Well, it looks like I’m going to have to drop out of the race for last place… I’ve woken up today feeling b*****y terrible, all fluey and stuff, and seeing as I have my PhD Viva on Monday I think I am, for once, going to do the sensible thing and not try and kill myself on a 100 mile bike ride!

Good luck everyone…

PS. Anyone want an entry?

I’ll be there.. fighting with Mike for that coverted last place spot…

Although there’s a distinct possibility that I might not have a bike to ride as I am still waiting on a waranty frame to come through… you’d have thought over 2 months would have been enough time! But it’s been promised for early next week so we’ll see… I’m not liking the prospect of doing it on the singlespeed if not!

The bushes themselves are small metal sleaves, usually with a special coating on the inside. These are pressed into the shock and don’t come out without the use of a hammer/vice…

The top-hats then sit in the bush, and are held tight by the frame mount and once done up, these should not move. The shock then pivots around this, with the bushing wearing over time.

Am not sure if it will work the same on a Five, but on my 5-Spot I can tell when the shock bushings are worn by lifting the back of the saddle slightly, with the wheels on the ground, and seeing if I can feel any play there. If they are worn there is a little bit of movement before the wheels lift…

For the best breakfast you need to go to Brown Bettys… it’s just off Market Square, you need to find the Bell Inn and go down the wide alley a little to the left. Brown Bettys is just down there on the left.

No idea if they can do gluten free, but it’s a small family owned sandwich shop which opens early for breakfasts. It might be worth giving them a call and they might be able to sort something out for you.

Dammit… now I want to go there for breakfast tomorrow!

Edit: the website is Brown Bettys

st colin – Member
An inverter/variable speed drive will work perfectly. Usually for a fan application, step it down a frame size kW wise, as an inverter will ‘boost’ to get a fan going but wont require much to keep it spinning.

Eh?

Surely that will depend on whether the motor is overspec’d for the application or not…

The fan loading on a motor will be proportional to the square of the fan speed, so if the current motor is overspec’d and is essentially running at or near it’s synchronous speed, then underspecing the inverter will be fine.

But, if the motor is the correct size for the application then an underspec’d inverter will will allow the motor to run at slower speeds, however you will then not be able to run at full fan speed if you ever needed to.

Whatever, the inverter needs to be rated for the power required to drive the fan at the maximum speed required…

However, as stated above, does reducing the fan speed still give the required extraction rate for the application?

You might be better off looking for a more efficient fan/motor setup rather than installing an inverter.

I’ve never understood why the company can’t just give the employee the bike.

Okay, it’s then a taxable benefit in kind so this means you have to pay tax on the value of the transfered assets.

According to the HMRC documentation, the value of the bike will be approximately 25% of the original value.

So, at 20% tax rate you’d pay 20% of the 25% in tax, which is 5% of the original value.

As far as I can tell, the only reason a company would make people pay the fair market value is that they want to make money out of the deal as in essense, the company will have been paid back the original value of the bicycle from the monthly payments, and then an additional 18-25% on top for the fair market settlement at the end of the hire period.

By the company giving the bike to the employee, they don’t make any money on the scheme as the 5% paid is in tax and goes to the HMRC.

mutley…. be thankful you had yours for 6 weeks… I had mine for about a week where I built it up before it all came apart again and went back to the shop with a dodgy rear break mount…

Am not feeling so chuffed about the August date too…

Humph…

I forgot to mention this last night, and nobody else has mentioned it either…

That is that you can claim tax relief on the different between what your company pays in mileage allowances and what HMRC states is the maximum tax-free rate for people using their own cars…

So, if you are getting 14p per mile while the tax-free HMRC rate is listed as 40p per mile, then you can claim the tax back on the difference… so for a lower rate tax-payer that would be 20% of 26p (5.2p) per mile.

While this isn’t as good as getting the 40p rate, it’s still something.

Just remember that you will pay tax and NI on the car allowance… it’s effectively just a top up on your salary.

Also, do you get a decent mileage payment as well? T’other half found that her mileage payments dropped to the same as the company car folks once they gave her a car allowance.

Well, I’ve gone from not riding my bike at all a couple of months ago, to now riding my bike…

That should be plenty of training I think…

Mike, you’d better watch out, I’ll be competing for last place with you!

