Apparently he’s leaving in the future once the expenses debacle has quietened down as he wants to install his son into his constituency seat and thus keep the family on the gravy train……

IHN – cast your mind back a couple of months to the mass strikes caused by people thinking some Italians (I think) might get their jobs – that’s the kind of people the BNP can easily catch.

It’s almost like a protest vote – they’ll never get in where it counts on a General Election, but a low turnout Euro vote might be the place to show contempt for the current government.

“It’s not racist to oppose mass immigration and political correctness – it’s common sense!”

And to be fair, reading that sentence presumable out of context with the rest of the leaflet it isn’t a particularly right wing statement – I’d imagine a lot of people would agree with it. Try reading the BBC Have Your Say!

Think I read somewhere the new Dura Ace roadie stuff is gonna have a superlink type thing on so I’d be surprised if Shimano don’t start putting them on all of their chains soon….

sent him a request for the total with a note on saying i am willing to negotiate on postage

By emailing the guy haggling for the postage you’ve potentially opened yourself up to a get-out clause – if eBay see that message during a dispute then they could well come down on the side of the seller

Bomberman – it wouldn’t be fair if you started haggling with him about the postage cost. That £20 might be the cost to the other person asking the question for the seller jumping in his car and delivering it by hand (potentially).

I’d request an invoice, or paypal him with the £20 postage included as an additional charge or something. Paypal will refund you if it all kicks off so you’ll not lose out.

If you neg, strop, etc. then you’ve lost a bargain Orange amp. Just remember that’s the goal here. You did bid on it knowing the postage was £20, NOT £7 so drop that notion of getting it cheaper.

If he was really switched on he pretend to post the frame, it’ll get ‘lost’ in transit, then he’ll refund you money….

I complained about a bus driver on my commute. I got a grovelling letter back and they sent the driver back to bus-school. Which hopefully deprived the idiot of overtime and incurred the ridicule of his mates.

izakimak – Member

mt. The only way the police can tell if you are who you say you are with an id card is if it is a legal requirement to carry it at all times

izakimak – I believe there was a tiny little line in the terrorism act introduced a couple of years ago that said the police could arrest you on the spot if you could not prove who you were. So ‘technically’ they could go through the motions of finding out who you were now, without ID cards.

The Labore govt still flogging this deah horse still astounds me.

Mastiles – you’d think those clever SHADO people who managed to get a moonbase up and running, plus nice little spaceships would come up with a way of have more than one missile on their spaceship wouldn’t you…..?

I was lucky enough to have a floppy disk drive on my BBC Model B, my mates didn’t – they used to look in awe at the military lasers I had fitted.

I even managed to complete that strange mission where you have to shoot up all those dodgy aliens. Or did I just dream that bit up on the game.

Always liked kitting the old ship out and cruising off to a sun to blast away the crims and pirates.

Sigh.

Ye olde worlde road bikes used to have some kind of tyre scraper that fixed to the fork crown that skimmed the tyre and knocked glass etc. off before it became a puncture.

Can’t think of the correct technical term so can’t find an example on Google.

something similar to that “might” skim the mud off….

It’s BMX and mtbs that have different threads

You using SPDs on the road bike – mine creaked badly with my Specialized shoes – had to cut away a little of the tread around the cleat to cure it.

Do you now lose something not having a physical landline number – I seem to recall some companies don’t like it if you don’t, though I may be talking complete tosh as normal.

And think how much those 0870 numbers are too as they’re not normally included in any ‘inclusive’ minutes.

And I’m assuming when we say “we…” there are multiple of you, so what happens if one person goes out and wants to take the mobile with them?

Depnds what your company policy is. And whether they like you or not!

The ‘chat’ might be a frightener, but if they’ve gone to the bother to speak to you I’d expect at least a slapped wrist.

Yep, I’d go with MrSmiths suggestion to centre it body {margin:auto} should sort it.

And you’ve got an closing */ in your carousel.css (below #flash) that is throwing a warning in Firefox. And I’d suggest pulling the .js files into the head section if I was being picky…..

Think the slideshow needs some more obvious buttons for the slider, it’s not apparent that you can move them – many carousels have an auto function, maybe making it do one circle of the options would inform the user they could scroll.

I’m not keen on pulling the movies into the main page, personally I’d go off to a “movies” page but that’s personal and as long as the movies are only pulled in once the user clicks then it’s not really an overhead, it’s not as if the page is too heavy.

Nice page though. Looks good.

Lister – good to see Husker Du/Bob Mould/Grant Hart/Novamob get a mention. That’s about a quarter of my music collection, they certainly produced a lot of stuff over the years.

Can I add
American Music Club
Tindersticks
Death Cab for Cutie
Nada Surf
Mark Lanagan

to the mix….

At my old place the office along the way had Dick Dipper and Reg Chiken working in it.

Current place has a Pinki Cok and a Wayne Kerr.

I used streamline.net – think it was sommat like £2.50 a month, or £25 a year. Probably others that would do it as cheap, or not cheaper.

If you’ve no experience of writing webpages there are plenty of webby types hanging around on STW if you need a helpful hand doing stuff.

Road tyres make my 29er fairly rapid.

I’ve got flat bars and ergo bar ends, get a pretty decent position of road use, you can always pop your hands closer to the stem for that “aero” position.

Basically you’ve got a sports hybrid!

Should read some of the “Have Your Say” comments on the BBC website.

They normally start with “<smug mode>I’m a vegetarian so the swine flu isn’t going to affect me and yah boo sucks to you meateaters</smug mode>”

Sigh.

So if I’ve got this right…..

The reason why we’re in the doo doos now is because people have been borrowing madly and getting themselves into debt.

