Tennis Racket Paint Job (轉文)

By admin, April 30, 2013 4:21 pm

Now, we are not talking about players that use the same thing as the off the shelf model available to us and add weight or a different grip shape like Pete Sampras used to.

For essentially his entire career, Sampras used the same ProStaff 6.0 Midsize racquet, although he did have a specific grip shape and size that he wanted, along with having it weighted to be much heavier and much more difficult to play with than the retail model.  One important note about his racquet is that Sampras would only play with racquets from the no longer operating St. Vincent factory.

The reason behind this is that Sampras was extremely sensitive to changes, and preferred the St. Vincent made racquets.  The quality control at the island factory was extremely high but more importantly, due to the humidity of the area, the molds became warped, resulting in a thicker 18mm beam than the standard 17mm from other factories.  Once the St. Vincent factory was shut down and only China made PS 6.0s were available, it wasn’t exactly the same racquet Sampras was playing on TV, but it wasn’t like we see today.

The question though, how similar the gear on the shelf to the ones the pros use?   Racquet manufacturers have gotten smarter in that from generation to generation, we are starting to see the same molds being used with updated technologies but essentially the same name.

For example, the Pure Drive that Carlos Moya used back in 2002 has many similarities to the Pure Drive GT of today.  So is it ok for a manufacturer to paint Kim Clijsters original Pure Drive to look like the new Pure Drive GT and sell the new model as her racquet?

Babolat, Wilson, and Head have been the most noted three companies customizign the pros’ gear.  For example, Andy Roddick still uses the same original Pure Drive + he did when he won the 2003 US Open, but now it is painted to look like Pure Drive + Roddick GT.

Rafael Nadal is still using the original black colored AeroPro Drive and the Cortex band is simply painted onto the racquet to look like the AeroPro Drive GT.

Wilson, of course, claims that Roger Federer switches racquets every two years, most recently to the BLX Six-One Tour.  Such small changes are made to the racquets between generations and Wilson is smart enough to implement internal only changes that it is not easily seen.

Other classic examples are Marat Safin who “changed” to the new racquet every generation but actually always used the predecessor.

While those examples are mainly differences in paint and a technology or two, what are the real differences?
When Novak Djokovic signed with Wilson years ago, Djokovic was using the Head Radical / Prestige / Pro Tour mold before, and Wilson developed the nBlade 98 in an attempt to mimic his previous frame.  Strangely enough, he never liked it enough to switch to it, and continued using the same mold he had been using.  Even when he won his first Australian Open supposedly using the 93″ KBlade Tour, a quick glance shows that both his nBlade 98 and KBlade Tour share the same 18×20 string pattern as his old (and current) Head racquets.

While both Wilson frames also have 18×20 patterns, they have a different drilling pattern and so it’s easily noticed that the positions of some of the strings are different.  Even now, Djokovic is listed as using the 100″ YouTek IG Speed MP 18×20, but continues to use the same PT57 mold.  Realistically, the closest racquet to what Novak is actually using would be an older Pro Tour 630 frame.  Compared to the approximately 11.6oz weight of the YouTek IG Speed, his racquet comes in about an ounce heavier in weight with more weight in the head.

Andy Murray claims that he is using the YouTek Radical Pro, but is he really? Check this out: Two indications jump out on this claim, the string pattern, and the grommets.  While the retail Radical Pro comes in a 100″ head with a 16×19 string pattern, Murray’s racquet does have a 16×19 string pattern, but different spacing, resulting in a different overall feel.  His racquet actually follows the string pattern of the Prestige Pro, which is a 98″ headsize.

As successful as Murray is, I honestly can’t imagine Head going to the effort of making a racquet with the same string pattern but different spacing, and making a mold and specially producing the CAP grommets that you see along the sides of his racquet when they have a 98″ mold already created.  The CAP system has most notably been seen on a majority of the Prestige models, and it’s no secret that Murray has been using the CAP grommets on his Radical frames even back to the days of his i.Radical.

A much more bizarre tactic of sales strategy involved Rafael Nadal up until about a year ago when he made the switch to Babolat RPM Blast.  While most will say that he is using the 16g version of the string, he is actually using a thicker version that is 1.35mm in diameter.  Up until that point though, Babolat was claiming that Nadal was using Pro Hurricane Tour, but was using the Duralast polyester.

There were actually two reasons for claiming that Rafa was using PHT instead of Duralast.  The first of course is that PHT is almost twice the cost and a newer string that they were trying to sell.  The second was because the Duralast string that Nadal was provided was yellow in color compared to the natural color available at retailers.

