Ride like an arsehole and you get treated like one.

I can’t subscribe to this “wild west” view of road culture. There is never any excuse for abuse or aggression.

We met a couple of riders at jog. They told us about the constant abuse and swearing every hour of the day of their 3 week trip.

You’ve concluded that these people received abuse and aggression because they were riding like “arseholes”. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. You need to define terms. Taking primary when the road narrows is not “riding like an arsehole.” Riding two abreast is not “riding like an arsehole”. Riding out of the door zone is not “riding like an arsehole”. Filtering, to the left or to the right, is not “riding like an arsehole”.

All of these behaviours are perfectly good cycling, and in some cases recommended safe cycling, yet will often cause a cyclist to be abused and intimidated, due to a “might is right” culture of entitlement on the roads, which is evident even on this very thread.

five mile stretch of road with literally no safe passing places

It’s just… a road. There are straight bits. And bendy bits. It’s a two-way road like any other.

Of course if you meet a line of traffic in the other direction then youre screwed.

Ah. Then why not rant at the fact that the road is too busy with cars? You could just as equally rant that those other-direction-driving-bastards are holding you up, and should pull over to let you through. Because you’re special, for some reason.

All for a lack of courtesy

Only if you think that “courtesy” means slower road users getting out of the way of the Proper People in their cars.

On the general point, whether I’m in the car, on foot or on my bike, it is invariably not cyclists that are holding me up. It’s queue after queue after queue of cars, all sitting there, stuck. So when you are stuck in a queue of motorised vehicles, do you rant and rave at the drivers in front of you for not pulling over and letting you through?

Is it time to end Carnival?

No!

The whole point of a carnival is that it is transgressive.

Societies all over the world have a tradition of taking over the streets for the odd weekend every year, to drink, dance and have a good time. There’s a town in Germany I think where the annual tradition is to lock the Mayor and the Chief of Police in a cell, then all go out into the street and get p!ssed.

The reality of carnivals in modern cities is that they require licences, permissions, etc. You may wonder why the policing nightmare that is the Notting Hill Carnival is so readily permitted. It’s because 1. It’s a safety valve. People need to blow off some steam every now and then. and 2. not even the police are so mean-spirited as to try to stop thousands and thousands of people from having fun on a summer weekend. 3. It’s an important cultural event for people of West Indian descent, and we live in a society where people are free to celebrate their cultures.

The Notting Hill Carnival should not be “banned” because of the actions of a few thugs any more than cycling events should be stopped because of the bellends who throw their gel wrappers into hedgerows.

We’ve all seen things that boil our piss from either side whether it be the driver leaving a fag paper gap or the Sunday middle management peloton taking up an entire road.

That’s a false equivalence.

The close pass is aggressive, territorial and dangerous driving, and how people are killed.

The two-abreast-group-ride (ignoring your redundant stereotyping of the participants) is 1. good cycling and 2. harms no-one. Please educate yourself

I think we just need to all agree that people are dicks

Nothing dickish about riding in a group.

I think you’re overthinking it.

“Don’t assault me!” Haha what a pussy.

You’re in Year 9, right?

So many things he could have done to avoid this

What things?

There was a bloke I used to chat to at the gym. Once he saw me arriving on my bike.

Him: I hate cyclists.
Me: Right. Well **** off then.

And that was the end of that.

Had a word with him, he obviously denied all knowledge.

Could have been his son I suppose. Or he’s just a big kid who can’t just be honest and say “sorry about that – it won’t happen again”.

Either way, I doubt he’ll do it again.

I have a Garmin Touring that does map navigation. You can use mapping app ie Strava to create a route then it’s 2 clicks to export it to your Garmin as a gpx file. This then appears on the route menu on your Garmin. You select it and it navigates you there.

Yep I’d have a word saying the kids were upset at finding a wounded pigeon in the garden, so could he and his boy please keep the shooting to their own property.

I met him once.

Been a long time.

Reset your router?

Oooh.

Andrew Motion (He was in town to deliver a lecture and I got the job of taking him to the pub afterwards – we talked about Tennyson and Philip Larkin)
Prince Philip (Gold DofE award ceremony)
Ali Brownlee (“sorry mate you can’t come into transition without your number”)
Robert Plant (“Got a light mate? Cheers”)
Christopher Eccleston (in the theatre bar after his performance of Hamlet)
Willy Russell (interviewed him for a radio programme)
Malcolm McDowell – at adjacent urinals (“not often you find yourself having a piss next to Caligula”)
Kazuo Ishiguro (“could you sign it to John please? Thanks”)
Bradley Wiggins (“could you sign it to John please? Thanks. Good luck in Rio”)
Graeme Obree (lovely guy – couldn’t get rid of the bloke – he gave me his address and everything)
Chris Boardman (nice chat about cycling advocacy and Graeme Obree)

Back-of-fag packet calculation: £250 a month should be enough for half decent food plus books, plus a bit left over for beer and class A drugs?

