Kind of Forgot...

That I hadn't posted here all week.  Been really busy scrambling to get some tests done for our project while attempting to write and edit the report too.  We've been given 50 pages of report and 50 pages of appendix, which we decided to split between the event and the car.  It sounds like a lot, but given the enormity of the project, it's not near enough actually.  There will be some tough decisions about details to leave out unfortunately.

I did try riding the bike to campus this week for a few days, but it's really bad timing.  The busy days just made it a bit too tiring, especially since I need to get work done at night after I get home too.  But I might try it again once the thesis starts and the work isn't quite as hectic as this and the next week are going to be.

Of course it is another 4 day weekend technically, but that doesn't mean much for us.  I am going to London on Saturday for a break, and because the train tickets were half price :)  Hope the crowds from the wedding aren't completely out of control, but they probably will be.  It is supposed to rain at this point, which would make things interesting.

I am getting a little homesick recently.  The busy schedule has helped some, so maybe that will help me get through it.

Well I'm gonna take care of some report editing before we meet as a group in a little while do discuss the report and poster (haven't started the poster yet). They are both due next Friday.

Easter!

Happy Easter everyone!  Waffles and fruit for breakfast today, though I bought the wrong cream to whip, I was trying to avoid having too much to use, and I bought the smallest container, but it was only single cream... Oh well, it still kinda worked on the waffles anyway.

Yesterday at Silverstone was really good, and it was actually hot enough to sweat while just watching the racing.  It was historic cars, and there were not only tons of them racing, but tons that had shown up and were just in the parking lot too.  It's just great to see people actually driving them, maintaining them, and using the cars, instead of plopping them in a museum or garage.  I think the highlights for me were all (literally too many to count) the old Aston Martin's.  There were also plenty of Jag E-types, and 2 of I think the 26 D-types that still exist in the world!  The last race we saw was completely old Formula 1 cars, which were really cool to watch and listen to.  I was a complete idiot and forgot to bring my camera though.  I'll try and get some pictures from the other guys that came though.  Let me know if you want to see any of them.  It did turn into a longer day than anticipated because Clive - not a lecturer, but kind of oversees the program - who was racing one of his cars had a hub fail on his car at the start, so his wheel fell off.  So we went back to his house which is in a village close to the track to help him get the car out of the transporter since it did not have a 4th wheel!  Of course after that we had a few beers as he told us story after story about his past escapades.  He's quite the interesting man, and is not shy about sharing it either.  And no, I can't repeat most of the stories!  He was also very honest about some complaints that had been brought up regarding the school and program.  The program was pretty much his idea, so he really wants to see it succeed and continue to improve.

After we got back here I wound up watching Indiana Jones on BBC 3 of all things while eating dinner.  It was a very nice, relaxing day overall.  This morning I'm doing a few small things for our project.  Then I have a lunch reservation at 1 at Ye Olde Swan for a lonely Easter meal.  I'm probably going to ride my bike to the gym first though, get a workout in, shower and then get to lunch.  The place is definitely out of the way, but I've eaten there twice and have been impressed, so I hope their roasts are just as good!

I am enjoying having the whole upstairs of this house to myself way too much though.  It's spoiling me for when the other roommates get back into town.  

Holidays

First of all, I fell asleep last night trying to watch the Braves and Dodgers in extra innings...

Today is the first of 4 public holidays in the next 2 weeks here.  Between Easter, the Royal Wedding and a random extra bank holiday on May 2nd, it's a couple of 4 day weekends in a row.  Would be great stuff except we're still working away on our report!  So I'm working from home today on the report while catching up on some shows from back home.  I can also log in remotely to campus if I need software, which I will probably do tomorrow since I seem to have broken something in our car simulation yesterday :(  Other than that I'm looking forward to getting back to the gym this afternoon, gotta try and use it since I'm ending the membership at the end of April.  Then the pub down the street is having a beer and sausage festival starting today, so I'll probably check that out for dinner.

I finally started the produce box again, and got my first one yesterday.  Cauliflower (that was really tasty actually), tomatoes, potatoes, a ton of carrots, zucchini, a bag of watercress, broccoli, and onions were all included.  Hope I can use it all honestly!  

So it should be a good weekend.  I'm still trying to decide on a good meal for Sunday to celebrate Easter.

Midweek

It has been a busy week trying to get some things done on our project.  We've started writing up the report, which is going to take tons more time, and I've still been trying to work out some bugs in a simulation software too.

I think I'm struggling to get back into a routine between the changes of moving and then having all the travel while Jessica was here too.  At night I'm just finding it hard to stay motivated to be productive for some reason.  The new place is working out pretty well, and it's nice to have SkyTV and a DVR now too.  I can't exactly figure out what channel package we have, there seems to be no pattern to it.  We do have MotorsTV though, which is similar to what SPEED used to be before it got taken over by NASCAR coverage and car auctions 24/7.

