The GTVeloce.com-munity

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Summary of recent stuff

Labels: bikes, blogging, business, images, myths

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Images

OK, I love taking photos. The time and care in composition, matched by care within the darkroom - or in my case now the digital darkroom. Ostensibly much quicker, although I still spend as much - or more - time; I just try more variations! You can check out the full gallery of planes, trains, trams, cars, art, plants and birds here.

Labels: art, gallery, images, photography

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Check out the lap records

Check out the lap records set at Adcock park by CCCC trackies...

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Where the bloody hell are you? (As the saying goes...)

Labels: Frappr, map

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

It's the silly season for car journos

Every newspaper and every car mag seems to have journos who like to vote for their own 'car of the year'. Let's face it - it's a wank. It's got precious little to do with actually choosing the car you want, rather it's an indulgence that makes the journos happy (because they get to drive lots of cars) and will please only the manufacturers who "win".

Look at this Aussie car of the year - the GM Holden Commodore. (From Carsguide.com.au) Heavier and thirstier than the previous model, it is a loathsome thing that will actually belt another nail into the climate change coffin. But it meets the criteria, doesn't it? Of course the journos set the criteria and off they go. In other places this is called corruption, or at least a conflict of interest.

But if we have an independent assessment of what's valued in a car, or even better if we select a panel of independent experts, they are deemed to 'not know cars'. At the end of the day journos need to sell newspapers (or websites, or mags) and will set the game up to be attractive to as many people as possible. So we can never get a true assessment of worth, as there is an inherent bias. We get what hey think we want. But what happens when the world is turning towards low-impact on the environment? Could it be that the journos will continue to feed us big, fast, fat cars as the "heroes" whilst we actually go out and buy smaller, lower-impact cars? Does anyone smell "irrelevance" here?

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Well it's a start

Car companies actually building smaller, from eco-friendly materials? How much is just show? How can we pick real ideas from marketing gimmicks? Fact is that steel and plastic cars consume something around 30% of their energy budget (on average) just being made and shipped. Now if these guys were serious they'd get some standards together about modular, replaceable, repairable components that could be plugged into any brand of car, rather than building cars with 5 year lifespans and guaranteeing "100% recyclability". How does one recycle without burning more energy? Where do we get this energy from?

Friday, November 17, 2006

What am I thinking?

Why do I pretend I have a dot.com-munity happening? Pretend?? Well, it started in 1995 with just one small site at OzEmail in Australia. It looked a bit like this. It focused on cars and bikes - well Alfas and my cycling club, really, for about 4 years - and then it turned into the "old" gtveloce.com, which looked a little like this.

Now if you fast forward a few years from there you get several new things happening. Firstly the reunion of my old classmates from Fort Street High School, spawning this site, this gallery and this bulletin board. The amazing thing is that we left that school in 1975 - and despite the passage of time, and having previously only entertained 10 year intervals between subsequent reunions, the Class of 75 now meets online every day and face to face every few months. It's the power of the Internet, folks. Not only did the Internet facilitate the coming together in 2005, making it much easier to track people down and let them know what was happening, it has provided a method by which to easily stay in contact. Now if anyone ever tells you that computers are anti-social and impersonal... they have fewer legs to stand on than they think!

Which brings me to the blogging... which is just an expansion really of all of the above ;-)

Friday, October 27, 2006

White & Nerdy

This is funny.. really funny. Well, I like it anyway! (And yes, Stephen Hawking's in my library, too. Isn't he in yours?)

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

The other thing keeping me busy

Apart from the updates to content, the other thing keeping me busy - real work aside - has been making up new background files, like these. I realise there's a taste component, as well as a 'gee it's slow to download' factor, but I like it - and I have an xDSL line, so I'm OK.

Other than that it goes slightly out of whack when you use different font sizes to me! So don't do that, OK! It's meant to look good, not weird. (I guess I'll work on it some more.)

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

I've been busy

It may not look like it but I have been busy. Apart from working for a living - which is not what you see here - I have been creating or updating a few blogs and image galleries... like...

My portals

My Alfa pages