delusional

What you're looking for is Drill 'n' Bass, a sub-genre Aphex Twin pretty much invented with 'Come to Daddy'. It's a pretty narrow sub-genre though. Check out 'Windowlicker' also by Aphex Twin or some Squarepusher, all good stuff. For a slightly more traditional Drum 'n' Bass sound but dark and dirty as they come give Panacea a listen. Something like 'Motion Sickness' is pretty much Drum 'n' Bass in a nightmare machine, whereas the more complex drum beats on 'Shiver' or 'Twisted Designz' start veering into Drill 'n' Bass. Again he has his more ambient moments, but it's all good. For dark and fast check out Hypnoskull, something like 'Kommando Entertainment' or 'Rythmusmaschine Eins - Zwei' are good places to start. Then it all depends how dark you want to get. If you want really nasty sounds that scare little children check out stuff from Converter, particularly the 'Blast Furnace' album and tracks like 'Death Time' or 'Blast Furnace'. But don't listen in the dark!

Seen them before, but they only seem to have half-waffle in MTB/ATV grips, and then only in medium compound (what's marked as 'trials' on there is for motorbikes). For trials use you definitely want full diamond. Don't know if they have full diamond MTB grips available as well, but they're not on that page.

My new (to me) bike. I'm absolutely loving it at the moment. [attachmentid=7934] [attachmentid=7935] A quick spec: Hi-Fi frame, Urbans, Pro2 hubs F+R, BB7, 'Burns, etc. If for some reason you want to see more (or bigger) pictures you can potter over to my gallery. I didn't realise quite how upright my bars are until I saw these pictures! Need to experiment a bit more with them tomorrow I think.

You clearly need this t-shirt.

Joy Division are my flavour of the week every week! Other flavours of my week include Philip K Dick, Baudrillard's postmodernism (those last two are all part of the same thing), Bauhaus (the band) and concentration inducing subliminal hypnosis tapes. Apropos of the last item, I'm getting strange urges to buy more hypnosis products

Buy a Seagate Barracuda HDD. I used to always buy Western Digital for the performance benefits, then a few of them unexpectedly died on me taking down lots of my hard earned (well, downloaded) data with it. Nowadays I trust the only HDD manufacturer to give a 5 year warranty on their drives (that's 2 years more than most) and with the best reputation for reliability - Seagate! After all, the performance benefits of a Western Digital are only fractional really, and most of the time (all of the time?) you're unlikely to even notice the difference. Of course, they're still going to die eventually, but 2 years extra on warranty is a lot of time, making them almost half the price of other drives in the long term. Also, as poopipe said, why so small? It's not even saving you any money (well not really). 80 gig drives are pretty much the same price, and 160 gig drives come in at about £40. The sweet spot at the moment seems to be around 320gig, which is weighing in at just under £70 over at Over Clockers. It's probably worth paying that little bit extra knowing you'll not be running out of storage space any time soon!

Linux users will probably find the following script useful. When you run the script it prompts for the URL of the video you wish to download and asks what you want it called, it then downloads the video, re-encodes it to mpg and saves it in a directory called YouTube in your home directory. This helps get around the issue with sound lag which people without Flash 9 (i.e. all Linux users) experience. It relies on you having ffmpeg installed (you probably do). I should point out, I didn't write this, but I've found it rather useful. #!/bin/bash bu="http://youtube.com/get_video.php?";mkdir -p ~/YouTube;cd ~/YouTube;read -p " YouTube url? " ur;read -p "Name? " nv wget ${ur} -O /tmp/y1;uf=${bu}`grep player2.swf /tmp/y1 | cut -d? -f2 | cut -d\" -f1`;wget "${uf}" -O /tmp/y.flv ffmpeg -i /tmp/y.flv -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320x240 ${nv}.mpg;rm /tmp/y.flv; rm /tmp/y1;rm gmon.out; exit

It'll only work over such long distances if you're using directional antennae. Standard omni-directional wlan equipment will not work over particularly great distances, maybe a few hundred metres with your average home equipment without anything in the way. You're likely looking at well under 100 metres indoors. I imagine from what you're saying it's his network connection that's going down and not his internet connection. You could try pointing out that the two things are completely different and even if you were saturating the 'net connection it wouldn't stop his wireless connection and the only affect it would have on his 'net connection would be to slow it right down. It's worth checking your setup to make sure you're laptop and his machine aren't trying to use the same IP or something silly like that as that could explain him being kicked off as soon as you connect. Distance is the most likely culprit though. As already suggested, move his computer into the same room to test. If that fixes it then you could look into getting a wireless card with an external antennae (may not work though), place all the wireless equipment so it's antennaes are as close as possible (and not hidden under a desk or anything) or moving his machine closer permanently. Alternatively, run some cat5.

