Outside bet – take off/refit your cleats with a dab of grease on each interface…..

We flew – Bristol to Belfast City is about an hour. Drive from airport to cottage was 1:10 direct, or 1:20 along the quiet, scenic and pot-hole free coast road….. If you have to fly to the other ‘Belfast’ airport, it’s just off the M’way on the North of the city, so shave 10/15 minutes off that. Ferries – no idea….. wife couldn’t face the idea of a multi-hour crossing entertaining a 3 yr old, so a quick plane trip and sleep (for Jr) in the hire car on the way there.

M_F – have a look here: http://www.antrimglenscottages.com/

We had the house at the top, the in-laws had the one further down in the same plot. With half an eye on your twins, I would say that if the weather is fine (which is was for us) it’s brilliant. We did wonder what we’d do with the little-un if it had been a wash-out without driving >30 mins in any direction. If I was doing it again with the kids out of ‘summer’, might have plumped for something either further up or down the coast line.

Furtehr to M_F’s comment, recently went to Antrim coast of NI in the Easter hols. Cottage (literally) on the beach was easily less than 1/2 the price of equivalent Cornish prices, even including flight/car hire. Stunning place, loads to do and no-one around.

http://www.bosinver.co.uk

Could be carbon, yes – you’ll need carbon-specific pads to get any bite. No idea about life as not used myself, but the smell after hard braking is distinctive…..

Have concluded that my flymo is rubbish and am looking to change it this year, although there is nothing actually wrong with it. It seems to lightly waft any grass placed under it, at best, even with a freshly sharpened blade…. and what it does cut, it sprays about the rest of the garden with clippings (despite an internal basket) with the vigour it should reserve to actually cut the lawn better in the first place!!!!!

I’m liking cben.net….. everyday’s a school day……

Free – not sure…. I usually pick up bits and bobs from the support side of the Solidworks site (though we’ve dropped support for a while, so that’s dried up), and have paid real-cash-money for the specific models (I think a surface map of the statue of Eros was ~£70 – don’t ask…..).

Maybe try some of the specialist forums for a favour – eng-tips.com is usually pretty active/helpful.

Free, or do you mind paying?

Have a word with Madison (I think) anyway – they were extremely good when I needed to replace mine.

Domain or P2P network? Trying to map the drive, or just connect through ‘My network places’? Permissions been set correctly on the share?

Thanks Mr A – anodized…. swoons…..

There is a chrome plating place aroud the corner from my office, and I have contemplated a fully plated frame…. though, apart from the practicalities, it just might look a little ‘too much’ 😆

Super job – thanks. Pics of the results, perchance?? 😉

EDIT: …and did they do the shot blasting as well, or did you provide the bare frame to them prep’ed and masked and they simply put the colour on?

Yep, that’s them though you need to mask carefully and they are getting more expensive these days

All good info – any idea of what current costs might be?

wwaswas – I’ll get the whole thing blasted anyway as the extra guides will mess up the currently messed up finish anyway. I know a man locally that will acid dip the frame for a fiver if I do that myself, but that’s another operation to organise….

Clubber – thought as much, opening in the market perhaps? 😉 ABC are in Nailsea, correct?

I’d still be looking to buy the trimmer and borrow/hire a chainsaw to do the first cut back to the size you want: a £60 chainsaw is going to be pretty ropey quality made from parts you won’t be able to get if they break, the bar length is going to be very short compared to a trimmer (will depend on the size of the hedge if this is too much of an issue) and you WILL need saftey kit for using the c/s like a trimmer (much more likely you will be working with it at face level to start with) and there is much less chance of chopping off a limb with a hedge trimmer.

Good point – I recall there was a thread about hiring a chainsaw a while back….. can’t remember the outcome. I’m sure you could hire SOMETHING for the w/e that would do the job for £60 though!

Surely you’re better off hiring one for a w/e? You’ll only need to cut it back once with the chainsaw and then can maintain it with a trimmer?

Clubber – no, by the time I got there, there were 2×43’s and a 44 and that was it. They did have quite a few pairs on sale though, but seemed to be mostly road and/or women-specific IIRC.

If you’re local to Bristol, Bike had some of last years Shimano M183 for £70-something, which I thought weas pretty good. I picked up a pair of 43’s and I BELIEVE there was another pair of 43’s and a 44 there as well. That was about 10 days ago…..

