We turned up at the track and were led up to the second track (which we had never seen or raced before):

I led the field out followed by Craig and we just felt our way around the track. Our first impressions were good, the track is wider than that downstairs but the ramps are steeper and so the weight disadvantage I experienced was worse. It also had some bumps in the circuit one of which at the most tricky braking point. On heading back down the ramp for the first time at near to full speed we came across Rachel Ross and Cathy coming the wrong way round the track. Rachel hadn’t followed Beth and had somehow turned the wrong way out of the pitlane meaning Craig and I came barreling down the hill towards them. It was dangerous and a bit silly.

Once everything got going Craig dropped off my back as I got stuck behind Cathy struggling to pass her after catching up after my uphill disadvantage she was good though and kept to the racing line. Eventually I had to resort to a little helpful nudging. Craig meanwhile having dropped back and found open space managed to set the fastest lap of the first session. Towards the end of the session I was confident but getting held up and was caught and passed by my sister at the end, she had also been going quite well.

It seemed from the first session that it was a great circuit for keeping people close. I found that there were only really two corners at which braking was necessary and thus the speed meant that there was less opportunity to really fall back. The headline fastest laps at the end of the first session were as follows:

1. Craig King
2. Jonathan Little
3. Helen Little
4. Beth Little
5. Catherine Leopold
6. Thomas McCorkell
7. Rachel Ross

At the end of the first session I got some stick for giving nudges to ease my passage past various people, personally I think my sister was worse but hey.

As I followed people out of pits in the second part I immediately came across my sister giving Cathy a wee shove out the way which I hope proved my point. Anyway the second session once everyone had gotten used to the track showed everyones true pace. It seemed that we were lapping Rachel Ross once every two or three laps and although he was gaining confidence Thomas turned up quite a lot as well but as was pointed out after he has barely driven anything before.

Towards the end there was a big old battle between Craig, my sister and I on the track and we all stuck together for about 5 laps. I could tell places where I was faster than them but I could not find a way past. Really seeing as the session was about fastest time I guess I should have dropped off the back of them but hey it was a fun battle trying to get past the other two drivers who were on my pace. Then about a minute from the end of the session I managed to get past Craig following a small mistake, I then made a big mistake though and found myself in the barrier. This followed a previous attempt when while we followed my wife she spun at a tight turn, Craig took one side and I took the other, he got through safe but my avoidance action on my wife put me very hard in the wall. I hope she appreciates how hard I worked to miss her. Also at the end of this session I got my own back on Craig for christmas by banging into him at the end… not quite as good but I’ll take it.

The second session contained a second red flag (the first of course being the pair of drivers going the wrong way round the track). This one was caused by Beth spinning and somehow stalling her kart. The stoppage was called as the driver had to go and restart it. Nothing serious.

Session 2 times (also overall fastest laps)
1. Craig King (faster in S1)
2. Jonathan Little (faster in S2)
3. Helen Little
4. Catherine Leopold (faster in S2 and overtook Beth)
5. Beth Little
6. Thomas McCorkell
7. Rachel Ross

After one round the championship standings are as follows (an explanation of the scoring scheme is below):
1. Craig King – 14 points
2. Jonathan Little – 10 points
3. Helen Little – 6 points
4. Catherine Leopold – 5 points
5. Beth Little – 4 points
6. Thomas McCorkell – 3 points
7. Rachel Ross – 2 points

The top 8 score points:
1st: 10 – 2nd: 8 – 3rd: 6 – 4th: 5 – 5th: 4 – 6th: 3 – 7th: 2 – 8th: 1

In a practice scenario (like this):
2 points for fastest in each session
1 point for second fastest
1 point for beating a previous personal best (set on a different day)

In a race:
2 points for fastest lap
1 point for second fastest

2 points for pole
1 point for second

With three events to go then, Craig holds a good lead. Unfortunately we are not certain he will make the next event but fingers crossed eh?

Also if anyone who went has stories of the sessions then feel free to comment.

We are currently voting on when our next event will take place on our facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=343599396053&

It was such a good deal as well, at least at trial stage. four pounds for a four week subscription. It then goes up to £5 a week for which you get the weekday papers plus the Saturday edition.

The papers themselves have proved great, I now am a lot more interested in the news and in politics than I was when I wasn’t keeping up with it all regularly and found I found more interesting stories that I would never have come across normally. It also gave me sudokus to do on tea breaks and news to read at bed time. Generally the paper was well written as well, certainly it could have been spell checked better at times but most articles even on subjects I had no prior interest or knowledge in were enjoyable to read. It also helps that the independent writers largely share my views on important subjects but it also helped shape my opinions on several subjects.