Much better solution. Legalise marijuana (other drugs would be good to, but one step at a time). Then you get extra tax revenue for the government, less people out on the piss (illegal to smoke in public remember), better policing (when they're not busy wasting time and money busting non-criminals) and less fights when a drunk person can walk into Costcutters and buy a spliff instead of another can of wifebeater (not going to feel so much like a fight after a J are you). Of course, if you legalised MDMA it would be even better. No fights in clubs then, just big double 'ard scallies hugging each other all night. Oh yeah, and stop talking about binge drinking like it's a new thing! This country has ALWAYS drunk a lot, our entire history is soaked in gin and ale. Two of our most famous politicians, Pitt the Younger and Winston Churchill, drank an incredible amount (Pitt apparantly got through two bottles of port a day) and they still managed to define the role of Prime Minister and fend of the hoards of Hitler respectively. The House of Commons is riddled with bars, although under the current administration that's begun to change as it's not seen as 'politically convenient' to have a bit of a drink in the evenings. The bottom line is, our parents generation were big drinkers (binge drinkers even), so were their parents, and theirs. Pretty much back to the invention of brewing the main pre-occupation of people in this country on their night off was to get pissed. It's never caused a problem before, the only reason it's a problem now is because of the media picking it up and the government doing exactly what the media ask instead of telling them to sod off and stop being so silly as they're supposed to.

Errr, or how about all people do it as much as their sexual drive pushes them to? Of course, in our society it's quite acceptable for men to talk about it in public, but not so much for women. As I said before, we're impressionable monkeys; you'll probably find this affects how much people talk about it (women being coy about it and men exaggerating) but it isn't so much borne out in reality. Just look at the very existence of Ann Summers, they make a pretty neat profit out of ladies getting themselves off Still, I don't think gender has that much to do with it you know. Mostly sex drive, and that's an individual thing, not a gendered thing.

That's a nice angle. Although I'm still intrigued by what causes us to fall on the place on the spectrum that we do, what causes us to desire the sort of people we do, or in fact to desire at all. I think that the traditional association of desire to reproduction has to be invalid - the very fact that people desire others of the same gender (and thus biologically impossible to breed with) shows that desire neccessarily has nothing to do with reproduction. Cheers for this! Very interesting and something I've never come across before. I'm definitely going to go away and read up on it a bit, see if it can lead me closer to an answer to desire. Any recommended starting points?

I don't actually think this is "human nature" - I think it's culturally imbibed. Look at the way that female sexuality has changed in it's perception in the media and, jointly, in the real world over the last few generations. From the Wonderbra adverts on women have been told to revel in their sexuality, and this has caused an upsurge in sexuality (as opposed to sensuality) among young women. I'm very much coming around to the idea that much more of ourselves than I'd like to think is culturally informed. To relate this back closer to the topic: I'd always previously argued with people that sexuality was something natural to a person, that is that you're born into your sexuality. But recently a few things I've read have made me wonder if all the conversations I've had were wrong. I've often heard people ask if you're born gay or become gay, but I'd rarely heard anyone ask if you're born straight or become straight. I'd always somehow assumed that heterosexuality was natural to the individual, and therefore homosexuality (or bisexuality) must be as well. Looking at sexuality over time we can see that it isn't static - what's generally considered attractive in a women today wouldn't have been considered attractive 50+ years ago. So if the notion of attraction within a specified sexuality isn't fixed, why should our notions of sexuality themselves be fixed (in fact our notions of gay/straight/bi have only existed since the 18th Century, before then there was no concept of being straight or gay)? If sexuality was natural, something inherent in each person, we would reasonably assume that the number of people associated with each sexuality would be roughly synchronous across the ages (even if they had not been labeled as such in the past) but this simply isn't true. As a well known example, in Ancient Greece women were considered merely for having babies - young boys were for pleasure. What I'm trying to show is how notions of what is attractive (wether that be as broad as a gender or as narrow as a hair colour) change over time with the mores of contemporary culture. So, if this is the case, how can anyone be born into their sexuality? Essentially I've begun to think that nothing about sexuality is inherent: I'm coming down heavily on the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate. I also think that what gender you're attracted to is about as relevant as what colour hair you find attractive, but unfortunately society doesn't agree so this will continue to be a contentious topic.

