There are lots of stories to tell about Korea but alas these will have to wait until I get home because I must now check out of the hotel and, having fried my computer screen on the journey to Mokpo, I have gone through the weekend using external monitors that I must now leave behind, so I am back on the iPhone again. Having seen the bill for the last couple of weeks, I have taken the executive decision not to use it any more than I have to because I literally could have bought a car for the same amount of money spent.
Onward to Incheon!
So no luck finding an Apple Store in the heart of Samsung territory I guess?
How good of a car? They didn’t have wi-fi for journalists?
Joe, I guess you likely know the following way better than I do, but when I travel I operate my smartphone on WiFi as much as possible, often turning off phone network data and calling out using a Skype app on the phone wherever WiFi is available. I have a £10 Chinese dongle to turn hotel-room wired networking into WiFi. And finally, I travel with a cheap old second mobile which I often drop a cheap local SIM card into.
All that remains is to be very hale and hearty with old pals who call from home, telling them how much you appreciate their generosity in calling to chat via a Mongolian satellite link which is billed on a per nanosecond basis whilst tracking stations on remote islands around the globe are activated to keep the call hooked up, and hey, how are the kids?
Oops, I’ve written a post with no mention of F1 at all! Er… until that one…
Hey Joe, I feel for regarding the laptop…but the bill being as high as the price of a car doesn’t say much since one can buy a car for 250 euro’s. That wouldn’t be too high a bill (not one I want every month…) but I am guessing yours is a bit higher…bon voyage!
Don’t you use wi-fi networks where available?, you need to hang close to the paddock club and use Bernies wi-fi. Appreciate the responses but not at that expense
There is not wifi everywhere in the world
You need passes to get into Paddock Club
Or a directional antennae, maybe a makeshift “pringles tin booster” kind??
What do you think of Andrew Benson’s headliner over at the BBC Sport that Vettel has an option to drive for Ferrari in 2014, subject to Ferrari’s performance in 2013?
I think Andrew Benson is a foolish fool who writes silly articles.
You don’t know him well then.
I thought it was a misleading headline as it said (at least last time I saw it) Vettel to drive for Ferrari in 2014. What the article actually suggests is what has been suggested for a long while by many journalists – that Vettel has performance clauses in his Red Bull contract and can leave before 2014 if he wants (according to Helmut Marko anyway) and Ferrari have an option on Vettel for 2014 if they also reach certain performance clauses by a certain point in 2013.
The only information in the article that was new to me (I probably missed it before though) was that Alonso has not vetoed Vettel as he did for Hamilton.
Personally unless Vettel knows something about RBR’s onrushing intention to pull funding and pack the game in, he’d look to be mad to move to a team with another number one driver. He wants to emulate Schumacher’s title streak he’d be best sticking in an Adrian Newey designed car while he’s still on a run in a car where he’s protected and given indisputable lead status.
Alonso may have lost some favour by 2014 in Ferrari if he’s not won a WDC but I don’t see him as the sort of person who cracks and I can only imagine it would be a very uncomfortable mix. Vettel for 2016 if Alonso is looking to retire or at least ‘wind down’ – that makes sense.
What exactly does the Ferrari’s performance in 2013 detail?
Would be interested to hear whether Joe thinks Red Bull departing F1 could be on the horizon?
Assuming the 2014 regulations do go ahead, 2013 performance will likely bear very little resemblance to 2014 performance (except by coincidence).
That’s one hell of an expensive cup of coffee! Safe journey.
Would that car be an HRT?
Or a used Mercedes, one slightly careless elderly owner, who has been forced to give up driving?
Hi Joe, I noticed here in Australia that some mainstream media outlets are now reporting the rumour of Vettel going to Ferrari in 2014. These guys rarely comment on F1 related things outside reporting on the results, so is there anything to it? It would be great to hear your views on the possibility and whether you have heard anything that would make you lean to a yes or no.
Monsieur, have you thought about the purchase of a new computer?
It is a far cheaper option [esp in the far east using Amex] than a new car, if that is what your iphone is costing.
Unless we are talking Lamborghini Superfast limited first edition “Donnata” 1979 from their exclusive dealership in Santa Barbara USA?
Joe did you learn the PSY Horse dance?
You can go back home and teach all your neighbors, tell’em you learnt from PSY himself.
David’s comments on Korea in the closing piece of the mag are hilarious: Shite indeed. As a side note we’ve now got proof Joe is indeed on location (as if we doubted it) : On Speed’s coverage we got to briefly see Joe chatting to Will Buxton about the lack of grid girls. Good to see you on TV !
