On a related note, what’s the deal with Propain bikes’ UK shipping costs being EUR189?

Canyon charges under £40 to ship a bike to the UK. YT charges about £50.

Have Propain always charged that much to ship a bike here, or is this also a Brexit thing?

Anyone know?

The only thing about this that puzzles me is why you seem to trust some randoms on the internet more than your accountant!

Nah, I said a couple of replies down the thread that I trust my accountant and am not concerned about legality. It was more about whether there was anything else I need to look out for.

if I were buying an expensive mountain bike in this way I’d make sure I could easily pull together a list of work trips I’d made on it, should the need arise.

Yep, I’d absolutely planned to do that.

I type slower than everyone else…

Ha! Yeah, I’m not concerned about legality – I trust my (large and reputable) accounting firm.

Was just wondering if there was anything specific to look out for. I guess not!

If only bikes were in stock. But that’s a different thread entirely…

Other use of the cycle, for instance pleasure use or use by members of the employee’s family will not disqualify the exemption provided that the other use is not the main use of the bicycle.

Seems to be legit as per this government guidance, providing the ‘main use’ is work related, which it will be. I’d estimate it would be used 2-3 times per week for work stuff, then 1-2 times per week for non-work stuff.

I turn away a bunch of clients wanting VERY similar work (2-3 page website with a contact form, etc), because all they really need at this stage of their business is something that would cost them a couple of quid a month, rather than paying a developer a few days’ worth of dev and setup time.

This is why I’m not a millionaire.

To get up and running quickly, my advice would be to buy a domain name (from anywhere, really) then create an account at WordPress.com or at Squarespace and use a fully managed/hosted CMS service like that for a while.

These services have spent a ton of time making the process as easy and intuitive as possible so virtually anyone can setup a simple website – and there’s plenty of support available if you need it. They offer a huge range of templates and themes for styling a site (you pay slightly more for premium themes), and most offer e-commerce too, so taking payments from customers would also be possible using these services.

Then, once the business is properly up and running and growing, you can start to figure out whether you need any bespoke functionality or customised automation, either on your website or as part of your business processes, or even as a native mobile app. If so, this is the point you should speak to a developer, who will take care of developing the functionality you need, and moving you off the managed service and onto bespoke infrastructure.

Of course, if you don’t want to touch any of it, then you can skip the managed stuff and work with a dev, but it will be significantly more expensive than a couple of quid a month.

Yep, definitely North East. Always said it… and still do regularly to my kids!

I’ve used bikedelivery.co.uk before with no problems.

The hardest thing here will be finding a bike box big enough.

I kick myself that I didn’t keep the box that my fatbike was delivered in a few years ago – biggest/strongest cardboard box I’ve ever seen!

I shipped a bike from the North East to the south coast just before Christmas with https://www.bikedelivery.co.uk/

Hardest part was getting hold of a bike box (which wasn’t that hard, really).

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Barry Bell (@surfmag) on Jun 13, 2020 at 1:45pm PDT

Just to hijack this thread (ish), I’m about to do something similar. We’ve got a loft room that runs from the front to the back of the house, and is about half the width of the total roof space. The other half of the roof space was converted before we moved in and contains a bedroom and the second floor stairwell.

This ‘big’ loft room needs a couple of Velux style windows putting in (one front, one back) before I can make a start on converting it into office/workspace. I’m going to attempt to do most of the work myself (apart from the windows). It’s partly done already and has electrics… all that’s really left is a bit of framing around the eaves to create some storage, and insulation to the roof with something to finish/face it.

What’s a ballpark cost for supply and fit of Velux windows these days? Anyone had one done recently?

Seems a bit of an odd aspect to focus on

In isolation, yeah, I’m with you. But this is just a fraction of what’s going on. There’s a whole bunch of research and other work happening. This survey is just about furlough and people’s experiences of it. The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme won’t end until the 30th June and may well be extended beyond that, so even in the current situation there’s still lots of scope for organisations to improve these furlough experiences however they can. And if there ever is another similar situation – even if it’s just a second wave of infections later in the year that shut the country down and send employees home again – then businesses might be a little more ready than they were two months ago in terms of managing that employee experience.

There are also conversations about whether working from home will become more prevalent in the future, about making more effective use of tech in the workplace, about work related travel… all springing out of this. The list is huge, and it’s all new ground. To almost everyone.

However, the overarching purpose to all this (at least for us and our field of expertise) is people comms, and the relationship between employee and employer… and how we can help organisations be better at it.

Ok, apologies for spamming the thread… this is my last one – promise! :o)

There’s some really good stuff written out over the 4 or 5 pages here about people’s furlough experiences, and it would be great to get this lot into a more usable format so we can dig into the data properly.

I’ve checked and the prize for the draw is a £50 Amazon voucher, and we could do with as many responses as poss before Friday.

The survey is here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/S5NQ6FC

Please share with any colleagues who are also furloughed too, if you’re comfortable with that.

Thanks all.

@bentandbroken I should probably add that this is part of a wider CSR type project where we’re taking the lead in establishing a working group for our clients and for the people/HR sector as a whole with a view to trying to figure out a playbook for businesses and organisations to better deal with this kind of thing now, and in the future.

