I went over to Weon & Anne’s this morning, where Ben joined us to watch the first F1 Grand Prix of the season. It took me a while to get over the shock of Jim “Count Von Count” Rosenthal being replaced by Steve “My hair is rock solid and shall never ever move” Ryder.

After yesterday’s bonkers but actually quite exciting qualifying sessions, I had high hopes for Jenson Button and Felipe Massa (who seemingly came out of nowhere to take second on the grid). Alas neither did quite as well as I’d hoped, though they did bring some extra excitement to the race, with Massa spinning out and nearly taking eventual winner Fernando Alonso with him, while Button pulled off a few fantastic overtaking manouvers. Nico Rosberg put in a fantastic debut, once he’d recovered from taking out his team-mate on the first corner, while Kimi Raikkonen stormed through from the back of the grid to finish third!

After the race we switched over to watch Manchester United vs Newcastle United and Anne served up a rather fantastic lunch, closely followed by the ever dependable crumble ‘n custard. Yummytastic.

The afternoon progressed, Man U cruised into a 2-nil lead and I could feel myself sinking deeper and deeper into the armchair. Despite the fact it was blatantly bloody cold outside I got it into my head that going out mountain biking would be a great idea. I got up, announced my intention and then out of nowhere Owen decided he wanted to come too. Rocking! I blasted home, changed into my bike kit, swapped the Cove for the ‘dale and shot back to pick up Owen.

We rode up Leckhampton Hill via a new bridleway we’d somehow never discovered before (it’s the next turning up from Daisy Bank Road). It’s an evil climb, but gets you to the ruins a fair bit quicker. DPA got us a fair bit further up the hill – and I cleared the ludicrously steep climb at the end! Rock on!

It was absolutely baltic up there, so we elected to keep moving up and over the top. After a quick blast across “Any Given Sunday” (which I’d not ridden for months), I took Owen down the ridiculously named “Second Coming” and “La Raclette”. Veryveryveryvery slippery and damn good fun. Finally we descended into the new section where we ran into Alex, Garry and Stubacca who were modifying the trail once more.

After chatting about Stu’s boarding holiday for a while we set off again. I suggested riding back to the top once more, but Owen really wasn’t up for that (and secretly I wasn’t either), so we set off down “The Old Tramway”. I ruled it for the second day in sucession, absolutely flying off the little rooty drops in the top section. We only did about ten miles, but it was fantastic fun – and that’s the important thing. No doubt Owen will put some photos up at some point More from Owen.

I’m slowly but surely pimping up the ‘dale. First to go was the stem: The orginal was long enough to resemble a fishing-rod. A nice little RaceFace Prodigy went on in it’s place as soon as I got the bike home. Then there was the seatpost. The original came loose a few times, so I replaced it with a nice twin-bolt FSA FR-200 from Garry.

The biggest difference though? That’ll be the bars then. The original’s didn’t have enough rise or width for my liking, so I whipped them off and stuck my EA70’s on in their place. It felt a bit odd to begin with – they make for a very sit-up-and-beg riding position, but point it downhill and it’s transformed. It felt uber-confident down through the fast open section by the Devil’s Chimney and I was rolling straight into some steep sections that would have fazed me previously (not all of them though, as you’ll see).

I did about 15 miles or so today – most of which was getting to the trails. It was all good once I got off-road though. Up-and-around Lecky, caught and then comprehensively burnt off the dude on the uber-expensive Ti hardtail who didn’t hold the gate open for me, then stopped, waited and held the next gate for him. I absolutely ruled the fast open rocky section down past the devils chimney (BWAAARRPPP!), then rode like a girl down the steep bit to the ruins that follows it. Rubbish. Porbably a good thing I didn’t rule that bit though, or I would’ve run over the people walking up. Oops.

I ran into Alex and Garry and chatted to them for a while, before riding a new section of trail (round there, then back, then wheeeeeee!!!) and linking it into the bit we built last week. It’s quite nice, but there’s no way in hell I’m attempting that jump – it’s monster!

I finished off with a blast down the old tramway. I always forget just how much speed you can carry down that trail when you get it right – a proper fantastic way to end a ride.

You may remember that a while back Joe Clark unleashed Failed Redesigns and invited the rest of us to do the same. To recap:

A failed redesign is a Web page created from scratch, or substantially updated, during the era of Web standards that nonetheless ignores or misuses those standards. A failed redesign pretends that valid code and accessibility guidelines do not exist; it pretends that the 21st century is frozen in the amber of the year 1999. It indicates not merely unprofessional Web-development practices but outright incompetence. For if you are producing tag-soup code and using tables for layout in the 21st century, that’s what you are: Incompetent.

