Hmm. She’d be in something much warmer than a 0 degree rated bag (and she’s always happily slept in the bike trailer in this weather), plus probably a big warm duvet too. And she runs warm like me (when it snowed last year, she was still taking her coat off to play at the park!). Plus we obviously have an emergency get-out option with the car. I’ve got a quite well sealed very small tent, rather than a ridiculously cold massive family tent which might help too.

Will have to give it a think. Camping pods sound good, but we’d have to go to another campsite.

In the USA, it seems there are quite a lot of winter campers with kids, and the gear is very readily available. Their advice sites are less about whether you’ll get cold, but more about not getting lost in snow when you hike from your car to the camp-site with your kids, and how to avoid dangerous winter predators which I hope won’t be problems in the wilds of Yorkshire!

I never bothered with it. Leave it outside playgroup once a week for a few hours, just with the built in rain cover, and it seems fine. Have also ridden in torrential rain, and the built in cover was fine until the flood-water came up to above the bottom of the trailer!

If you want to cover it when sitting out every day though, you probably want something similar to a lawnmower cover, but wider. Or some kind of tarpaulin affair.

I make sure it is kept in the warm and dry when not being used in the evenings, so at least it should get a chance to dry off after getting wet in the day.

Anyone?

HDMI switches are a bit flaky in my experience, particularly ones that try to be clever. Problem is that they have to pretend to be one device, putting out one display format, whereas in reality they are taking input from 3 devices, all with different display formats. Absolute pain. We have some quite expensive ones, and they are still a pain in the arse.

Does your TV not have enough inputs that you can switch between inputs on that – 2 hdmi + 1 DVI is I guess the minimum you need there? On some TVs the DVI wipes out one of the HDMIs though, so you might not.

I’ve seen a rubbish HDMI cable.

You could tell it was bad, because the signal suddenly disappeared if you run it next to anything else.

But it was pretty darned obvious when you weren’t getting a signal.

Over 30 minutes today – first run since Dovedale Dash in November, plus it was up a big hill, that’s my excuse anyway.

I had Zombies chasing me – am doing ‘Zombies Run’ at the mo – silly zombie story game that plays on your phone while you run. Every so often you hear undead hordes chasing you and have to run faster, it is pretty cool.

I did some work at a festival once, theoretically on expenses, but only things that there were receipts for. (try getting receipts from some random hippy running a falafel stall at 11pm) and complicated rules on what time of day breakfast lunch and dinner can be claimed, which when you’re working midday – 1 am days all go to pot. Hmph.

Personally, i’d at least tell my gp if I had something that was causing me a lot of hassle, especially when there is a relatively simple thing that they can test for which tells you if it is Coeliac. It is their job after all.

I would be a bit wary of using private testing companies for testing nutritional intolerances – some of that is snake oil stuff, designed to make money off neurotic people, even if it is done by people who wear white coats and look medically.

As for the beer, except for ones that are gluten free, it’s all got wheat in, so if you’re intolerant to wheat, you’d be intolerant to it too.

Check, but I think a lot of coeliacs can eat normal porridge oats – as I understand it the gf ones are just processed in a separate factory where no wheat is processed and they charge more for them.

Oh and indian restaurants are your friend – except for the obvious things – breads, poppadums, pretty much all good.

Personally, I would get the lightest most raciest bike that has mounts for full mudguards and rack mounts. Anything with rack mounts is going to be pretty sturdy surely. Would probably be fine for your commute with slightly wider than race tyres, and fine for going a long way too. Oh and rack mounts gives you most flexibility for putting kiddy seats on it too (plus for doing loaded touring if you want to later).

I have a five year old Trek 1200 which is fine – okay on towpaths and things, can fit a rack and can fit wider than 23mm tyres but I don’t know what the equivalent model is nowadays.

As for keeping up with them, I’ve ridden with a road biker who came on a summer chain gang with panniers and a rack, full mudguards, all his work gear in the panniers. Bugger completely dropped me on my somewhat racier and much lighter bike. If you’re going to get dropped, you will anyway, they’ll just have to wait for you and take it slow. Remember if you’ve got a whole day to do 70 miles, that’s less than 6 hours of actual riding even if you go at a super slow 12mph. The good thing about tours is that you can start early, so you’re not in any hurry. Best thing you can do to avoid being dropped is training, whatever bike you have.