@bentandbroken Sure – there’s bit more info at the survey link, but we’re at welovechatter.com

In a nutshell we help businesses communicate with their people, and we’re doing quite a bit of research around the whole coronavirus/furlough situation at the minute because it really is uncharted territory for pretty much everyone. No-one has ever been through this before, but we’re hearing lots of anecdotes around good/bad experiences from people who are furloughed, so we’re just trying to galvanise these into something tangible.

As for the prize, I have no idea as I’m not managing it. I’ll check and come back. Hold tight. :o)

On a related note, we’re running a survey at work to track people’s experiences of being furloughed (we’re a people/HR comms business). If you have a spare 5 minutes (ha!) this morning, it would be really useful if you were able to tell us how it’s going for you.

It’s all anonymous, and there’s also a prize draw too.

Survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/S5NQ6FC

Thanks!

Hmmm, I live in Whitley Bay and know someone called Henderson.

But they’re from Scotland.

Also no ‘Westlea’ Avenue but there is a ‘Westley’.

Our three year old didnt quite get the concept of the government

be thankful that you don’t have a sixteen year old daughter

I have a 3 year old daughter and a 16 year old daughter in the house.

FEEL MY PAIN.

The STW forum seems to be scraping urls and attempting to inject affiliate links into ’em. And it’s bOrking that Nokia link in the process.

Here it is in plain text: https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_gb/nokia-800-tough

Or just Google for ‘Nokia 800 Tough’

Torches? I’ve had one of these for YEARS… it’s not super powerful, but it is seemingly indesctructable: Gerber Recon.

Phones? I’m seriously thinking of swapping my iPhone for one of these (but I probably won’t because I’m way too deep in the Apple ecosystem): Nokia 800 Tough.

Camping and Survival Sportives are getting expensive these days ; )

Yeah, I applied and had a place this year… then priced the rest of it up, including kit that I didn’t already have, and it turned out I’d have been spending more than the cost of a family holiday!

No way was I getting that signed off.

I think in this position your parents have no chance

There’s no question of whether anyone’s going to contest it. No-one’s miffed, or expecting any kind of payout. I just found the situation as described in my OP a bit weird – but then I’ve had very little experience of family bereavements… all my grandparents lived into their late 90’s.

OP, is it possible your Great Uncle asked your mum whether she wanted to be in the will, and she refused as she didn’t need the money (and didn’t want to appear to be in it for the wrong reason?)

Yep, that’s absolutely possible, too. My wife actually suggested exactly this earlier this evening.

Sounds like your folks were in a similar position to mine.

@poly – that all makes sense and sounds perfectly rational. You’ve assumed/described my mum’s financial position pretty accurately, and I hadn’t really considered the situation in this way. Thanks.

Whoa. This blew up.

I was a bit hesitant to post this because I thought it might make me sound bitter that nothing was coming in my (or my mum’s) direction. That’s certainly not the case, and I know for sure that’s not the case for my mum either. She doesn’t need an inheritance at all, and was certainly not expecting one. She’s a good person.

I guess my point was that if it was me who was dying and I had family ‘supporting’ me then I like to think I’d want to return that help in whatever form I could.

I’m not sure I could live with myself knowing that my family is giving up a lot of time and energy looking after me, and that I’m going to thank them by giving everything I’ve got to… a priest.

Dunno. Just trying to figure out what he might have been thinking. Hence the rhetorical question.

Maybe he did write the will years ago and just never got round to changing it. Simple as that.

Guess we’ll never know.

I don’t want to perpetuate any sexist myths

I’d never want to do this either, but anecdotally, when it’s just been blokes (or close mates including women) around a table I can’t ever remember spending anything more than a few seconds agreeing how much everyone will put in.

Again, anecdotally, for me at least, it’s always been a different story when there’s more women than men around the table, and I’ve found it especially frustrating in work related situations. In my last role, our team went out for meals occasionally, and I was usually one of just two blokes at a table of 9-10 people, and often the only bloke.

There genuinely were times when it took way longer to divvy up the bill than it did to order, wait for, and eat the food.

Aye, sounds like we’re facing a lot of the same struggles!

We’re also planning to heat our pool too, which adds a whole new dimension to it.

Who’d have thought that getting planning permission for a swimming pool on a site that was built to be a swimming pool, and which already contains a swimming pool, would be so difficult. :o)

Good luck to you, too.

@DavidB – sounds interesting. Which pool?

We’ve been hammering away at this project since 2012: https://www.tynemouthoutdoorpool.com

We’re close to getting planning permission for the site… then there’s just the small matter of finding about £6m quid to complete the project.

Anyway, there’s a camera aimed at our pool 24/7, although no-one swims in it right now for obvious reasons. And it’s actually pointing out of someone’s living room window so it does use an on-site internet connection. However, there’s some info about the camera at http://www.tynemouth.org.uk/about which may or may not be useful to you.

Oh, and at the time of writing this it’s all black… because, well, it’s night time, innit.

