Going down the Bolton Road...

..to see the Blackburn Aces.

Except that it was an away game, so instead I made the journey from Banbury to Upton Park in West London to see West Ham v Blackburn Rovers.

The journey itself was worthy of a blog entry. I had planned to take the 12:24 from Banbury and change at Reading for a Paddington train to meet my friends at 2:00 pm. It was a 4:00 pm kick-off, so I had plently of time up my sleeve for a pre-match pint...which is just as well.

Things started going wrong when the train took 20 minutes to travel the last 500 metres getting into Oxford. I knew then that I would miss my connection at Reading. Things went from bad to worse when they said 'Everyone off..the train has been cancelled'. I eventually caught the 1:30 Oxford-Paddington (which actually left Oxford at 2:00). Thankfully a flurry of SMS'es kept all my friends in contact, and luckily Bruce and Shane remembered what each other looked like (they had met at my buck's and wedding) so they were happily on their way to Upton Park, where they met Janice who gave them their tickets.

Shane, Janice and Laura got to the game on time, whilst Bruce thankfully waited behind to give me my ticket. We only missed the first 10 minutes or so.

The first half was absolutely dire with Rovers not managing a shot on goal in the first half. West Ham took the lead with a great header from Teddy Sheringham who I think became the oldest scorer ever in the history of the Premier League. Rovers were without Brett Emerton so captain Lucas Neil shifted to right back with Michael Gray coming into left back. Savage was out injured as well so Mokoena played alongside Tugay in midfield. Gamst Pedersen was dropped for young academy graduate Sergio Peter on the left wing.

Things went from bad to worse in the first half with forward Jason Roberts being stretchered off.. Janice though he had broken his leg.. turns out he had 'only' broken his foot and he'll be out for eight weeks at least.



Rovers started brightly in the second half, dominating possession and laying siege to the West Ham goal. Unfortunately a chronic lack of confidence in front of goal meant that many half-chances went begging as the Rovers' forwards tried to find the 'perfect through ball'.

After about 20 minutes, the Rovers' onslaught subsided and West Ham were awarded a very dubious corner and naturally scored from it.

In the dying minutes Benni McCarthy had a nice turn and shot on goal which the keeper parried.. David Bentley ran onto the rebound to make it 2-1 but it was too little, too late.

Rovers had 65% possession against a team that had lost their last EIGHT games but still found a way to lose 2-1. I don't think Blackburn have won at Upton Park for about 30 years.

My own personal record of watching Rovers stands at watched six, with one draw and five losses.

Still.. persistence is the key, right?

More factory photos

This one is of the conference centre. I am right down the back.

Funny how Alonso can turn grown adult men into groupies!

More news from the factory.

The local BBC News in Oxford had a story on Renault the Monday morning after the championship win. As it happened I left the pub in Wootton about five minutes before the press showed up. Nice to see that my local regional network takes Formula One more seriously that Channel 10 does back in Australia. But I suppose things could be worse.. the way things are heading in Australia now with media ownership, the only things you'll ever be able to find out about are if Jessica Rowe is still pregnant and who got turkey slapped on Big Brother this year.

Heaven forfend if a couple of miners get stuck down a mine the same week that Aliens land in downtown Tokyo...you'd only get two seconds of footage before they cut back to Eddie McGuire.

But don't blame me, I voted for the other mob.

Oh well... anyway here is the clip.



Alonso visited the factory today, you can read about it here :

Autosport.com

See if you can spot me in the photo!













So what was it like to come into work after we've won both world championships? Rather bizarre to say the least. The security guard at the gate was very glad to see me and gave me the big thumbs up at 7:15 am.

We had an extra hour off for lunch, where we all went down to the pub. Lunch was free in the canteen.. a roast with free wine. Then we had a couple of rounds of champagne.. I've never drunk so much at work before! But things settled back into the groove quite quickly.. apparently last year it was a lot crazier... I suppose it's just business as usual now. Everyone at the factory is pretty-much flat out getting next year's car ready. Apparently when Honda won their first race earlier this year the whole factory took the day off!

Here is what you missed out on.

Australians are a narrow-minded parochial bunch of muppets.

Yesterday Renault driver (and Oxforshire resident) Fernando Alonso became the youngest ever double-world champion in the history of the Formula One World Championship.

Renault also retained the constructors' trophy, becoming only the 7th team in history to win successive constructors' titles, and only the 5th team in history to achieve the 'double double', successive driver's AND constructors' titles.