Any chance you’re Irish, or descended from Irish parents/grandparents or whatever? Coeliac disease (allergy to gluten, mostly in wheat) is very common amongst people from Ireland (I think because of their more potato than wheat based diet traditionally).

Anyway, I would be careful of the internet and allergies/intolerances, it is full of rubbish. Also of ‘allergy testing’ like they do at health food shops or alternative health places, which appears to basically be made up snake oil.

What you should probably do if you have a health problem (and it sounds like you do) is go to the doctor – there are blood tests for Coeliac disease, and other things they’d probably want to rule out also. Go to the GP, book an appointment right now. There are various blood tests for it, plus further tests they can do.

Oh, and if you are cutting out wheat or gluten, don’t forget it is in beer. Sorry. Oh and soy sauce (most of them except tamari), so no Chinese takeaways.

It is hard to say whether your symptoms fit the symptoms of coeliac disease or similar. It is also a bad idea to ask on the internet, as you’ll get loads of self-diagnosed people who ‘sneeze more when they eat bread’ or whatever, who whilst they may be perfectly well meaning, may or may not have any particular disease that is relevant.

I’ve been on the receiving end of something similar – our rather scruffy 12 year old car was left on a back street round here, cos I came home late and it was the only space. I didn’t use it for a couple of days (weekend car really). Someone called the police because they wanted to get a wide vehicle down there, and they didn’t know who’s car it was. Police came round, said to my wife that someone was moaning about our car, and was there any chance we could move it, and actually because she can’t drive, they took the keys and parked it up on our road for us. No problems.

If you’re up to date on things car related (insurance, mot etc), it really is no hassle having this kind of report against your car. If not, you blooming well should be, and you deserve everything you get – cars are dangerous buggers, and there are good reasons for all the regulation around them.

20 minutes on the flat is supposed to be the ‘proper runner’ time.

Last I tried I could do pretty much exactly 21 minutes, but I am not really a runner, just someone who goes for a run sometimes. When I went out with the local running club I was with a load of kids and geriatrics!

Oh, and we do obvious things to avoid some packaging like not buying individual yoghurts, just buying the big pots and putting them in ramekins at the table with syrup or jam or fruit in. Tastes nicer (most of the small pots are rubbish low fat yoghurt with tons of sugar in), and is quick to do.

My not wasting food waste stroke of genius this week, when someone left some christmas cake at ours that was getting a bit dry and wasn’t going to get eaten up (as we’ve still got some of ours left) was suggesting christmas cake trifle. Christmas cake, mixed berries out of the freezer, custard, whipped cream + cherry liqueur, decorated with spare chocolate buttons left over from Father Christmas, voila, one fabulous pudding!

I think we’re only good at not wasting because of my wife though – I’m a recipe cook for anything more complicated than risotto, pasta, curry, fried rice or stir fry. She can take an idea (like ‘christmas cake trifle’), and go with it until it is actually something yummy.

If you look at the details of those numbers, it’s actually 12%, because they say only 60% of that 20% of food waste could have been eaten. Presumably the rest is onion skins, potato peelings etc.?

Not sure how good we are, we cook things, so we don’t throw too much packaging away.

We plan menus too. I think it is easier if you only buy basics in bulk though – we buy things like onions, potatoes etc. and store cupboard stuff in bulk every so often, but we are helped by the fact that we’re both quite flexible time wise, and only work 4 days a week each, so we have time to pop to the shops in the week and pick up things for the next few days of meals.

I’ve had something stuck under my front guards with SKS mudguards. They have a breakaway bit at the fitting. It broke away, bit of a scraping noise but no real problems, I was fine. I got off, took out the stick, clipped the mudguard back into the breakaway bit, and rode away.

So I can recommend you replace them with SKS ones, they work great in this situation.

And be careful of other things too – 650 people a year die falling down the stairs, 200 people accidentally hang themselves, 200 people choke on their food. I am now very scared about pretty much everything!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/oct/28/mortality-statistics-causes-death-england-wales-2010

Check the rims very carefully before putting anything else on, and don’t try those tyres again. Sometimes one poorly seated tire popping off can put a dent in the rim just from the force of the pop. Expensive mistake when I made it – new rim time, as even when I bent it back in it wouldn’t brake properly.

If they both did it front and back, it probably isn’t anything you did, it probably is them. Not worth risking rims messing around further.

Looks ace. While I’m unlikely for now to find time to nightride, come next winter I hope to be able to do so with a local club. Also, as I try to get up earlier to ride at the weekends (lessening impact on family time), having a light like this would be ideal.

