Am reading Player of Games again now having read it for the first time many moons ago…

Our 'club' doesn't charge a bean. You simply pay when you share transport somewhere. Having said that, if there was a sub of £20, I think it would be worth it. The guy in charge of our club has a van especially for club use – and he only charges for petrol, nowt else!

I do a lot of presentations – but in the academic world. Generally, for a 20 minute talk, I would have around 20 slides (some of which I will go through faster than others). At the top of each slide, I put the main point, and then underneath I will either have pictures or diagrams or a set of sub-points. For the sub-points, I only put in a short bit of text and talk to it (i.e. DO NOT simply read out the slide).

Also, I put on the first slide (after a title slide) my aim – straightaway. I.e. The aim is to show you my great skills, and underneath I would then outline the structure of the talk. I.e. I will show you 1) what my skills are 2) what I use them to do, 3) some key achievements, 4) discussion of particular points and 5) summary/conclusions.

Have the talk ready several days before. Then practice it (i.e. actually lock yourself in an empty room and say the whole thing out loud whilst timing with a stopwatch. That way you figure out if you're on time, and you learn it. DO NOT stop the talk if you make a wee hiccup – just keep going through. Then go through the whole thing again afterwards. It is difficult.

Often, I will sit and give my talk to a colleague too. It is good for discipline, and for checking you are getting the correct points across.

Finally, leave a few minutes at the end for questions. I.e. – if you have a 20 minute talk, actually talk for 18 minutes. No-one will mind if you finish early, but they will mind if you go over (and may cut you off if you do so).

Final tip is to relax and BREATHE DEEPLY for SEVERAL MINUTES before giving the talk – that helps a lot…

Good luck – enjoy.

I'm Scottish. And I'm British. I hate all this SNP independence crap – we are part of the UK and I for one think Salmond should sod off…

I like riding solo or riding with my club. But then my club is more like a collective. There are no membership fees, there is one type of person in the club (i.e. they like riding bikes) and everyone ships in and leads rides. The benefits are that its sociable when you want it to be, you can club together for transport to ride a different place and you can find new trails etc. There arent any downsides in our club apart from the waiting around when someone gets a puncture.

Then again – I like going out on my own too.

The other alternative is that you set up a club/collective so that you run things how you think they should be done – i.e. with respect for other landusers etc. That way, you make friends and get out and ride. A club doesnt have to be a big organisational thing – just arrange where and when to meet and go for a ride. No money need be involved etc.

Anyway – hope you can get motivated…

Hopes – fully re-buildable, good performance, British made, look good. What more do you want? I love my Tech X2s…

Python is also entertaining since the tutorials use Monty Python to aid the enjoyment of learning :)

Joe is talking sense. Python is way easier to learn because the syntax is clearer. Perl programmers go for speed and therefore it is often very difficult to read their code if you are a beginner. Sure python is not as fast as perl, but its great for loads of stuff – and its plenty fast enough for simple operations.

STS.

Stu – yeah – thats what I thought. I bailed (the shame!) and I got painted.

Ah well – who cares – its just supposed to be a fun day out – I was never going to win anyway!

Well – the 69er is certainly distinctive – cant be many of them around here. I assume the stumpy is as standard – we'll keep a lookout…

Are they good for general XC riding? I am light on brakes, but something that works as well as organic but lasts longer sounds perfect for me… I'll probably get some to see how they work. Superstar pads have always worked well for me anyway…

Also, I suspect that if you have it as a 'race' then it needs to be licensed with British Cycling, which would cost more – e.g. each rider would need to be licensed.

I am surprised that they didnt note who turned off early. Top Dog – I think you are wrong, the blue dot was painted on if you shortened to the 45 km route, red dot if you shortened to the 75 km route. Wouldnt have been hard to note down which route you actually did when you crossed the finish line.

Bummer – sorry to hear that. Do you have any photos? I ride with the Newcastle MTB club – we'll keep a look out. What colour is the 69er and the Stumpy, and what kind of scott frame?

Stew.

I'll own up to losing a bottle. But I have no idea where – so going back wasnt an option. Was at least careful about gel and bar wrappers – its true that there were far too many of them by the side of the track, and I'm sure that some of those were not accidentally dropped :(

Jon – Will you be out on Thursday? Was this just an excuse to show your backside you the doctor? Can we post this detail on the front page of midaircrisis?

In all seriousness though, I find decent lycra shorts (you pay for what you get IMHO) and PLENTY of chamois cream help on longer rides. I used to find the problem was worse on my full suss, but I have no idea why! When I kept the same saddle and used it on my hardtail it was less of a problem.

Get well soon – see you Thursday (or Saturday for Ian Bs birthday)…

Stew.

mastiles – I obviously realise the 'on thin ice' title is more about the nature of the challenge – but it still irks me!

As an Antarctic scientist, the title of the program really annoys me. Antarctica has the thickest ice in the world – up to 4.4km thick.

