For possibly the first time this year, we had a sky. By which I mean a blue sky with some semblance of sunshine. Up until now it’s been dull and grey – all the time.

See, good stuff has happened. I had a fantastic Christmas. I got a new bike, which rides rather well. I had my appraisal at work and came out the other end very well – and recent website launches and upgrades have recieved generally good feedback. I’ve seen great films, with great friends. Yet still I feel somewhat down at the moment.

I don’t really know why, so I’m going to blame the grey. Looking out of the office window and seeing sunshine made it all feel so much better. If only I could have escaped into the hills to enjoy it… ROLL ON THE WEEKEND!

I took the new toy up Leckhampton Hill today. It was a struggle – my body just didn’t want to know. I had the raw power required to get up hills, just not the lung capacity to do it without nearly dying. Despite all that, I had a barrowload of fun, especially firing down the rocky section up by the devils chimney. Always good for a laugh, that one. The final descent of the old tramway was ace too.

I spotted the Ferrari in the supermarket car-park en-route home and figured it’d make a good shot. Alas my camera isn’t great in low-light situations. The idea was there, even if I couldn’t quite carry it off. Maybe some sort of mini-tripod might have helped?

Some things to note:

• It was really bloody cold out today. Despite the pissing rain and the feeling quite unwell I went out riding anyway – after all, I have a new bike to play on. I’m glad I did, it was ace!
• I’ve not ridden in clipless pedals for ages, but I got back into riding them as if I’d never stopped. I’d forgotten about the way they don’t want to clip-in when the sole of the shoe is clogged up with snow. That’s ever so slightly annoying when you’re approaching a tricky and steep bit of trail.
• Yes, it’s quite snowy up on Cleeve Hill. Not snowy enough to board, but plenty to turn the landscape white.
• The climb up Gambles lane is an absolute sod. It goes like this: Sit and spin until it gets really steep, then stand up and stomp. Die of exhaustion upon arrival at the top.
• I don’t think I’ve got enough air in the forks and there’s perhaps a little too much in the rear shock. On the way down Cleeve Hill I was constantly bottoming the forks, while the back was skipping around a fair bit. It got loads better when I just let go of the brakes and went for it, but then I went blind from the spray. Must get around to buying some riding glasses.
• I’d forgotten just how fast you can go when you’ve got a full complement of gears – handy when you’re on the wrong side of town and it’s getting dark very quickly. I also kept forgetting to change down when approaching a red traffic light – trying to pull away in top gear is quite difficult isn’t it?
• I struggled to get used to the SRAM X-7 shifters. You change to a smaller sprocket by pushing from the opposite side to a Shimano Rapidfire shifter. Most confusing for my tiny little mind.
• My Raceface Freeride Team jacket is really good in these conditions. I didn’t get overly hot and never felt particularly cold. Very glad I bought it now.
• Um… NEW BIKES ROCK!

Yes, I think me and the Cannondale are going to get along quite nicely thank-you. Now, where do they sell fitness and strength? I seem to have lost all of mine over Christmas…

Oh yes, I forgot to take my camera with me. Some “nice clean bike parked in the house” shots as and when I can be bothered.

Update: Some “dirty bike out on the trail” shots from today (8th Jan) can now be seen over at Flickr.

You may remember that we had our garage broken into a while back and I had a load of stuff nicked. Well the kind Mr Insurance man paid up – in the form of credit at one of the local bike shops. It’d be churlish not to go out and spend it all at once, wouldn’t it? Of course it would.

So on Thursday I’m going to pick up a shiny new Cannondale Prophet 400.

Excited? Me? Never.

Well OK then, maybe just a little tiny bit.

OHFERGOODNESSSAKES GIVE ME MY NEW BIKE NOW DAMMIT!!!

Update: Anticipation phase complete, new bicycle aquired. It’s rather nice.

I bought myself a Sony Walkman A3000 shortly before christmas.

It’s a really good bit of hardware: The sound quality is great (especially with a decent set of earphones), looks lovely, is nice to use, line-out mode is handy for plugging it into the stereo, I could go on.

Alas Sony have largely ruined it. How? Well, they’ve gone and bundled it with the wonderful new Connect Player v1.0.

Now, to look at it’s quite nice. All dark colours and smooth edges – very Sony. Alas to use it is a complete nightmare.

It uses up shedloads of memory and CPU time (how does 674mb and 97% sound?). It takes upwards of five minutes to start up. Despite using all that memory and CPU time it’s slower than a snail climbing Everest. On top of all this it’s not even stable: It usually crashes when you try to import a lot of music at once. Nope, I wouldn’t reccomend that anybody even tries to use it.

Instead, march straight over to the Sony Website, grab a copy of SonicStage 3.3 and use that instead. In terms of looks it’s the complete antithesis of Connect – being an ugly thing. On the other hand, it’s loads faster, a lot more stable, uses less memory and will quite happily transfer music over to your new player.