So for those that actively (or are electively in the future) minimising their exposure beyond what they think effects them or their ‘sphere of influence’ – would there be grounds do you think that you should also refrain from voting given you are electively naive/ignorant?

Well a general election isn’t something that sneaks up on you – you generally have a bit of notice. :o)

I’d like to think that I’m intelligent enough to make a voting decision based on whatever information is available to me at the time (or throughout an election campaign period), and right now I don’t feel that I need to spend the next 5 years before the next general election closely following politics so that I can make an informed choice at the voting booth.

I also believe that there’s a fair bit of ideology involved in voting too, as in there’s at least one party I’ll never vote for, regardless of how much news I’ve watched/not watched!

But that’s another discussion for another day. Or maybe not, in my case.

Apparently, my new year’s resolution is to be your wife. :oD

Up until the election result last month, I spent a huge (and I mean HUGE) chunk of my day reading news online (both domestic and US based) listening to R4, with either CNN or BBC News 24 on in the background while I worked. It was the first thing I did in the morning, and the last thing I did before I went to sleep.

There was so much shit happening around the world that I thought I needed to stay on top of, that I was becoming obsessive about it. A lot of it was making me angry too, and there was seemingly very little that I could personally do to change it.

So, mid-December, I decided I needed to change all that for my own mental health. So, I just stopped doing reading/watching/listening. Cold turkey style.

Since then I’ve not followed any news at all. I rarely watched any live TV, and still don’t. I did listen to Spotify a lot, but I’ve now supplemented that with 6 Music as a replacement for CNN/BBC24, and this is probably now where I get all my ‘news’, albeit a pretty watered-down bulletin every 30 mins or so.

For the record, I got rid of my Facebook account a couple of years ago (as in actually, fully deleted it and everything it contained), and I don’t really use any other social media – so I’m not exposed to anything manipulative in that respect.

In just under a month of doing this, I’ve found that I’m thinking about bikes and surfing and travel a hell of a lot more (three things I used to do a lot before I had kids)… and the other part of my plan is to find more time to get out and do more of all three in earnest this year – starting this week, in fact.

I feel like a proper weight has been lifted. I’m just generally more relaxed. I’m happier. And I’m probably waaay nicer to be around, too.

I recommend it.

You’ll struggle to block native mobile apps via a domain name. For example, it’s highly unlikely that the Snapchat app will be communicating with the Snapchat servers at an address that starts with ‘snapchat.com/’. It could be ‘api.snapchat.com/’, or most likely something completely different, and the app may be communicating with more than one service too, so you’ll need to know all of these addresses to be able to block it in entirety. Multiply this by the number of apps you want to block, and well… you get the picture.

Just turn off the WiFi. Or change the password.

However, that’s futile, as you can bypass your WiFi network with a 4G signal.

Which really leaves the only other feasible option… wrapping your entire house in electromagnetic mesh to create a giant Faraday cage.

That should do it.

What colour do you want it to be?

I think it would look good in orange, which means you could use one of these…

Holy, holy, shit.

58 pairs

..and that was *after* a clear out?!

Are some of these answers really genuine?

At any one time, I usually only have:

1x pair of Quiksilver flip-flops which, to be fair, I wear most of the year (these get replaced when necessary).
1x pair of trail runners from Decathlon which cover running/biking/anything else that requires trainers (these get replaced when necessary).
1x pair of Converse for some work stuff, client meetings, and, erm… weddings (these get replaced when necessary although I sometimes replace them earlier if I need something extra smart :o) ).
1x pair of bombproof North Face winter boots which only come out a few times a year (which I don’t think will ever need to be replaced).

I honestly can’t see any reason for owning more than that.

@whitestone – ah, cheers… I’ll check that out in detail tonight.

@whitestone – yeah, but I’ve only signed up for the 66km race, mainly as an intro to this kind of stuff with a view to doing more of it in future. I’ve got plenty of non-racing beach and mud experience with the fatbike but little in the way of snow, so I didn’t want to jump in too deep (pardon the pun).

I’m really, really not convinced I’m going to get this bike into that Planet X bag.

Also @brant – I’m curious… did you have a shit time riding on those tyres/rims, or trying to get those tyres/rims into the bike box?

@davewalsh – might be tricky putting anything other than fat tyres on those rims. They’re 100mm!

Other problem is the rear hub spacing is 197mm – that’s the width of most bags and boxes alone.

@bedmaker – right, that sounds promising. I’ve got 4.8” tyres on 100mm rims so I guess similar to your setup?

Can you share a link to that bag at all?

@brant – was it originally a box for a fatbike?

I packed a 26” 150mm travel full suss in a standard sized box today and that just barely fit. There’s no way my fattie including 2x 100mm rims and tyres is going in one of those – dropped forks or not! :oD

@tomhoward – yeah, I’m kicking myself that I got rid of the box my fatbike came in. It was by far the sturdiest bike box I’ve ever seen. I’ve not had much luck finding another so far.

I’m expecting the total weight of bike and box to be max 24-25kg. The airline allows 23kg for a boxed bike at a fixed price – anything over that is charged per excess kg.