And just how many sports crags actually suffer from rockfalls?

I’m not sure you’re going to want to use anything like that when you are half-way up a bolted alpine route, or anywhere ever on a trad route where you might actually experience them…

You mean I have missed all the drama? Damnit!!

Anyway, good pics Sheldon, and am even more impressed you remembered who I was… or did Mandi need to give you a hand? ;o)

So thanks to everyone for organising the ride… despite the weather and the grinding noises my bike is now making I loved it.. :oD

When you can find something that works with double ropes and pays out quickly while also being able to hold a fall then you might be onto a winner… working with frozen ropes would also be a winner too please… :o)

Until then it’ll be bog standard belay devices I’m afraid.

Also, as pointed out above, while not being such an issue with sport climbing, in trad climbing the amount of ‘slip’ within the whole system means that the shock loading on the gear is a lot lower than when using any of the auto-locking devices.

The latest version of Mobac does not allow the downloading of OS stylee maps as they got threatened by the OS peeps…

I think you need version 1.7 or 1.8 to be able to download OS maps from Multimap/Streetmap.

Bez.. I’d be interested in being able to add maps to Viewranger…

Sorry to make your problems with numbers even worse Pook, but I might be able to turn up for this one now…

:o)

Just about my favourite place is The Larder on Goosegate… have always had fantastic meals there, and not that expensive…

But one day I will go to Sat Baines’ restaurant…. one day…

AdamW… to be fair, Kayal specialises in Indian food from one specific region, which just happens to have a lot of nuts and coconut in it. It is very very good though… the one in Leicester is also very good.

Bouff? Surely more games geek than science nerd though…

The hardest bit I found was being able to get enough pressure on it, without the tool slipping off the freewheel.

I ended up bolting the tool onto the freewheel using an old quick release and that allowed me to get a big socket/spanner on the end. That mean I could get enough pressure on it, and once I’d done that it came apart relatively easily..

PJM… the director’s cut doesn’t explain everything, unless there is another one out there… it certainly gives some more hints and just when you think you understand it something happens and you don’t… which leaves you even more confused.

But, I do think I prefer the director’s cut…

So.. what about scallions then?

:D

My local Chinese does fantastic chips too… far better than the closest chip shop.

Their Chinese food is spot on as well…

Exactly… although some folks bring up the idea that this could also lead to a rise in the vote of the BNP. It almost certainly will do, but I’m not sure it will make that much of a difference to the BNP to be honest. I think that due to the type of party they are most folks who want to vote for them will vote for them already…

It’ll almost certainly help UKIP as well, and while I certainly don’t agree with their policies, I think that having more ideas across the whole spectrum in politics can only be a good thing.

ernie… who knows… I’ve not been to Brighton for many years, but I’d guess it had something to do with wanting to get Labour out, not really liking the Conservatives, and also having the leader of the Greens as their candidate. I seem to recall hearing that they ran a very targeted campaign down there too.

emsz… you must have weird sick if it tastes of cottage cheese.

Or had you just been eating cottage cheese when you had been sick?

I’m confused now…

I actually think parties like the Greens will do far better out of the AV system than they do with the present system, although it probably couldn’t get much worse for them really!!

A lot of people who like the Green party never vote for them because they never have a chance of getting elected anywhere, except Brighton obviously! Now, if you have a voting system in place where you can vote for someone like the Green party, but also know that if they lose badly you’ll be able to vote for someone else in later round, then I think more people will do that.

Now, they might still lose, but they would have won a higher proportion of the vote in doing so, which in turn will make more people think about voting for them the next time… it should also have the effect of giving a reasonable idea of who people really want to vote for across the country from the first round results. You never know, it might turn out that those that go on to eventually win need to take that sort of information into account.

So you allowed normal cheese then?

You do know that cottage cheese is only normal cheese that hasn’t been set yet don’t you, and still contains a reasonable amount of whey. It’s dead simple to make as well.

So I’m a little confused why milk is not allowed, but cottage cheese is…

But then again, I was asking similar questions on the other thread and am still none-the-wiser!

Hold on… I thought milk was out of the diet because of the exaggerated insulin response it caused…

How about this way of thinking of it…

Round 1:

Everyone votes for their favourite candidate.
Least popular one goes home.