Yesterday Hope Technology relaunched. I don’t like to do this, because I really like Hope as a company. They make some fine products and they employ some cool people. At one of the RedBull / Saab races back in the day they sorted out my brakes a treat – for free.

However, their new site (designed by GraffX and based on the ID CMS) is a complete disaster.

Let’s start with the home page: One look at the code reveals that it was sliced and diced in Photoshop and ImageReady, saved as HTML and then left at that. Amateur at best: the code is absolutely foul. There is no alt text on any of the images, rendering the buttons completely useless to screen readers. OK, so there may not be that many blind mountain bikers, but that also renders the page completely useless to search engines. Nice work.

So, being from England, I click the button with the union jack on it. I’m transported to hopegb.com. It hurts my eyes, but that’s entirely subjective and not what I’m here to discuss. I take a quick peek at the source code and… EEEK!

I know I can be a bit of an HTML purist sometimes but that code just makes me want to cry. How, in the year 2006, can someone still be producing that and charging for it? Reams and reams of layout tables, spacer gifs, alt-less images, <p><b><font> in place of proper heading elements, inline styles… I could go on. This is a shameless example of tag-soup straight out of the dark ages. It’s like the semantic web never happened.

Eh? What does it matter what the code looks like?

1. Semantically correct code will be far more accessible to screen-readers. Like I say, there aren’t many blind mountain bikers, but what if a blind mother wants to buy her mountain-biking son a new bit for his bike?
2. Imagine i’ve got bad eyesight, so I need to scale the text-size up. Oooh, look, the whole site breaks! Brilliant!
3. You don’t care about accessibility? Try this one: Semantically correct code has the added bonus of performing dramatically better in search engines. Why? Because a search engine sees your site in exactly the same way as a screen-reader.
4. Remember: Bandwidth costs money. That code is enourmously bloated. Streamlined, semantic code costs me less to download (remember: not everybody has access to broadband) and it costs you less to host.
5. It can also degrade nicely onto devices other than my high-resolution desktop PC: Think smartphones, PDAs, Nintendo DS, Sony PSP and that sort of thing.

Accessibility and search-engine performance clearly weren’t even considered when it came to building this website.

OK, enough about the code.

I want to buy a disc brake for my bike. I know Hope make them, but I don’t really know what sort I want. There’s a list of products over there, but what the hell is the difference between the Mini, M4, Mono6 and Trial? Apparently I need to know what I want before I click on it. Someone hasn’t thought about this from the user’s point of view, have they?

So, I think I want a Mono M4 disc brake. I click the link and again i’m presented with a confusing list of links. If I didn’t know exactly what I was after I would long since have given up and gone home. It’s verging on unusable.

The idea that someone has charged money to produce this shoddy excuse for a website just makes me angry. So then Hope Technology, I hereby brand you a Failed Redesign. Congratulations.

I dragged myself out of bed this morning, late as usual. I heard the pitter-patter of raindrops on the window. Great. Riding to work in the rain is always good for a laugh. In my mad rush I couldn’t find my waterproof over-trousers (in fact I still can’t). No problem, I’ll just bung the crud-guard on the back of the bike. Could I find it? Could I fu… No, I couldn’t.

Man, it was absolutely hammering it down out there. I had a decidedly wet backside by the time I got to work. Oooh, I had such a comfortable day. I recommend that you try it. No, really.

I’d also recommend that you get overtaken by a Smart Fortwo on the way home. Now, that’s got to be one of the narrowest cars on the road, right? So why, when on a near-deserted dual carriageway did they have to pass me with literally a few centimentres to spare?

MOVE OVER THERE YOU SPANNER! YOU’VE GOT A WHOLE OTHER LANE TO PLAY WITH!

You might well have a narrow car, but that’s no excuse for passing me without altering your course even slightly. Ferchrissakes, it’s even a left-hand drive model! Dunderheaded numpty.

I’m quite a fan of Dirt magazine. Back in the day it was great. Sure they made the odd design mistake like printing black text against a muddy trail but you overlooked that (unless you were Rich), because they had the grunge thing down to a tee. You would read it and want to get out on your bike right away.

The design style made it look like it was literally cut and pasted together – it was like reading a fanzine with some money behind it. The articles were compelling but it was the photography that really drove the mag. The absolutely stunning imagery was what set it apart from it’s peers. Reading through old issues of the magazine really brings out the image of the sport back in the day.