And the government have introduced an incentive for Joe Public who’s had an old banger now for a year or so to trade it in for a new car and presumably take out a fairly hefty loan for the other £6000+ he/she will need to finance it?

Are people who have old bangers genuinely going to go off an buy a new car?

Like Del says, probably lose the ability to upgrade much.

It’ll be more like laptop type components inside, usually pay a premium for ‘smallness’ if you need to replace due to failure, memory upgrades might be more expensive etc. etc. and prob means the processor is a little down on power but probably fine for day to day stuff.

Think the future will probably end up with a little black box in all cars by law. You crash or get pulled over then plod plugs into your box and gets your speed out. Either that or they connect it to GPS and automatically send you the fine….

I seem to remember some company (maybe Post Office) considering that for their vans now.

Missus has got a NC10, I really like it. Decent keyboard, screen is decent size. Decent for surfing and general work. Never really missed the hard drive, run USB drive most of the time.

Yep, if you mummies card doesn’t seem legit – maybe you’re trying to put the wrong billing address, card not in the UK etc. then they’d not take the booking.

Probably too late now, but ringing the customer services would probably have helped instead of slagging them off (for possibly not their problem…..).

I’d imagine with millions of credit card payments going through every month on their website they’d notice if they weren’t getting many bookings……

coffeeking – what we need is to all drive 1960s minis – I had one, driving at 30 was like 70mph in all other cars!

It is the volvo factor – if you feel safe and comfortable in their big heavy airbagged car then you’ll take risks that you may never do in a, say, little Fiat Panda.

As someone said, the best safety device might be a large pointy stick pointing at your chest from the driving wheel……

Hot_fiat – yeah, Newcastle is littered with 20mph limits. Sometimes its the extra little things on top that help.

They’ve just put 20mph zone into our estate. they’ve also tightened up the road junctions – before they were broad sweeping ones basically inviting people to keep moving and join the main road like sliproads – now it’s a 90 degree ‘turn’ which has done wonders for people actually stopping at the junctions.

Though it’s not all good news, there used to be little miniroundabouts everywhere to feed into the little roads off the main road – they acted like small speedbumps/chicanes whith the possibility someone might come out on you. They took them off, put some tiny speedbumps in (to allow the hourly bus service to smoothly plod around). Now the mummys in their X5s just plough through them doing 30 instead of 20. Sigh.

Nope Vinneyeh, you’ve lost me too – you can’t let pedestrians cross one way whilst allowing cars to potentially turn left/right into their path (how do you ‘hold’ car on a green light?

Stopping traffic flow to enable pedestrians to cross safely is pretty much the standard way up here. Sometime the pedestrians have to press the button on the lights for that to kick in so if no-one is there the cars can just do east/west, north/south until requested.

As Clubber says, just make sure it’s not a Campag one!

No let me guess, it was the referees fault? Or the wrong type of grass? Or some guys in the stadium weren’t cheering your team? Or they didn’t play enough “added” time for one of your divers to get into the penalty box?

Not the fact you fielded a bunch of teenagers?

Still, as it was Wembley all those Man U ‘fans’ didn’t have far to travel did they?

I’m quite sad to say it by Dr and the Medics were a great live band. Got dragged along by a couple of mates and thoroughly enjoyed it. They was some problem with the PA system halfway through, so they got the crowd to start voting what songs they wanted to listen to after it’d been sorted.

Saw them again at Newcastle Univ – the lead singer it pretty tall, always used to come onstage, do a great leap in the air and a big kick and start singing. Now the University stage had a really low air con duct or something above the stage. He jumped up and smacked this duct full on and landed in a heap on the floor. The band kept playing for a bit, give ’em their dues before he staggered back to his feet, bless him!

Was never that bothered by Pulp, but they were fantastic at Leeds Festival a couple of years ago.

Best gig, probably Husker Du – wall of sound with such intensity. Think they said “thank you” at the end, between songs was just feedback….

By the way 130mm isn’t standard mtb spacing – that’s a road hub spacing.

Though if it’s a steel frame you might be able to open it up to get a 135mm mtb hub in….

Yep, rear (160mm) mount placed on the front fork gives you a 180mm mount.

Could be worse, you could be awaiting some stuff from the Home Delivery Network.

Left Mrs Breathes laptop in a cardboard box beside the the front door last month. Amazon and Dabs must be losing so much business.

Don’t think there’s much difference in price for a front hub between XT and Hope (£20 maybe) but a big jump for the rear.

How about a compromise – XT rear and treat yourself to a Hope front so you have the 20mm option if requred?

I’m pretty sure the old style Deores would fit. Some of the new Shimano chainrings are different even though they are “4-bolt” style. Think I picked up some Hone ones on eBay cheap but found they didn’t fit my Raceface chainset annoyingly.

To be honest looking at the prices of the Deore chainrings on CRC, if you’re lashing out for three chainrings it might be better to actually just buy the Deore chainset!

Feel for you Shreck – my one day job over the weekend to pop out the old toilet and sink with a new replacment has already taken four days.

Fitting the sink/toilet back in is gonna be a piece of cake. It was the missus who decided as the toilet/sink were out why don’t we paint and fit some new flooring. Sigh. And to cap it all she doesn’t like the new paint colour even though she picked it. Sigh.

Sounds like you don’t need a new sink, just a pipe (or maybe a new waste fitting).

Trying KMC chain at the moment, they seem pretty decent.

Not tightening stem before you tighten up the SFN are you? Probably a silly question…..

I’ve got a pair of very comfy Pearl Izumi (Slice, I think) and some Assos ones (their ‘cheaper’ model). Both nice.

Think Cycling Plus have a bib-short review this month, IIRC the Assos and Cannondale LE Carbon came out favourably, though both about £115. Money well spend in my book!!!