Strangely Ayrton Senna is one of those names that sticks out quite vividly in my childhood memories although I really don’t have a great recollection him racing due to how young I would have been. He raced during a period where my dad would wake me up at whatever ungodly hour was necessary to watch the races live.

A lot of the documentary talks about how fast he was in the car but it was more than just speed that made him great. The best example of this as far as I’m concerned is the finish to the 1992 Monaco Grand Prix. Senna found himself in the lead ahead of the much faster Nigel Mansell with 3 laps remaining and managed to hold him off with the Williams’ car swarming all over his tail.

At school when I was 11 or 12 we were tasked with doing a project about the life of a celebrity and I recall choosing Ayrton Senna. Unfortunately I am sure that everything from that piece of work is gone now but it’s probably for the best knowing just how many important details I left out. I seem to remember that my essay and talk left out the 2 World Championships that were decided by crashes with Alain Prost, one “victory” for each man. I also neglected to mention how Senna was guided by his faith and believed that it contributed to many of his greatest achievements.

Most of my classmates went for footballs, singers and popstars with one noteable outlier and few were aware of who my project was about. It led to the best anecdote I have about Ayrton Senna falling rather flat and it’s a story from my father who told me a tale about sending a photographer out to get a picture of the racing driver who later returned with a picture of….

…Ayr Town Centre.

While my reasons for watching the film stem from wanting to add some colour and detail to what I remember from the races I watched as a kid I would recommend it to anyone, F1 fans or not as the study of relationships and politics of the sport should be interesting to all.

Quora is a large question and answer resource. In fact if you ask it “What is Quora?” the response is as follows:

“Quora is a collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The main goal is to be the best possible resourcefor someone who wants to know about each question.”

The primary difference between Quora and other sites out there appears to be the heavy integration with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter since every question you ask can be pushed out to your friends and followers on these sites. I have had an account on it for a couple of months now but have rarely made use of it.

I can see the appeal of being able to find answers to common questions through crowdsourcing and the fact you can get differing opinions from a wide range of sources but if I have a question the little voice in my head goes “Let’s see what Google has to say about that!” instead of “Let’s go put it on Quora!”.

Until someone can convince myself and others to make that connection I fear that Quora’s place on the internet may reside closer to the dictionary definition of the word it is derived from:

Quorum: a gathering of the minimal number of members of an organization to conduct business

That said I hope that I am wrong and that we have gained a good educational resource. I’ll give it a chance and am now going to ask it for tips as to how I can better engage with it.

Given the name of this site I felt obligated to mark this occasion with a quick post.

On a similarly robot-related note I am looking for drawings of robots from anyone who knows me or otherwise feels like contributing one to me. Just hit me up anywhere you know how to reach me or drop me an email at scott@stompyrobot.net.

I then proceed to push the icon that looks strangely like an arrow to the left, much like an opening angle bracket <. Instead of returning me to the previous screen as I expect I am presented with a number of options about sharing the story on Facebook or Twitter.

I am aware that the back button is in fact at the top left but I find that placement to be a little less “thumb friendly”.

Since I started writing this post my BBC app has updated to a newer version which sticks a refresh button in the bottom left and shunts the offending item to the right a little which will hopefully prevent me from making this mistake in future.

This is where I'll be spending most of what is left of Sunday. Sockmonkey is a rubbish piano teacher but he does try so hard.

A week later the thing turns up and it’s absolutely tiny:

It’s like a camera for gnomes or something. I am led to believe it is essentially an unbranded version of the Veho Muvi.

I’ve not had a chance to check it out properly yet except for a brief test in my office yesterday.

Hopefully I’ll get a good opportunity to put it through it’s paces shortly and report back here.

I’m no stranger to driving from Edinburgh to Dundee and back having been doing it most weeks for the past 6 months. Today however was different and instead of just shooting along the motorway I was accompanied by the one we call Chimp.

Chimp not showing his face as if he's in the SAS.

He rather bravely decided to make his first long trip a visit to Edinburgh and I had decided to come to Dundee on Saturday so it made sense for us to stick together and take the more scenic route back.

Having not been out for any sort of road trip in a while we elected to head to North Queensferry to take a few pictures however an early mistake was the not including this in our directions. Not including it in the directions became something of a moot point as I left mine and a can of my beloved Berry flavoured Relentless on a table in my living room. Well done Scott, have a gold star.

Eventually we made it to North Queensferry where we took a few photos like the one below:

Forth Bridge from North Queensferry

Photos suitably captured we decided to head for our final destination of Dundee. This didn’t go to plan. We came to the decision that I would lead along roads that I didn’t know and also as mentioned previously my directions are still sitting in Edinburgh, mocking me.

We drove through countless towns and villages for what seemed like forever and then finally, there was a Eureka moment. What if there was some sort of application that could give you directions from your current location to your desired destination. Some sort of satellite based navigation, or sat nav for short… What if it was called Co-Pilot and was already installed on my G1. Oh wait…

Yep I’m that slow sometimes. Half an hour later we’d crossed the Tay Road Bridge and all was good.

A few people have asked my why my domain name is www.stompyrobot.net and the truth is that it was the first thing that entered my mind when needing to get some webspace to hold my coursework at uni. I think it all stems from a video project me and a two friends had to do for one of our modules.

The brief was pretty vague with the basic task being “make a video”. We were given the choice of either doing a ‘Student Life’ documentary or a drama of any genre, naturally all the groups decided to take the easy route of the documentary. My group however opted for a B-Movie. The film was never finished but you can view some early raw footage by clicking the image at the top or you can view the trailer here.