delusional

It's really cheap, we're flying into Jerez in southern Spain, which cost me about £70 return from Stansted. Although, if I were booking it now I'd probably fly into Agadir instead, which is about £225 return. I reckon it's probably going to cost about another £50 or so each way in travel costs to get from Jerez to Marrakech, from where we can get the free festival bus to Tifnite itself, so it ends not being much cheaper this way. Although we do get to spend some time in southern Spain and Marrakech, which is always good :) We've got a couple of nomad tents booked as well, with several spaces spare should other people decide to come along at the last minute :D

I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but I keep forgetting (as ever). So, is anyone from here planning on going out to the Rhythms of Peace festival in Morocco at the end of August? I've now got all my flights and tickets booked and am getting rather excited :) 5 days of chilled hippy festival in the sun, it can't be anything but excellent really. Although, considering how badly I burned at NASS I'm going to have to be extra careful in Morocco in August!

Indeed. Equilibrium had more plot holes than, well something with lots of holes in it. It was a dire film. The Matrix was a million times better, and I don't think an incredible amount of that either. One DVD everyone should own: "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within". It's almost what DVD was designed for. Although if we're just talking movie and not specifically DVD I'd probably choose something different. I don't know what though, there are just too many good movies. Although "The Butterfly Effect" has to come close to the top.

Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist, I am however a sci-fi fan. This may be influnced somewhat by that :) To me, what's more interesting than whether or not time travel is actually possible, is the ramifications if we accept for a minute that it is (in a sci-fi manner rather than a 'technically time travel' contemporary science manner). This opens up a whole spectrum of interesting possibilities (often dealt with in a suitably in-graceful manner by cheap sci-fi). Allowing people the freedom to move through time means (at least for the purposes of my fantasies!) they also have the freedom to change things, which opens up the concept of multiple time lines, which is all great fun (and can also explain why we haven't come across time travellers from the future). Trying to conceptualise the existence of infinite parallel universes is guaranteed to give you a headache. I always think of these things as a flat plain, with time and parallel-dimensions being the x and y axes. Trying to conceive it in a more 'realistic' manner than that muddles my head. Of course, it's taking a bit of a jump looking into time travel and parallel universes when we've explored so little of our current time-line/time-period :)

So you think we should just ignore all the problems in the world, never talk about the bad things and as such, never learn from the mistakes of the past? For anything to change we have to be aware of the problems - we aren't going to become aware of these problems if we only ever talk about 'happy things'. For there to be action there first has to be discussion. The reason you're able to live your comfortable middle class existence, free of starvation, chronic disease and war is because people were able to discuss and argue with each other to structure the relatively comfortable society you prosper from. That doesn't mean you should "bring [yourself] down to the worst level in the world", however in my opinion it does give you some responsibility to try and bring those at such low levels up to the same level of comfort we all enjoy.

It would have been :o/ We'll have to sort out a ride sometime soon.

Going back on topic for a minute, something that was quoted from several people last Thursday and I think is fairly poignant: "At 12:00 BST today, London and many around the world observed a two minute silence for the 48 people who died in the terrorist attacks on London on 7 July. During those two minutes, approximately 42 children worldwide died due to poverty. We are not going to let terrorists cause us to lose perspective."

While some of Steven King's stuff is quite enjoyable, he's not exactly a superior author to J.K. Rowling. If anything he's a bit crap, relying on a lot of cheap shots and crappy horror. Having said that, I really liked the Bachman books, but I still wouldn't class him as a particularly good (and certainly not superior) author. If you want a really good author you want to get into some Philip K Dick (every single thing he ever wrote is excellent), Orwell (although Orwell had a few duds, notably Burmese Days, but we can forgive him that for the utter brilliance of his other work), Heinlein (more miss than hit, but Starship Troopers and Citizen of the Galaxy are utterly fantastic works) or Silverberg (mostly for Dying Inside, which is a master work paralleled only by 1984). Sorry, sort of slipped into book geek mode there :)

After rolling my ankle again today, for what must be getting on for the thousandth time, I've decided it's definitely time to pick up some decent ankle support. I've been really pleased with every other piece of 661 protection I've bought, so I was thinking of picking up the 661 Race Brace Ankle (crc link). The only concern I have is how well these will fit with my Ribos, which are obviously quite a lot tighter than your average trainers. So, has anyone used these with tight fitting trials shoes? Did they fit underneath comfortably? Actually, generally how have people found this sort of support for trials riding? 661 normally seem to be pretty good about allowing freedom of movement, but I guess there's always got to be a comprimise between movement and protection...

You know, it's much easier to just say MDMA :) But yeah, stupid claim with obviously no basis in reality. Caffeine and taurine have completely different effects to MDMA (or any of the MD* chemicals found in pills). Infact, in the kind of quantities mentioned MDMA is probably a lot less damaging than Red Bull. I know I'd certainly feel more comfortable dropping a couple of pills than drinking something like 25 Red Bulls. A good example of how caffeine can be a lot worse for you than MDMA... I remember a specific night out a few years ago when a friend of mine was catching a plane early the next day, so instead of doing his usual handfuls of pills he had managed to get hold of a gram of pure caffeine. The state of him the next day was ridiculous. He was a million times more messy than everyone else, despite everyone else having done quite large numbers of pills. On top of that, he hadn't got much more effects than feeling really jittery and energetic all night (kind of like really dirty speed). It didn't make him any happier, it didn't make him want to dance and it didn't really make him have a very good night. Very bad idea. Caffeine is a pretty serious drug!

