Month: May 2005

Cyprus Rally 2005: Preparations

Subaru butt

Cyprus Rally 2005 is about to start now. Today I went to the Rally HQ to buy a couple of Rally Passes. Mainly I was after the programme magazine which is usually included with the Pass package.

After waiting and walking around for a couple of hours, I learned that there was some problem with organizers and that they will start distributing Passes only tomorrow. Before I got disappointed and all depressed, I managed to acquire (hehe) a copy of the magazine with the rally programme. No need to feel sad – we’ll be planning our activities no matter what.

I have also walked around the Service Park. I was wearing the last year’s Subaru t-shirt and most of the guards thought for some reason that I was with Subaru team. They were encouraging me to join Subaru mechanics, asking questions, cheering and stuff like that. I used such a friendly opportunity to make a whole bunch of pictures. Drivers and co-drivers were out of the Service Park at some press conference or something like that, so no pictures of them. But, instead, I’ve got plenty shots of mechanics, cars, team camps, flags, etc.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-05_Cyprus_Rally/2005-05-11_Preparations/

Upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1

As recently promised I’ve upgraded to WordPress version 1.5.1. The process went very smooth and fast – something that I was missing with Nucleus. Most of the things work. Actually, the only bit broken is the BAStats plugin, which visitors don’t see and which is a beta anyway. So I don’t have any hard feelings.

The site seems slightly faster and more responsive indeed. There are still issues with my MySQL and Apache optimization, but I’ll get to it one day too.

If you see any glitches after the upgrade, please let me know via comments.

New tyres

For the last few month I was thinking about buying new tyres for my car. The old ones were getting slimmer and thinner every day. Considering my driving manners which envolve lots of speeding, driving on old tyres became dangerous. This is how my old tyres looked:

Old tyre

Without waiting any further for the worst to happen, I went to the tyre care today and bought four new tyres. This is how my new tyres look:

New tyre

I’ve tried them a bit driving around the town and I do like them a lot. I can feel the difference driving as slow as 30 km/h. High speed testing will follow shortly.

The new tyres are roughly of the same class as my old ones. I used to drive on Flamingo. The new ones are Runway. They are priced the same – 60 CYP a piece. They are guaranteed to withstand the speeds of up to 210 km/h, which is about the maximum my car can produce. The traction and temperature measurements are at their maximums, but I’ll have to do so reading on that subject as I felt rather uneducated when I talked to the tyre master today. If you have any good recourses about tyres bookmarked, let me know via comments.

I’ll be passing the garage about every 10,000 kilometers to change tyres back to front and vice versa. The procedure will be free of charge.

Anyway, while at it, I suggest you check your tyres and see if you need the replacement. It’s better to change those a bit earlier than forget and cry in pity later…

WordPress 1.5.1 is out!

There is an announcement of WordPress 1.5.1 at WordPress Development blog. In short, there were over 170 bug fixes, 1 important security fix, and several speed improvements. Changelog is available in two formats: short version and long version.

I myself haven’t seen any WordPress bugs (or I can’t remember any), but I sure could use some speed-ups and query optimizations. This site is getting more and more popular and I can see the load on the database already. Hopefully it’ll get cut a bit with the new version. I’ll be upgrading shortly.