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The first bicycle wheels were from a horse drawn cart, made of wood with a metal band round the bicycle rim, very hard and very uncomfortable to ride. Then a man called Dunlop (Scottish) invented the pneumatic tire, this along with Macadam (another Scot) inventing the tar road surface made cycling a lot more comfortable.

The bicycle rim, like the bicycle frame hasn’t changed much in design, its still round and always will be. From the first wooden rims the next were made of steel, then alloy and now if you can afford it, carbon. Of all bicycle parts the bicycle rim can make a big difference to how your bike handles. First the weight of your rim affects your sprinting and climbing as the weight will low you down, for a long, flat effort the weight isn’t so important as when you get the wheels rolling the weight can help to keep them going. The shape of the rim can be important also, a flat rim is best for climbing as aerodynamics are not so important on a hill, a deep section, aero, rim will help you cut through the air, but in a cross wind could cause you handling problems.

Bicycle Rims Materials

The different materials used for rims are very important also, steel is heavy and if damaged can be difficult to pull back into shape, but because its so strong it is quite difficult to bend in the first place and steel is cheaper than all the other materials. Alloy is probably the most popular rim, it can be made in any shape and profile, flat or aero, but not too deep as it would then weigh too much, most deep section rims are of a alloy braking section nearest the tire which is then mounted to a carbon deep section for lightness and aerodynamics and a very beautiful looking bicycle rim. As with most things if money is no problem you can go for the best, this would be an all carbon rim, strong and very light, but there are a few problems with these rims, first they don’t brake so well in wet conditions and you must use special brake blocks for carbon and they can be expensive, also the rim has to be perfectly round and not have any bulges in the rim wall as this will make braking quite erratic, carbon is a difficult material to work with and must be well looked after.

Types Of Rim To Consider

There are also two types of rim to consider and this depends on which kind of tire you want to use, first there are tubular tires these are glued on to the bicycle rim, cost more and are difficult to repair after a puncture, but for racing they feel and ride wonderfully. Clincher tires have improved a lot recently and are nearly as good as tubulars for performance and are easily repairable and more reasonably priced. Most manufacturers make all styles in both systems.

So which should I buy? Not an easy answer, as there is so much to choose from, years ago you went to your local bike shop, picked out which hubs, spokes and rims you wanted and he would build your wheels, but now most rim makers also manufacture there own wheel sets, Mavic, Shimano and Campagnolo are probably the best known, check out there web-sites for all there new goodies, there are other brands and if you go to your local cycle shop or look in the bike magazines you’ll find them. There is a lot to choose form, but they are all round.
A. Caxton is a succesful freelance author who contributes adding reviews for http://www.bike-cycling-reviews.com. A free online magazine that features reviews on mountain and road bike components, bicycle clothes and accessories. Read other interesting bike wheels and bike rims at his site.

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To maintain one’s balance is most vital skill in mountain biking. A scrupulous sense of balance is imperative to head anywhere in Trails. There are various different types of terrains in trails; you have to be able to uphold your balance in all terrains. Each of your moves in a trail depends on your ability to preserve your balance. Luckily, you can practice balancing anywhere and anytime. All you need is certain exercises that are specifically aimed at improving your balance.

Here are a few such exercises…

* Start at a very slight slope, point your bike downwards and move as slowly as possible.

* Make a figure ‘8′, progressing in a constantly tauter and slower formation.

* Paint an enormously long line on a flat surface and slowly roll over it.

A regular practice of the above mentioned exercises would give would perk up your balance to a great deal bestowing you a confidence, which would be a great help when learning to maintain balance in trails.

Here are a few tips to help you with balancing while mountain biking…

1. The Platform: Maintaining your feet level, i.e., at 3 and 9 o’clock position is your platform position. You are well balanced in platform position and it is the best position while biking unless you have to traverse a tight corner. So try to be in the position as long as plausible.