'Girlfriend' seems to about cover it... Or if you want to be more specific 'faithful, monogamous girlfriend'.

I'd say trials is easier to get into at a low level. It seems to me that with BMX you really need to have quite a lot of balls right from the start if you intend to actually achieve anything, whereas with trials it's quite easy to play around with a lot of slow tech stuff until you build some confidence. Although if you've got balls the size of watermelons I guess bmx could be more fun to start with as you can probably pull off things that feel a lot more impressive with less skills than you need to do something equally impressive on a trials bike.

I know it's probably far too short notice for anyone else to make it now, but just in case. I'm meeting up with matheprat from here tomorrow (sunday) afternoon for a bit of a ride. Going to be at the ruins by Perranporth airfield (which has been referred to as 'mecca' by several people on here) at about 13.00 tomorrow afternoon. It'd be great if a few other Cornish riders managed to make it :)

No, that would be offensive to black people because by using that as an insult you're insinuating that being black is an insulting thing to be. It's not insulting to the person you're actually talking to, because it's merely an incorrect statement. Of course they may be offended by your use of the word, but not by it's application to them! Although having said that it may be considered offensive if you use 'nigger', as that's not solely used to describe black people these days. It's kind of grown to cover anyone from a deprived group in society.

I'm not sure if that's still in reply to me? If so... by 'pipes' I meant the vertical lines seperating the items in the main menu. Too long using linux, I just automatically think of things in terms of shell commands :)

It's got a lot to do with history. That word in particular is rooted in the slave trade and so carries a lot of pretty dark connotations. Infact I think a lot of the problems with racism (at least white on black racism, which is traditionally the biggest problem) stem from the way black Africans were treated by the Europeans over the last 500 years or so. Conversely, the reason people don't react so much to black on white racism could largely be due to an undercurrent of guilt - something which is much less evident in the younger generation, who have mostly grown up after apartheid and all the horrors that came before it had become just another history lesson.

Just what I was going to say. I don't really see any reason for indented scroll bars, in my opinion things tend to look a lot neater when there's only the standard browser scroll bar. I have to agree on the menu as well, I'd be inclined to lose the centring and left align it. Changing the colour of the pipes either to a light grey to match the product menu or black would probably make it a little easier on the eye as well. Otherwise it all looks really good :) Kudos for failing gracefully when people try and break it with spurious _GET variables as well!

Tehe. But, that's not a square. It's a rectangle!

Not all. I reckon I'd be a much worse rider. These days there's no way TF interferes with my riding time, but it does offer me a much needed link to the wider trials world, as well as a wealth of inspiration and advice that helps me get inspired to actually try more stuff. In fact, if it weren't for TF I'd probably have given up riding by now.

There should be some sort of Windows install CD among all that; however, if it came from a large computer retailer the chances are the Windows CD it supplied will be tinkered with to install all sorts of random crap (at least, this always used to be the case). You're best bet to get a nice clean install is probably to find someone who has a 'pure' Windows cd kicking around they can lend you, or get on a p2p thing somewhere and download one. Of course, the cd supplied may have been a 'pure' Windows CD (not really sure how to tell without trying it, although the label often makes it obvious if it's going to install something other than just Windows), in which case it would be best to use that; or, you may be happy to have some random, manufacturer specific rubbish installed in exchange for the certainty you won't have to spend any time looking for drivers (unless you've changed any components since you bought the machine), in which case, you again may as well use the supplied CD.

I've been thinking about getting one of those at some point, but to be honest, I don't think I'd use it that much. It'd be more of a novelty item, or something to use when I run out of tobacco/rizlas. I think as much as anything, I enjoy the whole rigamarole of skinning up and smoking a J as much as the effect it has.

Indeed. I occasionally light up a rolly these days and then put out in disgust before I get half way through it. I've even been thinking about looking into some of these herbal smoking mixtures they sell in head shops so I don't have to use tobacco at all any more; even only smoking green I'm probably smoking on average about 10 roll ups worth of tobacco a week, which all adds up over time. Mind you, it's a drop in the water to the years I spent actually smoking :o/ Lies, damn lies and statistics :) While I'm not disagreeing that it's stupidly expensive (unless you smoke black market roll-ups, in which case it's probably cheaper than eating a few bars of chocolate a week), I don't think 1/3 of the average salary ties in with £1,000 - £2,000 a year (infact that's more like 5 - 10% of the average salary).

You know, I'm getting this strange sense of deja vu here.

It was a f**king ace weekend. I couldn't take my bike in the end and was sick about it almost from the moment we got there. I was watching for people I reckognised most of the time, but seeing as you weren't on bikes most of the time (I assume) it made it kind of difficult to tell if I spotted anyone. I'm pretty sure I was stood behind Simon and Porter at one point watching the end of the comp, but I was pretty stoned at the time, and not really up to tapping people on the shoulder and asking if they were someone I knew :o( Still, a great weekend. Next time I'll take my bike and get there early enough to find a spot to pitch our tent before it gets completely dark (taking a stupidly big tent didn't help matters much)!

I'd probably tighten up a few things on that a little bit. I'd change the two if statements to be one if/else that reads something like this: if( !isset($_GET['p']) || ($_GET['p] !== "sent")) { } else { } which more than anything should just make the page fail a little more gracefully if people try and enter spurious _GET variables. Also, I'd lose the quotation marks in these statements. They're not needed, and really should break things. Actually, I'd lose those two lines entirely. There's no reason to create two extra variables when you already have the information stored in perfectly usable variables. It's just wasting memory :)