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.

It seems that I’m not the only one who’s been enjoying the wonders of Glentress this summer – Leon and co have been up there having fun too. Is it really a 500 mile round trip from Manchester though!? We mush have gone miles further when we went there from Gloucestershire then…

Deliverance?

Leon’s exploits reminded me of one particular bit of trail we did back in the summer. It was the last descent of the morning – whether it was actually Deliverance or not I can’t remember. Anyway, partway down it splits into two trails – one way was Red, the other Black – ski-style gradings you see. I stopped where the trail split in two, thought for a second and took the black route. This may have been a silly move because it then proceeded to scare the crap out of me – two gert big step-downs and a huge tabletop greeted me before the two trails came back together. I reached the first one in a cloud of screeching brakes before going back to get a better run at it.

Gethin Woodland Park

I did exactly the same thing on a much smaller drop at Gethin, South Wales yesterday too. I don’t know why but as I approached it it just phased me completely. Perhaps it was the big rooty bits sticking out, who knows? Either way I had to take about five run-ups before I launched off it – and in the event it was really easy. Typical.

Not so easy was the rock garden. Ever since a few friends of mine raced the Dragon DH at that course a couple of months back they haven’t stopped going on about it. Its become a minor legend in its own right. About fifty yards long, its basically a “path” down the hill consisting of a load of very big rocks. Rocks that move about underneath your tyres. My advice would be drop off the middle, go down the left until it gets really tricky, and then move to the right before carving into the corner.

The course reminded me of the Fort William course up in Scotland. That kind of gritty, rocky, all weather surface thats ridable just about all year. Well, unless it snows all winter or something. Its amazing just how much grip your tyres can get on gert big wet rocky slabs really isn’t it?

The Ewok Village

Back in Glentress again, the ‘shore style stuff was ace fun. First of all there was all the messing around in the Ewok Village, and then there was the black run after it – big step downs, log rides and that massive swooping ‘shore-style roller-coaster descent. Acetastic. I’ll be heading back next year, you can almost probably count on that!

I wrote about The Collective the other day – and the way that it captures the feeling of “flow” that you get when you’re ruling the trails out on your bike.

I was thinking back today to the last few times that I’ve really felt that. It doesn’t happen very often, when everything just clicks into place, where the trail submits to you, when you’re invincible.

Afan provided one such descent a few weeks back – Final Decent Zig-Zags on The Wall trail was the place. I ruled that descent, powered by nothing but adrenalin and a Boost bar.

Before that the last one that really stands out was the downhill course at Caersws. My confidence on the bike hit a high that day – I was flying (relatively speaking).

An all-time high-point for flow was the week I spent in the french Alps in the summer. Once my arms had acclimatised to the workout they were getting, I was able to really flow. Les Gets I, Le Canyon, the top half of Les Gets II, that run down through the cloulds and cows to Lindarets. I think I’ll be returning there next season.

Scotland has to take an honourable mention too – parts of Fort William’s DH course, Grant’s best-of-compilation route around Glentress and the Traquair trail at Innerleithen (especially that final descent, with all those whoops and drops to play with) – they all gave me that huge adrenalin buzz.

Its been a good summer for biking all in all. I’ve ridden some absolutely fantastic trails in England, Wales, Scotland, France and Switzerland, and whats more I’ve ridden them with some fantastic people. Here’s to y’all, and here comes the winter.

Riding in the rain at Gethin tomorrow then. Should be fun…

It took me a while, but I found one. A simple PHP based gallery system, that uses XHMTL and CSS for the layout.

If only I’d googled “Simple PHP Gallery” in the first place I might well have found it at my first attempt. Because its called just that – and it comes from relativelyabsolute.

The only pictures in there at the moment are some from a trip to Bringewood in July of last year, that I was using to test it all out. I guess I’d better get a new digital camera to fill it out a bit then. Canon Powershot A85 anybody? Update: Its entirely possible that I’ve just ordered that very camera…

Right, non geeky readers can stop reading right about now and go look at the pictures…

The Geeky Bit: Implementing SPG

Still with me? Good.

Installing SPG is dead simple. Download the .zip file, extract it, and then upload that to a folder on your website. As the system is so very very simple, its dead easy to customise it to fit in with your site aswell. Just alter sp_index.php and sp_styles.css to suit.

The hardest part came about because I’m using a fixed width template on this site. Left to do as they pleased, images that were wider than the site quite simply broke it. So I decided to set a max-width on the images, then let the user click on them if they wanted to see them full size. Easy enough, or so you’d think. Just set the max-width in the CSS file and alter sp_index.php to put a link around the image. No problem.

That is to say, no problem until we come to test it in Internet Explorer. IE doesn’t actually support max-width does it? JavaScript to the rescue then.

With a bit of help from the peeps on the SitePoint forums, I knocked up a simple little script especially for IE, that figures out if the image is too big and scales it appropriately. You can find it in the head portion of the gallery pages.

The Collective hs been hyped quite a lot in certain circles as the best mountain bike film ever made.

I’ve not seen all of the bike films ever made, but I can tell you for sure – this one is ace.

OK, so the first scene – big jumps and drops in the desert – isn’t brilliant, mainly because its all been done before. But from then on in its just amazing. The filming captures the speed, it captures the flow, it captures the fun and it makes it look beautiful.

Better than Earthed? I’m not sure – its a different kind of film. Earthed, like its predecessors – the Sprung series, are presented as video magazines, and they follow the racing around the world.

This one is more like a showcase – something that makes our sport look fantastic. It doesn’t visit the races (apart from the RedBull rampage). Instead it takes you down miles and miles of stunning singletrack and ‘shore trails.

You know that feeling you get when you’re flowing through that awesome singletrack descent – everything clicking into place, the wind whistling past you, the trees passing by at speed? It captures that feeling.

Just thinking about it makes me want to go out and ride.