Valentino Rossi
Source: www.si.com
I have a wide range of interests, too many to detail in full here so I've chosen a selection of the main ones that might also interest you.
I enjoy many sports as a spectator including cricket and rugby. Football, while it may be the sport of the masses, is only a secondary interest for me. Motorsport has always been a passion since childhood days in the 1970's watching Hackney Hawks (latterly the Hackney Kestrels after a merge with Crayford speedway in 1983) and Rye House Rockets speedway and hot rods and bangers on the short oval circuit at Foxhall Heath Stadium, Ipswich.
I have also watched a great deal of motorsport on the television and have been lucky enough to witness the careers of racing greats like Senna, Prost and Hakkinnen in Formula 1, Doohan, Roberts and Fogerty in bike racing and the Schumacher brothers.
Valentino Rossi
Source: www.si.com
None of these however can compare to the sheer brillliance of (possibly) the greatest man ever to sit on a motorbike, Valentino Rossi. My girlfriend has a habit of spotting talented racers at a young age when they show snippets on tv of young up and coming racers in racing schools and writes the names down as 'ones to watch' in the future. One of these was Rossi and when he appeared on the start line of the first 125cc World Championship race of 1996 and finished his first season 9th in the championship at 17 years of age it was clear why he'd been on her list. Rossi proved this the following season by becoming 1997 125cc World Champion at the age of 18. In 1998 he moved up to 250cc finishing as runner up and winning his second world championship, the 250cc world title in 1999. Satisfied with another job well done he again moved up to the top class 500cc Grand Prix bikes for the 2000 season. In true Rossi style he finished as runner up in his first season and to no-one's great suprise really became World 500cc Champion in 2001, his third World Championship at the age of 22.
What then followed has been one of the most enjoyable demonstrations of racing I think I will ever see. The top formula changed to MotoGP, larger four-stroke engines and a totally different bike to ride. Valentino Rossi won the MotoGP championship in its first year, 2002 and again in 2003 with the Honda team that gave him his 500cc title and then in 2004 switched to rival and failing manufacturer Yamaha. Turning the fortunes of the team on it's head, Rossi won the 2004 and 2005 Word MotoGP titles on a Yamaha. At the time of writing Valentino Rossi has been World Champion seven times in four different classes of motorcycle racing and is still only 26 years old.
To be quite honest, if you don't think Valentino Rossi is the greatest ever racer you can't have been watching for the last ten years! Michael Schumacher is seven times world champion, still racing and is 40 years old. Valentino Rossi is seven times world champion and 26. The mind boggles...
He will compete in the MotoGP class again in 2006 for Yamaha but rumours abound that he may move to Formula 1 and try to emulate John Surtees by becoming World Champion on both two and four wheels.
I've always tried to own interesting cars. My first cars were all Triumph Dolomites and the notoriously rusty British marque started my interest in cars that vary from the current norm ever since. Triumphs gave way to the insanity of a 1980 Lotus Talbot Sunbeam, the road-going by-product of Lotus founder Colin Chapman's dream to win the World Rally Championship. This is not the place to reminisce but take it from me it was jaw-droppingly quick, ridiculously loud, looked like any other scabby old Talbot Sunbeam to the untrained eye and upset a lot of people in 'hot' European hatchbacks. My rule of thumb now is that anything that takes more than 6 seconds to get to 60 mph isn't hot, its 'warm'. I got a taste for rally cars after that and had a 1990 Mitsubishi Galant GTi with 4 wheel drive and 4 wheel steer.
These days the neck-snapping cornering of the Galant has been swapped for the more leisurely amble of a 1977 bay window Volkswagen camper van.
1977 Bay Window VW Camper
I like the sort of holiday where you make no plans other than to book a week or two off work, pack a tent and some clothes and go wherever you fancy. There is however, a fixed amount of times anyone can put a tent up in a howling gale on the North Devon coast in August.
That point came in 2003 when I bought myself 'Moog' the 1977 Bay Window VW Camper and surrendered to the 'handbrake on, kettle on' philosophy of camping holidays. Six weeks into ownership the engine blew up in a fairly terminal way which meant I had to get hands on and serious very quickly and put a new engine in and build it up. Some friends helped and what seemed to be a daunting task in the end turned out to be quite straight forward. As a friend of mine says quite often "Its only nuts and bolts, how hard can it be?".
He's right of course, the basic design is only just post-war, the technology is just nuts and bolts mechanics so most things are fairly easy to fix when it goes wrong. The popularity of the beetle and camper means that parts are still very easy to get hold of for such an old vehicle and there are plenty of modifications to make the general ride, power and handing a bit more acceptable by modern standards.
The camper van now sports Recaro bucket racing seats, twin 40 Webber carbutrettors, a tuned exhaust system, quick shifter gear change and as you can see from the photograph, I've lowered it too. That probably isn't the end of it either, VWs are an obsession now.
Splitterz Air-Cooled Club
A gathering of like-minded VW owners, initially in my home town of Chelmsford and a year later also near Stansted Airport on the Essex and Hertfordshire border. A fair number of VW beetle and camper van owners use the Internet and quite a few of them live in Essex and especially in or around Chelmsford.
Some of the Essex VW owners I met through online forums wanted to start a regular meeting in Chelmsford and I helped out.
One thing led to another and now Splitterz, as it became known, is a large, family-friendly group of enthusiastic VW and air-cooled vehicle owners meeting in two locations every month.
I turn my creative skills to running the web site and designing flyers and club branded clothing and my organisational skills to helping keep the club running in general. There is no formal club structure, people just seem to fall into roles as required and I have fallen into the Club Secretary role. Splitterz isn't separate to the VW ownership experience, it is part of the whole hobby for me.
2006 will be the third year of Splitterz and promises to be bigger and better than ever.
