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With the Tour De France in full swing I thought I'd post some details about my current road bike.

The original bike that I bought in July 2007 in Osaka, Japan was a 2008 model Specialized Roubaix Elite Compact. The image I grabbed from the Specialized website is the exact same colour of my bike (I would have gone for something more interesting looking but it was hard enough finding a frame in my size in Japan, let alone being picky about colour).

I bought her from Yoshito Yamamoto at Cycle Station Speed for about AU$2,000, roughly $1k less than the equivalent price here in Australia at the time (and subsequently got hit with $350-odd in duty by Australian Customs on the way home.. damnit!).

5000kms on Melbourne roads later my drive train was pretty worn out and the spokes on both wheels were becoming quite a pain (either frequently loosening or siezing up completely so that I couldn't adjust them to re-true the wheels).

I recently upgraded the wheels to Easton EA90 SL for approx AU$500 (big ups to ebay). At 1532 grams they're a lot lighter than my old Specialized wheels. They're similar to Easton's flagship EA90 SLX wheelset except that they have some extra steel spokes, which is great for someone looking for light but durable wheels. I'm not sure if it's just psychological, but they feel really responsive when accelerating.

I've also started upgrading my groupset from Shimano 105 to Dura-Ace. So far I've done the crankset, bottom bracket, rear cassette, chain-rings, and chain. The bottom bracket has had a ceramic bearing upgrade. Not sure if I can feel the difference with the ceramic bearnings, but overall it's definitely smoother than with my worn out old 105 components.

Here's a couple of recent pictures post-upgrade:

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The Fold recently finished their debut album "A Kind of Lightening", and they're launching it Saturday 19th July at Noise Bar in Brunswick. I play trumpet on track 5 of the album ("six in the morning"), and I'll be playing with them on a bunch of tracks at the launch. You can listen to streaming snippets of the album (including the section of track 5 that I'm on) here.

The Fold are also going to be interviewed about the album on RRR's Local and/or General radio program on Monday 14 July, 2008 @ 8pm.

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Something interesting..

I was chatting to Mike Culver, Amazon Web Services "Evangelist", after his talk on AWS here in Melbourne the other day. I'd gone up to tell him how great it was that Amazon had implemented their web services with such a well-designed REST interface (I'm quite obsessed with REST at the moment). He made the comment that as far as he was concerned, REST had "won the war" against other architectures such as SOAP, REST-RPC, etc..

I don't think the battle is over yet but it's great to hear that coming from the mouth of someone at one of the biggest players in the Web Service field. REST ftw!

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Why do we web developers spend so many hours making web pages work for broken browsers like Internet Explorer? Aside from the technical challenge it's a complete waste of our collective energy, and every time you implement a work-around you're giving people one less reason to ditch the non-standards-compliant browser. Ok, if you're building a site for someone else they'll probably stipulate that you need to make the site as accessible as possible, so go ahead and apply the hacks for them. But if it's your own site, what's your excuse?

Firefox is obviously my browser of choice but there's also plenty of other alternatives to Internet Explorer. As of today, anyone viewing this site in Internet Explorer will be presented with a message across the top of the site encouraging them to ditch IE for a browser that supports the Open Web.

For those interested in implementing a similar scheme on their wordpress blogs, the code I have used is shown below (a modified version of Markus Opolka's Anti IE Bar wordpress plugin)

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