Red… it must be red…. red is the fastest colour…. FACT. :-)

Houston Rockin Robins

Makes mental note for the next trip……

This may help:

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/things-to-do-in-san-antonio-tx

San An was actually very nice (thanks all who recommended the river walk!). Going back in a few months, so may try NASA this time or head over the Austin for a w/e…

My commute is ~13 miles each way – as they’ve ^^^ said, it’s basically a case of getting used to it physically, and getting used to it mentally, in that you won’t be able to ride it full on, both ways every day. Find out what works best for you food/drink wise and sleep as much as you can (mat. leave accepted…).

My insurers (underwitten by Lloyds) wanted to see the HETAS certificate – I am unsure if it was a requirement, but I mentioned to my broker we were having one fitted…. he suggested checking with them…. they were pretty clued up what the regs were and said if I sent them a copy of the HETAS documentation then no probs. Didn’t have the conversation as to what they would want to see without HETAS, so can’t really speculate further as to whether regs sign off would be enough.

All good stuff chaps – thanks. Feel free to contribute further – I feel sure I shall looking at this in more detail int eh near future as the more I look at it the more holes and questions I find….

Everything, up that last sentence is relevant and needs to be acted on. I suspect the business will only see:

It costs money though and usually involves a lot of someone’s time to set-up right and often impacts the usability for the end-user

Edit: Kona_TC – The CPNI link in that link you posted is a (very detailed) good starter for the issues to consider. Light bedtime reading…..

somouk – nail —> head. We are pretty slack, relying on people ‘not to be stupid’, but a prevalence of pen drives, drop-box, anonymous ftp, etc means that this isn’t much of a policy. When the director who raised this has no idea of the issues, what might be involved and the implications, and in the same breath says ‘don’t make it complex’ you have some handle on how much of a headache this will be.

scuttler – it’s not so much losing our data, but the implications of us losing confidential multinational data to one of their competitors that I worry about. The conversation would very quickly make us look like idiots (Them: ‘Show me your data security policy’, Us: ‘ Show you our what now?’)

Also, there is the issue that I’m not sure we have the skills to identify what the risk levels are for a particular medium (i.e. – how much of a risk is Dropbox, or Google Drive?) and not missing any obvious points of attack/data loss….. hence a free toolkit or template would be a handy starting point. I accept that a lot of this experience is hard won, so it may simply be a case of ‘getting someone in’ for advice.

Do a lot of drill bit/mud motor/directional drilling/drill pipe/packer/subs/etc design and stress analysis – only done/seen hands on drilling in a lab environment/test wells, so Black Gold has been brilliant for seeing how the kit is (ab)used out in the field ;-)

Yeah, looks like a freewheel. By the power of Google…

http://www.retrobike.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=150112

I built my own system in the end – bought a 12V solar panel, a charge controller for a street light and a 12V SLA battery with suitable capacity for my needs from EBay. Solar panel sits on the roof, the charger controller is a doddle to connect (6 connections to the panel, battery and load device, a light in this case) – happily runs the light in the shed, an AA/AAA battery charger, radio, mobile charger etc etc though voltage droppers, again from Ebay for a few quid each.

I do while commuting or on the road bike

+1

In true STW style, I’ve not read the article…. but I was sat on an advisory panel for an engineering dept. at Russell group University the other day and was told that extra curricular activities can count as part of the candidates UCAS points – e.g grade whatever piano is equiv to X UCAS points and can be included as part of the students total. This means that the University can make points offers much higher than could be achieved from exam grades alone and they use these extra curricular points as a first-cut guide to the student much more than the personal statements. Not saying it’s right/wrong, but they are oversubscribed by ~20:1….

Yeah, saw those – one option is to just buy that wheelset – they tick all the boxes, except possibly:

– The weights look a touch lardy (I may be being harsh here, esp with 135mm ISO disc hubs)
– Would prefer centrelock hubs, but that’s not a deal-breaker.

I’ve got a set of hubs with shot rims though, which is why it would be (initially) cheaper just to get the rims, but they do seem to be OEM only with the newer product lines.

EDIT: Actually, I am being harsh- they’re about 1/2 lb lighter than the SpeedCity wheels that I’m currently using (based on catalogue weights)!

Final bump, then I promise I’ll drop it! ;-)

This is less than a mile off the Weston junction of the M5 (and critically, in the opposite direction to Weston!): http://www.puxton.co.uk/ Indoor/outdoor play and a decent size cafe…

Bump for the afternoon crowd…..

NZ?

I ran a shimano mtb cable disc on my CX. the cable needed adjusting (for pad wear) more often, like every 6 weeks instead of 12 – not a big deal really

Did the same thing here before getting Road BB7’s – you have to keep the pads trimmed super close to the rotor, and keep doing it, to stop them feeling baggy. The down side of this is they feel a little digital and lack feel, but it was OK.

