Ben Swales

Matt and Woody came over to Madrid for some beer and tapas and to rescue me from six months no riding. Here's the video I made of the weekend. It's 12minutes long, 92MB Matt's on the Simtra, Woody the Czar and I'm riding an Echo Lite.

haha - the 2nd picture's actually the first chronologically, i thought it looked better to put them in that order action-wise. Benito fived that sidehop on his last lap, knocking out the marker on his way down. he then kept trying to nail the sidehop, hence the photo with no flag. here's a link to some more, better photos: Willi's photos

I went to watch the 1st round of the UCI Spanish championship in San Martín de Valdeiglesias yesterday, here's the photos of the day that I took. They're mostly (except three) unedited, and mostly of Benito and Dani, since I'm not a photographer and couldn't be bothered to take many. There were some other people taking proper photos and I'll edit with a link to their photos and the full results when one becomes available. It was a miserable day - it started out pouring with rain and quite windy, so everyone was cold and wet from the start. Later in the day the rain stopped, leaving all five sections slick with mud. The wind and the cold remained however, making for an uncomfortable and challenging day for all the riders. There was some spectacular riding on display, and everyone involved put in a maximum effort to make it a brilliant day despite the conditions. Benito came back from a seemingly bad start and a bad fall on his first lap to finish 1st in Elite, Comas finished 2nd with Carles Diaz in 3rd. The lad in the silver helmet finished (senior?) on 5 points to win, which considering how wet, muddy and cold it was, is an incredible feat (Benito finished elite with 50+ points). Photos Willi's photos

Raúl's bikes! nice. had a play on Raúl's the other day, very nice, but the brakes are "the wrong way round"....

just booked tickets to see steve coogan live in manchester for my girlfriend's birthday. "Back of the net!"

nice and relaxing matt. second half was a bit slow, but i liked it over all. look out for matt in a feature length european release coming soon!

or pretty good when you consider that his first language is french. be thankful it's in english at all! EDIT: also, it's grammAr nice interview, saved me from 10 minutes of boredom at work!

old school (shit) camera too by the looks of things....

word. I liked it Mike, thought it was pretty good (bit chemical brothers-y at times?). I've not heard the original, so I can't really comment much, but as someone's already said, it does sound a bit tinny sometimes. I'm not too keen on the synths, but they sound like they're probably in the original. good work though, I'm keeping it! Edit: are there any vocals in the original?

Just recently, my computer has stopped letting me put streaming videos (youtube, trialstube etc.) on full screen. I used to be able to, but a couple of weeks ago the screen started just turning black whenever i tried to put stuff on full screen. I haven't changed any settings to my knowledge, it just started happening. It's really frustrating, so if anyone's got any ideas, I'd love to hear them!

very nice as usual mike - good work! prefer it post-30minutes, but that's just down to personal taste.

of course. that would be wonderful.

i'm having a simlar problem with my dv camera - it's a sony dcr-hc26 handy cam, and i can't get my computer to recognise it. it is a new laptop, and on the old one i used a cardbus firewire connection, without installing any drivers, but there isn't a port for the cardbus on my new laptop, nor a firewire port, and the USB ports don't pick it up - anyone got any advice for me?

i think i'd be a vigilante. i'd find it hard to justify killing anyone, but if i "had to choose", doing it in the name of (or be it without the condonement (is that a word of) justice appeals more than 'just for kicks' or because i'm mental and think killing prostitutes is doing society a service. that said, i could be mental and THINK i was being a vigilante for the cause of justice...ooh it's a minefield. on another note - this is one of my favourite films of all time. i hardly know anyone who's even seen it, let alone likes it! 3 people in one thread, that's just too much! shame norman reedus couldn't....

look up the ruby kid on myspace. he's rather good.

try phi-life cypher (similar in style to foreign beggars), the pharcyde, dilated peoples, the herbaliser all pretty good hip hop groups.

i'm not accusing any one person of being narrow minded, nor asking anyone to prove that they're not, just pointing out that anyone who says that they dislike any one genre of music, such as metal or indie isn't seein the bigger picture. if you like hardcore (for example), you like bands that have been influenced by and evolved from punk and metal, as i'm sure you will agree, so i suppose there must be some metal bands that you'll like. i'm not trying to single anyone out, just trying to point out that music has too rich and entwined a history to be able to say that you don't like ANY music said to be of a cetain genre, and that i don't understand how anyone could claim to be able to do so.

i see what you're saying, but then these days, with acts like gallows and the arctic monkeys collaborating with lethal bizzle, linkin park with Jay-Z, and Dangermouse's Grey Album, there is that cross over with those genres aswell - admittedly they're not branching out much, and maybe not very imaginatively, but at least they are. unfortunately, music is and always has been one of those subjects that provokes massive differences of opinion, and of course, everyone has different tastes. there's another debate that we could get into here, about the idea of taste, and the intrinsic ideas of good and bad tastes, but that's really getting sidetracked.

word. i don't unserstand how people can claim to only like one genre of music these days - firstly, there's so much crossover these days, how do you know what genre's what (without inventing umpteen sub-genres)? and do you not get bored? I started off listening to 70's punk rock (although the first music i can remember is my Dad listening to Talking Heads while i played legos) and swore i didn't need to listen to anything else, but you can't - it's natural progression - in my case (somewhat simplified for this post), i got into reggae through the clash, ska and dub through reggae, electro, hip-hop and dance through dub...and there's SO much more that i like and have discovered since i first started listening to music properly. that's what i love about music, that no matter how much you have, how much you claim to know, there's ALWAYS more to hear and more to learn. so being so narrow minded as to say that metal's shit, or indie's rubbish is an attitude that i just can't understand. admittedly, the run of the mill chart 'indie' that we hear today does seem to be carbon copy pap (for example, i'm not singling out that type of music - i could say the same about a lot of today's 'metal', 'punk' or any other genre or sub-genre of music) but indie music didn't start in 2005, just as avenged sevenfold aren't the first ever metal band. all you have to do is delve a little deeper, which for me is one of the most pleasurable things about music, and you'll realise that there's so much more to be discovered. i couldn't (and wouldn't even dare to try to) name all the genres of music i like, or even that i don't like. regardless of whether i think metallica are shit, i love black sabbath. i might hate the pidgeon detectives, but i think sonic youth are f**king brilliant. my brother only likes the music they play on the radio - i wind him up that he doesn't really 'like music' because he doesn't know anything about any bands or genres or histories, but he does of course; he knows all the words and tunes to all the current hits, most of which i have no idea about, and who am i to judge?

killer as usual mike - loved it!! liked the intro a lot better than the last one (the one with the guy preaching about house music), it was ace.

i'll be back at sheffield again (can't stay away!) - doing a masters in screen translation at the uni. can't wait to get back!!

that looks like so much fun! want to swap it for a mod?

it's screamadelica (the original album) on ebay. i think the remixes album was available as a free download only, but all the sites i've found that had it available no longer exist so wondered if anyone else knew of somewhere it was available. guess it'll have to be john mack's idea then...(cheers by the way)

haha - cheers tomm, it wasn't the original i was after it´s almost impossible (well, so far it IS impossible) to find this album!!

I'm trying to find a primal scream remixes album called screamixadelica that came out around 2005, does anyone know where it's available