Website Blogs

... and now you can! Comments have been added to the videos - yay!

I've decided to stop posting blogs about bike rides and then posting the video of the bike ride and essentially duplicating the post. What I've done is added the track map to the video player so all the information is there and you can just go look at the video if you really want to. Given that Owen's the only person who looks at the video's it might have been easier to just message him on Whatsapp rather than posting a blog about not posting blogs, but where would the fun have been in that?

A new Formula 1 season is upon us and the race game is setup for all to play. There are very few changes this year, but will the cars perform the same? Let's see how good you are at predicting the top ten each race. The game is really simple, you need to pick 10 drivers that you think will finish in the top 10 positions of each race. In order to play, you must be registered with EastBayRag. You then need to logon (when you try to access the page or any other page that requires logon, you will be taken to the logon screen).

There are literally only two steps to play the game:

1. Go to 2024 F1 Game registration and register.

2. Go to selections for the first race to make your initial selections.

You can leave it there. Your selections will copy over to all the races so you will score points each week. You can update your selections for any race up until the race is locked (set to be two hours prior to the official race start time). You will be able to see practice and qualifying before you make changes to allow you to make any updates for drivers performing above or below what you expect for any given race.

The points system is pretty simple - you start with 150 points. You lose a point for each position each of your predictions finishes away from where you predicted them to finish (e.g. if you predict Lewis Hamilton to finish third and he wins, you lose two points. If he finished seventh, you would lose 4 points). You gain 10 bonus points for every correct prediction making 250 points the maximum that can be scored each week if you guess all 10 positions correctly.

Any updates can be made from your race game account by selecting the appropriate competition.

Good luck!

Well, congratulations to me, but only just. I didn't realize there was a race this weekend, so I didn't update my selections. I ended up losing 50 points to William in the final face, but I'd managed to get that far in front from the previous races, mostly because of the good luck I had with the Vegas selections.

Here's the final leaderboard

Well, not necessarily hidden, more missing from the weekly emails. Due to a glitch in The Matrix and nothing to do with poor programming or anything like that, the weekly email has been missing any general “Stuff” blogs if there were AI blogs in the same week. I did contemplate resending the weekly mail, but given that I didn't write anything interesting in the blogs from, what is now, last week, I didn't bother. Instead, I figured I'd write this to let you know you may have missed something that was completely unimportant. Anyone wanting to know if they missed something can use this link to the recent stuff blogs.

Slightly delayed, but the update is here and we're introducing the Race Game smack talk, a place to go to comment on the game, the season, the other competitors or anything you want, really. And it's all mobile friendly. (That link is for the 2023 F1 season).

Now, why have we done this? Well .... imagine this .... let's say Mr O is out getting a bit of daily exercise, playing Pokémon. There he is, catching one over here and another over there. Perhaps stopping to take a gym. Then, in the middle of his daily Pokémoning he thinks about something I wrote on about the last race and comes to the conclusion that I'm a knob. Instead of having to send me an email on the matter, he can just pop to a different window on his browser and post to the smack talk.

You might be fooled into thinking this is a very specific use case, but I like to look at this as service. Where else can you go to get pre-emptive problem solving like that?

But there's more. Oh yes, indeedy! Hold your horses and batten down the hatches. Get ready for this one. We are now emoji friendly 😎😍😋. Not going to lie, this change has been a bitch and will be the subject of another blog, but for now, just know that emoji's can be used anywhere on the site.

Why did we do this? You might ask. Well .... today's teenager is incapable of using words to express their feelings. Instead they rely on these symbols to communicate. Given that William is participating in the competition, I figured it would allow him the opportunity to join the conversation. Although I'm not entirely sure we'll understand what he's trying to say. I got confused the other day when I saw him message his girlfriend about coming over to make a very strange vegetarian dish that mixed vegetables and fruit. Something about him coming over to put his 🍆 in her 🍑. I can't think that would taste very nice.

Alrighty everyone, the moment you've all been waiting for. The Race Game returns, this time with 2023 Formula 1 season. The game is really simple, you need to pick 10 drivers that you think will finish in the top 10 positions of each race. In order to play, you must be registered with EastBayRag. You then need to logon (when you try to access the page or any other page that requires logon, you will be taken to the logon screen).

There are literally only two steps to play the game:

1. Go to 2023 F1 Game registration and register.

2. Go to selections for the first race to make your initial selections.

You can leave it there. Your selections will copy over to all the races so you will score points each week. You can update your selections for any race up until the race is locked (set to be two hours prior to the official race start time). You will be able to see practice and qualifying before you make changes to allow you to make any updates for drivers performing above or below what you expect for any given race.