The B&M lights are very much road focused – funny road specific beams. They are great for on the road, but you’d hit your head on every overhead branch at least with the beam shape on the one I’ve got.

The USE dynamo light appears to be aimed at off road riding (and supposedly works pretty well). If I had the money (and time to nightride for that matter) I’d have one on the mountain bike, I love the hub dynamo on my road bike.

We stopped watching it just after the meerkats, when there was the teenage leopard. It looked like it was about to go violent – is there much attacking other animals and eating them, or am I safe to let a 2.5 year old watch it. Bearing in mind that Muppets in Space, How to Train Your Dragon and Toy Story 3 all had to stop part way through due to the excessive violence (in her opinion that is).

A friend has the second one, and seems to like it. It is expensive though. It looks a bit more stable than a trailgator, but I don’t know anyone who has tried both.

If you are a masochist, you can also do bike seat on the bike with the trailer attached, so you can take all three.

On moving from a medium dodgy area of London (prostitutes on the street sometimes but never got mugged and not too druggy), Nottingham on a Saturday night was pretty scary. That was 8 years ago though – nowadays it is mostly okay. I wouldn’t spend too much time on Upper Parliament Street or Market Square where all the cheap pubs are late on a Saturday, but otherwise it is fine in all the bits you’re likely to go to as a visitor.

If you’re earning 4500 (at a guess – you don’t say how much your pension payments are), and 80 quid is enough to make a big difference, then you are seriously overstretched – that’s less than 2% of your take home.

And I notice you calculate everything ‘after pensions’ – whilst pensions are lovely and all that, the purpose of benefits isn’t to subsidize your cushy pension surely – and I bet you were paying more than 80 quid a month into that. And 400 quid a month for a car – I bet you didn’t drive the cheapest car that you could get that fitted the specifications of your company scheme? And I bet you weren’t squeezing that family of five into a two bedroom flat in a not so nice area?

I might be wrong obviously, but I would be surprised if that ever so expensive lifestyle didn’t include quite a lot of ‘essential spending’ on things that people on normal salaries either don’t get (massive pensions), or can’t afford (big houses, more expensive cars than needed).

Some people think running totally barefoot helps form, but I struggle to find any tarmac nearby that does not have glass etc on it.

No idea if it makes me a better runner, I’m not really a regular runner, but I quite like to go for a quick barefoot run every so often. I hate doing it on tarmac – I’d always do it on grass or mud/dirt paths. The squelching of mud under your toes is quite enjoyable in a Peppa Pig / Pig Pen from Snoopy way. I don’t like tarmac or gravel paths because I don’t do it often, so it hurts my baby soft feet.

I left our car unlocked, some bugger opened the glove compartment and nicked the sweets.

Also left key in the door overnight the other day, and everything left there.

I suspect a 13 year old golf might not be top of the thieves’ list.

I have several friends who bought houses to do up as their first houses. Second houses, they go for things that don’t need doing up at all. Stupid idea unless you have trade contacts, or are able to do all the expensive work yourself (plastering, plumbing, wiring etc.), or for some reason want something different to any other potential house in the area.

You just end up wasting all your weekends for years doing diy, spending all your money on it, when you’d probably have spent less on just buying a ready done up house.

About access to exercise – someone mentioned swimming, and that it wasn’t free. That’s a particular bugbear of mine – in the past, swimming in summer was often free, done in lakes and rivers. But since th”n, masses of signs have gone up saying no swimming, and apart from a very few spots, swimming is officially banned in most of the previously popular places. For example, both where I grew up, and where I live currently, there are riverside parks that used to have swimming stages in the river, and now have big no swimming signs. There’s also been a massive cultural change against outdoor swimming – there are still kids jumping in rivers off rope swings in places, but nothing like the massive groups you see in old photos of the same places.

On the other hand, there is also the growing evidence that what fat people do in terms of healthy eating, exercise etc should be targeted at just having a healthy lifestyle, rather than at losing weight as such, as a fat person with a healthy lifestyle may be equally healthy to a thin person with a similar lifestyle, whereas losing weight by dieting has been associated with poor health outcomes in the long term (and is very rarely successful). Looking at that evidence, whilst targeting fat people and encouraging them to live healthy lifestyles may be useful, a high priority should be put on preventative measures to stop people becoming fat, like eductaing people about food, restricting or at least informatively labelling unhealthy foods, restricting advertising of junk foods to kids (and restricting the use of tv tie ins on food items like Thomas Yoghurts etc.),. oh and trying to remove or reduce social, financial and legal barriers to exercise.