These are just a few examples of these marketing techniques, and plenty of other players customize as well.  Lleyton Hewitt, for example, used the SRD Tour 90 for a long time with various different paintjobs.  The most extreme instance that comes to mind was the short lived contract between Marat Safin and Dunlop.  At the time, Dunlop released the Muscle Weave 200G 90, which was never released in the US, to make it appear that Safin had switched.  It turns out that Safin never made the switch from his Head racquet though, and after having the Dunlop logo stencil put on the string, Head actually filed a lawsuit against Dunlop.

來自波蘭的車模攝影愛好者

By admin, April 30, 2013 2:04 pm

這位來自波蘭的車模攝影收藏家的相片效果很逼真,跟我追求的攝影風格極相似,看來都是憑感覺追逐光影的一族。另外發現他有很多出色的作品都不是出自專業單反相機的,而是用普通Sony的卡片機DSC-W170拍的。

更令我驚訝的是這個前共產主義國家原來有那麼多人喜歡Die Cast!

Diecast Club Poland

神來之筆!

By admin, April 30, 2013 10:35 am

這位Bowerbird Garage朋友的逼真的場景製作,All I can say is He’s Gifted!

用中文來形容應該是”神來之筆”!

大敵當前

By admin, April 30, 2013 9:50 am

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這個當然是對AA說的,Welly這次又狠狠地抽了AA一大巴掌(上次是LP700),更儘佔市場先機,得到了不少世界各地車模朋友的支持,看來此舉勢必會影響到AA即將推出的Signature系列Pagani Huayra的銷情。

歷史上永遠是長江後浪推前浪,不進則退。個人認為如果Autoart繼續持如此高傲的態度不跟現實接軌的話,那麼總有一天會給那些後起之秀迎頭趕上的。

另外近來看見AA去年底才剛推出的Shelby Mustang 2010年藍色和白色現在都開始大特價了,似乎AA最終還是要向事實低頭的,不清清倉庫的大量存貨,作為車模玩具零售行業的龍頭,這樣的囤積規模現金流肯定遲早會出現問題。

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當然,認真改錯的機會永遠都會有的,只要你真心經營,大家一定會感受到那份熱誠的。那隻狡猾的狐貍Welly不就是看准了這個千載難逢的機會,成功地一舉拿下當初屬於AA壟斷市場的局面。

希望AA這次真的能夠聽到此番發自很多車模收藏家內心的聲音,痛定思過,重振旗鼓!

Tired of Brute Force on your RDP?

By admin, April 29, 2013 1:29 pm

Here is the ultimate solution and most importantly it’s FREE!

IPBan

For me, I simple set an extra difficult to crack password because most of my clients do require RDP to be accessed from all IP addresses.

Finally, I use VPN to secure RDP for those machines I have total control. :)

Array RAID configurations and associated RAID sets

By admin, April 29, 2013 12:14 pm

The tables show a logical drive layout when an array is initialized for the first time. The actual physical layout of drives can change and evolve due to maintenance and administrative actions. Spare drives can move as they are utilized to replace failed drives and newly added drives become the spares. It is not possible to determine which physical drives are associated with each RAID set. This information is dynamic and maintained by the EqualLogic firmware.

1

PS Series Firmware Compatibility with EqualLogic Tools

By admin, April 29, 2013 12:03 pm

The following table provides a quick reference of EqualLogic product version compatibility for the recent major firmware releases.

1

Tag Devices as SSD under vSphere 5

By admin, April 29, 2013 11:47 am

Just found this useful information.

Tag Devices as SSD
You can use PSA SATP claim rules to tag SSD devices that are not detected automatically.

Only devices that are consumed by the PSA Native Multipathing (NMP) plugin can be tagged.

If you need more information about the commands listed in this topic, see the Getting Started with vSphere Command-Line Interfaces and vSphere Command-Line Interface Concepts and Examples documentation.

Procedure

1

Identify the device to be tagged and its SATP.

esxcli storage nmp device list

The command results in the following information.

naa.6006016015301d00167ce6e2ddb3de11
Device Display Name: DGC Fibre Channel Disk (naa.6006016015301d00167ce6e2ddb3de11)
Storage Array Type: VMW_SATP_CX
Storage Array Type Device Config: {navireg ipfilter}
Path Selection Policy: VMW_PSP_MRU
Path Selection Policy Device Config: Current Path=vmhba4:C0:T0:L25
Working Paths: vmhba4:C0:T0:L25
2

Note down the SATP associated with the device.

3

Add a PSA claim rule to mark the device as SSD.