I'm trying to find a good place for a nice Easter meal on Sunday.  I've seen a lot of advertising for St. George's Day feasts, on Saturday, but not too much for Sunday yet.  Worst case I'll just find a place that's doing the normal Sunday roast!

Ginormous Update Post

It's another nice afternoon here in England, partly cloudy, somewhere around 65 and not windy either.  I am writing this from outside a pub, in shorts and a t-shirt, enjoying the weather and a good cask pale ale.  Think I'll give you a little overview of my day so far and then go back and catch you up on the last week, or has it even been two since I wrote a real post?

I woke up a little after 7 this morning to watch the pre-race (they call it "build-up" here) and the Chinese Grand Prix.  The race turned out to be absolutely thrilling, lots of good battles for position, no safety cars, tons of strategy, and couldn't tell who was going to win the race until fairly late.  I won't say anymore in case anyone reads this before watching it on their DVR at home!  I then made some good progress working on a simulation program for our project, though I still have some complications to work out.  Just like yesterday I decided to ride my bike the appx. 4.5 miles to the gym after lunch.  Then I decided to take advantage of the weather and my new Netbook to write this post from a nice pub on the way back home (ok, it's actually not on the way back home, just slightly out of the way, but they now have a selection of 9 casks on all the time). 

The trip into London to pick up Jess was uneventful, but long.  There are faster ways to get to Heathrow, but much more expensive, so whatever.  I was actually worried I'd be late to get her, as the plane seemed like it would be significantly early to land.  We took the tube over to Parsons Green nd enjoyed sliders and a Ploughman's salad for lunch at The White Horse.  Our train to Oxford was extremely crowded and really hot.  Easily the least pleasant train ride I've had over here so far.  We made it though, and our B&B was a 2 minute walk from the station.  It was a cute little spot and we got the ensuite bathroom at no extra charge because something was wrong with the public one!

 

The MIA dinner at Williams F1 was good, though I was hoping that the networking part of it would've been a little easier.  I should've used the time I spent looking at some of the cars upstairs finding the people I wanted to talk to.  I did find most of them after the dinner though, we'll see what comes of the connections.  Gian Paolo Dallara, the guest of the night was really good, very insightful, honest, humble, and really entertaining.  The Williams museum was great too, though I think they intentionally lit the place so it was nearly impossible to take pictures.  Maybe it would work with a DSLR or something, but I dunno.  I did meet and have a long discussion about our project with Sam Collins of Racecar Engineering in the museum, which was helpful.  It wound up being a late night, didn't get back to Oxford until like 12:15 I think. 

Next on the itinerary was a place called Stonehouse, and the train ride there was nearly empty and much much more comfortable than the previous one.  The hotel I'd booked there wound up being the accomodation highlight of the trip for sure.  A lovely old stone building, well done restoration, good restaurant, and just fabulous weather.  We wound up eating lunch and dinner at the hotel, enjoying some white wine on the patio in the early afternoon, and enjoying how uncrowded the place was.  It helped that they didn't seem to be too worried about adding all of our charges to our room, we wound up getting a decent portion of our food and drink for free :)  We did explore the nearby larger town of Stroud, which was a neat little town.  The next morning we did absolutely stuff ourselves on the breakfast at the hotel, which turned out to be a good thing...

Our third stop of the trip was pretty far off the beaten path, and we decided to pay for a taxi to get there instead of a bus and a walk with all of our luggage.  We got there to see a "Pub for Let" sign and no one answering the door!  Finally someone came out though, and we dropped our bags off and got checked in.  We started off on our journey to walk and explore the beautiful scenery in this part of the country.  I'd been hopeful to find an easy path to the Cotswolds Way, but hadn't found a good enough map of the thing to locate it.  So we just set off towards what I thought would be the most scenic path.  Unfortunately it was up a steep hill, advertised on the warning sign as a 25% grade!  And it kept going and going and going too.  But partway up we found the actual Cotswolds Way, which got us off a road and into some shade, which we actually needed at this point.  The destination was a town called Edge, with no idea what we'd find there, but hopefully some food of some sort.  I think it was probably 3ish miles to this town.  We got disoriented at one of the path markers, but eventually found the town, but it seemed to be purely residential.  The next town over was Painswick, and another 1.5 mile walk.  So this is where the huge breakfast was paying off!  We had planned to walk back to Haresfield where our room was, but decided to continue to Painswick and get a taxi back.  Luckily once we got there we did find snacks and drink.  Jess continued to try various ciders while I stuck with cask ale.  Google Maps did fail us miserably at the end of our journey in Painswick, which led to a massively frustrated Charles and calling our taxi driver back for a ride home.  It's funny now I suppose, but definitely wasn't at the time!  Dinner was at the Pub, The Beacon, where our room was, and it was absolutely massive.  I think it could've fed a family of 6 or 8 probably.  Nothing spectacular but it worked, ribs and chicken wings for me, and a burger for Jess.  I did find it funny that as my side option I asked for a jacked potato (baked potato) and actually got 2!!  Insted of breakfast we decided to get the pubs Sunday roast, and spent the morning watching the Malaysian Grand Prix and then another short walk around the small town of Haresfield.  It was decent, nothing fantastic, but a good experience nonetheless.