We put three car seats in a touran today (not mine), two and three year old at middle and one side, and one year old at the other side. Was easy, sure it could probably fit three of the big seats in it. Actually, not sure if the one year old isn’t in a big seat too, she is very tall. Buckles and all that were easy to do. Be easy enough to do on a regular basis.

Think it has 7 seats too if needed, although you lose much of the boot.

Dunno what you’d get for your money though.

Croozer on my road bike with full mudguards – tons of clearance on it.

Also, if you’re swapping disks around, it’s always handy to have a usb to sata caddy – basically a small box that you stick the old disk in, and plug a usb into, and it turns it into a usb drive. Means that anything you forget to copy off, you can easily get hold of.

We have a croozer.it is brilliant and done well over a thousand miles with no problems, including camping trips, big supermarket and shopping trips, trips to the woods, picnics, and still runs perfectly smooth. Keeps the weather out really well, and is lovely and warm and comfy inside.

Instamatic etc has totally ruined moody black and white pics like the above – just scanning the thread I assumed they were off someone’s iphone before I looked closer. It just looks like some cheesy effect now everyone is doing the ‘bland picture + black and white = deep and meaningful’ thing.

Whilst there were obviously some art photographers who took pictures on film by painstakingly setting everything up and taking a single perfect shot, I bet that ninety percent of the professionally shot pictures of the film era were done with a scatter gun approach, taking a few rolls of film to get the perfect image. I @ean look at old sports slrs with their motor winders and gubbins. Digital just means that everyone can use the approach that realistically was used for pretty much any action photography in the past (and probaply for most other professional shots too for that matter).

Aphex, if its a proper child rear facer then they are good till way over 3. We are just running into comfort issues at 1m tall for journeys over 1.5hrs.

Not to knock your choice of car seat, as I have no idea if they’re good or not, but if you’re hitting ‘comfort issuses’ at 1m tall, then it surely wouldn’t last till way over 3 for a lot of kids – our 2 and 8 month year old is about that tall already.

I’ve been to the US at least 10 or 11 times now (mostly for work).

Of the probably 60 or so people I’ve been with on various trips, I’ve only known one gun incident – they went jogging in Atlanta, and obviously went into a neighbourhood that was a bit less tourist friendly than some, and were told by a man brandishing a gun that they should turn round now and go back to where they’d come from, followed by shooting a bullet over their heads as they returned the way they came, at more of a run than a jog to say the least.

Really, it is very segregated by area (even by state as the graphs above show), so other than random nutters, as long as you stay out of the dodgy areas you’ll probably be fine. The only thing that I am aware of in US cities is that the distance between pretty safe tourist area and proper scary dodgy area, can be extremely small, like a couple of blocks walk, and when an area is dodgy, it can be way more dodgy than most UK dodgy areas. I’ve been caught out a couple of times having an explore and had to hurry back to a well lit street!

Having said that, Europe can be scary too – scariest place I’ve been for that has to be Athens in Greece – literally 100 metres from lovely tourist cafés to a street full of smackheads literally cooking it up on spoons and foil on the street corner.

It’s obviously hard to tell if the ban specifically did that obviously, it could also be due to our incredibly strict compared to the US gun controls generally.

30 people killed with handguns in the UK 2009/10 (last figures)

Well, banning handguns worked well, didn’t it!

Hard to tell, but we could try comparing it with a country with widespread easy access to hand guns. Like say the USA, where they have well over 10,000 handgun murders a year (not to mention roughly similar numbers of people comitting suicide with guns)

So banning handguns does not completly stop gun murders, but does appear to make it an order of magnitude less common, which has to be a good thing.

So looking at the statistic you’ve provided,it looks like banning handguns is a brilliant success.

For a modern front light you don’t need regulation – it’s only for old lights that have bulbs, where they might blow. I think my b and m light instructions actually said not to fit any regulator. I’m guessing the same is true for rear.

If your regulator has the standlight built in, rather than it being in the rear light unit itself, that is a pain, probably easiest just to buy an led rear light with standlight built in, and maybe a modern front light while you’re at it (they are brilliant, you need one).

Alternatively, I have a home made dynamo rear without a standlight, and a cheap flashing light as a backup for junctions, which works fine. So standlight is not vital.