Actually you may well find that that is most MEN. Nothing to do with their sexuality. Our culture continually tells us that men must always be after sex and women are to keep them in check by just looking for relationships, it is of course a load of bollocks, but people are impressionable monkeys and this sort of thing has an effect. So, when you take women out of the equation, there is a slight tendency for things to be seen as all about sex. Although, that is just the image of things. Having been to quite a few gay clubs and straight clubs I know which felt more like a meat market, and it wasn't the one the media would have you believe.

Aren't they great? I get the same feelings about little Beta 80s these days. I keep finding myself almost wishing I had kids so I could buy them one, they're just such awesome little bikes. I remember when my little brother was wanting to move up from his TY80 there was nothing like that available, he ended up on an old air cooled Fantic 80 that was complete crap (I never rode such small bikes as I didn't start riding until I was 14). One of my young cousins has been showing an interest in getting a trials bike recently and I've jumped on it in the hope I can get him on a Rev80 soon

Huh? 72meg for a 2 minute video? Crazy.

Hmm, perhaps rubbish was the wrong word to use. The articles weren't particularly bad, they just lacked any real content. I mostly mean the non-biketrials articles. To be honest I didn't really pay so much attention to the biketrials articles as, if I remember rightly, they were mostly event reports of events I'd already heard about on here (and probably seen videos of). Also, I'm more interested in motorbikes these days, so the rest of the magazine was of more interest to me. It's hard to explain my problem with TW without really repeating myself. I think this is the problem, there wasn't much in it to stick in your mind, good or bad. I don't think I've ever found myself referring back to any of the issues I have here to remind myself of anything, which is generally not a great sign.

Really? You must have been reading a different Trials World to me. I thought it was a bit pants. Sure, it was nice to have a dedicated Trials mag, and for that reason I bought pretty much every issue, but the articles were rubbish. You could easily read it cover to cover in under an hour. I think the problem was that the TMX/DBR crew were doing it all in their spare time around their usual work for TMX/DBR; it's no wonder it lacked a bit of substance! As for Trial Magazine, I've got much higher hopes for this - I've heard very good reports about the French and Spanish versions. As it's coming out bi-monthly it's only £15 a year to subscribe, something I've done already. If the qualities going to be there we don't want TM sliding down the same pit of financial death as TW did.

Isn't any graphical remote control package a bit OTT for Linux machines? I've only ever used SSH myself, and don't really see the need for anything else. Certainly nothing else is as secure, lightweight and easy to use. Correct, rdesktop is a linux RDP client. Like all my favourite software it's very simple and lightweight. It just does what you need it to do. I'm using Gentoo. I moved over not long after it came out and haven't been tempted to use any other distro since. If for nothing else, portage is a godsend for lazy people like me! Once you understand how it all works you can forget all about dependencies, compile options, etc, etc. It's a bit of a steep learning curve at first if you're not used to getting your hands dirty, but well worth it IMO.

Hell, RDP works fine over a small aDSL connection. When I was last developing stuff on windows I was able to (fairly) comfortably use RDP (over an SSH tunnel) from my home to office over a 512/256 aDSL line. Try doing that with VNC! Also, rdesktop is far superior to any VNC client I've ever had the displeasure to use on Linux. The only real use I've found for VNC on Windows is to enable to me use X2VNC, which is a tool which has really confused several co-workers in the past when I've moved my mouse pointer off the right of my linux desktop and onto my windows desktop beside it (both running on separate computers and monitors).

Neither are white people actually white... however, our language has chosen to label black people as black, and as I'm talking about representations in language I think that's more important than the reality of peoples skin colour. I'd say brown is a bit of an enigma in this situation though - on one side it connotes earth, nature and growth; and on the other it connotes dirtyness and grime. I only studied semiotics briefly about a month ago, I really enjoyed it (along with pretty much everything else I've studied in a similar vein). I don't know it that well though, I'm just able to talk in a way that makes it sound like I do! This is the second time I've had the opportunity to use it in some form of online debate. It makes me happy that my education is helping me achieve something :D