My god Joe, your overhead must be frightening…
The new Concorde Agreement should include a heritage payment for journalists who do it the old fashioned way (a la Ferrari’s 2.5 per cent of the prize money). One per cent of the season’s aggregate drinks bill at the Paddock Club to each journo who pays his or her own way to every race — that would be a start…
I remember seeing some figures recently that Stirling Moss apparently provided to Nigel Roebuck. My memory might be a few quid off here and there, but for his final full season of competition Stirling reckoned that he made around 35k, of which he ended up paying tax on around 8k. More than three quarters of his income was going on the expenses of a traveling racing driver! I’m sure that Joe isn’t going to divulge his income en plein, but I can’t imagine that a highly paid racing driver is worse off than a freelance journalist…
Joe – don’t know if you’re aware of this but you were on American TV at the Korea race! Speed picked you up talking to Will B about the lack of Grid Girls.
Quite funny and great to see you on our screens!
If true then that Vettel/Ferrari deal will leave Hamilton a year to find out that he hates Mercedes and then switch to Red Bull.
Hey, I never said that it made sense…
My bill for my phone was $5k last year for a months worth of travel thank god work paid for it
Good luck with your computer woes, don’t go running your phone bill up on our account – and if the stories about Korea are anything as amusing as the last lot i can’t wait!
Perhaps you could also leave all the puns behind in Korea!
No
I think that would be a bad Korea move
So no free wifi in the whorehouses then?
Yes, but I don’t spend my life in whorehouses if I can avoid them.
if you have just fried the screen you are in luck ; probably easily repairable [ normally just inverter or backlight ] but knowing how you get ripped off in france on these things [ bitter experience ] I would probably just get a new one from notebookbitz in the uk [ they have an Ebay shop ] and bolt it on
personally , being cheap , I would wait until India ..they seem to able to fix anything there for next to nothing in labour charges , bit like maroc
Joe, your phone will also almost certainly be chattering away to all manner of unneeded connexions in the background. Came across this: http://yllier.webs.com/firewall.html which might be worth the fiddle around even for normal use. Can’t vouch for it, but not found any complaints either. General idea, anyhow.
Anything with GPS will be slow to lock on if you stop data. Those sats transmit a digest which you need, at a awfully slow rate. Explained here: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/15919_A_real_world_comparison_of_off.php (how well maps work with data off, for iPhone, old Nokia, new “Nokia” and NavFree on various.)
You think _someone would have the bases covered by now. Nooope.
If your SSD borks, it’s all gone. Got a fast USB 3 external with you? Means to automatically replicate (volume shadow copy on windows since xp) , small enough to velcro it out of the way?
Ouch, but more ouch . .
CellCos are often more than a decade behind on real time billing. Still get those lovely 3 month delayed surprises . .
Ain’t it fun? Trussed up like a rat catcher, spares, multiple phones, sim cards galore, backup drives . . .
I distinctly remember first hearing the term “Road Warrior”. Mid 90s or so. Clever workaround marketing. I think Roadshow Sucker applies more, Steve Martin “The Jerk” style, way I remember it, and is anyone fixing it? The “cloud”? Try working out how to back that up, independently. Pointing finger at you, Adobe..
Larry Ellison’s snide take on “Teh Clowd” is almost a relief: http://goo.gl/X3E6A (gets increasingly more interesting after the amusing outbursts)
For his sins I notice he delivered – dead pan, plainly bored – a whole 1hr keynote on just what he was deriding a year or three later. Maybe those claimed efficiencies plain suck, when you sell hardware also . .
But that delay as likely because he was working out how to charge the price of a decent car, meanwhile.
In the same price range, do as I once did, have FedEx send a shadow spare laptop after you . .
but that was when doing anything graphical required a not small laptop. I can get at least two of the new Asus ones, better screen, better spec, for what Lenovo quoted me for a Thinkpad. (noting any that are covered by intl service and have top screens are special order, not quoted online, so cost as much as the Asus to procure) Adding 3lbs may not be so bad.
Now . . can I still afford to expense biz class and All Carry – on?
Oh. Oops!
but bottom line, this is all retrograde.
When I first got roaming GSM dialup data at 2.4Kbs, it was excruciatingly expensive. Definitely decent second hand saloon territory. But it did everything save courier off large files on a CD-ROM for me. Still got the files overnight from pretty crappy places. 3 days from truly crappy places. End of. Am I feeling nostalgic? A little. When you were one of the few doing that, it had a element of fun. Now everyone is up to the same thing. So, you don’t have the comparative advantage commercially, and now *everone’s* time is being wasted. Economic effects I worry about . .
