I make Amazon's top 1000!
I've been reviewing fiction for quite a while. I review books because, privately, I want to write them. So when I read a book, I try to analyse where the author succeeded and where the author failed, and in trying to analyse it I often write it down. It's a good exercise. It helps me to read with attention.
I used to have a little database system on this site which organised my review, and I may revive it one of these days; but while it's been down I've been posting the occasional review to Amazon — mostly, but not all, of books I've been impressed with.
And last night, browsing Amazon, I noticed that I've got the rank of 'Top 1000 reviewer'. It turns out to be absurdly easy to reach this rank; I've only posted 12 reviews. But I'm never the less pleased and not a little proud of my achievement.
Oh, I completely give up!
Since 2001 I've used a standard stylesheet for my home page which has the navigation panel fixed to the right hand side of the browser so it doesn't scroll with the page but is always available. It's a nice trick. When I wrote this stylesheet, there were two browsers available which rendered it correctly. One was Konqueror, and the other was a late beta for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.
That beta was really very, very good indeed. It correctly dealt with all the interesting test stylesheets I threw at it. So I was really frustrated and annoyed when the final version of Internet Explorer 6 — the one which actually got released — had a very broken CSS engine.
Now, three years later, most of the available browsers render my stylesheet correctly. Mozilla does, and consequently, so of course does Netscape, which uses Mozilla's rendering engine. Konqueror does, and consequently so does Safari, which uses Konqueror's rendering engine. Opera, naturally, does. But one browser notably does not: Internet Explorer.
#1 Road C
Dreaming
It was my partner who first drew my attention to Terry Dolan's bicycles. My partner inherited my sister's Raleigh Royale when my sister died; it's a thoroughly nice bike quite apart from the sentimental attachment, but it bears the scars of twenty two years and she was thinking of having it professionally repainted, so she went trawling round websites looking for people who could make a good job of repainting a precious bicycle.
Terry Dolan, among other things, paints bicycles. But he chiefly paints bicycles because he makes bicycles, and he makes some very nice bicycles indeed. The first time I looked at his site my attention was caught by his carbon monocoque frames, which look almost organic with their flowing curves. And ever since I'd had a sort of distant fantasy of having a new road bike built on one of those frames.
A weirdly enjoyable afternoon
I was doing a bit of fettling on my new bike yesterday evening, and my neighbour came round and asked me for advice on fettling his bike.
It was a mess. Both deraileur cables had frayed under the bottom bracket, and the front one had snapped entirely. The deraileurs were caked in dirt and not working. The brakes weren't working. And the tyres were utterly perished — the worst I've ever seen on a bike. The frame had minor cosmetic rust everywhere, but no obvious major rust. He's a very good neighbour; I owe him a lot of favours.
So this afternoon I collected it and started to strip it, dismantling and cleaning virtually everything (I didn't strip the bottom bracket — it felt very good and given the time I had I thought best to leave alone).
Review: Cannondale Jekyll 700
In the beginning: Lust and Longing
Long, long time ago, I can still remember when... I walked into Alan Dent's shop in Lancaster, and saw something beautiful. I knew about mountain bikes, of course; I even had one (and had shedloads of fun on it). Mountain bikes were crude, heavy gas pipe things with straight bars, wide gear ranges, tandem-style brakes, huge, knobbly tyres, and garish paint jobs. But what I saw that day was something different. Yes, it was a mountain bike, but in place of that crude, heavy gas pipe frame was an elegant confection of aluminium tubes, so cleanly welded you couldn't see the joins. In place of the garish paint job was plain, simple colour — a slightly muted green. In place of fancy graphics was a simple makers name in a simple bold sans-serif font: cannondale. It oozed quality. It begged to be ridden. But — it cost an arm and a leg, and I needed all mine for riding.
In due course, as happens in Lancaster, both my bikes — my hill bike and my beautiful custom framed road bike — were stolen, and I went down to Alan's shop to get myself a new one. The Cannondales were still there and I still lusted after one, but there was no way I could afford one and I walked out with a Scott Sawtooth, a huge, heavy, ungainly gas pipe contraption in swamp-monster-vomit green with purple and shocking pink banding — but at a third of the price.