About
Me And Site History
As you can see from
the above photograph, I am
an ex-Ferrari Formula 1 driver ;)
This website was started in the summer of 1997, built using FrontPage
97 running on a Digital
AlphaStation 200
using FX!32
Intel code emulation
software. Image manipulation was done using XV
for OpenVMS.
Using a100MHz processor and a whopping 32MB of memory.
If you came to the site wondering where all the fancy Adobe Flash, Java
and Menus are, well apart from the videos and picture galleries the
site is basically unchanged from when I did it, I was going to update
it to a more modern look, but I thought I'd leave it as it is as a sort
of example of how simple the web was back in 1997. Back then
no one had broadband in the home; I was still using a 33.6K
modem. That’s why some of the original pictures are
so bad quality; you had to really compress them to save bandwidth.
The site was originally hosted by Geocities at
http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/7864 and launched on 1st August
1997, became extremely popular around 1999 as you would have expected,
but after Eddie joined Jaguar I did unfortunately neglect it a bit
until those buggers at Geocities deleted it in 2002 as I hadn't logged
in for a while.
So why is it back? Well it was coming up to 10 years since I
launched it, so it gave me a target to aim for. But the main
reason is that I met my wife through the site, even though she is a
Jacques
Villeneuve fan. She visited it after Schumacher
rammed Villeneuve at Jerez in 1997 and unlike most Ferrari
sites I said on the
site that Schumacher did it on purpose, so I think she liked
that. So it's something to show the Grandkids, if there is
still an Internet by then..
When we got married we got a special cake made up
from Jenny's Cakes
with Eddie and Jacques pushing us in our Mazda MX5.
I then got involved in Motorsport myself from 2000 onwards, doing
Hillclimbs/Sprints until last year when I crashed, here are a couple of
my cars in action.
Never made it to F1 though ;)
If you want to find up what I'm up to these days, I have pages on Bebo & MySpace just click on the links.
We also have a travelogue site at http://www.mccormackj.fsnet.co.uk
And if you want to contact me the old fashioned way by email, click here.
Links
For great free music, check out my friend's bands.
Bitchfinder Genital
(banned by Belfast City Council)
Dadgad
Hundredweight
And to learn how to Just Go Faster....
Just Go Faster
Credits
Thanks to James Richardson for getting me into
Formula One again, Peter "Badboy" Lavery & Diane
Lowry at the Formula One Pitstop shop in Belfast for tipping me
off about Eddie's whereabouts & keeping me amused at
lunchtime, Lisa B for donating the cute animated car, Mark
Sheppard for the trickier image editing, Murray Walker for
brightening up my Sundays, Karl Thoroddsen for the 1994 season
details, Stefen Wende for the 1996/97 qualifying stats, Leigh
Curran for helping me gatecrash the party Eddie was at, Lynne
Henderson because she asked me for one (a credit that is), Karen
Comley for letting me have a couple of pictures on the index page,
Kevin Dawson of the Sunday Business Post for making me famous in
Ireland and a million thanks to Kim Andrews of FOCA, who tested
this site out, told me how to improve it, and without whom it
would have been a load of cobblers.
Special
thanks to Shiga, a friend of Eddie's in Japan,
Eddie has seen this site and said ``I sat in the Hard
Rock
Cafe in Tokyo one night and a friend of mine was just coming from
work brought his computer; we went onto the net and we were
hoking through it there and had a few laughs. Some of it's true
and it's very funny, it's a good laugh.''