Actually, thinking about this a little more, I have had Gatorskins do do as you describe but have hapilly carried on until the tread surface died, so I may just be scare-mongering ;-)

First thing – check your brake blocks aren’t riding over the top of the rim sidewall (either through wear or poor alignment) and contacting/wearing the carcass of the tyre when the brakes are applied.

These guys http://stchrome.co.uk/ were very patient with me when I was contemplating having a full frame chromed a while back….. They aren’t cycling specific, but do a lot of classic car/bike restoration work so may be able to help.

Go to youtube and find the clip of Hirosaka winning the worlds with the first long wheelbase CAT at Romsey in ’87 (was it??)…. then go to something like http://www.eurooffroadseries.com/ or rcracing.tv and compare and contrast. Bonkers-nuts…

I’ve got a complete, original, Frog in bits at my parents somewhere…

Mate of mine, who I used to race with has, started collecting older RC buggies from our era – his garage has an ever growing collection of various CAT’s, Optima/Optima Mids and Tamiya buggies (he’s particularly fond of a mint Bigwig he’s just bought). Always a hoot to go round there and thrash a couple of them, esp against the newer brushless stuff and marvel at how fast we thought a 17-double motor was ;-)

I can highly recommend Start8 [ and ModernMix (not tried it) ] from StarDock to restore the Windows 7 feel and help save your sanity

This – $5, apparently, is the price of sanity…..

I built my own system in the end – bought a 12V solar panel, a charge controller for a street light and a 12V SLA battery with suitable capacity for my needs from EBay. Solar panel sits on the roof, the charger controller is a doddle to connect (6 connections to the panel, battery and load device) – happily runs a light on the shed, an AA/AAA battery charger, radio, mobile charger etc etc though voltage droppers, again from Ebay for a few quid each.

Yes, but I stuck it out (all 4 years in the end) and treated it as a-means-to-an-end – didn’t get drawn into the academic posturing/politics as I knew I was getting out and into industry once it was done. It was just a way of making me more employable in the job I wanted (which it did).

If i did it again i’d put all my nice stuff in storage, live/sleep in a room and go all out on the house.

We did it this way (before kids mind – not sure I’d do it the same way now….) – There was a 3 or 4 month period when there was just a hob and sink standing in an empty shell downstairs (no ceilings, no floor coverings, plaster back to blocks where necessary, materials piled and sheeted in the middel of each room ready to start the ‘re-birth’), similar upstairs (just sink/bog/shower tray in the bathroom)… except for one room, which served as bedroom/dining room/lounge/kitchen. Happy days ;-)

Miniature steam turbines

…..Coming to a BMW road car near you (possibly) soon (well, sometime, if they can get ot to work).

Stoner’s numbers sound about right – think I ended up/got away with 292mm on both sides of an LX dynamo disc hub, 3 cross on an Open Pro.

Surely, wearing sunnies that don’t offer UV protection would be no worse than wearing no sunglasses at all?

I was rooting for you, Rocky-style, all the way, through all 9 pages, until this…. so close…. ;-)

Fortunately all good inside the box.

Last parcel I sent with them, the box didn’t even survive, let alone the stuff inside. Never again.

Bump for the pre-BH Friday slackers….

Our youngest also struggled with travel cots – in the end, sorted it by buying a piece of foam cut to size to fit snugly in the bottom so it approx matched the feel of her matress….. in fact now she’s grown out of the travel cot, she just sleeps on a piece of the same (but now larger) foam if we go away now.

I’m onto my second bottle of White Lightning Clean Ride, which I really like – but exclusively for summer use. It does what it says on the tin bottle, but the fact it’s not oil base means (obviously) the chain starts to rust when it rains if I’m not on top of a clean/dry/WD40/dry/re-lube routine after every wet outing.

Synology 212j is just about in budget – pleased by mine. Easier to set up and manage than I expected, which was a bonus ;-)

It’s human nature to only recall the bad stuff, not the good.

That may well be true, but if there’s no bad stuff to recall…..

we could pledge to ride courteously, stick to the highway code and smile and wave at every opportunity to paint cyclists in a better light.

That’s just crazy talk you loon – you’re gonna get flamed to death by flames for that nonsense about the highway code to start with! ;-)

The really bizarre thing of course is that the actual peak output of a good horse has been measured at close to 15hp. 1hp is what an average working horse in Stevenson’s time could produce all day

True, but that was the beauty of heat engines, in that (provided you could fuel it and it was reliable) you could run it at peak power all day. The horse gets tired, bless. The fuel thing was the issue with early steam engines – <1% thermal efficiency takes a lot of coal to produce anything meaningful.

I’d prob do it slightly differently – Bristol/Bath cycle path until half way, then break North on to the Yate link. Back roads from Yate area to Alveston and then on to M48 bridge. Avoids lots of hills out of Bath and most of the traffic local to Bristol itself.

Once over the bridge, I have no idea! ;-)

Google suggests you’d go over the wet bit via the M48 bridge

yep