Skip to main content

Why I want a Lamborghini

When I was younger I always favored the underdog, often for no good reason, but I usually managed to invent one. For example I always build my desktop PCs with an AMD processor instead of an Intel processor. When everyone else had the vapourised Maroon Raleigh Mustang, I got the black and white one. All my friends at school had a ZX Spectrum and I had an Acorn Electron. I even had a betamax video player once, but that’s another story.

My dad loves and has always taken part in motorsport. Hill climbs, sprints, classic car trials and more. He even started the local branch of the TR Register (a group for Triumph TR enthusiasts). So I grew up with fast cars all around me and I’ve always liked speed. I often joke that the way I live my life is bigger, better, faster, more. Now I’m approaching 40 it feels more like just bigger! Before I got married I used to have a green Triumph TR 7 with a 3.5ltr, 175 bhp V8. Maybe now is the time to get another one, but that is also another story.

In the summer of 2005 I saw Mark Knopfler at the Royal Albert Hall and as I walked up from South Kensington tube station there was a Lamborghini parked on Exhibition Road. A little later on I saw it driving around the edge of Kensington Gardens. It looked and sounded amazing. I was hooked.

When I worked at Canary Wharf I was surrounded by Ferraris, Aston Martins and even the odd Maserati. Expensive fast cars were everywhere, Michael Schumacher had won his seventh world championship a couple of years before and the last five were with Ferrari. Even the road going supercars tend to be rather highly strung and need a lot of maintenance and Lamborghini’s are no different. So I decided there and then that when I got to the point in my career I could afford a supercar, it needed to be a Lamborghini. It just wouldn’t be a yellow or an orange one. Besides, my dad is constantly toying with the idea of getting a Maserati so my chance with one of those will come.

Things are different now. For example, I have an iPhone because it’s the best tool for the job. If I was still blindly supporting the underdog, I’d have an Android or a Windows phone. I try to always make sensible decisions, based on fact, reason and sometimes gut feeling, but when it comes to a supercar, I still intend to favour the underdog.

Thank you to James Neale Photography for the image.





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th

Bloodstock 2009

This year was one of the best Bloodstock s ever, which surprised me as the line up didn't look too strong. I haven't come away with a list of bands I want to buy all the albums of, but I did enjoy a lot of the performances. Insomnium[6] sound a lot like Swallow the Sun and Paradise Lost. They put on a very good show. I find a lot of old thrash bands quite boring, but Sodom[5] were quite good. They could have done with a second guitarist and the bass broke in the first song and it seemed to take ages to get it fixed. Saxon[8] gave us some some classic traditional heavy metal. Solid, as expected. The best bit was, following the guitarist standing on a monitor, Biff Bifford ripped off the sign saying "DO NOT STAND" and showed it to the audience. Once their sound was sorted, Arch Enemy[10] stole the show. They turned out not only to be the best band of the day, but of the festival, but then that's what you'd expect from Arch Enemy. Carcass[4] were very disappoin