2. Once you’re in a platform position, the position of the rest of your body parts relevant to balancing should be: hands gripping the handlebars (but not very tightly), your back should be bent at an angle of 45 degrees, your elbows bent at an angle of 90 degrees, while your knees at 30-50 degrees. Your head should be straight, eyes looking ahead and your chin parallel to top tube.

3. The foot that you leave in the frontward position while descend a steep hill or while coasting is your ‘good foot.’ While balancing, either maintain a platform position or keep your ‘good foot’ ahead.

4. Turning your foot away from the side you have your forward foot is called ‘Trackstanding.’ For instance, in case you have your left foot forward, turn your wheel clockwise. Once you have acquired this position, with your weight centered over the bike, tilt slightly and make pedal adjustments. Doing so would maintain your center of gravity and you will be a balanced position. This technique is useful in flat surfaces.

5. If you are to balance on uneven surfaces, ‘Rocking’ can help you. This is done by weight shifts and/or raising the front and back wheels in a series, making some alterations to maintain your bike balanced; all alterations that you do have to be subtle.

6. Be seated unless you are coursing a rough terrain.

7. Do not grip the handlebar very tight, especially when clearing obstacles, climbing or descending. You should be able to drum your fingers.

8. While climbing, have your weight rearwards, and to maintain the traction of front wheel, lean to shift some weight to your front wheel (this aspect is explained in details in chapter 12).

9. Just focus on where you have to go, not anywhere, you do not have to go.

10. Restore your balance soon. In case you wait long, probably you will not be able to do it afterward and possibly end up falling.

About the Author

This article is an excert from a new downloadable ebook. For more information see http://www.terrainskills.com/

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Are you like thousands of other people who are looking forward to lower their mortgage payment?

After a few years of your monthly payment increasing it becomes more beneficial to look for a new lender to help assist you in lowering the payment.

Taking advantage of a remortgage is one of the easiest and most beneficial ways of learning how to lower your monthly mortgage payment.

Each lender wants your business, so they will work hard to find a way to help you lower your payment.

By lowering your monthly payment you are giving yourself the advantage of either paying off your mortgage faster or saving more money in your savings account. Either way it is a big benefit to you.

How would you like to save money each month on your mortgage? Having extra money in your pocket is a great way to help put more money into savings and different investments.

That is why you need to consider finding ways to lowering your payment.

One of the easiest ways to do this is through a remortgage. By investing with a new lender, you can take advantage of the current specials that they are offering.

Many companies will offer specials just for people who are searching for a new loan on their current home.

Taking advantage of these specials is one of the best ways to help you lower your payments. This is a great way to help you get the best value on your mortgage.

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The marital aid market has registered an extensive increase in revenue since the seventies. This is part of the marital aid revolution and a vast benefit to mankind. Sex aids are a lovely way to increase passion into your sex life, sexual toys might well help you come to orgasm and sex aids regularly put a cheeky grin on your face.

Whichever astonishing sex toy you decide to get this Summer let your needs be your guide. If you are into rough sex then go and purchase yourself a whip, if you are into romantic sex then go and get yourself some oil. Keep your eyes open and see where it guides you.

The most famous sexual toys on the sex market have got to be the vibrating marital aids. The aforementioned marvellous sexual toys have been all around for decades and you have doubtless seen one in your local sex toy retailer. Vibrating sex aids come in a variety of girths and colours, you can get vibrators in mini size for your bedside table right up to thirteen inches. The wonder of a vibrating marital aid is the breathtaking vibration that it gives off, this vibration is the big source of pleasure for gals and will usually be changed in vibration to suit the female. Sexy aids are breathtaking. For those who want double the pleaseure try sex with Double Ended Dildos.

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Launch of Flashation Web Menu Builder Flashation Web Menu Builder is a new, easy-to-use software package that enables users to create animated Flash buttons and menus for websites. It was launched into the Flash tool market on April 15, 2003. Flashation (www.flashation.com) is the first dedicated tool to offer offline creation of impressive and professional animated Flash buttons and entire navigation menus for websites.