You can add a claim rule by specifying the device name.

esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s SATP  --device device_name --option=enable_ssd

You can add a claim rule by specifying the vendor name and the model name.

esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s SATP  -V vendor_name -M model_name --option=enable_ssd

You can add a claim rule based on the transport protocol.

esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s SATP  --transport transport_protocol --option=enable_ssd

You can add a claim rule based on the driver name.

esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s SATP  --driver driver_name --option=enable_ssd
4

Unclaim the device.

You can unclaim the device by specifying the device name.

esxcli storage core claiming unclaim --type device --device device_name

You can unclaim the device by specifying the vendor name and the model name.

esxcli storage core claiming unclaim --type device -V vendor_name -M model_name

You can unclaim the device based on the transport protocol.

esxcli storage core claiming unclaim --type device --transport transport_protocol

You can unclaim the device based on the driver name.

esxcli storage core claiming unclaim --type device --driver driver_name
5

Reclaim the device by running the following commands.

esxcli storage core claimrule load
esxcli storage core claimrule run
6

Verify if devices are tagged as SSD.

esxcli storage core device list -d device_name

The command output indicates if a listed device is tagged as SSD.

Is SSD: true
What to do next

If the SSD device that you want to tag is shared among multiple hosts, make sure that you tag the device from all the hosts that share the device.

Audrey’s Dolce Vita (轉文)

By admin, April 29, 2013 10:04 am

cn_image.size.audrey-hepburn-rome-style

NUN BETTER Audrey Hepburn on the terrace of the Hotel Hassler, in Rome, with the telegram announcing her best-actress award, for The Nun’s Story, from the New York Film Critics Circle, 1960.

With Roman Holiday, which earned her the 1953 best-actress Oscar, Audrey Hepburn became not just a major Hollywood star but also a living icon for the Eternal City. Alongside intimate photographs from his new book, Audrey in Rome, Luca Dotti recalls his mother’s three-decade love affair with the Italian capital, while Laura Jacobs examines what the images reveal about her style.

Laura Jacobs

The first thing she did with her newfound freedom was buy a pair of Roman sandals. Then she went to the barber for a pixie cut. And then she bought herself a gelato. Simple pleasures all, but as a princess on the lam in 1953’s Roman Holiday, an unknown actress named Audrey Hepburn made these pleasures indelible. She can cook and sew and keep house, the princess tells Gregory Peck, a newspaper reporter who’s onto her. “I just haven’t had the chance to do it for anyone.” He spends the day showing her Rome while secretly planning to report the story and have a scoop. He doesn’t report the story. He falls in love with her instead—just as the viewing public did—and protects this girl of doe-eyed grace and gravity. Hepburn won the year’s Academy Award for best actress.

In the remaining years of the 1950s, Hepburn would go from strength to strength—from sunlight to moonlight to starlight—in movies that included 1954’s Sabrina and 1957’s Love in the Afternoon and Funny Face. And she would make two more movies in Rome: War and Peace, in 1956, with her first husband, Mel Ferrer, and Fred Zinnemann’s magnificent The Nun’s Story, in 1959, in which she plays Sister Luke, of all her roles the one closest to her heart. Rome, too, was close to her heart. Hepburn and Ferrer kept an apartment there and visited often. In 1969, with most of her film career behind her, she settled in Rome to make a home with her second husband, the psychiatrist Andrea Dotti. She’d had a son, Sean Ferrer, in 1960, and dearly wanted more children.

Hepburn felt at ease in the Eternal City, and for their part the Romans thought of her—this beguiling girl who’d zoomed through their streets on a Vespa—as a kind of ambassador. Even during the Dolce Vita 60s and into the disenchanted 70s, Rome’s paparazzi continued to protect her. When Hepburn’s second son, Luca Dotti, began gathering photos from the Reporters Associati archives to make his new book, Audrey in Rome, he was stunned by the richness of the material housed there. “We pre-selected 2,500 photos and just 10 percent made it into the book.” He was also surprised to see that “even in these candid shots she was always herself—perfect.”

The intention behind Luca’s book is that it be “a kind of liaison between a private Audrey and a public one. She didn’t live a life secluded or behind bars; she would walk around and everybody knew her. She was part of the city. The majority of these photos are in the streets.” For the world’s legion Audrey aficionados, imitators, and worshippers, these never-before-seen photographs represent a whole new archive of style.

For instance, Hepburn liked to carry small baskets as a purse and was fond of kerchiefs tied under the chin (not wound around and fastened in back in the French manner). These touches of farm-girl freshness are redolent of her childhood. “My mother was, at the very deep of her heart, a farm girl,” says Luca. “She grew up between England, Holland, and Belgium, in the countryside, and with a great love for everything linked to the countryside—furniture, style. That’s why at the end she chose to live in Switzerland in the middle of the fields.”

