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.

I’ve seen a lot of them lately…

Kontroll

A tale of friends, enemies, competition, love, demons, food, suicide, murder, and a girl in a bear costume – all set in Budapest’s underground system. Absolutely brilliant.

Hotel Rwanda

Not quite the heart-wrenching tale I expected it to be, and probably all the more watchable for it. It’s one of those films that makes you think long and hard about just how fickle western governments can be, and just how nasty the human race can be. Oh, and Owen – you’ve seen Sophie Okonedo in ‘Spooks’, ‘This Years Love’, ‘Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls’ and ‘The Bill’ (I know you’re a big fan) amongst other things.

Corpse Bride

Nobody told me it was a musical! I enjoyed it despite that and the singing didn’t make me cringe once. I must be ill or something.

Amélie

I finally managed to see it on Saturday night. Its a feel-good film of the highest order – I defy you to watch this and not feel happy afterwards. You can tell it’s a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film a mile away, and not just because Dominique Pinon is in there. He has a certain style that really stands out.

City of God

It’s about boys growing up in Brazil’s slums. Despite the dark subject matter (life in the slums, drugs and gang warfare), it remains upbeat, good humoured and very enjoyable.

Æon Flux

This is complete tosh, but in a good way. There’s some fantastic fight sequences, special effects and stunts in there, not to mention Charlize Theron in very tight clothing (hummmna!). It’s just a pity that the cast appears to be made almost enitely of wood.

Right, I’m off to watch Magnolia. Wish me luck… [and then a little over three hours later]

Magnolia

Wow. I know several people who really didn’t like that, but they’re clearly all wrong :-) It’s an amazing film. I think I’d struggle to sum it up, simply because there’s so much to it. So I won’t, I’ll just recommend it, lots.

Just a quickie to say that I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1, and moved things around a bit. Things are bound to be a bit screwy for a while – bear with me while I get them sorted out.

The home page is at plain old thinkdrastic.net as opposed to /journal/ now for a start. You should get redirected cleanly, but I can’t promise anything.

So far, WP2 looks quite nice. The wysiwyg preview is a great little addition.

Update (Monday 20th Feb)

OK, so I might have ever so subtly redesigned the place aswell. I still need to do loads of tweaking, aswell as find somewhere to put my interesting asides.

The really bonkers bit? It’s needed approximately no tweaking for Internet Explorer so far. Crazy biscuits!

Update II (Sunday 26th Feb)

‘Photos’ and ‘Interesting Asides’ make a return to the sidebar. Is that better Matt? You may need to hit ‘refresh’ to get the latest version of the stylesheet or things might look a little odd.

Man, it’s taken me over a week to write about this. Slacker extrodinaire. Anyway, I got up very early indeed last Friday morning and made my way across the country to the Victoria Park Plaza Hotel for Clearleft‘s Ajax Workshop. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but what I got was very good indeed.

So the Clearleft crew took a bunch of web designers and developers and threw them together in a room. I had a few wierd moments where I looked around and recognised various faces from my travels around Flickr and the blogosphere [1]. I also felt ever so slightly jealous as a variety of Powerbooks were unfurled onto the desks around me.

Jeremy Keith spent the morning taking us through Javascript, DOM Scripting, the basics of Ajax and how it’s done (JSON looked particularly interesting). If you’re scratching your head and asking “WTF is Ajax, man?” Suffice it to say that it lets you refresh only the parts of the page that you want to, rather than fetching a whole new page from the server every time a user clicks a button.

All good stuff, but not the main reason he had gathered us there at all. No, that came after lunch:

Hijax

Hijax is a best practise methodology for building web applications. It basically says:

• Build your pages in a completely modular fashion.
• Build it such that it will work for users without Javascript enabled.
• Add the AJAX functionality in once you’ve got the pages working without it.
• Only add the AJAX in once you’ve thought very carefully about the usability and accessibility issues involved with them.

It takes it’s name from the fact that you hijack the default actions of a web page and bend them to your will. Clever huh? Jeremy does a much better job of explaining it, so I’ll leave the rest to him. One more comment though: When Google built GMail (one of Ajax’s poster children), they delivered a complete Ajax application first, then months later managed to produce a completely separate plain HTML version. They had to do all of the work twice: If they’d done it the Hijax way, they could have had both versions of GMail at once and in the same application. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Ajax: The downside

Ajax is a fantastic technology which has far reaching implications across the web. However, it has some major issues: Usability and Accessibility to name but two.

Say the user clicks a button and something updates elsewhere on the page. How do we inform them that something happened? There’s a number of answers to this question: Animations and special effects are just two of them. But what if they have a low-resolution screen, they’re using big fonts, or they’ve simply scrolled too far, leaving the vital animation or effect off-screen? What about screen-reader users – how do you tell them that only part of the screen has updated?

Then there are the problems with bookmarking and the back-button. In a traditional web application, every move you make is added to the browser history. Ajax apps suffer many of the same issues as Flash and Frames-based sites: Because you aren’t refreshing the page every time, you aren’t updating the browser history. Hitting back will likely take you right out of the app and bookmarking simply doesn’t work. Jeremy’s answer was that if the user felt the need to bookmark, maybe you’re changing too much of the with page using Ajax?

There is currently no clear answer to to a lot of these issues, but a lot of good work is going on in that direction. Recent work by the likes of Mike Stenhouse and Robert Nyman is showing us the way. Some people are advocating that we should get screen-reader users to disable Javascript. Others disagree and say that improved software will come in time. I share the latter point of view – besides, what about those in-between cases, like low-res screens, big fonts, mobile users and so on? There’s definitely lots to think about when you’re putting together Ajax apps.

Coffee Break!

On top of all this, I found the time to chat to the likes of Adam (from the DiH mailinglist), Molly, Mike and Paul about IE7, it’s implications and how Microsoft are changing, then later to Jeremy, Bruce and others about haircuts, earrings, Flickr and social networking.

After the workshop, we all trudged upstrairs to the hotel bar and indulged in a couple of beers. At some point my sister, Alice, phoned me and demanded that I go and see her. We met up with Angus and dined in a very good turkish restaurant, before hooking up with various friends of hers for the evening. I think we left Tru Thoughts @ Cargo at about 3:30am. A long day, but a good-un.

Oooh, that got a bit stream-of-consciousness there for a while didn’t it?

[1] Did I just write “blogosphere”? Gaaah… shudder.

Replace the “Jet” with “Train” and you’d be getting there. But that sounds rubbish. Anyway, I digress.

I had a meeting up in Knutsford today, so I jumped on a train out of Cheltenham at silly o’clock this morning. I changed at Birmingham, then progressed to Crewe where I discovered that my connecting train had been cancelled. WOOHOO! I eventually arrived over an hour late, which was just wonderful.

We apologise for the late running of this train…

Fast forward to the return journey this evening: I get all the way back to Birmingham New Street before they thwart me again! This time the train was over half an hour late leaving. Truly fantastic service.

I’m really growing to love travelling by train.

So tomorrow I’m off to London to see a man about some AJAX. Again, I’m catching the train at silly o’clock. This one should be OK in theory – it’s direct. Going by today’s experience though, anything could happen. Wish me luck…