Flashation offers exceptional Flash buttons with a wonderful after-glow effect. Users can create their personalized buttons and menus by simply changing the settings of the templates, such as colors, text, hyperlinks and animation. They can use as little or many buttons in horizontal, vertical or even diagonal rows as they like, and the buttons can easily be made to match the style and color scheme of a website. Users’ settings are automatically saved in Flashation and the updating of a design is simple.

Nowadays 99% of web users worldwide are able to view Flash elements. More and more websites are making use of Flash but still very few people know how to use Flash. Flashation will help people who want to make an impact with their website to draw and impress their visitors. Users do not need any programming, design or Flash skills to be able to create web buttons with Flashation.

Flashation Web Menu Builder is compatible with all HTML editors and Macromedia Flash, so it is easy to incorporate the buttons into websites or Flash projects. File sizes are kept extremely low: just 4 to 8 KB for an entire navigation menu.

A unique feature of Flashation is the possibility to create an unlimited number of different layouts for navigation menus. It does not necessarily have to be a neat row of buttons from left to right or top to bottom. By using anywhere from one to as many as 250 buttons and arranging them in any configuration over many lines, horizontally, vertically and diagonally, a personalized layout can be formed.

The price for this tool has been set at US$29,95 but, as a special introductory offer, Flashation Web Menu Builder now sells for just US$19,95 for a limited time only.

Flashation already offers more than 50 unique button templates, and more will be added to the software in future upgrades. People who buy Flashation now will automatically receive upgrades with more buttons and expanded features, up to the next major version, for free.

More information and samples of web menus created with the tool are available at the website. A demo version of Flashation Web Menu Builder can be downloaded free of charge from the website at www.flashation.com.

Note to editors (not for publication): Need more information about Flashation Web Menu Builder and its features, benefits and possibilities? Contact the makers of Flashation at support@flashation.com.

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XHTML first came along in December of 2000. It has since then grown in popularity substantially but has yet made the final leap. Although XHTML has some problems being viewed in Internet Explorer, it is still of great use and is very powerful.

Unlike HTML, all XHTML have to have a closing tag. Be it an img or a p, it has to end. This is great practice for beginners and also helps even the most advanced markup writer keep up on his work. Also, if you are looking to impress your buddies or if you are looking to start your own web design business, XHTML is a good place to start. It makes your source code clean and readable, the most important things when looking for a professional.

Not only that, it has other benefits as well. With XML becoming ever so popular, XHTML comes right along with it.

XML has been gaining ground ever since the start of RSS and will only grow as the weeks and months go on. When Firefox announced the support of live bookmarks in 1.0 the frenzy just began.

Since the beginning of 2004, Yahoo, MSN and many other news organizations have came out with RSS support. Plus, with the rise of blogs XHTML and XML have come to the forefront of today’s technology.

With Internet Explorer getting heat from Firefox with Opera (who also has RSS support) holding onto a small percentage, they are looking at possibly using RSS support to help hold down the Mozillians.

So in retrospect, XHTML shows professionalism and is the future of the World Wide Web. So why not stay ahead of the game and switch over now It is worth your time, believe me.

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I’m a freelance programmer and somehow I managed to get clients, speak with them, and generate leads for years without a live help system. To be honest, I had put in bids for a “live” help system several times, and I wasn’t aware there were free options out there.

Well, early last week I went hunting for something that would be my help desk and give me live support. I had some pretty strict requirements because I am not always sitting in front of my computer. I needed it to work like my present contact system and have live help built right in. I finally found something that works for me.

It’s called helpcenterlive and if you do a search for it, you will find it in a heart beat. I was a little disappointed at first because even though it was free, I kept closing the window by mistake. Today I started going through all of the features, and I actually went to their website and roamed through their forum. I found out that they have an application that sits on your desktop and works just like the browser.

Now the important thing here is that what is it doing for my business?

My business is exploding. I have gotten 15 small copy writing jobs in a matter of days just because they can contact me instantly. In dollar signs this free script has paid for itself quite a few thousand times over. Because of the types of service my website provides, there really isn’t a way for my clients to just “checkout,” most of them need to speak with me and I need to speak with them to give them an accurate quote. They expect someone providing a service like mine to be professional and a live help desk is really helping me do that for my clients.

