My new(ish) bike!

I Need To Do More Exercise, So....

Well, there it is... I received a handy sum of money for my birthday back in April, and it's been safely ensconced in an envelope marked "Bike Fund" for the last couple of months, and then finally, the weather was right, no more excuses or delays, I rushed out and got myself an eBay super-bargain - as long as you don't count the van hire and petrol to collect it from Bristol, a round trip of some 350 miles... Because frankly I could have bought a new one for less - but where's the fun in that?

Since buying, I've realised I am not a good eBay buyer... I didn't ask about anything, I just knew I needed a bike and I was gonna buy one today... I arrived, said "hi", piled the bike into the van and drove off without more than a cursory glance at the thing. Unfortunately it's not actually as mint as it looked in the photo - there's some rust, and some wear and tear, the tyre valves look like they have been mucked about with, yep, I could have bought a new one for less - but where's the fun in that?

I definitely had to replace the saddle for something, how shall I put it, a little more capacious! I also noticed one of the pedals looked a bit knacked, and yesterday it decided to give up the ghost, so I've got a new, larger pair of those installed now too. I've only had the bike one week and I've realised I'm going to need a water bottle cage - wow... I could have bought a new one for less - but where's the fun in that?

I've managed to get as far as the seafront and back, although even the new and improved (huge) saddle can't claim to be exactly comfortable, and my legs we're trembling in shock for the rest of the day... It sounds like hard work, but actually, I've got a sneaking suspicion that there's a lot of fun to be had in this!

YouTube - sigh!

If you're going to force us to have the boring OneChannel format - don't pretend you're giving us a choice.

Didn't we have this last time with YouTube, forcing an unwanted redesign on everyone.

All the accounts I've seen using the OneChannel format look really dull and boring - and who wants an introductory video? To be able to show our content in a design that we choose, that's what we want. 

End rant.

The Pro Tube

Pretty much every day, for the last six years, I have spent a few minutes searching for a fresh video to feature on our front page. Sometimes it might be a new video from a recent tournament, other times it might be something instructive, sometimes it might not even feature American Pool, but some other discipline, or perhaps it might only have the most tenuous of links to our website's focus... But every day, I go through this ritual selection process - at weekends I try to feature the best live streams from tournaments all over the world, with a particular focus on European events and players.

Some videos don't make the grade because the recording quality isn't sufficiently good enough to grace our front page, other videos may be too rude, or not quite polished enough. Having said that, some videos may be very poor recording quality, but have such fascinating content that they simply have to be shown.

Over the years, I've repeated very little... One that does get a regular airing is Efren Reyes' magical shot from the Color of Money challenge - I'm sure everyone forgives me that  little indulgence. Another is a cartoon of Donald Duck explaining, in his own unmistakable way, the simplicity (and then the complexity) of his own personal diamond system - I just love it. 

Apart from those two videos - and the odd occasion when Pro9 is promoting a featured livestream, we have had a new video every day - that's over 2,000 videos!!!

Maximum Reportage!!!

Return of the Blog

I'm going to have another crack at the blog, and you're going to have to learn to take the rough with the smooth - today's post is definitely one of the rough ones, so here it is...

It always tickles me when one of our snooker articles receives 147 reads.

That's it!