Oh what a day...

You might think, I gone nuts now, or what. But today it was a good day. First of all: Happy Birthday to my mate OPK who is engaged for a while now and is coming along well in his life. All the best, buddy.

Then, germany won the oscar for best foreign language film with a pure, strong, good movie about the "Stasi" in the GDR in 1985. Go get the DVD or see it in cinema, it's worth it!

And besides that, The Stig made the best move ever, but I wont spoil anything here, get the newest episode of Top Gear for that ;) Finalgear is the keyword.

And last but not least, I'm feeling kind of OK again after having the worst diarrhoe ever (that's what's happening to you, when you're married with children ;) ). Oh, and besides that I just had some great stuff got done today, and that feels just good :)

New Maserati Gran Turismo

Ok, here comes the Big Bang for every petrol-head out there. The new Maserati Gran Turismo! From the pics, I just say WOW!



Check www.maserati.com for more infos!

The sound of OCRANA

As promised, here's the song to the video:

MP3, 4.5MB

krani rules!

soooo, now we are the ocrana racing team for about 3 years, ocrana itself just became 10 years old and therefor it's time for a really special vid. We made the music, we did the stunts, we won the championships and krani did the video! ;) check it out here:

HQ, 73MB
youtube
google

UPDATE:
Because of all the questions, some infos on the vid, the sound and its history:

1. Yes we have that many members in the racing team, although some of us are a bit more inactive than others.
   
2. OCRANA itself is a fantasy word, made by the founders of this very nice team.
3. The song is called "Just OCRANA", done by Ingo Spyra and Christian Schneider, bass-player and drummer of Echo Appartment. Songtext and wav-file we'll provide later. It was done in purpose for the video.
4. OCRANA became ten years old november '06, the racing team is in OCRANA since january 2004, it exists since April '03
5. Yes, I founded that racing team, not OCRANA ;)

Hope that helped a bit ;)

NFSU? STFU!

Sooo Cafepress won today;) Check it out!


 

Some Oldschool hardware stuff

Man, that was a time when I had my first Voodoo add-on card. The one you had to connect in between your gfx-card and the screen.  Now see what graphics-card technicians and game devs really did during the last 10 years, by looking at THESE pics. Check out the framerate up there. Is your uptodate 2004 gfx card doing that many frames easily in doom3? :P

Pure Emotions

OK, I just told you about leagues starting etc., same goes for the "city liga", and they produced one of the finest trailers as advertisement I have seen so far in LFS. Check it out here:

Movie, 25MB

LFS Sound betterd up

Due to the nice find in the geekx blog of the sound editor for LFS, people started working on their own sounds for the LFS cars. The best atm comes from DaveWS, get it HERE! It's worth every bit of bandwidth!

League racing is warming up again

As always, the sim racing seasons are about to start or just started. We will have a lot of online racing this spring, I even think with more LIVE coverage than ever. The ESL Pro Series is entering their 8th LFS season, again 5000 euros will be given as prizemoney. That'll puts the overall prizemoney given to LFS from the ESL itself to 40k euros. Nice amount...

OLFSL, The Original LFS League, the oldest of them LFS leagues is starting again too, and I think you will see some really good and close racing in there. There are plenty of other leagues just starting, so check out the leagues subforum of LFS HERE ;)

pseudo |-|4XX0R

What happens, when a poor and lonely not-that-young-anymore french mind loves a game and thinks he himself is some kind of Hitler of hacking? Well, he hacks the forum of his beloved game, posing, showing off and posting "It was just for fun". But, to bring that to a clearer point:
That wasnt actually a hack, it was more like executing some files to use a documented hole in the forums-code. That actually doesnt need any special hacking skills but more some criminal and sick motivations. Shame on the devs here, that the hole wasnt closed b4, but lean back a moment and laugh a bit on the oh-so-big phlos from france, who's JaHK (Just another Hacker Kid).

Check THAT for more reading on it.

Bugatti et al.

There you go, you check videos on some sites and then you come to myvideo and you see that really surprising vid of some bike-driver filming a Bugatti Veyron and a Porsche Carrera GT. So you watch this vid with the typical pleasure a petrol head feels, seeing exotic, fast cars, and then you realise that this was shot right around the corner, on your typical part of Autobahn that you travel quite often: check this out, for Highspeed on A5, A66 and some smaller road ;)

1000 bucks, for what?

Well, there is this Online Racing league, using only open wheelers, if possible some Formula One cars. Well, here's the first problem: There is no official Formula 1 Sim for the PC, except the two BMW F1.06 for LFS and rfactor. Besides that, you will need to have a licensed team - or get hired by a team with a license - to drive in that league. Sounds all fine and cool, but:

To get that license, you will have to pay the small amount of about 1000,- € . Yes, Euros. Honestly, there are so many good and great leagues, that even offer more content, more news-features, more price money for none-2-small starting fees. I still dont get it, why teams pay 1000,- bucks for... almost nothing. Anyway, good luck to all sim racers, cause the new seasons all over the world are about to start soon ;)

"Die Deutsche Post"

... that's how our german main mail service is called. The last two weeks I had my special experiences with the german post. But lets start from beginning:

I ordered a nice Hat over at the LFScentral shop (Check the geekx blog for more ;) ) beginning of january. Or even last year, dont really remember it. Anyway, on january 17 the german mail didnt meet me at home when delivering the parcel and just threw a reminder into my mailbox that I could catch it up the next day in the local mail-office. That was exactly what I did... but the mail didnt o what I expected. It was not there. The guy in charge had no clue at all and sent a FAX with my phone numbers and details to the central mail office... OK, long story short: After several visits @ several local mail offices, an evil phonecall to customer support, including a lawsuit threat, I received a standard letter:

Sorry Mr, we cant find your parcel. If you want it to be traced back, the sender will have to do a detailed search request. Yeeeaah, sure, Cafepress from California will take care and do a detailed request for a little hat, MY ASS!

Well, last thing I could do was to contact cafepress support and tell them my story, here's the answer (1 hour after I contacted them ;)):

"Dear Joachim,
Thank you for contacting CafePress.com!
I am sorry to hear that you did not receive your order. I have issued a replacement order at no cost to you. However, you should receive your order by February 26th.
If the original order does arrive there is no need to return it. Please go ahead and keep it as our way of apologizing for the delay.
If there is anything else I can do for you please let me know."

CafePress 1 : 0 Die Post

Joost

Do you know Joost? I just got into the beta-test of this nice upcoming TV-revolution made by the skype-makers. Instant TV, I'd call it ;) You just start it, choose your channel, and bang you're in the show. It's not TV channel streaming like TV Ants or TVU, it has it's own channels, and during that beta time, there arent that many channels, but right now I'm enjoying some World Poker Tour Show.

I just hope Scawen is into LFS TV already, picking up the great Pre-Work done by several guys, and brought to some kind of beta state by WolleT from Triso-Racing.