Another taxi ride took us to Cheltenham, and a studio apartment style hotel.  It turned out to be an interesting place, it was cheap and, I wasn't sure what to expect.  I knew we were sharing a bathroom, but we had a shower in the room, just a shared toilet, and a kitchen sink, refrigerator and microwave.  Cheltenham is famous for being a "Spa" though I'm not sure exactly what that means.  We walked around the town center, through a few nice parks and tons of shopping.  It was a nice area.  The last place we stopped, a pub called the Jolly Brewmaster was fantastic.  We wound up trying all 8 of their cask ales (not pints of each though) as they had a huge outdoor seating area that was packed.  We noticed a few patrons with some serious sunburn going on though!  Dinner turned out to be some pate, cheese, crackers and fruit that we found on the walk home.

I didn’t finish writing this at the pub, it was getting a little colder, and I needed to begin the ride back home ;)

The train back home to Milton Keynes was in the morning, in time to get me back to campus for a presentation.  We got breakfast at a local deli, a baguette for Jess and a piece of quiche for me, both very tasty.  It was hectic when we got back here because I had to move my stuff into the room I was staying in.  We barely caught the bus to campus, the one time that it being a few minutes late has helped me.  Jess entertained herself at the CSA during our presentation, then sat in on our group meeting afterwards.  She had been craving some Indian, and had found one of the places in Newport on the web during the afternoon, so that is where we went.  It implied there was a buffet, but it must’ve been old, it was a “banquet menu” instead.  It was tons of food for only £7.99 each.  I got lamb in a mint coriander mild curry sauce, and she got the house special sauce with lamb as well.  The chicken chat appetizer was very good too.  We left stuffed again, even after deciding against trying a dessert.  After that we, well I had to pack for the next night in London.  This involved doing laundry first though, as I hadn’t done that in quite a while because of moving.  I was glad Jess was here to help me clean up the bathroom and room, it wasn’t very clean at all, and the vacuum was all kinds of clogged up too.    

After my group presentation in the morning we headed back to London for the afternoon.  Picked up lunch at a little sandwich shop in Newport, with a chocolate éclair for me (see I’m not trying to lose weight) and a coronation chicken sandwich for Jess.  The chicken was good and I’ll have to get it there again sometime, I’d stayed away from it in general because I think I saw it had mayo in it, which I generally avoid anyway.  We really did a mini pub crawl in London, mixing in a beer store to pick up a few bottles to take home and ending up at a relatively new restaurant and beer place for dinner.  They even had a special menu going that saved us some money because we ordered before 7.  We had Scotch quail eggs, boar sausage, and duck breast.  Dessert was a rhubarb tart and cranberry eton mess.  All very good and glad we tried it out.

 

Our last place to stay, in the Chiswick area, was easily the most interesting.  It was really just a guy’s house, who rents out his spare rooms.  A pretty neat concept, felt much more comfortable than a lot of hotel rooms do for sure.  It was a shared bathroom, but it was basically right outside our room.  It was a bit noisy at times, hearing people go up and down the stairs and what not.  We had full access to his kitchen in the morning for breakfast.  Jess made eggs in the hole, which were tasty.  After breakfast we walked around the area a while, and discovered that it was quite nice, lots of neat looking shops, tons of restaurants, even more bakeries, and overall a place that you could spend a lot of time and money exploring.  We’ll have to remember it in the future, it’s a good place to make getting to Heathrow a lot less time consuming. 

And that was it, the week was up unfortunately.  It was hard to leave Jess at the airport, but it was a really great week and I was super glad to have her company. 

School is going hard and heavy with our project work.  After talking to one of the supervisors about some data we were struggling to get, we realized that we should have gone and brought up our concerns earlier.  He had some ideas as to how to get around not having the exact figures, and had been hoping someone would come ask!  We were the first though, and he gave us some good ideas and there is still time to implement most or all of them actually.  It was a very encouraging discussion actually, it had been very discouraging with some of the problems that we had not been able to get around.

