You know, those instant completely unexpected involuntary sneezes that really take you by surprise?

You take out a tissue, wipe your nose, happen to look down… EEUUWWW!!!!

There’s a crapload of thick gooey phlegm on your top. Oooh, look there’s some more on your trousers too. That really is a mingtastic phenomenon of the highest order. 100% gack.

Myself and my good friend Lisa spent a few days in New York last week. Blimey. They do BIG very well out there.

We weren’t there for long, so we decided that the best strategy was to pick a few things and visit them. In the end that went out the window in favour of wandering around taking in as much as we could before collapsing in a heap.

Unfortunately I went down with a full on man-cold a couple of days in, so Lisa had to put up with my coughing fits for the rest of the trip. I didn’t let it slow me down at all though. A trip to a local pharmacy sorted me out with some Comterex, which did a pretty good job of masking the worst of the effects.

Blueberry muffins in a lake of syrup for breakfast? Aye, that’ll do me.

We carried on regardless, wandering round the city. The weather swung wildly from one day to the next, going from bright and cool one day to howling winds and driving rain the next — and right on back to bright sunshine again the day after.

We stopped off at all the big names: The Dakota Building, Central Park (beautiful), Times Square (bright and flashy), Broadway, Battery Park, the Staten Island Ferry (taking in views of The Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and the Brooklyn Bridge), Ground Zero (where many of the surrounding buildings are still being repaired three years on), Tiffany’s, Trump Tower (home of possibly the most ostentacious shopping mall on earth), the New York Public Library (an amazing building), St. Patricks Cathedral (another amazing building), the list goes on…

We stopped off in traditional diners, cafes, sandwich bars, coffee shops and good old McDonalds (it tastes much better over there). Blueberry muffins in a lake of syrup for breakfast? Aye, that’ll do me.

Sadly it was all over far too soon. There was so much more that I wanted to see but we just didn’t have the time. We both really want to go back — for more than just a few days next time. Maybe next time I’ll be able to finally meet up with you Stuart?

There’s some more pictures from the trip over in The Gallery.

Oh, and steam really does come out of the ground, just like in the movies!!!

After a fair bit of faffing about, I’ve implemented Clagnut‘s Onload image fades without Flash script over in The Gallery. You’ll know it when you see it.

Please feel free to look at it in all of your fancy-pants browsers and let me know if it works properly — I’ve only got IE/Windows and Firefox here. Oh, and I’m well aware of the issues the site has in IE5/Windows at the moment. One of these days I’ll get around to fixing it…

And now I may have mended it!

The fadey stuff that is. Its no longer broken for Opera users! Hoorah! Of course, the site still looks horrendous in IE5.x. Maybe tomorrow…

And now I may have mended it even better!

In an unprecendented sequence of site testing and bug fixing, I seem to have made just about all of thinkdrastic.net work in IE5.5 and 6 for Windows, Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and Opera 7.54!

Of course, IE5.0 is doing some crazy wierdo stuff with the gallery, but it does seem to actually work for the most part, which is the main thing. I’ve had a quick look and can’t see whats wrong. I figure that its your fault if you’re still using IE5.0. Not only does it mess up perfectly good CSS, its a secutiry risk to your PC. Go and get something better!

The clocks have gone back, which means that to get a decent amount of riding in over the weekend, one has to drag oneself out of bed at a reasonable hour. 10:15am is about as reasonable as I get at the weekend.

After a bit of deliberation over breakfast, Brett and myself decided to go ride up Leckhampton Hill again today — after all, everybody else’ll be up there, won’t they?

No, they won’t. They’re all being lazy. They missed out on a ride that was cold, wet, grey and BLOODY FANTASTIC!

For some reason, the slalom course is one hell of a lot more grippy in the winter, so we rode that a few times. I had slight issues on the first run, including me running away from the bike as it slid out from under me in a particularly claggy berm. Once I got myself together though, I was having great fun.

I charged on through the middy puddle, sending cack flying everywhere!

After a couple of runs, Gary turned up. His DH-bike was in pieces spread across the workshop, so he had his XC bike with him. We did one more run of the slalom course, then with the light failing, we headed up and did a run down the rocky run from the trig point.

Wow. Why hadn’t we been up there all day? It was awesome! Start off on the field, then drop onto the grass, then hard on the brakes before swinging down into the rocky chute, and then it goes mental. I found my confidence and just went for it. I didn’t notice as I dragged my arm through a gorse bush — I was so focussed on not braking and getting the line right into the next drop. Down the next chute is ace – at the bottom there’s big rocks on both sides and getting through the middle is like threading a needle. I’ll let go of the brakes and fly through there then. I then backed off a bit through the nadgery bit, then let go of the brakes again for the run down to the ruins. I hit the compression at the bottom and took-off out of the other side, before charging on through the middy puddle, sending cack flying everywhere. Absolutely ace fun.