So am I going to keep up my subscription?
The answer has to be no, firstly it is not good value. While I am happy to pick up the paper on weekdays and take it to work with me, I found it a stretch to pick up the Saturday edition. The paper was not interesting enough and was filled with extras which were largely dull… the 50 best kitchen appliances springs to mind. Therefore if you exclude the Saturday edition then you are looking at paying £5 a week for papers whos value is… £5 a week.

Where is the incentive to therefore subscribe? It limits me in that I would be forced to pick up the paper every day where without the subscription I can happily walk into Londis on three days of the week and pick it up and make a saving. It also means if I want an extended break or a holiday then I am still paying for that privilege. Sure they give you a two week holiday but I still feel constrained.

In addition to the prior mentioned errors (which are a very minor issue) I also found their Monday edition a little on the light side, the sports coverage is no match for the Times’ on Mondays and this was disappointing.

So my overall thoughts? There is still life in the newspaper, at least for me. It is the same argument as the one I have against ebooks, I just like having paper in my hands. Sometimes I don’t want to be staring at a screen. It will be a sad day when this likely outdated medium comes to rest.

The Independent is currently a very well put together and well written newspaper to which I would happily subscribe for a weekday only subscription at about £3.50 a week. This would bring papers down to the level I have mentioned before on this blog that I would buy them more often. Until that day I will happily pick up the independent several times a week but will not be constrained by the limiting factor of a subscription. For me newspapers (at least the non-tabloid ones anyway) still have a place and I hope they stick around for some time yet.

These conferences tend to have themes, back in my university days I went to a video forum with Paddy two years in a row. The first year was on online and DVD and the year after was dominated by HD kit. Internet World is no different. Last year’s show seemed dominated by Mobile marketing, the iphone was beginning its major ascendency and it dominated the booths. This year the theme was social media. As this is a part of my companies current IT plan it especially interested me. The problem this year was that the seminars were attended seemingly by a lot more people than last year. This year there were queues the whole way round some of the theatres and I had to give up on some of the seminars I intended to go to. This lead to a nice time sat outside in the sun that was not overly productive. That said I still managed to get into 5 seminars and learned a good amount in all of them.

This year though there were some other features that caught my eye. First of all I found a couple of versions of the Microsoft Surface technology. It was not the best technology but the company demoing it said they’d had to turn down the sensitivity for the show (lighting issues). Apparently they have rolled out a couple in airports. Because of the lack of sensitivity I was not overly impressed but I can see potential. That said I don’t really want to look down and interact with a table.

Next I played with a touchscreen technology that everyone has heard of but few in this country have played with… I refer of course to the Apple Ipad. After a couple of minutes playing with one I thought that having touched one I could see the potential in tablets but I don’t think Apple are on to the best idea. I like the idea of it not running a full desktop style operating system but I think the Iphone interface is a little stretched. I await tablets using Android as this can more easily be tweaked. The other downers for the ipad are that it is really heavy. For something you are meant to use on the sofa it is surprisingly uncomfortable after a couple of minutes. The other downer is that the brightness and contrast do not encourage its ebook reader functionality. I am now willing to give a tablet the benefit of the doubt but do not think it will be the ipad that wins people over even if it is the thing that grabs all the headlines.

Finally I got around to trying an F1 simulator for the first time. Previously I have wimped out when I have seen these fake F1 chassis sporting RFactor and ‘realistic’ handling. I took my shoes off and got into the car, my word is an F1 car not properly configured to its driver uncomfortable. It is a seating position you will not find anywhere else and in the simulator the seat was digging into my back… which I am sure would not be the case in reality. Anyway onto the driving. The track was Silverstone so I knew where I was going (that said the guy felt the need to tell me every turn). I managed to spin on lap 1 by touching the kerb a little hard at one point but from then on I was fine. I managed to set the second fastest lap at that point of a 1:33.200 but by the end of the day I was 6th out of however many people had a go over the day (I would imagine at least 25) so am relatively pleased.

So overall a good day, I learnt a good deal about how we should deal with our social media strategy at work and I got to play with some good toys as well. I look forward to going back next year.

6. Apple Safari – I tested Apple’s browser at work yesterday and found it very slow, sure browsing speed was fast but the software itself kept stalling and smacked of software built mainly for another operating system.

5. Flock – Flock is the best of the smaller browsers. It allows you to keep an eye on your social networks with a style largely based on Firefox even borrowing the rendering engine

4. Internet Explorer 8 – Its become rather cool to mock Internet Explorer, IE8 goes a long way to fixing the problems but its still not as good as several other browsers but with IE9 coming in a few months time Microsoft will be hoping that they can get back onto peoples computers.