Its still interesting to watch though – Cracknell doesnt seem to be terribly good at thinking/working in a team…
Have been impressed by Ben and Ed…

I'd say Landy's are the best thing I have driven in deep/fast moving water. Much better than the hilux – largely cos they are heavy and dont get washed down river so easily. Having said that, they do break down a lot…

This is me driving an icelandic big-wheeler defender – on the same day, the wind ripped the door half off and we snapped the drive-shaft on another defender…

tibolts.co.uk[/url]

Hummingbird Hawk Moth indeed. I took this photo in the Pyrenees last year. I didnt realise they could be spotted in the UK though!

Well – I've been skiing since I was 2 and my dad is a BASI trainer. And I am still learning (31 now). I can easily spot errors with technique which would not be obvious to your average ski-ing punter. So it depends who you want to impress! The skis these days help a lot. I reckon less than a week with an instructor would sort you out if you are already good at balance etc. from boarding…
It took me 2 days to convert from alpine skiing technique to telemarking whereby I could get down the hill and look OK. Has taken me at least several more weeks instruction (via dad) to get to what I would call an acceptable level though…

+1 for textpad – been using it for 9 years now – excellent (and free) bit of software :)

Middleburn hardcote slickshift (i.e. ramped and pinned) – the hardcote makes them last longer in my experience and they seem to shift well…

How about simply downloading a web template from an open source site such as oswd[/url]

and then edit the appropriate text to suit. I use textpad (also free) to edit any of the pages.

If you change tyres a lot then it could get messy/faffy…

Are you sure the bottom race for your headset is properly seated onto the forks? I had this problem recently – I took the headset apart and cleaned every surface in there and on the fork, then re-greased and reassembled – no problems since.

Also, re-check you have tightened your stem/handlebars to make sure its not that.

I got the stans 355 hope hoops. Been riding them for a few months now – great wheels. I am about 12 stone and ride quite hard on my steel hardtail – and the wheels are perfectly happy and nice and light :). And they are great value. I think the normal price is around £285, but I got them for £250 cos my LBS was nice and friendly. Easy to make tubless with the stans kit although I havent got round to actually bothering with tubless yet.

I’m downloading as we speak. The Led Zep says its full price on the left as you check out, but if you look at the total going on your credit card (on the right on the same page), its actually costing you 29p. :)

Rolling Stones, Faith no more, Metallica, Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, etc. etc. excellent link!

I even bought the 99 classical tracks – for 29p you cant go wrong!

10 albums in total for me…

Lance Armstrong – in training for Le Tour…

If you watch the national news (e.g. 6 o’clock news) on BBC1 then you should get your local bulletin afterwards – works for me fine. However, if you watch the 6 o’clock national news on the news 24 channel then you will get the London bulletin. So – she was watching it on BBC1 wasnt she?

Thanks all for info – come good places to start…

charliemort – it could be, but I need to discuss with better half (who is abroad til next week). Also, it may need to be bought through her work, but if not I will get back to you…

Cheers,
STS.

flatboy is right – the image of the rider will be a pseudo-HDR. But it matters not. They have got more detail from the raw file by merging 3 versions of it. It is the tone-mapping component of that merge that makes it look weird.

Loving the ‘Wolfenstein 3d’ image – brings back memories from my school days when that was top notch graphics!

No offence taken mastiles! Castle wolfenstein – that was exactly the effect I was after funnily enough! Anyway – I’m no expert at HDR – I just muck around with it for fun.

The stuff on vanilla days is much better – not overcooked linky

Gee – thanks Mastiles! Well, the point is that you can overcook the effect all too easily. But then again, they are good for creating a certain effect – dont think of them as photos because they are heavily manipulated.

The technique is supposed to enable you to capture more of the range of brightness in a scene. Often it is difficult to expose a photo correctly to capture very bright and very dark areas. This method merges 3 or more images exposed for different parts of a scene. Thus you can get more information and capture more detail. Its particularly useful for pulling the detail in the sky out. The consequence of this though is that the algorithm can make things look unrealistic or cool or crap or arty. Depends on your point of view.

In my case, I tend to go quite light on the HDR effect and then manipulate things in photoshop afterwards with the aim of creating a particular effect – e.g. eerie looking castle.

HDR is great fun. Check out Vanilla Days[/url] for tutorials and lots of detail. In the meantime, here are some of my HDRs – some overcooked, some not…

So its only me that wasn’t particularly impressed with Whinlatter? I found it fairly uninspiring for some reason. I suspect I am feeling that way about most trail centres though – same old predictable stuff with little to challenge. What a grumpy old bastid I am…

Maybe I should go back and try Whinlatter again sometime to see if my opinion changes…

I use heart internet for domain registering and hosting. Also, if you are new to web design you can download lots of web templates for free – just google for ‘open source web template’. Download a template and then you simply replace parts of the template web pages with your own information – easy… Then you can edit these in your favourite editing software (I use textpad – a free text editor – http://www.textpad.org).

I just got a middle and outer middleburn set from pedalon cycles for just over £60 all in. Will last longer than shimano…