I have a potted and thinking about it, not particularly successful history with bikes.. probably the most genuinely valued (at the time) was the Giant OCR I bought at Uni. An upgrade for the tatty 5-speed 501 racer I'd bought off a fellow student that had piqued my interest in road bikes, the new, ally OCR with its 3x8 gearing and budget STI shifters felt - if bottom-of-the-range - like pretty cutting edge tech.
The bike was really the first to indulge my love of cycling reasonable distances for the sake of it. I probably covered about 4-6k miles on it during my time at uni and then in latter years when I dipped back into the riding that I'd largely forsaken due to lack of geographical opportunity.
Retrospectively I can see it wasn't all a bed of roses - with very aggressive geometry that gave increasing amounts of head / neck pain until I finally twigged and swapped the bars and stem to reduce reach and increase stack. It also had a small, stiff, harsh frame that eventually succumbed to cracking at the seat tube / top tube junction thanks to Giant's cack idea to use a short plastic shim at the seatpost..
It served me pretty well but it's the last ally or Giant bike I'll ever buy; my advancing years and more descerning tastes now dictating more relaxed steel as the order of the day
EDIT: Dug out a photo from back in the day; from probably my first year or so of ownership outside the shed at the student hovel:
Below in its middling guise - many years after purchase; still sporting the silly-long stem and long-drop bars but also the replacement rims and (much nicer, Ultegra-level-that-I-wish-I'd-kept) shifters I got in replacement for those damaged after some stupid woman ran into me in her car..