– - –
sorry for the rant, guys and gals, I personally think that “big business” retrenched and demanded that nothing useful for the “little guy” is ever made, not to real quality anyhow. .
But for treading the long contested lunacy / heroism border, when it imitates something between Belfast in the late 70s and the wrong end of LA on a night someone just posted a video of the police in action, I must doff my cap.
(last para ripped straight from Terry Gilliam’s vision of “Brazil”)
And if you think that’s bad for F1 reporting, try year on year EU car registrations down 10% this month, in 11 consecutive months of decline. Road Warrior, or Mad Max?
Shirley the “Road Warrior” was originally Mad Max who later became a lethal weapon 4 times.
That Firewall looks like good old Zone alarm from my windows days. Now though that I only use Linux “Noscript” is just as important if not more so.
As several people have pointed out its probably quite easy to fit a new screen, if it is indeed the screen and not the video chip that’s gone.
Nice call as to cinematic precedence, rpaco!
I think I have something like a dozen plugins to manage FFox, but I also found Privoxy very neat, for those other browsers, that have not such a variety of plugins. I mean add – ons. Adblock Plus, AutoCopy 2, Beef Taco, BetterCache, BetterPrivacy, Blank YOur Monitor + Easy reading (realkly drops eye strain) , Ghostery, Greasemonkey, Groundspeed, Header Spy, HTTPS Everywhere, JavaScript Deobfuscator,
Half of those are to get rid of “supercookies”
all that nonsense, but Request Policy is very useful. Lets you immediately see how your page is not coming from where you think. Mozilla Archive Format allows me to dump a big load of tabs intact. For when you lost yourself on a insane search for gizmo thingies. Quick fix: just get Privoxy, stops the calls going out, rather than stopping the images being rendered, nice on a small LAN.
But don’t expect any page to just work with all those add-ons installed. Yeuch!
Linux, pretty unavoidable, but I live in Win7, quite happily on the desk. I would argue you can lock down any Win box post Win2K in far greater detail than you can Linux, but that’s serious chore. I mean profiling every application intensely. You can tell it that blah.dll can only speak to grunt.dll via urgh/port. Then you find you can’t update or change anything . .
Next stop: hear good things about the Sophos endpoint do it all gateway, over Cisco Ironpoint. These things delve deep into cruddy connexions full of things you may not want. Point in favour Sophos (apart from being British) I can have that in a VM, not a datacenter squealing noisy rack box. Or just a big IPtable to ditch the networks you don’t fancy . .
Erm Too Much Information.
(but well meant, if your eyes glazed over, basically you can do 95%+ of a seriously expensive firewall for free, ditch long page loads, have nice fast pages not waiting on super slow adnets, almost home and dry with simple tweaking. Knock of the things that love to track you, and they de-anonymise by crossing your data with known logins . .)
Also, I give up on all that here. If they can’t track my twaddle on this place, there’s something really odd in the world . .
But my bugbear is so many websites use javascript to make the page render / be visible and those talk back all sorts to advertiser trackers. My apologies to my supposed comrades in adland, but printed pages steal not thine everything personal . . FWIW Firefox apparently has more lines of code than most operating systems now . . please take a look what it might be up to . .
Hmm, screen swapping. All of them are OEM somewhere, might as well go for a search, and some far cheaper DIY. Until you get those awful micro – fiddly compression connectors that are conductive foam, about 2mm by 20mm in a spacer joint. Oh, yeah! I get St. Vitas Dance if I even look at those . .
Quick follow up: just dawned on me why my machine (venerable it be, but wholly usable) choked up lately. Ad networks are gumming the system with HTML5 guff. I looked about, and there are some pithy “HTML5 is the New Flash, where’d ya think all the lousy programmers went?” style discussions.
Great, that now means I must consider a highly expensive Layer 7 firewall. (kind that digs through every last bit of the network connexions unravelling actual application code . .)
I note that my test WinPhone tries by default to render pages desktop style. It does pretty well, actually. But this is another arms race for processors and battery life and piles of bloody excellent but outmoded landfill.
One for Joe: if you do go looking at that CloudFare CDN next time you evaluate your websites, they do one modest thing for mobiles, which is condense all the silly javascript bits and bobs into one call to their nearest data center, so – and I’m only checking out other people’s sites who use this, it is a whole bunch nippier on a phone.
