Its a long long time ago. So long that my old GT LTS was my regular bike. We’re talking more than seven years here.

I’ve gone over to my cousin Tom’s house, somewhere near Hindhead in Surrey, and we’ve gone out for a play on our bikes. We having an ace time, blatting down hills, darting up singletrack, generally having a good time. We’re buzzing!

We’re bombing along this bit of track, no wider than my handlebars. There’s trees along one side, and a small rancid ditch on the other, full of thick, dark, gloopy “water”. There’s roots growing straight across the track. You can see what’s coming can’t you?

All of a sudden my front wheel makes a sideways dash for the stream. There isn’t a single little thing I can do to stop it. Before I know it, I’m lying on my back in the steam, looking back at my bike, which is stood upright with the front wheel wedged into the ditch. I’ve somehow managed to complete a 180° somersault into the stream. Pure genius.

Just thought I’d share that with you.

Its acetastic. Go and see it. Now.

I’m fairly sure that B.A.T.G.R.A.T. stood for something once. I can’t remember now though. The important thing is that its a group of college friends getting together and having a laugh. You might even go so far as to call it a reunion. This year we did it in central London. Present were Claire Bear, TJ, Becky, Brettle, Christophe, Weon, Anne, and myself.

We arrived. We had the longest lunch of all time at The Rock Garden, Covent Garden. We visited the Tate Modern – where Bruce Nauman’s Raw Materials exhibit both impressed and freaked us. We wandered over the Millenium Bridge and watched the Ice Skating at Somerset House. We drank in Punch and Judy’s and a random Starbucks. We wandered some more. We went our separate ways.

I had an absolutely ace time. It was really good to see you all again guys.

There’s s few more pictures in The Gallery.

The National Rail website site is fantastic. You go to “Planning your journey”, type in your starting point and destination, the date and approximate time of travel, and press go.

It comes back with a selection of train times that will suit you. You can then choose a service, click a button, and it will send a text message with the train times to your mobile phone. Its an absolutely wonderful use of technology.

You can hear the “but” coming a mile away can’t you?

Its a wonderful use of technology, right up until you arrive at the station to find that THE TRAIN DOESN’T FLINKING EXIST!

OK, so maybe engineering works meant that the timtable go re-jigged or something? No, it wasn’t that – this train isn’t listed on any of the regular timetables up on boards all over the station. Perhaps its on the updated Winter Timetable then? The ones that don’t kick in until the 12th of December – about a fortnight from now. Pick up a leaflet, check it out, and… no, its not in there either.

I have no idea where National Rail got their information from. When I eventually got to the next station, I found that my connecting train (that I’d long since missed) never actually existed either.

All of which added up to make that brilliant use of technology completely and utterly bloody useless. Bah.

It was Stuart who first introduced me to Audioscrobbler. Its goes like this:

1. You visit the site and sign up.
2. You download and install a little plugin for your media player of choice.
3. Now everyone in the world can see what you’re listening to and tell you just how bad your musical tastes are! Acetastic!

What completely threw me was the large similarities between the music that myself and Stuart listen to. Still, I guess we’re both English blokes of a similar age. Its just that he’s already gone and done some horrendously grown-up things like emigrate and get married. Both things I can’t ever see myself doing at the moment. Hey ho.

Just a quickie to tell you that I’ve upgraded the gallery to SPG Version 1.1.

I’ve made it work in all of the browsers I’ve got here (Firefox1.0, Opera7.5, IE5.0, IE5.5, IE6.0, all on Windows XP SP2). If you’ve got something different, could you have a look and let me know if its OK please?

Its not perfect in Internet Explorer 5.x but it’ll have to do for now. It was bloody hard work making IE5.0 work at all! I had to jump through all manner of hoops to work around the bugs in that one, but I think we got there in the end.

Cameron Moll wants to see what everybody’s working on again, so he’s asking them to post a portion of a screengrab of it. Here’s mine:

If you’re suffering from a creative block, or even if you’re not, this (along with its predecessor) is a great source of inspiration. There’s such a huge array of colours, typefaces, layouts and so on that you’re bound to come up with some fantastic ideas.

Either that or your brain will overload, you’ll go blank, your eyes will turn to mush and you’ll fall even further behind shedule. Sorry about that. Go and have a game of Lemmings to see if that sorts you out.