3. Opera – Opera were the company making the biggest noise about the need for microsoft to stop packaging IE in Windows which immediately made me hate them. That said though they have built a decent and speedy browser with some very neat addons to improve the experience including a turbo button that puts sites through their server, compresses the images and then shows it to you a lot quicker than usual. They have also added a system to allow you to share files and host websites via your browser.

2. Google Chrome – I’ve liked google chrome for a long time for its speed and minimalist style. This is the fastest browser in my opinion and it never nags you about updates which is a bonus.

1. Mozilla Firefox – Firefox has gone downhill a little in the last year or two, the browser has gotten slow and clunky but the range of extensions and its brilliance as a browser for web design makes it a must have for me.

What do you think? Which browser do you use?

This analysis is not meant as a general means for everyone, I mainly use image editors to prepare images for websites so a little minor touching up, a bit of text addition and a lot of resizing and optimisation. I do not get the most out of these pieces of software that are built for so much more.

First off though two suites that Craig recommended that I could not work out what need I had for. I am sure that for some they are very useful but for me, not so much.

So last:
Xara Xtreme and Xara Xtreme Pro – as I said I just could not find a use for these products that really justified the price.

Now to those that I found could do most if not all of the things I wanted.

6. Paint.net
Paint.net is largely a wonderful tool, it is intuitive and has almost all of the image editing features you could need and being free only sweetens the deal. It is easy to resize and optimise images for the web and will do simple design… BUT it is last of the editors that had the features I needed because of its really bad text tool. The Paint.net help pages explain it best:

“While typing, you may press the Esc key to finish the text and render it to the layer. Once you have finished with text, it may not be modified except by undoing it and retyping the text. To be precise, after the text is rendered it no longer exists in the image as text, but only as pixels and that is why this limitation exists.”

Well sorry but sometimes I make mistakes in my text and want to edit it. I do not want to have to retype the text every time I want to change a word or make a small change. This is retarded and ruins an otherwise excellent free program.

5. Gimp 2
Gimp has been around for ages but I’ve never really seen eye to eye with it, while it did everything I wanted it to it sometimes took more steps than I thought it should and it is not always an intuitive program to use. Being designed primarily for linux means the interface looks dated. That said it could do everything I wanted to do, it just took me a while.

4. GimPhoto – BEST FREEWARE
It turns out that people have been releasing their own updates to the Gimp freeware, this version aims to make the software more like Photoshop and it largely succeeds. Everything feels a little bit newer and a bit sleeker. It is definitely an improvement over the original design and represents my top rated piece of freeware.

3. Corel Paintshop Pro – £59 on amazon
My Father introduced me to Paint Shop Pro years ago with out Windows 98 machine. Back then we had our first digital camera and the software was pretty dang basic. Now though the software is a lot better with many of the features of Photoshop. It just seems to nag a little too much, be a little slow in places and lack a bit of the sheen of the premier product. If you are looking to manage and touch up a photo collection then this would be a good choice.

2. Photoshop CS4 – £580
The big daddy of image editing is about to get a new release. This program offers pretty well any tool I could ever need and does everything in an intuitive way. It is very easy to resize images, manipulate images in any way and has a save for web option. Adobe Bridge is also a pretty good way of managing your images and overall this software is just a joy to use. The downside is the price, oh to be a student and be able to get this program for £200. £580 is just too much for a piece of software for the majority and it leads many to find other means of getting Adobe’s masterwork. If adobe halved the price I would snap this up in a second but when I can buy Photoshop or a new PC, TV or a heck of a lot of games and some grand prix tickets or 20 times Karting it is just no deal. No matter how good it is I just cannot justify the cost for what I would use it for. If my livelihood were image editing and design then I would have to swallow the bill but its not, I just need some light editing and touching up for websites.

Therefore…

1. Photoshop Elements 8 – £50 – OVERALL WINNER
With all the features that I need to do everything at the moment and a pretty good image manager built into it as well Photoshop Elements is a clear winner. At a tenth of the price of its big daddy you would expect something a lot more cut down than what you receive here. Sure you might be missing bigger modern features but what I am doing is things that could have been done years ago and so have happily filtered down into the Elements program. Its fast, its optimisation is identical to CS4 and it maintains the same straightforward interface in most places. I see no reason to spend the extra £550 on the bigger software.

What do you think though? I will certainly be trying out CS5 next month. Content Aware Fill looks incredible and I can’t wait to try that out. What image editors do you use and what was I meant to use Xara for?