The concept of Black/Asian/Other non-white racial type Awards is, in my opinion, a racist one. I vaguely understand the point, but I think in the long run these sort of things do more harm than good, by highlighting the difference in racial groups and insinuating that Black/Asian/OnWrt artists are not competent to compete in the non-racially specific awards. So, racism. Let's play a little game shall we. Why don't you all sit down and right a list of the connotations inherent in the English language for the words (the words themselves, not as applied to a racial type) 'black' and 'white'. To make it easier for those of you with no imagination (or grasp of language) here's a select few from a thesaurus: Black: atrocious, bleak, depressing, depressive, dismal, dispiriting, distressing, doleful, dreary, foreboding, funereal, gloomy, horrible, mournful, ominous, oppressive, sad, sinister, somber, threatening White: light, neutral, pearly, pure, silver, silvery, snowy, spotless, stainless, transparent, unblemished, unsullied After that maybe we should look at the way in which these colours are used in literature. Something's evil? Lets make it black. Something's good? Lets make it white. These are ongoing themes that are used time and time again, throughout the language. For example: Gandalf the White, The Black riders. Hopefully you can start to see how our language is itself inherently racist. Considering language is the only way we have of formulating our thoughts and opinions it's somewhat difficult to see how we can ever fully solve the problem of racial inequality when the very language we use to discuss the issues is steeped in racism. This isn't just a problem for race either. Try sitting down and listing all the connotations of male and female. A slight patriarchal slant there I think! I'm not sure what my point is here, beyond pointing out to people that problems with racism (and sexism, and other 'isms) run very, very deep in our cultural (and most other cultures). Sure, sometimes PC arguments seem a little silly, and to be fair they sometimes are. But they have the right idea, they just got the wrong end of the stick a little (or maybe simplified the stick a little bit).

Unsuprising really, considering they're the same company! I concur on the crapness of ebay's customer service. I've been trying to report a bug with the site for about 4 months now, each time I try I get into a really frustrating exchange with their customer services muppets where I repeatedly tell them everything they need to know to pass the bug on and they come back either asking for more information (which I've invariably already supplied in the previous email) or making utterly innapropriate suggestions (like suggesting I 'upgrade' to IE immediately after I'd explained I'm using Linux). Very frustrating. Especially when the later emails show not only a complete lack of technical competence, but a fairly poor grasp of the English language (two things I would have thought pretty requisite to manning a customer support centre for an English language website). I've pretty much given up on trying to get anything like a sensible response, and have instead found a workaround for the bugs I'm coming up against. If you do find a contact address that gets a sensible response please let me know. BTW, as far as I'm aware you're not coming up against robots, just very useless humans. A script would almost certainly be able to reply with more relevance and better English than the customer service bods do. I think the only way to get a phone number for ebay is to become a power seller. My parents should be power sellers by now, but thanks to more problems with the ebay site, and customer service being unwilling to help, we've not been able to sign up for it and gain telephone support. Might be worth trying to contact a sympathetic power seller though?

Don't you get registered in your lessons? If so, could he not word it carefully so as to say something like 'excellent attendance to lessons' rather than 'excellent attendance' overall? Seems a weird idea to me being registered in the mornings at 6th form. The college I went to was really well structured: there was no such thing as morning and evening registration, as far as I remember we had one 'tutor group' meeting a week and that was all we were expected to turn up for outside of lectures. That and the general attitude of the lecturers really helped in making the college an effective stepping stone between school and unversity. I think 6th forms that are attached to schools, or operate on similar principles to school, probably make things a lot harder for the pupils when they step up to university. It's a big enough gap from the type of college I went to to University, so it must be really hard for people to get into line with the University method of study having come straight from school.

Yes there is. And at decent speeds as well. What you want in this instance is a 3G card (and probably fairly deep pockets, although I haven't looked at the prices for this in some time). Then, what you get is ~512k speeds, to your laptop (or PDA, or phone, etc) wherever the hell you are. You don't need a mobile phone to do this either. This isn't exactly new technology. A few friends of mine who work for companies with money to burn (internet porn companies mostly) have had 3G company accounts for a couple of years now. However, unless the prices have come down dramatically in the last year or so, it's not really practical for your average user.

I got Bells Palsy for a while, a few years ago now. Mine didn't quite just turn up overnight... I had a pretty bad tick in that side of my face for a few days, which got worse and worse and sort of took over one side of my face until it was totally paralysed. I think I was quite lucky with mine - it only lasted about 5-7 days. I'm sure the doctor told you, but it's a good idea to get some sort of eye patch to wear when you sleep (or even around the house generally). Not only does it make you look like a cool pirate, but it protects your eye as it can't close itself if something gets in it.