Good Time in Bedford

I took the long bus ride to Bedford - it was about an hour and 15 minutes. There was a quicker express bus, which I wound up taking home, but my monthly bus pass is only good on the long route. The parts of town I saw were an interesting mix of old historic looking buildings, and new looking shopping and retail sections. It was very crowded too, lots of people walking around the streets. Street vendors were very popular, there was a fairly large farmer's market, as well as food carts and also just generic merchandise for sale too.

Eventually I found the Corn Exchange building where the festival was being held. I walked in around 1pm, and it was already packed. There were at least two levels of seating, so they did a good job of keeping where you ordered beer accessible. They were selling half pint and full pint glasses for 2£. If you didn't want to keep it, you could just return it for a refund after you were done. I kept mine because, well I don't have any pint glasses here.

I was immediately impressed by the organization. As the fest had been going on since Wednesday, not all the advertised beers were still available. They had a printout, in alphabetical or ABV order, of everything that was still available when they opened. The sheet also said what style the beer was, and had a 1-4 number of how much was left. The casks were ordered alphabetically, which made finding what you wanted very easy. In addition, each cask had clearly marked on it what the beer was, what the abv was, and how much a pint and half pint would cost. Most of them were about 1.5£ for a half, and 3 £ for a full.

I think my favorite of the afternoon was probably the Potbelly Beijing Black mild. I found overall that I enjoyed the dark milds, porters and stouts much more than any of the bitters or lighter (color) beers. It is also tricky because some beers are called IPA, but they are 4% abv, and technically they are classified as bitters.

I did wind up stopping by a pub recommended by a guy at the fest for Belgian beers - The Wellington Arms. They had a ton of hand pumps available - 16 I think and a nice cooler of European and Belgian bottles. I wound up with a De Graal Dubble that was very tasty.

I'm glad I took the time to venture to Bedford, it was an enjoyable time.

9-10-10 Bedford Beer Festival

Picasa is being funny this morning, so I'll go through and caption these pictures later.

Hello Again

It's Friday night, and might be my last truly free weekend for a few months.  The intro week was good, we had presentations from alumni working for Red Bull F1, Renault F1, Flybrid Systems, ART Grand Prix and MIRA.  All very interesting, though some focused a lot on CFD, which I don't really have a lot of interest in.  Still very useful knowledge though.  We got to see a cutaway of a mechanical KERS system (almost exactly what is on the Porsche GT3R Hybrid, and likely very similar to what might be on next year's F1 cars).  The system was surprisingly small, and could have a footprint the size of a 8.5x11 sheet of paper in the near future.

I did find out that the Social Club does curry on Friday's, it's only 4£ for a full plate with crispy naan. It wasn't as spicy as I might choose, but still very flavorful. We did have group presentations on the paper we were supposed to write this week. I think our presentation went well, even though one of our members had to go back home to France, so we had 2 less people presenting than the other teams. We were given a 10 minute time limit, which no one else really adhered to. Luckily we did, and got complimented on it too. Hopefully our content was as good :) Our paper got scored by another team, and we had the best score on that as well.

Instead of going straight home to MK, I got off the bus in Newport Pagnell and had a drink at a 2 different pubs. The town is very small, but there were lots of people out and about. I will probably wind up spending more time there, it is an easy bus ride from school, and the bus runs back to MK until 10 or 11 at night. There is a nice little river running through the town too, with some nice park areas around.

Tomorrow I am going to venture to Bedford, which is about an hour ride on the bus (unless I pay 12£ roundtrip for an express bus). There is a CAMRA beer fest there, free admission, and you just buy the beer you want in pints or half pints. Should be over 130 real ales and ciders, in addition to an international beer section. I'm curious to see what if any American beers might be there. Other than that I'm just trying to enjoy my truly free weekend, as life is about to get seriously busy. I do need to get important dates into my Google or Outlook calendar and finally do laundry too. I'll probably try to get a run and workout in tomorrow morning too. Hopefully it doesn't rain.