Alas this means you’ll lose some of the extra functions of the Walkman (the Artist Link and some of the intelligent shuffle features), but to be honest I don’t think you’ll miss them. The joy of being able to finally put music onto the new player without tearing out your hair ought to more than make up for it.

YOU NEED TO SORT YOUR BLOODY SOFTWARE OUT, SONY!

Thankfully, it looks like they’re making steps in the right direction. ATRACLife reports that they’re taking a leaf right out of Apple’s book (quite literally) by poaching Tim Schaaff and making him Senior Vice President of Software Development. Still, that doesn’t help those of us using the software right now…

I really ought to biggup mattmagic. He’s managed 5000 miles by bike this year, the majority of it off-road on his singlespeed Chameleon. Well done sir, that’s a big total.

By the way, that fantastically high quality photo is of Matt at Mountain Mayhem a few years ago – back in the days of Team Kusatado Ninja. Ah memories…

…you’re not the only one getting to the end of your tether.

We had a major website release to put together the other day. We’d fixed every possible bug we could find in the C#, HTML and JS code, bar one: A CSS bug in Internet Explorer was breaking something vital.

I don’t get visibly angry very often, but on this occasion I was absolutely steaming. People were waiting on me to find this fix so we could do the release and go home, but I just could not figure it out. I tried margins, padding, heights, widths, overflow, even obscure positioning techniques. Everything I could think of – all to no avail. I was getting more and more frustrated as time went by but that wasn’t helping either. The handy developer toolbar wasn’t helping – it pointed out that element had the right amount of margin, padding and their wierd hasLayout property.

Ahhhhh, all of them except that seemingly completely unrelated one. I hadn’t fed a specific height to one element and the whole thing came crashing down.

Once I figured it out, that anger faded away to relief and we got the release out of the door. But it made me think: a CSS designer/developer’s profession requires that they pander to a product that despite being vastly technically inferior, is the most popular on the market.

Despite all of this though, I could never contemplate going back to the old way: Using <table> and spacer.gifs to lay out and style a page. I’d need to retrain all over again for a start – I really can’t remember most of the old tricks we used to use back in the day. There’s one particular (internal) website at work that’s horrendous in that regard – it uses every trick in the book so the slightest change takes hours. What’s more, it limits you in so many ways: Would Sir like to position this box over there? Or perhaps Sir would like a slightly different layout when he comes to print, or when serving to a handheld browser? Sorry Sir, no can do.

Yes, the pain of pandering to Internet Explorer is definitely offset by the advantages that the standards-based methodology offers.

Blimey, that was cold.

Saturday 26th November 2005: Myself, Anton, Flash, G-Dog, Rob and Stubacca drove up to Rheola, in the Vale of Neath, South Wales, for a bit of Dragon Downhill uplift day action.

After about ten minutes stood on the back of a truck, chugging it’s way up a snow-covered fire road, you get to ride down the track – and it’s epic. The first third is awesome – the closest thing I’ve found to the alpine courses. Fast, wet, rocky and very very good fun. We finished that section by blatting out onto snow-covered fire road, before diving into a completely bonkers chute-of-doom. From there on down it was tight, deeply rutted singletrack to the bottom – with the occasional “North Shore” interruption.

It started off being quite rideable, but by the time we got a couple of runs in the track was getting really proper mental. Bikes and riders were completely unrecognisable by the bottom – coated from helmet to tyres in a thick layer of the local mud. I’m told that I looked like the “Wild man of Borneo” by the end of the day. That didn’t stop it being bloody great fun though.

I had a series of absolutely comical crashes – none of which hurt (at the time), which was nice. There was the headfirst dive down the chute, the getting high-sided by the bike wedging itself in a rut, falling off and sliding backwards into a ditch (in front of the photographer girlie), not to mention the one where I rode off, failed to grab the handlebars properly and ran straight into a tree. Wonderful.

I also ended up on a pretty exclusive uplift truck at one point. This lot will mean nothing to those of you who don’t follow the sport, but I was stood alongside Brendan Fairclough (they Royal Racing rider who was second in the World Champs), Rowan Sorrell (of Mojo fame), Steve Jones (Dirt Magazine) and a load of others who I recognised but couldn’t name. Oh and me, who in comparison can’t ride for toffee. This lot could probably ride a shopping trolley down that track faster than I could on my bike. Proper bonkers quick.

Big thanks to Anton for the lift up there, Alex Burwood (I think?) for letting me have his place on the uplift, G-Dog for taking my bike up there and back, Jason Carpenter and the Dragon Downhill crew for organising it and Maccy-D’s for feeding me at the end of it all. I might have left your bathroom a teensy little bit muddy – sorry about that.