gaggle64

Eep, just watched the back and forth between Jenson and Seb in the lounge after the race. Good god the tension. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/formula_one/15231273.stm

Great race, fantastic win for Button, once again he excels in tyre management wherever it really counts. Grats go to Vettel for his 2nd Championship - actually managed to get some coverage this round thanks to his battle with Alonso. I worry what will happen now the Championship is done & dusted, people will think he's dropped off the face of the planet. A relatively quiet race for Lewis - disappointing in fifth but at least he won't go into the next weekend with stewards or the media breathing down his neck for once. If he ever gets tired of racing should get a job as an aerodynamic engineer at Ferrari - their cars have been consistently going faster any time he lops any part of them away.

I will be getting up early. I swore into my hands when Lewis didn't get over the line in time - didn't his engineer give him a hurry-up? Last thing he needed was getting into another spat when he should've been scrapping for pole. Hopefully Vettel will run wide and prang himself again tomorrow, but Vettel making mistakes seems to be a lot to ask for this season. Hope Kamui has a good race too, he needs one and getting it in front of the passionate Japanese fans would be perfect.

This is sort of crazy, for a console at least - the console versions of BF3 will have an optional high-resolution texture pack that can be installed on the hard drive to allow better graphics to be streamed into the game. http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/119/1198976p1.html Thank god I sprung for that 120GB hard drive.

This is why WebMD is a fundamentally terrible idea, unless the goal is to hustle some prescription drugs. Is that what this is?

So who's getting up early for quali? I'll be tuning in to the human-hours re-run (or better yet on iPlayer) before toddling off to work tomorow afternoon. Reckon Vettel's going to stomp it all again but Button's looking strong in practice. Anyway, my copy of Senna arrived today, saving it for when I'm not quite so tired or rushed. Watched the first ten minutes, god the soundtracks beautiful. I understand they'll be releasing it soon - when they do I'll be all over it like a bad rash.

Story trailer, anyone? I'll probably pick it up cheap some time for the campaign - the set pieces look as fabulously bombastic as ever even if they're still likely to lack the story & pacing of the original MW. They know how to cut a trailer together too, I can't deny that.

Don't worry Coolness, it's all just a dream. Now lets burn RUBBER BABY!

This horse has long, loooong since been beaten to death and I shan't be sorry to see it finally put down. We'll still always have the solid-gold classics that the show has given us in the past.

£1700-odd pays off my MA for the year and a years subscription to the student gym. I feel oddly faint...

Awesome, they've got my favorite, the British L85 - that beauty doesn't get fractionally enough love in military/shooter game. Is the expansion available day 1 or some time after?

Probably, they've been doing a full round of server maintenance this morning.

Ah, I wondered why I was having this massive erection. This explains the first nine inches at least.

Getting a teaching job anywhere seems to be impossible. It was pretty difficult before thanks to the slightly idiotic and continuing government policy of throwing money at training as many teachers as possible without giving schools the money to actually bloody hire them. It was bad before but it's impossible now as schools cut budgets and reduce hours. I have a cousin who recently finished training who can't get a job anywhere. My mother had to leave our area (Dumfries & Galloway) as soon as the youngest of us left for Uni because there was so little work, but she's still only been able to find supply work which is ridiculous given her training and experience: She's a fully qualified music teacher and specialised in teaching kids with severe learning difficulties. She's done terms in secure units in inner-city schools in London turning the problem kids no one else wants around - we're talking about kids with assault charges and diagnosed behavioral problems no one wants to deal with. She's turned whole departments around in at least two different schools, vastly improving grades in just a few weeks. She's done work in both public schools and at least one private institute, but still the most she can get is supply positions with no definitive period of employment, often having to pick up after somebody else's mess. She's considering taking a position in Dubai because nowhere in the UK seems prepared to giver her a permanent job. To put it bluntly if someone like my mother, with all her skills and experience, can't get a decent basic position in this country I can't help but feel most of us are pretty much fucked. On a vaguely related note, I understand Tony Blair (the great architect of our current prosperity) is a very wealthy man now. I hope he drowns in something.

I don't think this has anything to do with COD. Some of these people are straight-up insane. I saw one poster claimed he was cancelling his pre-order in disgust because he had grown bored after just 10 hours of play. In it's full context, that's 10 hours of play on one map with one mode, within the two days of the limited beta before it went full open. I shouldn't find it so amusing, but I do.

I'm reading some of the feedback on the Battlelog forums and I would hate to be a community manager on one of those things. There's some genuine discussion and complaint but that's floating in an electronic sea of human bile. I'm looking at a whole thread of people complaining that it's too difficult to spawn kill or "Base Rape" (actual thread title: "No Base Rape? Why?") accusing Dice of "catering to the console crowd". How is anyone supposed to engage with that sort of feedback? Anyway, I hope the final version has a quick mute function or a "team speak - OFF" button somewhere. I spent an otherwise perfectly enjoyable game listening to it from somebody else's television somewhere.

Nothing really. They just sort of changed the canon. One the character's asks him how many he's got during a quick fire Q&A (during an air vent infiltration) and that's what he tells them. If you want to you can imagine he got into something during one of his many off-screen adventures I suppose.

Nope, they rewrote that in an episode of Sarah Jane Adventures - he's got 512 or something now.

This episode kind of grated me a bit. It wasn't bad, but it kind of felt like the whole thing had been constructed starting with a lot of really cool sounding ideas that the story struggled to develop or sew together in any convincing manner. The twist was sort of clever but that didn't really make sense even within the mythology established by the episode. Really by constantly trying to threaten the Doctor I think they're grabbing the wrong end of the stick. The Doctor's immortal, either because he's too clever or he can keep on regenerating. There' no point in threatening him, there's no real peril there. Instead they need to start threatening everyone and everything else a lot more. That doesn't mean the whole world or the whole universe has to be at stake, we've had quite enough of that recently. But the bad guys should be allowed to win from time to time - the Doctor wins, the Doctor loses, the Doctor may muck things up from time to time, but the show still goes on. Let the bad guys win just once and suddenly anything is possible.

There's your back-of-the-box quote.

Couple of finniky connection moments going on right now, tried to join Dr O D Dare's game invite and got stuck on the loading screen (I've got stuff I need to get on with anyway - sorry O). Only the one dropped game thus far, which I'm actually quite impressed by given the usual state of such things.

We're gonna need a bigger boat... Happy Birthday!

On the subject of Finnish F1 drivers: Do you think there'll be much left of the body?

Welcome aboard, soldier!