I did buy some Fox's bars (wafer and chocolate) and Cadbury's Caramel and Fruit and Nut bars too on the way home tonight. The first few bites of the caramel bar are pretty tasty!

To Bed...

Wound up with some real relax time tonight.  We got done with our paper a little early so I had around an hour and a half to burn until our free buffet and pub quiz at the social club.  I used it to call Jess for a while and then found a few classmates and hung out with them until the buffet at 6pm.  The food was pretty good, chicken pasta, rice with garbanzo beans, an assortment of cheese, and some deli meats too.  It turned into quite a late night, I got a ride back home with a classmate, and got back home at about 11pm.  I'm hitting the bed, I need to get a bit of sleep, that bus comes awfully early :)

Going to sleep to a stream of the Yankees and Twins game.

Silverstone!

The important stuff - pictures:

6-10-10 Silverstone

The school arranged a nice tour bus for us to get to Silverstone.  The trip took about 50 minutes, through some nice English country landscape.  Once we arrived we were led through the Silverstone Innovation Centre, where the track leases office space to various firms.  The CEO of Silverstone Holdings went through a presentation describing all the different functions the track has going on.  They are very much focused on making the almost 800 acre property a multi-function business.  Interestingly though, the whole "empire" is owned by the British Racing Drivers Club.  It was intriguing to hear the business side of running a race track, as an engineer and enthusiast you rarely think about the things that it takes to keep a track running.

The next presentation was from the architecture firm that was responsible for designing the new Pit Complex.  Populous has an extremely impressive resume of motorsport complexes and sporting venues.  Originally the building was estimated at 40 million (don't remember if that was $) but due to the economic decline and value engineering, the cost had been reduced to 27 million.  The structural engineers also supposedly reduced the amount of steel in the building by half!  Along with the pit complex, the firm has an in house circuit designer.  His presentation was really interesting, especially hearing about how he has to balance the various run off and safety barrier requirements between the FIA (F1, GT1/GT3) and the FIM (MotoGP).  The redesign of Silverstone accomplished many goals, from updating the circuit to all current FIA and FIM standards, to making more land accessible without having to cross the racetrack.  The original proposal had a Laguna Seca style corkscrew that dropped 8 meters.  Unfortunately this was scrapped because of water table and flooding issues.

The next stop was easily one of the highlights and could be a once in a lifetime opportunity.  We were welcomed into the British Racing Drivers Club by the current club secretary, Stuart Pringle.  This club is very exclusive, and to even be in the building is an incredible opportunity.  We got to see all three levels, the top level being an outdoor deck and great view of the final few corners of the Grand Prix circuit.

After the BRDC we got tours of Race Control and the Medical Centre (one of if not the leading facility of its type in the world).  In essence a complete small hospital.  Race control was impressive to see how much camera control and capability they have.

To finish the day, we got to experience one of the Circuit's driving experiences.  They maintain a fleet of "Formula Silverstone" cars at their Stowe circuit (completely separate from the main Grand Prix and other track configurations). The cars are something like Formula Fords with wings added on.  A Ford Duratec 1600cc engine is mated to a 4 spd manual racing gearbox.  No synchros, straight cut gears, and no reverse gear.  The transmission was the hardest aspect of the car to get comfortable with.  One time down the straight I kept grabbing 3rd gear, so I just kept bouncing off the rev limiter.  It wouldn't take a lot of time to get used to, but definitely more than the 20ish minutes we had.  The experience was absolutely great, easily the fastest and most responsive car I've ever driven.  I'm sure they are setup this way, but they were surprisingly easy to drive, you could feel the back end sliding if you were doing something too quickly and correct it very easily.  The entry to the pit straight and the chicane following the pit straight were the coolest bits of track.  At the end of the longer back straight you could very much feel the wind pulling up on your helmet - not a comforting feeling!  There was no speedometer in the car, only oil pressure and water temperature gauges and a tachometer.  I think I was getting to a little over 100, maybe 110 on the back straight.  The tach was too far down in the car for me though.  You are supposed to keep your eyes ahead when driving, and while doing this it was difficult to pick up the tach or the shift lights.  The view of these was basically through the bottom half of the steering wheel.  I mostly shifted based on sound, which worked out for the most part.

