a terribly long time to warm up there and get around with some sort of rhythm. Unfortunately last night wasn't much different than previous visits to this venue. During the qualification I had a fast car that just didn't want to go where I pointed it and had to struggle to stay ahead of Stefan in his killer Eagle ;-) I did that, but only barely. Then it was race time. The flag guy was just visible and my start was not bad. Very carefully we all approached the first corner and even though we're now running in the first division people just don't seem to understand that the race isn't won in turn one. A couple of cars hit each other and I saw one Ferrari go up in the air which is always a pleasant view, as I have something against these red b*stards *grin* In turn three another pair collided so before the first lap was done I had gained I think four places or so. If only I hadn't missed turn x (actually I'm not that great with turn names and numbers but I think it was turn five) and mowed the lawn there I might have kept these places for a while ... So I continued the race in last position and started my hunt for Stefan's Eagle, who also had passed me too while I was on the green stuff. Somehow the team orders are not quite clear to him I think ... hahaha. This, to say the least, took quite some time but I finally made it! Hurrah ;-) Then the long run home began. Nothing, and I mean nothing happened during those lonely laps, apart from me going off track in just about every lap or so. Terrible driving, just nasty. Thanks God that one is done and over with, I'm actually looking forward to driving the Ring which is also known as the Green Hell ... I need some training there so I'll catch you all later.

Hi all. There's nothing like winning a snooker match convincingly for boosting the moral in a team folks, trust me. I've seen it happen with my own eyes. Our team joined up for another cosy raining night, as we try have each Tuesday and as usual I picked up Bas at home and then continued to Nijmegen where we play. Just about the whole drive over there we talked about their victory over the other team last Thursday. Man was he exited about it, and frankly why wouldn't he be. I mean it was a great win and I'd be over the moon too. Then we arrived at Matchroom's and began our training frames. If we weren't in a nice mood then already, it sure would have gotten a boost when Jaap came in. Had I been a wizard (other than with my Lotus 49 ... hahaha) I certainly would have let the place light up like a Christmas tree, just to let it match his mood. I lost both of them for the first fifteen minutes or so as they were busy talking about their victory. Words like 'overkill' 'massacre' 'we're great' ... stuff like that. Again a pity I missed it, really. Suddenly Jaap must have realized that I was kind of missing out on the whole party/victory thing because he then claimed that had I been there in the form I was in the Tuesday before, the other team might have considered quitting snooker all together. That helped :-) Here I was thinking I was good at motivating people ... I tell you it does something special to you when you're on the receiving end of a moral boost instead of trying to give them. You have to love these guys and I wouldn't want to miss them. Ever. I think I could (but only if I would have to) miss snooker, but not those blokes. Oh, the snookering part of last night went surprisingly great. I had some nice and some better frames between the lot and had a genuine great night. Time flies when you're having good fun, and does so with incredible speed (I think it has a love hate relationship with light and simply tries to match up ;-) so in the end the night was again way to short. Let's keep this spirit up guys, I like it and it's a good one!