you probably don't need it. It was only because as a company we had bought lots of domain names from different providers and it provided somewhere central to manage them e.g. http://www.mywebsite.com = 165.82.2.35

Sorry, I was probably just over complicating things. Good luck!

BB – If I wanted to move from fasthosts, where would you recommend?

Well Rackspace are certainly up there as one of the more reliable ones but they are quite expensive. Their technical support is some of the best I have experienced and they'd be able to help you through the move I'm sure. IIRC the other option that was going to be cheaper was http://mediatemple.net/ I'd heard lots of good things about them.

For basic DNS management I also used http://www.zoneedit.com/ which worked really well.

I was a sys admin for a company that used Fasthosts when I arrived. After some serious downtime because of their hardware failure and then the password scandal[/url] I moved all our apps to Rackspace and haven't had any outages since.

Unexpected problems will always occur but some companies are better than others at minimizing the consequences. I can't believe Fasthosts are still in business.

A handy tip is to use google reader to subscribe to podcasts, you can then listen to them streamed through the web page.

http://propersongs.blogspot.com/ is a good one to start with

hairstyle of choice for trustafarians

They'll soon grow out of it.

One flew right down my throat last night when playing touch rugby. I was sprinting and shouting for the ball when I saw a flash and it hit the back of my throat which made me swallow as a reflex. Spent the next five minutes coughing on the sidelines but it didn't come back up. My throat did swell up a bit but not really enough to cause me discomfort which makes me wonder if it actually stung me.

I wouldn't recommend eating a wasp.

sent

I've got a couple of these[/url] and they work pretty well. No damage to rim or spokes since I've been using them.

SC Chameleon

Roy Thame fixed

6′ and I have a large frame. Use it more for XC than downhill and I reckon it fits me perfectly. Also had slicks on it for commuting and just away to go for a tour using a trailer.

They were good up until Big Calm and I especially liked Trigger Hippy but as soon as they started writing songs for Mondeo adverts I went right off them. I haven’t heard anything by them for ages now, hasn’t Sky left them?

Great tips, thanks everyone! Getting quite excited about this now. I’ve ordered a couple of the Bikeline guides from Amazon and an Altura handlebar bag so once they get here then I should be good to go.

I’ve got a handlebar gps so will have all the relevant metroguide maps and waypoints installed. Also found a great download of all campsites in Europe from here – http://www.archiescampings.eu/eng1/

Also reading this account has got me itching to go.

Also thinking about water carrying. There are two locations for bottle cages, one either side of the down tube, would it be worth using both of these? The lower one doesn’t seem very accessible.

Thanks very much for the tips everyone. I have a single wheel trailer like this so I guess stability won’t be great but will try to keep the weight low and evenly spread.

I’ll look into tyres and some sort of bag either for the frame or a small one for the handlebars. Will go and read all these blogs now!

Totally missing your point but I got a lovely fixie from joe1983 via this forum. Get something classic and wangle the formalities, you know it makes sense.

Wicked, cheers for the advice. I know what you’re saying about the forks but I’d also like to make my bike less nickable. Did you have to worry about security when you were out there? Currently got some RockShox Revelations on there and reckon they’re a bit unnecessary.

No rack mounts to speak of on the chameleon so going to give the trailer a go. Sounds like I’ll be heading the opposite direction to you so hopefully I’ll get the benefit of those headwinds!

Chains generally wear at the same rate as cassette’s and chain rings so chances are you’ll have to replace the whole lot to avoid the dreaded chain slip.

I use a playstation3 and can stream films/music/photos from my PC. If you get PlayTV you can record and pause live digital TV but I haven’t tried it. Bonus blu-ray player and excellent games console as well.