I did make some pulled pork and vinegar based bbq sauce on Saturday, using a steamer as a slow cooker.  It came out better than I was expecting, though if I do it again I’ll buy a cheap slow cooker from Tesco or Asda.  The pork came from the local butcher shop that I found in Newport on Friday when I walked up to the bi-weekly farmers market to buy some vegetables.  Both of those will be a nice bonus to living here I think. 

Well 3 pages later and I think I’m finished writing.  I’m going to finish up a little project work with baseball on in the background and then head to bed relatively soon.  As far as pictures go, Jess is putting together a slide show I think, so they are coming J

Nice and Busy

This won't be long, just thought I'd write a little to let you all know I'm here and still super busy from the move and our project.  Had a wonderful week with Jess, though it felt like only a few days by the time she had to leave. The new accommodation seems good so far, especially after the super helpful cleaning assistance I got from Jess :)  But I've been busy running back and forth to Milton Keynes for some shopping that I need to do.  My laptop might be back to normal though for some reason, crisis diverted for now on that I hope.  Lots left to do on our project, but we had a good discussion with one of our supervisors yesterday about a few of the problems we've been having.  Ok, off to make some lunch and then to MK for some errands and a workout.

Fun Stuff :(

Well I'm moved into my new house, but not my new room.  The landlord mixed up dates and I won't be able to move into the other room until Thursday, which of course is when I'm getting a pretty early train (nothing as early as Belgium though) to go meet Jess at Heathrow.  So moving my stuff around will be fun, but we'll figure it out.  I'm enjoying the quietness here though, hope it stays that way.

The bigger problem is that my laptop screen has now decided to die.  It had been flickering a little, but still totally usable and not that big a deal.  Tonight it refused to come back on though.  I finally got the computer rebooted with my TV as a second monitor connection, so that is how I'm using the computer.  It is absolutely awful timing, as I've got a number of things to take care of tomorrow and Thursday on the train and throughout the weekend I need to at least have access to my emails and the internet for some project stuff.

I don't think I've mentioned it here, but Thursday night I'm going to the Williams F1 conference center for a networking dinner hosted by the MIA.  The featured guest is Gian Paolo Dallara, and as a student attendee, I get an extra 30 minute discussion with him before the dinner, that is exclusive to the few students in attendance.  So I also need the laptop do finish preparations for the dinner, as there will be many people in the room that I am interested in working for this fall.

So yea, my laptop, why now!?  It doesn't help that I'll have to ship it to Russia or Poland in order to get the warranty work done, so I won't have it for a while (hopefully less than a week maybe?).  I think I can get a loaner laptop from the university, and if not, I'll be buying a netbook of some sort, so maybe that will be a good thing long term.  Who knows, but it's the last thing I want to be dealing with tomorrow.

I did manage to get all my stuff in the back of Rob's Fiesta, which was pretty impressive from seeing the pile of bags I had in the hall.  I really didn't think they were going to fit!

It's going to be a later night than usual here, working on some combination of what I mentioned above for a bit longer until I decide I really need to go to bed.

Nice Weekend

It has been a busy but enjoyable weekend.  The test day and two races on Saturday were great.  Had lots of fun, Oulton Park really looks like a fun track.  Much more elevation change than a lot of the ex-airfield tracks that are all around the UK.  Testing on Friday went very well, times were fast compared to the competitors we chose to sample with stopwatches.  Unfortunately this didn't translate well during Saturday's qualifying session, Jamie only managed 9th, and well over a second off his best times from Friday.  But he managed a good first race, working his way up to 4th over the 30 minute event.  That meant he would start 4th for the second race, as there was no additional qualifying session.  Things were going as planned as the end neared, he had stayed 4th trying to not overheat the tires for something like 25 minutes.  Then on nearly the same lap, the guy in second took out himself and the guy in the lead, but the next time Jamie came around he was obviously slow with some sort of problem.  He limped it around to finish in 18th.

In the garage I discovered it was a broken A-arm link in the rear suspension.  It turns out this is a pretty frequent failure on the Caterham's, so we'll have to keep an eye out for it in the future.  We actually replaced the piece on the spot before loading the car up in the truck.

Today I've been getting some work done on our project while mixing in a workout, some MLB.tv, and a few beers at Wetherspoons with their festival deal still going on.  The weather continues to be pretty good, it's been around 55 all day, just a spit or two of rain, and the wind hasn't been too bad.

I am finally officially moving on Tuesday.  It's been the most frustrating thing for me in a long time.  I started packing some things today, it's gonna be tough to get all my stuff into the suitcases I have with me I think.  Been trying to work my food stock down so that packing should be minimized I hope.

The week will stay busy, I'm trying to get some good project work done still, and of course Jess is coming on Thursday morning too.  Super excited about that, so I'm trying to have a few super productive days so I can relax when she's here.