Index | Reply

Hi all,

It’s a long time since I put together a news letter, so I guess there is a fair bit to cover.

First, although some know already, I guess the biggest bit of news is my plan for 2002. You may remember our plan for 2004 to sail to Australia. Well Maggie and the kids are getting second thoughts about that. A few lumpy trips in the Channel has knocked all the enthusiasm out of them for crossing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Unfortunately it has also fired up an enthusiasm within me for doing just that.

So the only sane course of action (to my mind anyway) was to sign up for the Challenge race in 2002. The current BT Challenge left from Ocean Village in July of this year and is raced every four years (ie 2000, 2004 etc). They have now introduced an in-between Challenge dubbed the “New World Challenge”, which also goes wrong way around the world, leaving from San Francisco in May 2002. It heads across the Pacific to Japan, then two short hops to Hong Kong and Singapore before heading across the Indian Ocean to Cape Town. From Cape Town, we race to Buenos Aires before taking a deep breath and rounding Cape Horn East to West and heading up the West Coast of the Americas back to San Francisco, to finish early 2003.

I signed up for it in August and have been stressed out for the last month or two waiting to be accepted. On Wednesday (1 November) I heard that I have been accepted as a core crew, and have been sent all the training manuals. Training starts in a few months time. March 2002 sees the boats, 72 foot steel hulls being delivered in San Francisco, race preparation and selecting the crew and skipper for each yacht.

If you want to know more, or follow the existing BT Challenge race, point your browsers to http://www.challengebusiness.com/ or to http://www.btchallenge.com/. I will also be putting a diary and training anecdotes page on my web site, so check out http://www.thechalmers.com/ from time to time also.

Maggie and the kids are pretty excited about it all too, mainly the thought of being able to go on a round the world holiday meeting me at the various ports of call.

Life on the home front is going well. The battering that Britain has been taking from the weather has meant a pause in the sailing on Debanessa (www.debanessa.co.uk) who is tucked up safe in Ocean Village marina. The Z3 has also been left undriven for the last week or so, left in favour of the big red 535i which feels much more comfortable in the howling gales, driving rain and deep puddles which is pretty much the way it is here at the moment.

I have lost my Solutions Developer status from Microsoft as they have withdrawn their WOSA 1 and WOSA 2 certificates in favour of a Solutions Architecture (70-100) exam, which I haven’t taken yet. So more studying is required.

Nicky is busy with her mock GCSE exams which are stressing her a bit. Still, at least when the real exams come around it will all be familiar by then.

Maggie is having great fun with her Designer One (Husqvarna) sewing/embroidery machine. She was commissioned by Winterthur-Life to do some logo embroidery on some clothes of the Olympic athletes that they were sponsoring (Ben Ainsley, Denise Lewis, and three others I have forgotten the names of). We also have some new cushions, logos on T-shirts and hundreds of other cute clip art “printed” onto various bits of cloth.

On the Datak Lan news front, apart from the new Designer One “Printer”, I have installed a 3Com wireless LAN which has given us the freedom to use the notebooks around the house and still be connected to the LAN and via the router to have access to the internet. The ADSL 2mb/s connection STILL hasn’t materialised yet. Some fight going on between BT and the various ISP’s is causing the delay. Pretty annoying though as it is delaying various pet projects which I was hoping to get started on. Various machines have been upgraded, Squelch (my SQL Server box) has a lovely pair of IBM 76Gb drives running via a 66Mhz IDE controller card. My PC (Tomcat) has been put into a nice 400W tower which has a total of 9 fans to keep it all cool. The new Hercules graphics card (G-force 2, 64Mb) is still driving the old W900 Sonly monitor. The only other improvement is a combo DVD-Rom and CD-RW drive to complement the DVD-Ram, Jaz and DVD-Rom drives.

Ricky (the PC), came home from Winterthur-Life and has been renamed Python and is now primarily the hot backup machine until the ADSL connection is installed when it will become the Exchange Server and IIS Web Server for the Datak web initiatives. Hooligan, Magpie, Dolphin and Casper are pretty much unchanged apart from them all running Win2000 Professional. The only non Win2K machine is Gopher who now runs Windows Me.

Ricky (the person) is back at the gym, and suffering a bit at the moment from today’s early morning session at the gym. Still the weight is coming off nicely and hopefully after a year of this I will be fit enough to be able to enjoy the world cruise. We will see how much it helps at the first of the training sessions which I expect will be some time in January.

Gaming is still a big time waster. Diablo II is the main culprit. If you are an online player, look out for a game called Ricky on the Europe server, or look out for characters RickyChalmers (not very original name), AppleCore, ScaredOfTheDark, FromAfar, or SexySade. If you do come online then you can send a message by pressing ENTER and then /m “some message”.

Also wasting time is C&C2, Midtown Madness 2, Combat Flight Simulator 2, and the Microsoft Plus card games. Tiberian Sun, AOK II and far too many others also seem to suck up time which I should be spending doing better things.

OK. I will try and keep the news flowing better than I have done in the last year. Certainly once the Challenge training starts you will be hearing all about it.

Keep well all…

Ricky

Last 5 Visitors

© 1998 - 2009