Picture the scene: It’s the evening before the Megavalanche quali­fier. We’ve all returned from a day of riding and a few of use are out on the balcony, fettling bikes.

One of the guys staying on the floor above us leans over their balcony:

Excuse me, do you guys have a 7mm screwdriver?

Funnily enough, we don’t, but it’s not long before Brett’s upstairs taking on the role of works mechanic and bleed­ing brakes for them. It turns out they were legendary downhill world cup racers Tommi and Pau Misser (now co-owners of the mighty Guak empire), who’d come to the mega with their mum. She was busy cooking them dinner and shout­ing at them every time there was any danger of grease going anywhere near the carpet. Brilliant.

Tommi went on to win his quali­fier the follow­ing day, with Pau finish­ing fourth in his. Whether it was because they couldn’t stop, we may never know…

For us though, “Guak” took on a whole new meaning. It became the call of some sort of rare animal, and could be heard ringing out across alpine valleys for the next week and a bit. GUUAAAARRRK! GUUUAAAAARRRRRK!

You probably had to be there.

La Clusaz, France, July 2008.

Well that was expens­ive. I burned through a set of disc pads, put a hole in the side of my shoe and to top it all off, I somehow punctured my camelbak’s bladder. That’s a comfort­able feeling, let me tell you. A slow but steady stream of ice-cold water running down the centre of your back until… well, you can guess where it goes from there. Then there was the unceas­ing headwind which somehow faced me no matter which direc­tion I rode.

Despite all that, I had a bucket­load of fun. I rode trails I’d not ridden in ages. I discovered an enchanted cottage hidden in the woods. I had a bleat­ing match with a freshly shorn sheep. I blasted down the sides of fields, along fire-roads and though twist­ing technical single­track. I sprin­ted up climbs with Rage Against The Machine shout­ing through my earphones.

I got home feeling better than I did when I left, and that’s what it’s all about.

Coed y Brenin rocks, quite liter­ally. I spent the weekend up there with a bunch of friends, old and new. The trails are rockier than just about anywhere else I’ve ridden in the UK, save perhaps Fort William. It’s the sort of terrain the current breed of “all mountain” bikes were built for.

We started with Temtiwr, which is the shortest of the trails. A mere 9km or so and sadly too much of that is fire-road (this is a running theme). The Dream Time section is fantastic though — so much so that we went back to ride it twice.

After a hearty lunch we took on MBR. Again, too many fire-roads, but the single­track was a great pay-off. Brutus is one of those incred­ibly technical climbs that you’re happy to get to the top of without putting a foot down, while Cain, Abel and the legendary Pink Heifer are all fantastic descents.

On sunday, Brett and myself had a go at the Tarw trail. The fire-road theme is all to evident here too; The bit after Heart of Darkness was partic­u­larly disap­point­ing because it’s all downhill! Luckily, the single­track on offer is nothing short of brilliant. Hitting Snap, Crackle and Pop at high speed is like tackling the dragon downhill track at Gethin; rocks every­where and no easy way through it. Keeping momentum through there is a challenge in the best sense, while the slightly smoother Rocky Horror Show is absolutely flat-out fun.

There’s a few more photos on flickr. Thanks to Andy for organ­ising it, and to Brett, Neil, Ash and Darren for making it such a good weekend. Fire-road be damned — I want to go back for another go at all that singletrack!

Man, I’ve missed this. Today was my first ride since the broken hand incid­ent. I saw a dead snake and what I think are some Crias (baby Llamas). I’d not seen a snake in the wild since the adder we found in the woods at school. Exciting huh?

Obviously most of my strength, fitness, confid­ence and stamina had evapor­ated (although bizar­rely my legs seem as strong as ever). They’ll come back though, given time and effort. My hand was absolutely fine through­out. Winner!

Great fun. Glad to be back.

It was Owen’s 30^th birth­day the other day, so to celeb­rate it a bunch of us descen­ded on Go Ape! in the Forest of Dean.

Put simply, it’s a great big ewok-village style obstacle course set up to 35ft in the air. When you’re that high up, all of the front goes out the window and you can really see who’s scared — It’s usually not the people you’d expect.

The highlights of the whole thing had to be the zip-wires. They pale into insig­ni­fic­ance compared to the Fantasticable, but they’re great fun nonethe­less. Clip on, jump forwards and WHEEEEEEE! You’d inevit­ably crash land at the other end (unless you were Ben), filling your shoes and pants with wood-chippings. Sweet.

The pictures are up on Flickr should you be interested.

Well, perhaps it wasn’t entirely accidental, but I appear to have bought myself a new Apple MacBook.

So far it appears to be pretty lovely. Being used to a Windows machine, I’m still getting used to the slight keyboard odditites and lack of a right mouse button, but it’s proved to be a fairly easy trans­ition so far.

I switched it on, filled in my details, chose a wireless network… and we’re done. Start up iTunes and within seconds I’m stream­ing music from the rest of the house. It’s a bucket full of aceness!

Right, what’s the text editor of choice out there? I’m used to TopStyle on the PC if that’s any help. Any other must-have software I need to download?

So, my first @media is over and very good it was too. Highlights for me (in no partic­u­lar order):

• Jeff Veen’s present­a­tion: Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps. Caused me to have all manner of light-bulb moments.
• Chris Wilson’s very inform­at­ive present­a­tion about IE7 — and (perhaps more import­antly) future versions beyond that one.
• Mexican food with Adam and Gareth.
• The relief when Peter Crouch finally scored for England, then the elation when Steven Gerrard sealed it.
• Kate “buying” us (Amanda, Rich, Ross, Alan and myself) the most foul champagne of all time, then running away without drink­ing any enough.
• Ian Lloyd mistak­ing the moon for Big Ben.
• Robin Christopherson’s present­a­tion was absolutely amazing (despite the technical hiccups). It gave a real insight into how a blind user operates a PC and what problems they can (and do) run into on a daily basis.
• Chatting with Adam, Nate Koechley (it’s pronounced “Keckley”) and [insert name of that canadian dude who took a liking to London Pride here] about some of the innov­a­tions going on at Yahoo! includ­ing a great sound­ing inverse-forum on their corpor­ate intranet.
• Andy “Malarkey” Clarke’s present­a­tion: The Fine Art of Web Design. Really inspir­a­tional talk on pushing web design out of it’s current “comfort zone”. I intend to try. I wonder how far market­ing will let me push it?
• The “hot topics” panel session which closed the confer­ence. Jeremy Keith lorded it over Molly, Jon Hicks, Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelic, which produced a very enter­tain­ing debate.
• Inventing a series of new micro­formats (includ­ing hTopTrumps and hLove — for dating websites) in the pub with Rich, Gareth and Andy.

Big thanks to Patrick, Amanda and the rest of the team for organ­ising it and every­body else who made it such a good event. It was great to meet you all again / for the first time. Can we book tickets for the next one yet?

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