On the pro-gun arguments:

1)The Canada thing is rubbish. Canada has roughly half the gun ownership compared to the USA (22 percent vs 48 percent of households according to the document linked above). Further to that, in Canada, less than 12 percent of those households own any handguns, being the best guns for sneaking into places to do murders (and the best for killing lots of people quickly at close range once you have done so.) In the US, it is 58 percent.

So Canada has less killings with guns, because they mostly buy guns that are only very good for hunting, mostly only own them in remote rural areas, and hence mostly shoot animals with them. In the USA, they buy handguns, which are good for killing people, keep them in busy cities, and often carry them all the time, and voila, they tend to kill people with them.

So basically, guns don’t kill people, but providing vast numbers of people with the type of gun that is designed to kill people, tends to make it a lot easier for them to kill people.

It also makes it way easier for them to commit suicide – hence the really really high rate of suicide in the US, particularly amongst teenagers. Similar percentages attempt suicide in many other countries, it’s just that we don’t provide about half our kids with a foolproof method of killing themselves. Unless one is to argue that any suicide, even amongst confused teenagers, is natural selection, by supporting widespread and unrestrained gun ownership, you are supporting this state of affairs – essentially saying that your ‘right to bear arms’ is more important than giving thousands of kids the chance to live at least until they are 18.

2)If you arm the teachers, you are giving guns to many thousands of people, all of whom have every day easy access to kids, are regularly stressed out by kids and have mental breakdowns at at least the same rate as any other profession. So, you’re putting guns in the hands of a load of people, all of whom are the most likely people to have some kind of a breakdown around kids, and to be blaming the on kids at the point they have that breakdown. Nice idea.

3)Further to that, and more importantly, assuming you want the teacher’s gun to be close enough at hand for them to shoot an intruder at a moments notice, you are putting a gun which is not safely locked up in a secure lock box (or else they’d never get it out in time), right near a load of kids. That’s not a recipe for an accident when a curious kid finds it (about 200 kids a year die from gun accidents in the USA, and more adults – according to some statistics at least, they have a significantly higher rate of accidental death by gun per 10,000 population than our murder rate).

4)The mental health thing is a bit of a red herring – if mental health services had any way of knowing who was likely to go postal, the people would be locked up already. Other than that, if you seriously think that anyone with mental health issues shouldn’t be allowed a gun (the commonly stated statistic is that this would include approx 25% of people), logically, you’ve also got to say that they shouldn’t live in a house with a gun, which would mean probably a majority of people wouldn’t be allowed guns. It would also be an active deterrent for gun nuts to seek mental health support, as they’d know their guns would get taken away, so could actually make things worse. So the only logical thing to do there is to argue for extreme restrictions on guns.

There is no point in going into IT if you just want to make money easily. People make good money in IT, but only either really good people with a real interest in something, or managers (who often aren’t really anything to do with IT, but sometimes work their way out of technical roles). Most people making good money have been in it for 10 years or more, so have a lot of experience. It isn’t a get rich quick career.

For any of the highly technical development jobs (software/hardware development etc.), I would ask the question – what related stuff have you done for fun. If you haven’t done any development stuff for fun, then there is no point in applying for anything development-wise. You will be applying against a load of people for whom it is a vocation, their one true calling. Particularly for the really well paid and/or interesting stuff. Any thing else will not be super well paid or interesting, which kind of defeats the object of a complete career change.

There’s network admin type things, which are pretty generic and easy to learn, but first jobs will be extremely poorly paid, particularly outside London, and some companies at least are fussy about qualifications and certificates for this kind of job.

I don’t really know which particular field at the moment. I am good at problem solving, organising events and people and am not afraid to take a risk and make decisions.

That kind of non-specific sounds like you want to be some kind of manager, not a technical person. Personally I don’t see any reason to restrict yourself to IT if you want to be a manager – it is a pretty generic thing to do, and managers in IT can come from an IT background or a management background (and both can be equally bad or good in my experience). Why not try and make management in your field (or move up the management pole).

I like to be out and about, working independently ideally.

You’ve just described being a consultant.

I don’t mind travel although I wouldn’t want to be away for weeks (have other half and 2 young girls at home).

You’ve just described the exact opposite of being a consultant.

A 12v tyre pump cost me 20 quid from the local car shop and works fine (set the number, turn it on, unplug it when it stops). If a track pump is going to break after excessive use on car tyres, that’d probably cost you more than 20 quid.