Before you go buying a prime lens, remember that a 50mm lens is only a “standard lens” on a camera with a full-frame sensor. I can’t work out from your post what camera you bought, but if it’s a budget SLR it will probably have an APS-C sized sensor, which will [it’s a bit more complicated than this but] make a 50mm a short telephoto lens. Which would be good for studio portraiture but the wrong choice for most landscape photography.

For landscape photography, you will probably not need wide maximum aperture a prime lens offers, plus you’d be depriving yourself of a wide-angle range which most landscape photographers consider essential.

My advice would be to start with a standard zoom lens (18-55mm or whatever), the same brand as your camera. They’re not expensive, they are flexible, and they are perfectly good for hobby photographers, regardless of what Hasselblad-fondling-camera-club-snobs say. I have sold several photographs taken with a Canon 400D and the kit zoom lens.

If at some point in the future you find you just can’t live without a set of prime lenses, then you can go for it then.

Pick a spot where bluebells will grow in spring!

Our TV has HD, and we have the choice of HD channels, and streaming HD films, but we never bother.

You know you’re getting old when a technology you can’t see the need for, and never adopted, is being superseded by something even newer and flasher (and more expensive).

As for Smart TV – doesn’t one of those £30 dongles turn your TV into s Smart TV anyway>

You don’t need to spend £500 on a PC just for

net surfing, photo editing and home office duties

.

I got a refurbished PC from this eBay seller.

It does everything you’d want it to do and came with Windows 10. It cost me less than £150, and that was including a monitor, which I presume you already have.

The sellers are good lads. They forgot to include a VGA cable in the box, but they sorted it out straight away with no fuss when I contacted them.

Cancel and don’t worry too much about negative feedback. Everyone knows ebay is full of t***ers.

But also – eBay’s defect removal policy seems to state that if you delivered within stated timescale (using tracked method), they will consider removed neg feedback.

http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/defect-removal.html

I would cancel the sale too. This **** will only cause you further problems once he gets the item.

I’m nothing but an enthusiastic amateur but here are my tips:

1. Create a sense of depth by using foreground interest; something to lead the eye into the image. To this end, be prepared to shoot using small apertures (tripod required) for maximum depth of field (ensuring both the foreground and the background are in focus)

2. Learn the Rule of Thirds. Use it, and experiment with breaking it.

3. Woodland can pose lighting challenges, with extremes of bright and dark in the same image. Acquaint yourself with the bracketing function on your new camera.

4. The best light can often be had at the beginning and the end of the day. Get out early for best results.

5. Put your photos online somewhere (Flickr?) then link to them here so we can all see them 🙂

6. GIMP is a good Happy-Shopper Photoshop, and it’s free. There are probably others.

Enjoy!

I bought a Logan back in May. It’s my first brand-new car and I love it. The boot is huge (for kids, bikes, tents, building materials etc.

I went for the 90TCe (petrol turbo) which is a bit quicker than the diesel but still economical. It ain’t quick, but I have no trouble overtaking the “I always drive at 40” tards on the moors without having to thrash the engine. On the slip road, it gets up to motorway speeds quickly and comfortably.

I went for the middle trim level. You get electric windows, built in hands free, Bluetooth stereo etc. I’m not sure the extra is worth it for the highest trim level. I can live without front spots and alloy wheels. I did, however, pay extra to have it in a colour other than the standard white.

I can’t comment on reliability as I’ve only had it 3 months, but seeing as I got a brand new estate car for 9 grand, it would have to be pretty bloody unreliable for me to deem it a bad deal.

Do a google search to see what the motoring press say about resale value, if you care about that. They’re not bad.

On holiday in Scotland the other week, I saw loads of Logans, UK, French and Dutch registered ones, loaded with kids and bikes and surfboards and the like. I think it’s a good choice of car for active-lifestyle-type families.

Go and test drive one.

I know people joke about H&S gone mad, the nanny state, babysitting a nation etc etc and the “dumbing down” of everything from TV news reports and quiz shows to school tests – but at some point, taking away the need for people to use that “organ in their head” (so to speak) must cause it to atrophy??

