iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Here’s my geeky and productive way to start off the 2012 Formula 1 season: Textexpander shortcuts for Formula 1 driver names.

I’ve blogged about Textexpander before: mattclare.ca/blog/2009/08/28/textexpander/ In short, with TextExpander installed on your Mac you can type short key-commands, like “ddate” which is automatically replaced with something like Thursday March 15, 2012 saving keystrokes and looking things up. I store handy E-Mail responses or marking responses in TextExpander shortcuts as well as things like HTML elements and other filler text.

There is also the compatible MS Windows option: PhraseExpress.

For the 2012 Formula 1 season I’ve taken the Formula 1 timing and scoring three letter short code abbreviations and turned them into a Textpander group. This should help me bang-out my tweets, blog postings, gripes and other comments about F1.

3 Letter	Driver	Abbreviation
ALO	Fernando Alonso	F1ALO
BUT	Jenson Button	F1BUT
DIR	Paul di Resta	F1DIR
DLR	Pedro de la Rosa	F1
GLO	Timo Glock	F1GLO
GRO	Romain Grosjean	F1GRO
HAM	Lewis Hamilton	F1HAM
HUL	Nico Hulkenberg	F1HUL
KAR	Narain Karthikeyan	F1KAR
KOB	Kamui Kobayashi	F1KOB
KOV	Heikki Kovalainen	F1KOV
MAL	Pastor Maldonado	F1MAL
MAS	Felipe Massa	F1MAS
MSC	Michael Schumacher	F1MSC
PER	Sergio Perez	F1PER
PET	Vitaly Petrov	F1PET
PIC	Charles Pic	F1PIC
RAI	Kimi Raikkonen	F1RAI
RIC	Daniel Ricciardo	F1RIC
ROS	Nico Rosberg	F1ROS
SEN	Bruno Senna	F1SEN
VER	Jean-Eric Vergne	F1VER
VET	Sebastian Vettel	F1VET
WEB	Mark Webber	F1WEB

Here is the TextExpander Group for you to either download or subscribe to.
Read more... (271 words, 1 image, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

This weekend is the first race of the 2012 Formula 1 season. I’m excited and I hope you are too.

One part of the season that always gets me excited is entering my team, ZERO Racing, in Mitch & Brooke’s Fantasy Racing competition. I’m encouraging you to as well.

All you have to do is pick a team name and then a driver from all of six groups provided. The only prize is respect, and you should probably check back once and while to see how you’re doing, but if you let me know your team I’ll be sure to give you credit for besting mine.

Something else to look forward to is the new look I donated in the form of pictures and CSS to Mitch & Brooke’s Fantasy Racing. I hope to see it applied soon — once the guys are done starting the season etc. Here’s a preview:

I had a great time at the 2011 Rally of the Tall Pines in Bancroft Ontario Canada this weekend. Great weather and a good result for Crazy Leo. Thanks to all the volunteers and towns people who make the weekend happen.

My Flickr photo set at www.flickr.com/photos/mattclare/sets/72157628184149659/with/6416075347/
the results are posted at rallyscoring.com/results/2011/TallPines/index.htm

As the 2011 season is almost upon us I’m once again encouraging you to sign-up for Mitch & Brooke’s F1 Fantasy Racing League at www.fantasyautoracers.com/f1_01/

This will be Mitch & Brooke’s F1 Fantasy Racing League 14^th year in a row and my third participating. I encourage you to make your team to compete against ZERO Racing, my team. It makes the season that much more fun.

The deadline for the first race is 1 hour before race time on Sunday, March 27th. Go to www.fantasyautoracers.com and sign up now to make sure you get your team in before that deadline. The site looks like it could use a visual update… working on that. But I’m sure you can look past that.

To get you in the mood, here’s a great tribute to Ayrton Senna from Top Gear, featuring Lewis Hamilton. Can’t wait for the new season or to see the Senna movie!

The convoy hauling six giant beer vats passed our house. You can follow twitter.com/ChallengerMF to track their progress.

This was one of my first attempts at night photography with the DSLR.