The points system is pretty simple - you start with 150 points. You lose a point for each position each of your predictions finishes away from where you predicted them to finish (e.g. if you predict Lewis Hamilton to finish third and he wins, you lose two points. If he finished seventh, you would lose 4 points). You gain 10 bonus points for every correct prediction making 250 points the maximum that can be scored each week if you guess all 10 positions correctly.

Any updates can be made from your race game account by selecting the appropriate competition.

Good luck!

The subs are here! One of the things I've done as part of the website cleanup is implemented sub domains. This now means that you can reach parts of the site quicker and easier by using the following sub domains:

vote.eastbayrag.com
blog.eastbayrag.com or blogs.eastbayrag.com
forum.eastbayrag.com or forums.eastbayrag.com
photo.eastbayrag.com or photos.eastbayrag.com
video.eastbayrag.com or videos.eastbayrag.com
funstuff.eastbayrag.com
racegame.eastbayrag.com

You won't though, but if you did want to, you could. Now, the one that you will probably click on is the one I use to write a shopping list for William and given the nosy nature of people, I'm sure you're going to want to see what I'm asking him to get:

shoppinglist.eastbayrag.com

Not really sure why I'm writing this up as I doubt I'll remember I wrote it up if the same thing ever happens again. Anyway, for those observant among you, you will have noticed that last week's mail message was late going out (~12 hours). It didn't send automatically, so need to investigate.

First thing, did the job run - yes it ran and completed successfully. Hmmm, how can that be? Well, it did run and everything ran right except the actual emails never got sent. OK, try to recreate. I've created a bunch of tools to troubleshoot the background jobs. In this instance I can send a test weekly message with a front end view to each process and it only goes to me. Ran that and it failed to create the message because it couldn't connect to host eastbayrag.com. Hey, what? It can't connect to itself, don't be silly ....

... open web browser and connect to eastbayrag.com .... times out and can't connect. Try on work computer and it works fine, the website is there and up and running fine. Which it has to be, otherwise I couldn't connect to run the tools. Connect to site on ipad - fine. Connect to site on phone - fine. Connect on home laptop - fails. Weird ... ok, what's changed. Well, I've been setting up a linux machine, maybe I've buggered something up. Start linux machine and connect on that - fine. What's the pattern? Well, it's connecting from IOS, Android and Linux, but not from either of the windows machines on my home network. It does connect from the windows machine that is VPN'd through work. OK, try gaming machine which is on windows - yup, failed. OK, definitely a windows thing it would seem.

Technical bit - when you connect to the website, you connect to the IP address of the website. When connecting to my own website, it's sending me back to myself. So, figured windows may have updated some firewall rules or something to prevent the system from accessing itself.

Ping eastbayrag.com and tracert eastbayrag.com both work fine, so I know the machine knows where to route the traffic. It literally just won't load in a browser.

Let's hit Google for the answer. Obviously this scenario is very specific and quite hard to search, but getting lots of hits for machines loosing connection to some sites, so I start flushing the DNS and resetting the ipconfig and trying a whole bunch of stuff - nothing works.

Moved laptop into other room as cleaner was here and suddenly it worked. What the fuck? Plug it back in and it doesn't work again. Wait, what? Now I realize that all the machines that don't work are hard wired into the router and the machines that do work are wirelessly connected to the router. Put one of the other machines on wireless and it works fine.

OK, now we're getting somewhere - it's clearly a router problem and something to do with the hard wired part of the router which makes no sense as the hard wired computers are working fine with the exception of the fact that they can't connect to my own website either by using the domain or the external IP address. Using the internal IP address works (I checked that somewhere along the line).

I spent ages searching for the answer, plugging and unplugging computers, switches, routers etc. Re-mapping IP addresses and going mad as it doesn't make sense. I had the router config open and was looking through things in that and I randomly noticed that the router name had gone back to a default of Linksysxxxxx where xxxxx are some random numbers. I looked at my computer and it said it's connected to RagNet which is what the router was named. I renamed the router back to RagNet and everything works.

I still don't totally understand why it didn't work in that everything worked fine except being able to browse my own site. Best I can come up with is that the computer goes "I want to connect to eastbayrag.com", it sends that to the DNS and the DNS says "that's you mate". Computer then goes "oh right, yeah, let me look at my network, RagNet are you there?" And the router doesn't respond, because it's forgotten its name.

Roll up, roll up! It's time to create your team for the 2015 NASCAR Race Game. When most people are looking for to a valentines day with their sweetheart, I'm going to be watching the Sprint Unlimited race which is the precursor to the 2015 Season.

Register for the 2015 NASCAR Race Game.