Professional cycling has it’s work cut out to improve its image that’s been tarnished through rampant drug and illegal supplement abuse. Not a day goes by as I sift through my Cycling News feed that there isn’t some mention of a pro cyclist that is coming off probation, . Lance, personally, was a huge disappointment.

I still enjoy cycling as a sport and will continue to keep up with the pro-cycling races albeit with a slight scepticism when the winners step up to the podium.

My Trek Madone that was stolen-then-recovered is destined for a complete make-over, new wheels, new parts – this is going to be a side-project of mine to completely rebuild it. Should be fun!

When my original keyboard loss some functionality (it had a missing key on the number pad and both Windows keys stopped working) after being in the hands of my 3 year old, it was time to search for a replacement.

I came across Long Zheng's article about the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop, I thought it looked pretty cool, and having been a previous owner of a Microsoft ergo keyboard I thought I'd give it another try.

The desktop consists of the keyboard, mouse, an external number pad, and a "raiser" that makes the keyboard sit a bit higher. All input devices come with Duracell batteries. Oddly, the keyboard takes two AAA batteries whilst the mouse takes two AA batteries - I thought it would have been the other way around as this makes the mouse a bit heavier on the desk and thus restricts movement.

The standout of the package is most definitely the keyboard, after using my Razer Lycos with the soft rubber keys, it's going to take some time to get use to the more typical finish on the Sculpt keyboard. The travel is pretty short on the keys but it feels really good and responsive, my favourite keyboard still being the one on my Lenovo X1 Carbon. They sure know how to put a great keyboard on their laptops!

The mouse is a different story, whilst the movement is precise its physical size is massive - my current breed of mice is the Logitech Anywhere MX which is quite small so it's a big difference to the Sculpt mouse. After about 30 minutes of use my wrist started to hurt, and apparently there's a right way to hold it as depicted in one of the booklets you get with it. I'm going to need to give it more time to get comfortable with it. Here’s a size comparison between the two mice.

I inserted the USB receiver (yep, it's not Bluetooth, it's Bluetrack!) to the back USB port on my PC that sits below my desk, and both mouse and keyboard had absolutely no problems finding it to get them working. Great stuff!

Finally, would I recommend this? Absolutely - but give the mouse a try to see if it is to your liking, especially if you're not use to larger mice.

It goes without saying that I really haven't been keeping this site updated as frequently as I would have hoped to but here's some tidbits on what's new around here.

For the last six years I've been hosting this site and others with Media Temple (mt) and after hearing that they've been acquired by GoDaddy I decided that it's time to move my site. I had previously migrated domains over to Hover (I use NetRegistry for .au domains) from GoDaddy. See a theme here?

The website move is slightly more involved as I was also using Media Temple to host my DNS records. I ended up moving my DNS to Amazon Route 53, whilst not free, it has some great tools and it really isn't that expensive - unless this domain gets a ridiculous amount of DNS queries.

By day I'm a .NET developer but I've actually never hosted my own sites on .NET, this had to change! After visiting TechEd this year I decided to learn more about Windows Azure. The blogs of Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie were great to get up to speed on the how and what things need to be done. That said, if you use Visual Studio it's surprisingly easy to publish a site straight from the IDE - things get even easier if you're using Visual Studio 2013!

A few hoops later I had migrated my sites and emails over to Azure - actually, I'm using a hosted Exchange service for my emails that's linked to my Azure Active Directory. Of course this all meant that I had to swap out blog engines but I'll save that for a future post.