Force India without Fisi

Giancarlo Fisichella has recently announced that he will join Ferrari until the end of the season, which is great news for him and for Formula 1, but I wonder who will now drive for Force India.

Even though Force India have put a brave face on it (see the official statement below) I bet they must be gutted to let him go, especially as they and Fisi had such a strong showing (2nd) and their first points in the Belgian GP in Spa-Francorchamps last weekend.

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Official Statement from Force India

Following extensive discussions over the past 24 hours, the Force India Formula One Team has agreed to release Giancarlo Fisichella from his contract to join the Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro team for the remainder of the 2009 season, starting with immediate effect.
Dr Vijay Mallya, chairman and team principal, commented, ‘Giancarlo and his management team approached me yesterday with the proposal from Ferrari. For any Italian driver, a Ferrari race seat is a long-held dream and for Giancarlo it was no exception. No one should stand in the way of this. Furthermore the agreement will secure Giancarlo’s long-term future with Ferrari and it would be incorrect to jeopardise this, particularly when Giancarlo has made such a vital contribution to Force India.

‘We would like to stress that we have not agreed any financial settlement with Ferrari. This agreement has been made in good faith and for the good of Giancarlo and the sport in general. A competitive Italian driver in a Ferrari for Monza is a positive story for Formula One, which can only help raise the sport’s profile in these difficult times.

‘We would like to thank Giancarlo for all his help over the past one and a half seasons and for delivering us our first World Championship points last weekend. He has been an integral part of the team and we owe him a great deal for his input behind the scenes and performance out on track. We wish him all the best for the future.

‘For Force India, this sport is a team effort and removing one part, even a major one, will not significantly affect our performance. The competitiveness of the team seen in Belgium was a result of hard work in the factory and wind tunnel and we have further developments coming for the final races, so we are confident this momentum can be sustained. We are now looking forward to a strong finish to the season.’

Giancarlo commented, ‘I am very grateful to Vijay Mallya for allowing me this opportunity to drive for the Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro team. It is true that it has always been an ambition to do this, and for Vijay to have allowed it to become a reality is very generous. I hope in my turn I have helped Force India grow up and be on the right path to achieve their own ambitions. They are now a very competitive team and I wish them all the very best.’

A decision regarding the driver of car number 21 will be made in the coming days and no further comment will be made on this front.

Bolognese Sauce Recipe

Nothing too special about a good bolognese sauce (except the taste that is), but what felt good is that I have just finished making one where I used home-grown tomatoes, garlic, carrots and onions, which makes it taste all the better. With a new addition of a greenhouse to my garde, next year I hope to also have the peppers added to the list.

If you are interested here is my easy peasy Spaghetti Bolognese Sauce Recipe:

Ingredients

1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
1 carrot, peeled and finely diced or grated
225g/8oz minced beef
2 tbsp olive oil
1 green pepper, seeded and finely diced
2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
1 tbsp mixed dried herbs
4 ripe tomatoes
Few Dashes of Worcester sauce
Tomato Paste
Tomato Sauce
salt and pepper

Method

1. Heat the oil in a large pan and cook the onion until it starts to soften.
2. Add the mice and cook it until it is just coloured
3. Add the Worcester sauce, Tomato Paste, Tomato Sauce, carrot, garlic, pepper and tomatoes and a small amount of water if necessary and cook for a few minutes
4. Add a glass of water and simmer gently for 40-50 minutes until thick. Use to make lasagne or serve with Spaghetti pasta.

The View from my Office

When I first came to the UK and used to work in London, I had an in-house joke with some friends where we would email each other photos of the 'views from our office', just to prove how dull our jobs were!

Now, I am lucky enough to be able to work from home and whilst it does have many benefits, there are also many distractions, especially if you are like me and enjoy wildlife photography.

On a few of the sunny days this spring and summer, I have often taken my laptop along with my camera, to do a little work outside.

I have seen plenty of birds, including the usual common UK birds and have also managed to spot two of the three woodpeckers that you get in the UK, the Green woodpecker and the lesser spotted woodpecker.

As well as the birds, I have seen plenty of butterflies, a Grass Snake (Natrix natrix) who lives in my compost heap, the occasional sighting of a pair of Monkjack Deer and a young fox who has taken to stealing my shoes and planting them in my vegetable garden!

Whilst I still miss all the wildlife from back home, I am really enjoying the wonderful nature that has taken to visiting my urban garden here in the UK this summer.

My Love Hate Relationship wih Google

Recently Google decided that it no longer liked my Best Binoculars & Binocular Reviews website and keywords that I was previously ranking in the first 5 places for, were now down to the tenth page or worse.

I was totally gutted, because I have been doing a lot of work on this website for many months now and it was slowly starting to pay off with the traffic to it, steadily increasing and as such so has to has my income

So what I had done to incur the wrath of Google?

In my opinion nothing, because I am looking at this site as a long term project I am purposely keeping away from any shady ways to improve my search engine rankings and producing quality unique contenet that I feel is genuinely useful should you be looking for advice on binoculars.

I did wonder if I may have too many internal links on the homepage, Google's own Webmaster Guidelines recommend that you keep it to less than a hundred and mine is pretty close to that, but surely this is not the worst crime in SEO?

After racking my brains and not coming up with anything and as a last resort, I submitted a Reconsideration Request from my Google Webmaster Tools account. This was done in frustration more than anything else as I have written to 'Big Brother' in the past and never received a reply and so was not expecting much.

Five days later
Yeagh \o/ - all my rankings have now returned and I even have a very generic reply from Google that says:


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We've processed your reconsideration request for http://www.bestbinocularsreviews.com/ July 30, 2009

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: www.bestbinocularsreviews.com.

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.
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I still do not know what (if anything) I did was wrong, but at least now I now once again have people visiting my website although I have a horrible feeling it may happen again.

So if someone in the reads this from the Google Search team reads this, thanks guys, but to improve it, why not tell us why it happened, this would help people who are genuinely not trying to trick you to to produce better websites for your search engine and for the billions of people who use it.

Discount Binoculars

I have been working hard on my Binoculars website lately and it seems to be paying off with the amount of visitors up buy just over 87% for the month of June as compared to May and this in turn is converting into an equal increase in sales.

One of the most recent features that I have added is a page where you can quickly compare discounted binoculars, these are real discounts on binoculars found on either Amazon, Binoculars.com, Eagle Optics, Optics Planet or Jessops here in the UK.

I think that it helps users of my site quickly check to see what is available at a discounted price and so far according to my analytics, it is being used a lot which is great.

Leica Binoculars
Also new to the site is a page on Leica Binoculars - not cheap, but definitely some of the best quality binoculars out there.

Skinny Blonde Looses Bikini

... thought that title may get your attention!

Kooler Box - Jou Moer

Too Good...