But, this happened – my machine borking on adverts – just inside a couple of weeks. I’m sifting through to find out if the networks have made a definitive change, or if I am being delivered more Never Will Finish Downloading guff, because I have played hard with the extent of how well I can be tracked, as a experiment. However, if this is the “way forward” – and my 7 year old desktop benchmarks equivalent to a i5 2400, a respectable modern laptop spec – here we go again, only there’s no boom to have everyone upgrading . . adland is marginally more up their own nethers, again.
I’m sure you’re going to cover this soon but the recent press release concerning the way the sport is governed made me think how quaint the idea was to only have six teams represented on the F1 commission instead of all the teams being represented and how blatantly it was proposed. The usual means of sowing doubt amongst the teams by BE of course, in order to force the teams’ hand and sign the wretched Concorde agreement, but it surprises me still how disorganised politically they are. What they need is BE representing them!
Yes, and the reporting this morning all seems to be along the lines that BCE backing down on the 6 teams idea is somehow a great concession on his part. I swear the way Ecclestone plays the media makes Glen Gould’s piano tinkling look like cathouse honky-tonk.
It has got nothing to do with Bernie.
My mistake. Obviously reading the wrong news sources…
Just re-read your blog entry of October 10… much clearer. Thanks!
I have mentioned this before but no one seems to agree with me. Some right flankers were worked by Bernie, while everybody was watching Hamilton’s press orgasm with Merc. Joe said “Details” but I think they will be very significant.
what do you mean by “right flanker” in this context, rpaco?
‘fraid lots of details went whoosh over my head recently . . ~ j
You have already dismissed them Joe!
The increased FIA fees payable by FOM to be paid now instead by the teams with really huge increases. The technical and sporting working groups disbanded, the reduction in team representation on the commission. Basically the team’s influence on the sport has been significantly reduced by various means, their main channels of participation have been blocked or squeezed, in particular in the rule forming process.
Now I expect you will say that it’s nothing to do with Bernie, but I would say that ok “nothing” in the same way as Adam Parr’s departure was nothing to do with him.
Bernie’s view of the new 2014 engine regs is well known; the teams have invested, but a change or delay for a few years could now happen. Whilst Bernie does not make the rules he has the ear of many who do, and many all over the F1 industry; favours, backs scratched, common interests, obstacles and consequences are his forte and now having knocked the teams down a peg he is probably about equal in influence to them in terms of the rule making process, though not having any official input.
The 2013 regs do not mention the CA but the Code instead. The schedule of parts (To be made by the team) is now in the regs as an appendix. However the 2014 regs still refer to the old 2009 CA.
The very best thing to happen for Bernie is now an official RRA, he will leap upon it with delight and reduce the amount dished out to the teams.
He has put FOM in an even stronger position than before, he has ensured the income for 7 or more years to come, a final pushing back of the 2014 engines and he could retire happy. (Or continue property dealing from his cell should he be convicted.)
Sorry, bit confused there, I meant JoJ not Joe but was thinking of Joe’s dismissal of my previous posts on the matter.
Now I’m confused, rpaco!
I don’t recall ever using one person’s comment to dismiss you or anyone.
Argh, I just know this is a silly confusion, and I need to read a bit more carefully, but may I please plead Innocent meanwhile?
I get your point about Bernie / FOM, though, I just think that other forces might pull the rug from under the teams, and that is a nice little piggy bank Bernie counts on raiding. Numbers at MARKIT who track the earlier bonds, suggest one could have made a killing buying them low . . might happen again . .
I might just be suffering tertiary memory hassle. My mum’s bro went first (wife, cancer, suddenly, 45 years married) and his do-lalley confuses my mom, and that confuses me! I’m not gone funny just yet, but we had a family wide loss of current memory and a huge influx of old ones. Kind of a daily puzzle. My private laugh at it all is that who I talk to in business seem to be equally dazed right now. That’s the sentient ones. The blinkered lot seem to be cock sure still. I think being a little uncertain is about right of the moment. That’s be a bit more realistic. Just recently, I paid attention to some discussions of adland types on LinkedIn. I cannot believe people with as much experience as I are so undecided, questioning so much, unless reality has caused some rethinks.
err, okay, I think I sussed it now. But I am feeling sillier than I was before
I forget too, rapco, what were the details, but without reference to the alleged details, I would broadly argue that people miss details too often, yet who focusses on the details too much is readily, maybe reasonably, accused of being the stopped clock who tells the time only twice a day . .
I’m just getting used to the new uncertainties, and I actually don;t think it’s just growing up a bit. Between crackpot economics and the Babel of the internet, I’m starting to feel a bit safer in my lack of understanding. Heck, my catchphrase used to be “I know nothing.” My past darling girl did a wonderful rip of me saying that . .