A very long, full, excellent day.  I do have to edit some of our group assignment though, so it's going to be a bit later night than I was planning on.  

Long Day

Today was one of those necessary evil days - we had 4 hrs of auditorium presentations on using the Library, IT Services, Plagiarism, and the Career Service.  Some useful information, but most of it could've been found on the internet.  On top of that, I waited around while working on our assignment to intentionally take the 6:20pm bus, that turned out never coming.  It is a different route and run by a different operator.  It wound up working out because there were others waiting for the same bus, so we split a taxi 4 ways back to Milton Keynes.  That turned out to only be 2£ each.

I did finally find a few water coolers around, I hadn't noticed any before.

The exciting stuff though: our bus leaves for Silverstone at 9:30am tomorrow morning.  It's too bad I have to go 30 mins to campus just to take the bus back towards my house to get to Silverstone.  None of us are really sure what all the day will consist of.  I'm sure we'll get a tour of everything, and one of the lecturers strongly hinted that we would get to drive something that was both open wheel and single seater, so that should be cool.  Maybe we'll continue to get lucky with the rain too (knock on wood for me please).

It will be weird to not be able to watch the MLB playoffs start tomorrow.  If we had Sky Sports in the house I might have a slight chance of catching some, but we don't.

I should probably go now, hope to have some pictures for you tomorrow.    

Another Sunny Day

I know the rain is coming, but the weather has been better than advertised these last few days, and I've been enjoying it. The process of getting to campus and the lecture hall is much more enjoyable without rain. Buses were much more crowded today though, and unfortunately the seats are not very big and don't provide much legroom. We have a week of introductory lectures, today we covered the basic course manual, schedule, some background, some of the computer programs we have access to and a brief history of motorsport.

We do have a small group assignment, which is to prepare a paper discussing some aspects of technical innovations in a particular type of racing. My group chose to cover drag racing, as we were given "all other motorsports" that weren't covered by the other 6 groups. After getting home and cooking some chicken and vegetables for dinner I did my research online so that the group can discuss tomorrow at lunch.

I did bring a sandwich, some fruit and a granola bar for lunch and our breaks during the day. I'm going to try to avoid having to buy meals on campus every day. On the way home I stopped in the Iceland to find some water as I haven't been able to find water fountains on campus. The store seems very cheap for things like milk, water, eggs, bread, but most of their other food is frozen and doesn't look too healthy. Maybe I can find some good options next time though.

Pictures From Yesterday and...

I uploaded some pictures from yesterday to Picasa. The link is:

Cranfield and Other Surroundings

Let me know if anyone cannot get to it, it should be public if you have the link.

I did get a cell phone yesterday. A Samsung GT-S3370. Seems good so far. Twitter and Skype are free to use, they don't even count against my data limit. I'm on a pay as you go plan where I can get 300 minutes, 3000 texts and 500mb of internet for 10£. The top-up as they call it lasts for 30 days. On a slightly related note - I don't understand how they can have so much more technology in their basic phones, but yet the sinks here have totally separate spouts for hot and cold water!

There has been rain off and on this morning, but I caught up on college football and MLB scores. I also worked on a short presentation we have to do tomorrow. We are supposed to talk for about a minute about our CV (resume). I'm gonna go make some lunch here in a few minutes, and walk to the store a bit later. I'm gonna try and buy some things so that I can take lunches to school with me and not have to buy food from the cafe every day.

It really is too bad how the NCSU game turned out yesterday. I knew that the second half meltdowns would come back to hurt against a good team, and it certainly did. Let's hope they can keep improving and continue to fight for an ACC title.