They managed to beat the might of Ferrari and Michael Schumacher, despite that fact that Ferrari's budget is 2-3 times larger than Renault's, the FIA is fully behind the Ferrari team and dished out several dubious judgements and penalities to Renault over the course of the season, and the fact that Michael Schumacher is a dirty cheating mongrel (at least on the track.. in private life and at work I've heard he's quite nice).

You would think after this monumentous, history-breaking achievement that my inbox and phone would have been bombarded with congratulations and best wishes.

But no... I received one email (thanks Marc) and one SMS (thanks Nicole). Thank you to the both of you.

To the rest of you myopic narrow-minded kangaroo shaggers, you were probably too busy watching Big Brother, voting for John Howard, or watching cane-toad racing or AFL footy or whatever quaint local customs that manage to keep your interest these days.

Shame Australia shame.

I'll have you know that the leading story on BBC Radio Oxfordshire (yes.. regional radio in England) was 'Oxfordshire has a new world champion today... Fernando Alonso ..etc.' In fact, our head of operations was interviewed on radio, and employees at Enstone were invited to phone-in/SMS to let them know what the spirit at the factory was like.

Of course, we aren't allowed to do this, that's why Renault F1 has a press/PR department.. but the thought was nice.

It's quite galling when my local newspaper, the 'Banbury Cake' has more F1/motorsport news in it that an Australian national broadsheet.

It's nice to be living in a country where my achievements are widely reported and clearly are of interest to some people.

A quiet night in Banbury

This is what happens when the Banbury Town Fair comes to down. Basically, they close down the entire town centre and turn it into a mini-Royal Melbourne show in your own backyard!

Apparently, in order to be called a 'Market Town', you have to hold such events at least once a year. Furthermore, as long as a horse exhanges hands (i.e. is sold) during the period of the fair (usually three days), the council cannot oppose the holding of the festivities.

At least, that is what I have heard.. feel free to correct me!



The view of the town centre from the railway bridge.





I took some video as well. If someone could tell me how to orientate video from landscape to portrait it would help ;)

Good things about England #78

Listening to Oasis B-sides on the BBC!!

The sond was 'Acquiesce', which I've previously only heard as a live version.

Oasis - hoorah!

Uncle Shane

Old work-mate Shane dropped by the other day. He's been in England for work and he thought he'd say hello before embarking on a two week holiday to Geneva, the Alps and Ireland.

The happiest thing about Shane's visit was the fact that he got to eat a banana for the first time in months. For those of you who don't know, Australia's banana crop was destroyed in a cyclone at the beginning of this year.













Shane's looking particularly unimpressed with Banbury in this shot.

A good day at work

Today I successfully implemented the Turkel/Weiss-Smith preconditioner for Roe's flux-splitting alogrithm on an unstructured finite volume code.

Hoorah! Took me long enough.

First I'll check it using an explicit solver, then I'll implement the preconditioner on the Implicit Matrix Dissipation Jacobian.

Relive the glory of Australia's greatest sporting moment.

I was actually at work when Australia played Japan in the World Cup. I survived thanks to BBC text updates on their webpage, and Mark sending me SMS'es every five seconds from Sydney.

I had never watched the game in its entirety, but luckily David and Yvette had taped the game for me, and they were kind enough to post the tape over a few weeks ago.

Last week I was laid up ill for a couple of days off work, so I thought it would be the perfect time to dust off the tape and watch the game from scratch. Those goals still had me jumping out of my seat cheering!

Here they are again :







Fantastic stuff!!

Weird Al Jankovic does it again

From the creator of 'Eat it', 'Like A Surgeon', 'Another one rides the bus', comes 'White and Nerdy'.

Chad Vader episode 4

What will become of our heroic Dark Lord as he is banished to the night shift??



Remember that I have posted links to the first three episodes elsewhere on the blog.

Lucas with his rice shaker

Thanks to Amanda for the suggestion.. he loves it!

Another trip to London

The family visited London on the weekend, this time heading to the lovely leafy northern suburbs of Highgate. We caught up with old family friends Andrew and Simon, and Andrew's old friend Philip who now lives in Highgate.



Auntie Nicole joined us for Pizza at Strada, which apparently is a pizza chain in London and is very good.



Highgate is set up on a hill on London with amazing views of the whole city. Lucas enjoyed sitting in Philip's 'Bumbo' during his feed.



Uncle Andrew with Lucas.

More pics to follow.

Lucas is on solids now

BTW I've got a very cute video of Lucas in the bath playing with his rubber duck, but because you can see his doodle I don't want sickos on the internet watching it, so email me if you want a copy of it.