Yesterday Italian GP

As one of the Ferrari fans, my younger brother and I were really upset of the Ferrari team performance at Monza, Italian GP. The pair drivers, Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen were starting on 3rd and 5th position on the grid while the rival Mc-laren’s drivers, Fernado Alonso and Lewis Hamilton were on 1st and 2nd. Starting third, Felipe Massa fought really hard with Hamilton to get 2nd position (I never have doubt about Massa’s performance), but ten laps later was forced to retire from the race with a rear suspension problem. The failure to finish drops Massa to fourth in the championship, 23 points behind leader Hamilton.

The retirement of Massa was putting his fans (yes, me) nervous. Without him, who will fight the Mc-laren? That should be Raikonen. Yes, he made a good start from fifth on the grid to run fourth before Massa retired. With his one-stop strategy, he was later able to briefly run second (about only two laps) before Hamilton made an aggressive pass to re-take the position. Raikkonen finished third, 20 seconds behind Hamilton. That was another pain for his fans. My brother was really angry. Both of us wonder why he performed such a weak performance.

As the result, Alonso won the race while Hamilton and Raikonen finished 2nd and 3rd respectively. With such performance of Ferrari, I never slept tight. I tried to seek the answer behind the result and finally I found the explanation from Raikonen.

Actually he had a pain at his neck after his crashes in practice a day before racing (my brother and I didn’t know it). It was hard for him to hold his head steady under braking. That’s really pity for him. His fans should not have been angry with him.

Ok, here are some interesting photo from the race:

I’m one of those red flag holders.

Mass (3rd) fought with Hamilton (2nd) during the start.

Clever Hamilton went through shortcut.

Was Hamilton really happy with Alonso?

Linux Instant Messenger

Kenno’s post about Pidgin reminds me about Kopete, my favorite instant messenger in Linux.

Kopete’s logo

Sometimes ago, I wrote an article about communication via Kopete using Khmer Unicode. Sometimes it was really difficult to communicate in English if you are Cambodian. We can’t just find an equivalent English words of what you want to say in your native language. Most Cambodian chatters use language transliteration during their chatting.

Yap Man! – This is the English transliteration of the word “យ៉ាប់​មែន” (sorry, Khmer Unicode is required here to avoid the square boxes) in Khmer. I can’t find any English word equivalent to this Khmer word. One of my colleagues suggested “Bullshit” but I don’t think so.