I’m sure the fact that my “presence” on-line is now much more professional I will get even more clients on a regular basis because they can contact me easily and my competition might take 3 days to get back to them.

Will it work for your site? Probably, if your selling anything it’s nice to be able to talk with the folks who are your customers. It leads to more referrals and additional work. If your not putting customer service at the top of your priorities your missing out on the best part of being a webmaster. Security.

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Shared web hosting lets thousands of people run a website for a reasonable cost, but it has some drawbacks. With hundreds of site being hosted on one server, that server’s resources can get overloaded – resulting in poor performance on your website.

If you’ve outgrown shared hosting or are looking for a way to have more control over your server, you should consider Virtual Private Server hosting.

A VPS is a single physical server that is running special software that divides it into several virtual servers. Each server acts as if it is a completely self-contained machine, with no bearing on any of the other virtual servers running on that same system.

Each VPS can be configured however you want and can even be running different operating systems. You can install any special software you might need for your website, without having any effect on the other people on the server.

One of the biggest advantages of a VPS is you get root level administrator access to your server. You can install and delete any software you want, set permissions, create special accounts or anything else an administrator can do.

A VPS is also more secure that shared hosting. On a shared server, all the websites are running on the same operating system so if the server gets hacked, it will affect all the sites on it.

If a VPS gets hacked, it won’t have any bearing on the other virtual servers on the same machine.

The disadvantages of a VPS are closely related to the advantages. Because you have ultimate control over your server, it can be dangerous if you are not familiar with how to manage a server.

You can delete files, change permissions, fail to update security issues and more if you’re not careful. If you aren’t familiar with server administration you would either need to spend some time learning how to do it or hire someone to do it for you.

If you’re considering VPS hosting, find out how the server resources are divided, how many virtual servers are on each physcial server, whether you can upgrade your plan with minimal hassle and what your operating system choices are.

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The Bed and Breakfast "OCEANO MARE" is a pre-800’s building which has recently been renovated. It is located in Sestiere Castello, which is also know as "Venician’s Venice", which is a quiet setting in the historical centre. It is a short distance from Piazza San Marco, Ponte di Rialto, Arsenale and Biennale d’Arte Contemporanea.
There are three rooms and a welcoming breakfast room on the ground floor. It is furnished in a sophisticated and elegant style with parquet flooring and "seminato veneziano", typical of this region.
The love of the sea is our main inspiration behind this Venice Bed and Breakfast which is shown in the artwork of each room.

"OCEANO MARE" offers double and twin rooms. The furnishing is comfortable and elegant with parquet flooring and cast iron beds.
Each Venice Double Room includes an ensuite bathroom, satellite TV, a minibar, hairdryer and air conditioning.
It is possible to request up to two extra beds.

Children under 3 years are free of charge. All prices include a breakfast buffet.

"OCEANO MARE" is located in Calle Donà (Sestiere Castello quarter). It is an ideal Accommodation in Venice to spend a relaxing holiday in "Venician’s Venice". Set in the middle of the historical centre, it is a 10 minute walk from Piazza San Marco and from Ponte di Rialto. It is also only a short distance from Arsenale and Biennale d’Arte Contemporanea.

How to find us:

- by TRAIN: from S. Lucia station in Venice, take the "vaporetto" n. 52 to Celestia, or the "vaporetto" n. 41 to Arsenale.
Night arrivals: take the "vaporetto" Linea N to S. Zaccaria.

- by CAR: from Piazzale Roma take the "vaporetto" n. 52 to Celestia, or the "vaporetto" n. 41 to Arsenale.
Night arrivals: take the "vaporetto" Linea N to S. Zaccaria.

- by PLANE: from the airport "Marco Polo", take the Linea Rossa (red line) of the AliLaguna (ferry service) to Arsenale (a 1 hour journey).
Or take the shuttle bus ATVO (every 30 minutes) to Piazzale Roma (20 minutes journey). From here follow directions stated in "by Car".

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