If your Kwik Fit is anything like mine, they won’t have put any gas sealant in the joints before doing up the clamps (TBH, this fairly standard practise). Until carbon deposits fill the inevitable gaps, the exhaust system will be blowing slightly, which does affect the mpg numbers until it seals itself….. though the drop you’re seeing does sound large.

…without faffing about with cold setting

Why not a longer axle and spacers – same job, less effort no?

Oooookkkkkaaaaayyyyyy………… 😯

Alright – fair enough. The fact that it exists at all is good enough for me 😉

For sale?!?! Why – any particular reason? That build was inspiration for my latest dandy-horse……

Maybe get in touch with these guys – http://www.carboncyclerepairs.co.uk/

Running a spare 9spd Ultegra chain on mine – seems fine.

Got a Cambridge Audio jukebox thing a while ago. Has a CD player built in, which you cna play from or just use to rip to internal HDD as well. Plug a small LCD PC screen into it for naviagtion and it’s actually pretty usable. With a USB Wi-Fi dongle I can stream from network discs as well. Still buy CD’s (I like the physical artifact) – rip once and then off they go to the attic. Free-ed up loads of space.

On the downside, the CA software is a bit clunky and seems to take an age to fire up, and, TBH I’ve not had chance to use it as much as perhaps I might – perhaps that is telling.

Thinking aloud, if you get it to tell you the equations of the trend lines, can you not solve for X? Or put the two equations into the sheet and use Goalseek to do the solving for X – plug X back into either equ and have a coordinate (plug into other equation as well to confirm you have the correct intersect if the equations may predict multiple intersepts).

I could care less

<nods furiously in agreement>

A guy at work tried this last year (can’t remeber which airport it was – probably Gatwick) and tried to get a holiday, or a flight and wing it, in the hope of doing it on the cheap. In the end he came home as no-one was prepared to do a deal on either – in the case of the airlines, it appeared that if you didn’t pay as-near-to-the-full-price-as-made-no-difference you were more hastle to them than flying with an empty seat.

Thoughts? – check how many pairs of shoes she has….. 😉

Not your way (in fact about as far down the other end of the country as it’s possible to be), but my cousin is a “tree surgeon” who does a lot of contract work for his local council hedge clearing and alike. They shred all the small stuff and leave the bigger stuff in 4ft lengths by the side of the road. Without any advertising, the piles are usually gone within a few days – everyone’s happy 😉

Wish I could afford Abaqus

This is now the ‘biggy’. The cost of extra tokens to make use of, say, another 8 cpus is going to be pretty big, even compared to the software costs of going HPC Server route….. hence I imagine this is why a basic clustering capability has implimented direct as no-one would bother if they had to buy the token AND additonal software to run the cluster. Toys – what are you using?

When I have a minute (which won’t be anytime soon) I’ll give it a go, just spreading the tokens we have between two machines to check it works.

News from Simulia – the latest version of Abaqus supports clusters directly using internal parallelisation of the code and the free MS HPC MPI pack, which gets installed by default when Abaqus is installed on a 64bit systems. I ‘just’ have to turn on and set the MPI parameters for our machines at the master node and it should rock-and-roll (subject to all the usual infrastructure limitations and software frustrations).

That gets me up and running for next to no effort – the others in the software deveopment team can go an poke it! 😉

Thanks all!

Just tried a Charge Spoon for the first time…. and wished I’d tried it years ago. As above though, it’s a very personal thing.

2012?!?! Hmm…..

Yeah, saw that article in CW under the headline of “105 Di2” or somesuch. It did seem a bit of a non-story as all they did was buy the electronic DA Di2 bits and sub those into an existing 105 transmission. Bit if a non-story really.

It is intersting, but…. it’s part of larger IT infrastructure review for our company of 15, I’m the only one interested in attepting clustering (for the moment – though that will no doubt changewhen management sees the bill for new hardware as the alternative, compared to using the machines we have!) and the only reason for the questions at the moment is to see if any issues relating to clustering in the future affect out immediate decisions about hardware and software. Looks strongly like we could build a cluster as and when it’s needed (within reason), without impacting the rest of the busniess to any great extent….. hence, with that information in hand it may be put on the back burner for a while.

Thanks for all the thoughts though – it’s been genuinely useful. If we take it further I’ll report back.