These baskets and kerchiefs also reference, no doubt unconsciously, something of the fairy-tale elements, both dark and light, of Hepburn’s life: the Brothers Grimm–like hunger and danger of World War II in occupied Arnhem, Holland—and then the magical, postwar, Charles Perrault transformations that illuminate the Cinderella story lines of Sabrina, Funny Face, and My Fair Lady. Those who knew her well acknowledged a sadness within. “The war,” says Luca. “All that death around her. She lost a big part of her family; she lost the home she had—everything. That stays in the deep of your soul.” But there was also “this fantastic will and enthusiasm. Because after all that sorrow everything was a discovery. When she talked about her career she always said that she was so lucky and it was like winning the lottery.”

In fact, Hepburn’s persona, her style, were born of extremes. “She thought she had a big nose,” says Luca, “and big feet, and she was too skinny, and not enough breast. She would look in the mirror and say, ‘I don’t understand why people see me as beautiful.’ She reasoned that she must be a good mixture of defects.”

Yes, the too wide smile on the too long neck; the swan-boat feet (size 39) on the tulip-stem body (she was almost five feet seven); the girlish trust, yet always those eyes seeing straight to the truth. Striking photos from 1959 show her walking her Yorkshire terrier, Mr. Famous, along a deserted street. She wears a flared tweed coat and carries a grade-school satchel, and her hair is down, unusual for her, which makes her look more like a philosophy student than a world-famous actress of 30.

“I love those photos,” says Luca. “That is the time, I think, between The Nun’s Story and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Most of Hepburn’s style choices were based on simplicity and practicality. Ballerina flats and low heels accentuated her long feet, adding to her elegant attenuation, but she wore them so that she could walk comfortably. She did not wear watches, because she didn’t like the sensation of cold or weight against her skin. Her serious jewelry was pearls, either pearl earrings or the pearl necklace Ferrer had given her, because pearls are warm. Her favorite color was cyan—a light blue, says Luca—and her favorite flower the white tulip. Scarves were a bit of a vice. “Well, it wasn’t like Imelda Marcos and shoes,” says Luca. “She had, like every woman, maybe 30 or 40. It was a good way to be in disguise, big sunglasses and a scarf. Occasionally she was able to do her shopping without having all the crowds behind.”

Hepburn did not waste time holding on to youth. “She was always a little bit surprised by the efforts women made to look young,” remembers Luca. “She was actually very happy about growing older because it meant more time for herself, more time for her family, and separation from the frenzy of youth and beauty that is Hollywood. She was very strict about everybody’s time in life. Children should be allowed to play because you’re going to need all your happiness to grow up. And aging was part of the circle of life.

“The only big regret I have and she would have had,” Luca continues, “is not knowing her grandchildren. Because she would have been a fantastic grandmother—cooking cakes, keeping the grandchildren on every occasion, and telling them stories.”

Hepburn’s life with Dotti began as a great romance and brought her Luca, the longed-for second child and brother for Sean. Rome was Dotti; it was family. When the city became unsafe in the 70s, rife with gangsters and terrorists, people began asking if she would leave. Hepburn would answer, “Well, my husband is here; my family is here. Why should I leave?” Still, the marriage became difficult.

“This is a speculation I’m making,” says Luca Dotti, “but also a fact. She was 40 [when they married] but at the same time so much older than 40 because of all the success and history behind her. And my father was 10 years younger. To be around a woman who has been an icon for many years, and you’re a young doctor, for a man it makes a difference. If that equation was reversed, if my father was the one 10 years older and a little bit more secure, it would have probably worked out better.”

Hepburn separated from Dotti in 1980. In 1986, when Luca went to a Swiss boarding school, Hepburn moved to Switzerland as well, back to the 18th-century barn she’d bought—proudly—with her own money in 1963. Hepburn’s Roman sojourn was over.

擦身而過的緣份

By admin, April 28, 2013 10:09 pm

原來滿以為有機會從一個美國私人收藏家手里收購到以下這台全新狀況京商第一版的Countach Prototype,但是…哎,注定的,強求沒幸福,只好等下一次的机會了。

另外京商就快推出Countach Prototype的第二版(紅色),這次肯定是要買的,幸虧京商還沒把林寶也納入高端High End系列,要不然我就慘了。

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更正: 其實紅色才是真正意義上的第一版,測試撞毀后,利用底盤又造的綠色版本! 另外有頂翼白色的是“石油版”的第一款定制車,也稱為0號車。

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