I'm what people call a 'muso', I listen to a lot of music of varying styles, I go to music festivals, local gigs and try to listen to as much 'real music' as possible. Favourite artists include Bob Dylan, Levellers, Pink Floyd, Leftfield, Prodigy, Faithless and Bob Marley among many others. I also play a bit.
My mum tells me I've always played drums, at about the age of three I was playing in the garden and turned three plastic buckets upside down, arranged them in a line and proceded to hit them with wooden spoons. The old lady that lived next door remarked to my mum that even then I had a sense of beat and timing. I've had beats in my head and have been annoying people ever since by tapping or drumming on desks, dashboards, anything that makes a good sound really. A number of my friends were in bands at school and more at university, some of them made it big too. I often ended up helping to load amps and drum kits in and out of vans and set up. I know from this time I can just about drum my way round a basic kit.
My noise-maker of choice is the djembe hand drum (also djimbe , jembe , jenbe , yembe) pronounced 'Jem-Bay', a skin covered drum shaped like a goblet and of African origins. The djembe is played with the hands not sticks and is capable of producing a wide range of sounds and tones.
There are three ways to strike a djembe:
These tones are made to ring out by allowing the hadn to bounce off the skin whens triking. Muted tones of all three are achieved by more tempered striking and by placing the non-striking hand flat on the drum skin to damp the sound.
My fascination with the sound of a digeridoo dates back to my teens when I first met a man in my home town of Chelmsford known to everyone as 'Rich the Dige' who, by the sounds of it, was probably born holding and playing a digeridoo.
My girlfriend bought me a digeridoo as a birthday present in 2001 and I spent a year annoying the neighbours with it learning to circular breathe. It was made of bamboo and was a good dige to learn on. I started to put more of the vocal elements itno my playing and needed a more resonant dige. Bamboo is a fibrous material and while light and easy to make drone, it doesn't have the denisity to amplify the vocal elements well.
I started looking around for a new dige and had been playing djembe once a month on a friend's boat with up to a dozen other drummers. Rich the Dige turned up and played along with the drumming on several occasions and used to explain the acoustics of diges to us. Flavian, the owner of the boat decided to try and make a digeridoo himself and selected a piece of timber and made one using his own methods. It turned out rather well, he made three more and I chose the one pictured and bought it off him. The wood is more dense than the bamboo and is also soaked in epoxy to harden it further giving a very resonant and crisp tone.
I've got two guitars, I wouldn't say I am an accomplished player of string-based instruments at all but I can work my fingers into the right chord patterns to be able to play a few songs round a fire at the end of a good party or festival.
I inherited my Hohner steel strung acoustic guitar somewhere along my journey through life and to be honest it is horrible to play and is probably one of the contributing factors to my failure to master the guitar.
My other guitar, a Columbus semi-acoustic that I bought for next to nothing from Cash Converters because it looked nice and at the price if it wasn't any good it would at least look ok hanging on a wall. As it turns out I quite enjoy playing it but it isn't great and does go out of tune very easily.
I started building web sites when I was studying architecture at university in the 1990's. The post-graduate diploma course at South Bank University London wasn't too challenging, especially in the first of the two years of study and the university was big on I.T. at the time compared with many other institutions. I found myself in a university building with a rarely used computer suite hooked up to something called the Internet that some graduates used to find out information for theses and I had nothing much to do. I decided to find out what it was all about. One of the tutors who was considered to be clued up about computers at the time answered a few basic questions about what web sites were and showed me that they were made of tags of markup and how to view the tags using 'view source' in a browser.
I could see the potential in this and decided it might be a good idea to learn how to build a web site. I looked at the code and copied bits of it to see what they did, effectively reverse engineering the simlpe web pages of the day and learning as I went along.
I built and published my first web site on the university Internet server in 1993, pre-dating even Compuserve's introduction of home user dialup, as part of a development project at university and convinced that this was the future. One day everyone would communicate thier ideas to the mass audience this way. When I say I was building web sites before most people even knew what the Internet was, I'm not joking. Unless you were using the UUNET and Gopher systems in the late 80s and early 90s it's true. Sadly I didn't keep a copy of the site. It was however on the subject of the redevelopment of the Shepherd's Bush Green area of London and concentrated on the history of the White City site and why it was named White City as part of the Exhibition of 1906. What you see around you is the result of everything that I have done since :-)
... and yes I did put the piece about Valentino Rossi at the top because it gets searched for more frequently than any other topic in this document ;-)
Here are the websites I do for the love of it. Most of them have had a recent semantically harmonious revamp.
The site I built at the end of 2005 to consolidate and rationalise everything I had learned over the last dozen years of building web sites. Technohippy is the pseudonym I use on forums most of the time. Too many people are called 'Dave' and as I discovered, too many people are also called 'Dave Howe' so 'Technohippy' covers what I do and how I look in no uncertain terms. Technohippy.co.uk is a cookbook tutorial that I wrote to teach myself the strict, semantically harmonious approach to web coding. An approach that I see forming the basis of the Internet over the next dozen years.
The site I needed to build as the example site for the Technohippy learning excercise. As with most of my web projects it has turned into something bigger than I intended it to and is very much 'Dave Howe - About Me' and contains all sorts of musings and ramblings.
My web portfolio site. A selection of my online work and a historical timeline of my greatest hits that have been and gone and now form part of Internet history.
The web-based manifestation of my Volkswagen obsession and the first step on my XHTML journey.
I always needed to refer back to the many things I have learned over the years so in 1999 I started a website with everything on it so I could get to it no matter where I was. I chanced upon a good domain name that was available and notepad was born. Over the years its developed and now in its fifth incarnation as the book on how to be a Web designer that I never got asked to write by one of the publishing companies that makes those big fat computer books you see on the shelves of bookshops.