All things move on though, and so did Dirt. They wanted to expand their horizons to take in more than just downhill biking – and why not?

Alas they seemed to lose their way a bit for a while. The photos were still present and correct but they were held back by the the layout. If anything they got a bit too sensible, stuck in a wilderness somewhere between their old look and the very clean cut lines of What Mountain Bike. There was plenty of white space and it was all perfectly readable – all traditionally good things (just look at this place) but the grunge that defined them was sidelined.

I think they’re back in the groove now though. They’re still reasonably sensible where they need to be (you no longer get black text on a black background for instance), but the grunge is back in full effect. Each page of a feature article has it’s own layout, something which ought to disrupt the flow, but somehow it doesn’t. Not every one quite hits home but it doesn’t matter – each page is trying to push the boundaries in one way or another, making good use of colour and strong photography to create a fantastic looking magazine. It’s back to being a magazine that inspires you to get out on your bike and attack the trails.

If only they could sort out all of the spelling mistakes. Some people are never happy, are they?

The downhill trails on Leckhampton Hill are ace. Fast, flowy and technical. Alas, there’s a couple of places where they cross footpaths and the local council weren’t particularly happy with at least one of them. A diversion was needed. Today we built one.

Enter the final section of the course as normal (just about all of them end up on the same bit of trail) and instead of blatting down and over a blind footpath crossing into the final jump, you now carve around to the left, down a steep slope into a monster new berm and over a fairly major 20ish-foot jump (avec chicken-run) which takes you back towards the bowl we all used to ride back in the day.

It’s amazing how quickly things get done when there’s a load of people there to do the work. Biggups to Roger, Garry, Olly F, Simon, James, Nick, Anton, Jez, Mike and the lad whose name I’ve since forgotten (sorry) Rich. Good work peeps.

Saturday was supposed to be a tourist trip to London, but alas that fell through at the last minute. Luckily Simon swooped in with a trip over to the forest of dean for a bit of cross-country bike malarkey. I grabbed a lift from the G-Dog and despite getting caught up in some closed road shenanigans en-route, we eventually arrived and met up with Si and Emma at the cycle centre.

After the usual extended faffing we headed off around the FODCA trail, me on the ‘dale, Garry on the shiny Enduro, Simon on his Yeti DH6 and Emma on a tiny Spesh Hardrock.

The trail is only about 4km or so long, but that’s 4km of technical, swoopy, rooty joy. None of us were on top form, struggling up the climbs and depositing ourselves ungracefully in the dirt on the descents. Garry even managed to pull an SPD-cleat right out of his shoe at one point.

It was all good fun though, especially the final section of the trail which is a slice of fast swoopy singletrack from bike-heaven. WOOP!

After a quick bite to eat we set off again, for a nice relaxing half-hour jaunt down the fireroads to the lake. It quickly became a jaunt that took us miles off-course and significantly more than half an hour.

Fireroads aren’t the most interesting things in the world, but the slog was well worth it. We eventually found ourselves at the top of some lovely singletrack which took us across the top of the hill before diving steeply down the side, taking us nearly all the way back to the cycle centre. Lovely stuff.

So this evening I tackled The Last Samurai. Everyone told me it was good, but I resisted for a long time. A few reasons:

1. Tom Cruise.
2. It’s one of those historical epic things. Gladiator put me right off such films for a long while. 100% of not very good.
3. Tom Cruise.

“This one’s got samurai though!” they tell me. True, and the Samurai were really bloody cool – right up there with ninjas. But Tom Cruise? I really struggle to take him seriously in any role at all. The likes of Top Gun and Days of Thunder have forever marred him as an actor.

But it’s in my housemate’s collection and I seem to be in movie mode at the moment, so I finally caved in.

I’ll give him his due: He was quite good in this. I really was willing him to beat Ujio on the training ground. He’s still a cheesy bastard, mind (please, stop it with the thousand yard stare) and his supporting cast was much better. Ken Wanatabe in particular was fantastic as Katsumoto, and Timothy Spall played the bumbling englishman as only he can.

Then there’s the scenery. I really want to visit Japan now: Lost in Translation made me want to see the cities and after seeing this I want to explore the countryside – though hopefully they’ve cleared up the mess of dead bodies and weaponry left behind after the massive battle scenes.

So in summary, it’s an epic, starring Tom Cruise, with one of the most ridiculous plotlines ever. A recipe for disaster really isn’t it? Somehow they’ve pulled it from the jaws of becoming another Titanic and made something quite enjoyable. It’s by no means one of the all-time greats, but it’s well worth watching.