The perception that things are worse than they used to be (in whatever way) is common but I’m not sure it’s always real.

Dumbing down? Last time I looked, TVs still have an “off” button, Shakespeare, Proust and Plato are still in print, IT and Biotech are still huge growth sectors… I think individuals can dumb down as much or as little as they want.

Can the armchair Incident Investigation Team please give it a rest.

We don’t know enough about what happened and apportioning blame based on ignorance, on a public forum, 24 hours on, is bad form.

This is a cycling forum. How about a little solidarity.

yup… was so surprised i showed my mate on the rear tyre, too. and then we st on the opposite side of the car park watching the tyres (really really) slowly deflate on the Citroen AX.

funniest bit was seeing the guys rection when he went round the back to get the spare and realised the opposite rear was also flat.

That’s not a nice story, is it. It’s just you boasting about doing something cowardly.

When you’ve only got a second to say something to a couple of knobbers, you can’t waste it on “bloody childish”.

You need to say something that they’ll think about and remember for years to come. And every time they think about it they’ll get a little bit sad. And the next time they think about starting a dispute with a stranger in the street, they’ll decide not to.

So come on, OP. Did you give him his money back or what?

One women got abusive when I said I would not end it now, and that’s why I had put it as an auction.

Another blamed me for now having to go and buy one in Halford’s !

I just ignore the stupid questions.

White Hart, Giggleswick

You’re more likely to reach subsoil type material below the topsoil, not rock directly below topsoil.

Yes I’m sure you’re right – I don’t know the technicals. But at a depth of a foot I can’t dig any more with a shovel – I’d need a pick.

If you lay in directly on the clay there is a chance overtime the clay at the interface with the aggregate will soften due to water ingress and then the repeated action of applying pressure to the slabs could cause movement. However, having just looked at a very similar situation in a carpark, I would suggest foot traffic alone would not be sufficient to cause this in any great rush.

To be honest a geo textile membrane to stop the aggregate pushing in to the clay and properly compacting the aggregate with a wacker would be a sufficient.

Really helpful thank you.

I assume that if you put a foot of type one down for your patio that you properly compacted it, preferably in two layers

Oh yes. And yes.

You dug down to rock to lay a garden patio?

How fat is she?

Ahem. There may have been more than one going in.

Which is it? Big difference.

Topsoil = you are right
Clay = your girlfriend is right

It’s clay soil. You just saved her life.

I’m afraid you do have to declare it. If you don’t, you can have your insurance cancelled/be refused insurance in the future.

Yes your premium might rise. Yes it’s unfair. Sorry for your trouble.

It rubs the lotion on its skin.

The thing with people like this is, you can’t win by engaging with them. They want attention, so as soon as you give them that they’ve already won.

Give him his Paypal refund through the normal channels, then ignore him. He’ll be a pain in the proverbial for a short while, then once he realises that you don’t care he’ll move on to his next target.

This is excellent advice…
…
…
…
Or you could make him watch while you slaughter his whole family.

he said I was a junkie on fb and had spent it on drugs.

LOL and did you spend it on drugs?

did you say the deposit was non refundable?

if you did then their problem

I’m no scholar of law, but if tested in court, I’d doubt whether any such agreement would be enforceable.

better to just give them it back and avoid all this as life is too short to go to war with a complete nobber

100% this

Make a new account on e-bay no one cares. I lost mine in the hack and had no issues buying or selling despite low scores

And this

All the other stuff aside, this is a simple non-paying buyer issue.

Leave a non-payment strike on his account and relist. That’s all you can do. You are not entitled to keep any informally-arranged “deposit” and you should repay him.

I don’t know what “request it in the proper way” means. Just go into Paypal and reverse the payment.

Edit: eBay is full of massive knobbers. You have my sympathies.

In my experience, it’s more likely to get interest at a 99p start. Don’t bother with reserves. It’s not much of a risk – eBay is a very liquid market and stuff will fetch what it is worth.

Have a look at what similar vehicles have gone for. This will give you a “range” of expectation 🙂

I think a bike like yours is a good compromise and the closest to a “do it all” bike you can get.

Use the suspension lockout for events like that Eiger thing and have fun.

For about a grand (I might go a bit over) I’d be starting by looking at something like this:

Grado SR325se headphones
Schiit Lyr headphone amp
Project phono preamp
Project Debut 3 turntable