Round 2:

Everyone votes for their favourite candidate, which means the people who voted for the least popular in the previous round get to choose someone else. I’m taking a wild guess here that if your favourite candidate is still in the running that you’d want to vote for them again, and not suddenly swap allegiances! If your candidate dropped out in the last round, but you decided you didn’t want to vote for anyone else, then you’d just not vote, and you’d drop out of the voting.
Least popular goes home.

Round 3:
As for Round 2.

And repeat until one person has more than 50% of the votes in that round.

This is all AV is except you make all your decisions about who you want to vote for and in what order on a bit of paper in advance.

The argument that someone who’s candidate wins only has one vote, whereas others have more than one vote doesn’t really hold. While it’s true you would have only voted for one candidate, you would have voted in every round of the voting, which is just as many times as someone who has changed who they are voting for.

Junkyard…

Where did i say how I was voting?

I think you said on the first page…

I am pro PR but cannot support this poor fudge compromise.

Unless of course you are just not going to bother voting on this, in which case why are you bothered which way it turns out?

Now, while I agree that PR would be a far better system than we have now, AV is still superior to FPTP in that it takes in a far larger ranger of peoples views, and even at the point where it seems breaks down, as in your example, it then becomes the same as FPTP.

I think whoever wins this referendum will take it as a signal of far more than just the question on AV… if it goes for AV, then I can see that the question of going to a full PR won’t be too many years away, however if it goes against AV, I think that electoral reform is going to be dead for a generation.

To some extents, I think those who want PR, but are going to vote against this, or abstain, are really just cutting off their nose to spite their face, because while it’s certainly not as good as PR, and I’ve not heard anyone argue that is the case, it is better than FPTP.

Black is also the absence of reflected light…

For example, if you shine a torch down a bottomless pit it will still look black, as there is nothing for the light to reflect off. This means that you won’t see light travelling through a vacuum unless you interrupt it.

If anyone is interested, there was a BBC Horizon program about visual tricks like the one m_f posted above, and they have something on the BBC website which has a few optical illusions on…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/interactives/isseeingbelieving/%5B/url%5D

Imagine under AV this happens
1. 24 % vote candidate a
2. 23 % vote candidate b
3. 53% dont vote for either and dont transfer their vote – voted for other candidates in previous rounds etc.
Candidate a wins with more than 50% of the votes and the majority supports them. YAH for deomocracy Hopefully you understand my “nonesense” now.
Happy voting.

Junkyard… what you have just described above is FPTP if the 53% don’t have any additional preferences.

You ridicule that example, but still you are going to vote to keep it?

stephen… I think he might have been taking the mickey out of VR somehow…

But a fantastic race… Rossi was amazing coming through the pack like that, obviously before his little faux pas!

It’ll depend on which spider you have on the Middleburns…

Having just bought some prescription Oakleys I’d have to agree with buzz… I think it was about £160 for the lenses themselves!!

Thankfully I can claim the money back though.. :D

For dark and gritty sci-fi I’d be looking at some of the Cyberpunk authors… William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling…

For a bit more of the noir side of things I’d suggest Phillip K. Dick… his ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ is what become the film Bladerunner. He wrote a huge number of books so should keep you going for some time there…

Iain M. Banks for pure sci-fi… but just remember to go for the ones with the M in his name… he also writes ‘normal’ fiction as just Iain Banks, which is bloody good too by the way.

I remember when the Kirk frames were shown on Tomorrow’s World… the first bike frames to be made out of seaweed!

And now I have one in the shed…

I know it’s rather unlikely, but if you ever see any beer by the Nutbrook Brewery give it a go, it’s very nice indeed…

I’m currently finishing off a 4-pint jug of their Mongrel which I bought from them earlier today.

Brisket is fantastic, and would back everyone up who is saying it needed to have been cooked low and slow… or braised… hmmmm… beef..

Anyway, what you can do with it now is make a very nice cottage pie. Instead of using mince, just whizz up the remaining beef in a food processor and use that.

But then again, Conqueror’s suggestion looks spot on.

Depending on the handset, you might be better off looking for an app for the phone which will backup the SMS to GMail or similar.