We spent today playing up on Leckhampton Hill. I took the oppurtunity to play with my new camera.

I haven’t got the hang of action shots yet at all – I struggled to get the riders even vaguely in focus. More experimenting needed there methinks. The light wasn’t great either, which is never very helpful, but thats life. I had a bit of fun playing with the macro modes, getting nice close-ups of various bits of the bike, as you can see below.

As for the riding itself, it was ace. I struggled with the mud a bit to begin with, but once my confidence started to return I really enjoyed myself. I was starting to flow really well until blammo! My chain device decided it wanted to lose the chain — for the first time in months. Maybe it was something to do with the chain having more mud than lube on it, or perhaps running the chain a little too long isn’t helping. Maybe one of the grub-screws coming loose had something to do with it. Either way, a few minutes with an allen key sorted it out, and it didn’t come off for the rest of the day.

We rode most of what Lecky has to offer today — everything from tight nadgery singletrack to flat-out wide open rocky chutes. It really is a great mountain bike playground. If only it was a little bit bigger…

You can see the pictures over in The Gallery.

I’ve just read a plea from Jon Hicks about his inability to change a hotkey in Photoshop. I felt for him, because I have to deal with that sort of problem on an almost daily basis.

At work, we recently got the Adobe Creative Suite. That’s five Adobe applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, ImageReady, InDesign, VersionCue) in one box — its like the Microsoft Office of the creative world.

Now all of these applications, with the glaring exception of VersionCue (don’t even get me started), are fantastic applications in their own right. Whats more, their interfaces are all very similar — meaning that someone who is familiar with Photoshop can quite easily get to grips with Illustrator or InDesign.

Now, this is all well and good, but there are a number of glaring omissions that just serve to irritate me. Jon has already mentioned that there are certain hotkeys that can’t be remapped. But there are loads of other things that could so easily be sorted.

It might sound like nit-picking, but to me it all all adds up to a very disjointed user experience.

Take the Colour Picker for example. In Photoshop its lovely. In Illustrator its like they thought “lets make it the same as Photoshop’s” — and then gave up halfway through, and threw an ugly unfinished mess at the screen – it doesn’t even have the built-in eyedropper tool! Its different again in ImageReady too. Why they can’t all use the same one I don’t know.

Now lets take the options palette – in Photoshop it can be docked with the menu bar. InDesign lets you do that too, and yet in ImageReady it can’t be done. Whats that all about? Mind you, Illustrator doesn’t get an options palette at all…

It doesn’t stop there either. All of the applications use slightly different looking palettes too. Photoshop and Illustrator have diddy little title-bars across the tops of their palettes, whereas ImageReady uses gert big thick ones. InDesign goes off on its own and tries to hide them away in tabs on one side of the screen. Group palettes together and the join is different between Illustrator and Photoshop.

It might sound like nit-picking (and to a certain extent it is), but to me it all all adds up to a very disjointed user experience. By all means mess about with the interface and make life easy for me, but for goodness sake, make it consistent! I for one really hope that Adobe get it sorted in time for the next release of the Creative Suite.

Last week, whilst eating a bacon-and-egg sandwich, I managed to launch egg-yolk into my keyboard, necessitating a long and drawn out clean-up operation.

This morning, I was opening a bottle of Irn Bru, which unexpectedly did a fizz-whoosh thing and sploshed all over the very same keyboard. Another long and drawn out clean-up operation later and we’re back on track.

As Owen commented at the time: “You’ll be able to get a whole meal out of that thing soon!”

I joined the Cheltenham Film Society a couple of weeks back. I went along with some friends of mine and was surprised to meet a few other people I knew there, including my aunt and uncle Helen and Stephen. Its a small world isn’t it?

Anyway, tonight’s film was House of Sand and Fog, starring Jennifer Connelly (who always surprises me by actually being a good actress) and Ben Kingsley.

It was very clever, in that throughout the film, you never quite decide where your sympathies lie. A large part of me wanted Behrani [Kingsley] and his family to win out, yet I didn’t want Kathy [Connelly] to lose out at all (even if she did bring her downfall upon herself somewhat). The only person that you really end up disliking is Lester [Ron Eldard], who starts out as the friendly policeman but ends up being a bit of a psycho nut job.

Its a fantastic film, but its really not the most light-hearted in the world. In fact it verges on being downright depressing. I got to the end and thought “What the hell is she going to do with her life now?”

Myself and Ben [not Kingsley] were discussing it on the way home — is it even possible to make a really good happy film? Its just that the really good films always seem to be gritty, intense psychological dramas (or that seems to be the way at this film society). Is it even possible to portray shiny happy intense gritty realism?

I was reading Stuart’s halloween post and felt I should probably tell you all about mine.

We got dressed up. We went out. It were gert fun. I haven’t got any photos of it yet, so I’ll have to describe my get-up to you and let your imagination do all of the hard work.

Inspired by Dangerous Dave B, we start with the classic Zombie/Axe Murderer look. Take one white shirt, and put lots of rips in it. Finish it off with surprisingly realistic looking blood-stains and smears everywhere. Add trousers with similar amount of rips, and (fake) blood dripping down your legs. Nice.

Have you got a nice picture forming yet? Good. Now lets mess it up.

Now we mix in an element of tango man. Not the bright orange element though &#8212 no, we went for the really very bright red look. Thats my entire head (including my hair), my arms and my hands. Bright red, as in pillar-box red. Ferarri red. Very very red.

Feeling ever so slightly intrigued yet? Good. Pictures as and when I get them.

Update: There’s now some scary pictures in the gallery.

The oqo personal computer is the coolest little gadget I’ve seen in ages…

Its got “…a 1GHz processor, a 20GB hard drive, 256MB of RAM, a color transflective display, and integrated wireless, as well as Fire Wire and USB ports.”

And get this: “…in the desktop stand it is a desktop computer, allowing you to connect easily to a variety of peripherals, including full-size keyboards, printers, scanners, and high-resolution monitors.”

The coolest bit? Its 4.9 inches long, 3.4 inches wide and 0.9 inches thin. That’s proper diddy – about the size of the old Psion Revo PDA. Gadgetastic!

Its entirely possible that there’s a new camera sat on my desk now, along with a gert big memory card :o)

That’s quite impressive service from Amazon – I didn’t order it until about 22:30 on Friday night!

The last time we had a season where the other teams dominated and we still won, we managed to win Division One (now the Coca Cola Championship I think). This year not getting relegated is all I ask for…

BBC SPORT – Birmingham 0-1 Crystal Palace.