I know it's been a little too quiet overhere but indoors I've been working on a lot of things. Among them was the proud job of painting the Giant Pixel Racing Team's company cars. The first car that's finished now is the Chevrolet Corvette C5R we're going to use in competition. Should you have the unstopable urge to take a peak I suggest you head over to either the GPRT's official forum or to my alter ego's Overstear home at the Deviance Art website and take a look at it there. Besides all the painting I've been rearanging the insides of my small home to make space for some extra closets I have waiting for me at a friends house. All I needed was space to put them in and I'm allmost done making enough room for them. And since I'm moving over to the local support team at work I'm required to get MCSA certified which means a lot of studying which I've been doing in the mornings mostly, while I was still awake and sharp ;-)

I still haven't figured out what I like more: working long days and that way having a solid excuse to not do a lot of things that actually need to be done, or having two weeks off all of a sudden and still have to little time to do all the things you normally don't get to do. Tricky this whole vacation business is, hmmm? But I'm hanging in there like a professional holliday taker. I tell you if you didn't know me better you might even be getting the idea that I did this all the time, it just looks that natural ;-) Bas and I went to the movies tonight. The Island was playing and we had seen (and heard, my God ...) the trailer and decided that this was one for the theater. And it was. Good movie, good action, good story and a Cadillac Cien so no way that could have been a bad movie ;-) Go see it.

After this ridiculous long period of me not posting anything I'm not sure where or how to begin. The thing is that nothing much happened actually, I've just been busy with all sort of things and didn't think it about the site for a couple of days. Yeah I know, that sounds as strange to me as it may do to you. However I'll give you the highlights of the past two weeks so at least you haven't missed anything 'important' going on in my life. The biggest news I guess is me getting a promotion of some sort by moving on from the service desk to the local support team at Philips where I work. This means a different style of work and more contact with the people I'm helping all day, which was just about the biggest thing I missed from previous places I worked at. So this is going to be a good and interesting period for me work-wise. And less than a week after I heard that good news my boss kind of thought it would be good to go on holiday for a couple of weeks to get myself completely recharged and ready to dive right into my new function. So to cut things short: this is week one of my two week holiday and I have to admit that it's not that bad. My mother rang me up yesterday, asking me what was wrong. She had sent me an email and hadn't gotten a replay so she figured I was ill. 'It's even worse' I told her, 'I have vacation' ;-) But now that I'm in day three the idea isn't feeling all that bad. I'll just sit this one out studying and cleaning up the house and see if I want another one next year. Who knows.

The past weekend was in many ways a classic (race) weekend. To begin with more than half of all of the GPRT drivers showed up, instantly making this a well visited race weekend. I got to Bas' place on Saturday already and Sunday morning Stefan joined us making the fun complete. Unfortunately it seems that a GPRT race weekend can't be complete without some piece of inferior hardware failing and this weekend it was my turn. My trusty red MOMO force racing wheel got the gibberish and started to act up in such a way that racing was over for me. This was at about three o clock in the afternoon on Sunday I think so although racing might have over, the weekend sure wasn't. The problem was the cable connecting the wheel housing and the pedals together. I had been having some minor glitches before but didn't realize this was due to the cable breaking up. And yesterday afternoon it gave up and broke down on me completely leaving me with two pedal positions: full brake and no throttle or the other way around, both making it impossible to drive another meter. So I logged in on the S.NL chat channel to ask around and see if anyone possibly had a spare cable that I could use. I could think of at least one person who could have one, but decided to let them come forward instead of pointing out the volunteer :-) Within about ten minutes I could get in my car and pick up my loaned cable from Toon, one of the better drivers at S.NL. He just said 'sure, come pick it up' which instantly saved the weekend. At the GPRT site I made a nice thank you post for him, the least I could do. So in total about an hour and a half after the breakdown the three of us where racing again,thanks to Toon. I believe that this example is one of many that make internet communities pure gold. Where else could I have gotten a good cable for my steering wheel halfway through a Sunday? Exactly, no where. To tell you the truth I don't think I'm able to get one at all since Logitech stopped making my wheel for no known reasons ... :S To be continued I guess ...