perkonis

So here’s the Cliffs Notes version of the season for them so far…

In Monaco they were heavily criticized and investigated for allegedly using team orders to keep Hamilton behind Alonso. The stewards cleared them in this one, but the British press vilified them for compromising their golden boy, Hamilton.

Next, Ferrari fired Nigel Stepney and it was then discovered that he had passed some 780 pages of Ferrari technical documents to Mike Coughlan. Coughlan was, and still is I believe, an employee of McLaren. The FIA was gracious enough to invite all parties to a hearing of the World Motorsport Counsel. It was decided at that McLaren was guilty of being in possession of Ferrari intellectual property, but there was no evidence that they had used it. Therefore, there was no penalty issued to McLaren.

Oh, then there was the Hungaroring fiasco where Alonso sat in his pit box long enough to block Hamilton and prevent him from completing his last flying qualifying lap. The stewards again requested the company of the team and this time penalized Alonso by stripping him of his pole and placing him 6th on the grid. They also stripped McLaren of any Constructor points before they even lined up for the race. The team has an appeal scheduled for September 19.

McLaren decided to file an appeal to the WMSC counsel verdict that was to be heard on September 13. That changed yesterday when the FIA announced that they have new evidence in the case and once again requested the honor of the presence of the team. In the original hearing, the FIA stated that, should further evidence be found, they reserved the right to ban McLaren from the F1 championship for not only 2007, but 2008 as well. In that light, this latest invitation probably isn’t Max wanting to share high tea with Ron.

And just for good measure, the stewards of the Italian Grand Prix fined McLaren $50,000 for the use of an unapproved gearbox in the Hungarian Grand Prix. I guess they had run out of other ways to penalize them.

I really don’t think I would want to sit in on any kind of meeting at Paragon on Monday.

I should know better. Should being the operative word there.
Since I am our IT department at work (I was the only one who could spell IT) I’m always harping on security. Left to their own devices my users (who all outrank me) tend to do really dumb things. Like disable firewalls, uninstall anti-virus, and connect to any random ad-hoc network they see. I have the envious task of edumacating them.
So far I have done a pretty good job. They let Windows install updates (they weren’t even on SP1 a year and a half ago), they keep their anti-virus up to date, and they quit surfing somewhat shady websites. They even quit storing information that should be secure in plain text on a laptop. I seem to be setting a good example.
Then today I remembered that some time ago I had to share my printer. Didn’t need to do that for long, but I forgot to “unshare” it when I was done. Care to guess how I figured that out? Yeah, the printer automagically spit out a page when someone else in the motel decided to use it.
I’ll turn in my geek card in the way out.