migrant|roo

The World's First Race Across the Internet is over! It took an extra huge (have you had enough hyperbole yet?) effort from Mattias, Dezza, Igor, Greg and Mike and I over the past couple of weeks to pull this one out of the bag, and it's so hugely satisfying that people enjoyed it so much. FFS, I got 74 comments on a single post! All the well wishes and thanks is really appreciated by us all - it was brilliant watching the buzz around the race during the past week and I'm immensely proud to have been involved in building such a unique and fun piece of work.

Oh - have you checked to see if you made the top 500 on the Balloonacy Leaderboard?

So, with the past 3 months being so busy I can't believe it's the summer!

This weekend just gone I've finally got back into the kitchen, cooking:

• Asparagus with german smoked ham and chili and balsamic glaze
• Linguine with chorizo, king prawns, red onion, pepper and basil chili oil
• Barbecued mackrel with roasted Mediterranean vegetables

I've got heaps of nice photos of them, I'll be posting them on Friday or Saturday, hopefully whilst out in the garden in the sunshine drinking a cold one.

In the meantime, here are a couple of photos I've taken recently:

Welcome balloon racers! I work for POKE and I was lucky enough to be part of a very talented team that created the Balloon Race Across the Internet. It's been a long and in part difficult road, but I for one am so proud of what we've managed to achieve.

I love the idea of people dropping onto here, so please say hello! If you leave the name of your balloon I'll even give you a boost :)

I'm now the proud owner of a Specialized Sirrus bike!

My bike got stolen from the station a few weeks ago, which coincided nicely with Poke joining Evans' very noble Ride2Work scheme, meaning I got a cool 35% off the price :)

Here she is:

I am so, so impressed! The ride is extremely fast, and the bike itself is so much lighter than I thought it would be. Riding on London's shitty potholed roads is a bit, ahem, jarring.. but I'm going to be using this mostly out around the countryside near Milton Keynes, so i'm not really bothered.

If you're looking for a fast, racey bike but that isn't actually a racer, look no further. At £400 you get a lot of quality for your money, and a bike that should cope really well with any kind of road riding.

It's something I've been talking about for a while, and today i've actually done it - I've permanently removed myself from Facebook.

I'd never really taken to it, preferring to use lots of the tried and tested methods to keep in touch with people I like, and found it was mostly useful for having inane twice-yearly "conversations" with people I intentionally stopped speaking to.