The light was fading fast so it was time to make a break for home. So down the old tramway we went, mud flying everywhere. I very nearly lost it in the s-bend trying to catch up with Brett. The front stepped out in the deep mud and I thought I was going to be lying in the mud before the berm caught it and somehow it all came together again.

You know you’re feeling confident when such an incident doesn’t slow you down at all — its only when you reach the end of the trail that you realise just how close you came to eating the dirt.

Then it was just a case of getting across town in the pouring rain without getting run over. Really must get me some lights…

You can find some more pictures in The Gallery.

Now, a 1-1 draw might sound a bit rubbish to someone who knows nothing about the subject, but to a Palace fan, thats something of a big result.

Arsenal have won the Premiership title countless times, were top of the table until this weekend, and have a team whose collective value is almost certainly higher than the whole of Crystal Palace — players, staff, stadium, the lot. Palace, on the other hand, came up to the Premiership the hard way — after just scraping into the Division One play-offs. In fact, this time last season, we were staring relegation from that division in the face. We didn’t even get a win for the first eight games of this season!

So to get a draw there is a huge result. And by the looks of Soccernet’s match report we might even have won it! Rock right on!

We face Manchester United and Liverpool in our next two games — one in the cup and the other in the league. That’s another two of the biggest teams in the country. Thats the same Liverpool that inflicted out biggest ever defeat upon us all those years ago in 1990 (though we beat them in the FA Cup semi-final later that season) .

Bring them on!

We spent today playing up on Leckhampton Hill. I took the oppurtunity to play with my new camera.

I haven’t got the hang of action shots yet at all – I struggled to get the riders even vaguely in focus. More experimenting needed there methinks. The light wasn’t great either, which is never very helpful, but thats life. I had a bit of fun playing with the macro modes, getting nice close-ups of various bits of the bike, as you can see below.

As for the riding itself, it was ace. I struggled with the mud a bit to begin with, but once my confidence started to return I really enjoyed myself. I was starting to flow really well until blammo! My chain device decided it wanted to lose the chain — for the first time in months. Maybe it was something to do with the chain having more mud than lube on it, or perhaps running the chain a little too long isn’t helping. Maybe one of the grub-screws coming loose had something to do with it. Either way, a few minutes with an allen key sorted it out, and it didn’t come off for the rest of the day.

We rode most of what Lecky has to offer today — everything from tight nadgery singletrack to flat-out wide open rocky chutes. It really is a great mountain bike playground. If only it was a little bit bigger…

You can see the pictures over in The Gallery.

I’ve just read a plea from Jon Hicks about his inability to change a hotkey in Photoshop. I felt for him, because I have to deal with that sort of problem on an almost daily basis.

At work, we recently got the Adobe Creative Suite. That’s five Adobe applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, ImageReady, InDesign, VersionCue) in one box — its like the Microsoft Office of the creative world.

Now all of these applications, with the glaring exception of VersionCue (don’t even get me started), are fantastic applications in their own right. Whats more, their interfaces are all very similar — meaning that someone who is familiar with Photoshop can quite easily get to grips with Illustrator or InDesign.

Now, this is all well and good, but there are a number of glaring omissions that just serve to irritate me. Jon has already mentioned that there are certain hotkeys that can’t be remapped. But there are loads of other things that could so easily be sorted.

It might sound like nit-picking, but to me it all all adds up to a very disjointed user experience.

Take the Colour Picker for example. In Photoshop its lovely. In Illustrator its like they thought “lets make it the same as Photoshop’s” — and then gave up halfway through, and threw an ugly unfinished mess at the screen – it doesn’t even have the built-in eyedropper tool! Its different again in ImageReady too. Why they can’t all use the same one I don’t know.

Now lets take the options palette – in Photoshop it can be docked with the menu bar. InDesign lets you do that too, and yet in ImageReady it can’t be done. Whats that all about? Mind you, Illustrator doesn’t get an options palette at all…

It doesn’t stop there either. All of the applications use slightly different looking palettes too. Photoshop and Illustrator have diddy little title-bars across the tops of their palettes, whereas ImageReady uses gert big thick ones. InDesign goes off on its own and tries to hide them away in tabs on one side of the screen. Group palettes together and the join is different between Illustrator and Photoshop.

It might sound like nit-picking (and to a certain extent it is), but to me it all all adds up to a very disjointed user experience. By all means mess about with the interface and make life easy for me, but for goodness sake, make it consistent! I for one really hope that Adobe get it sorted in time for the next release of the Creative Suite.

Last week, whilst eating a bacon-and-egg sandwich, I managed to launch egg-yolk into my keyboard, necessitating a long and drawn out clean-up operation.

This morning, I was opening a bottle of Irn Bru, which unexpectedly did a fizz-whoosh thing and sploshed all over the very same keyboard. Another long and drawn out clean-up operation later and we’re back on track.

As Owen commented at the time: “You’ll be able to get a whole meal out of that thing soon!”