I think we’re mature enough as a species to recognise a **** when we see one and tell him/her to piss off..

Except if it is some ridiculous hobbit themed piece of retro nostalgia rubbish built with no consideration for petty things like building regulations, in which case some of the species appear to think they should be allowed to do whatever they want.

Not that I necessarily think it is rubbish, just that to some people (a lot of them presumably), a ‘mock georgian/tudor barrat box’ looks attractive, whereas something like that looks terrible, so ‘as a species’, we should surely be applying some kind of rational logic to whether people can build things, rather than just saying ‘ooh it looks like hobbit land, allowed’, and spouting out a load of snobbery about the tastes of the masses who presumably like their ‘barrat boxes’.

Surely if he has power of attorney, essentially she will be selling it, he will just be acting for her. If it’s a home not a rental property, she can sell it without paying tax, unless I’m missing something obvious. Loads of people sell their home to fund care home fees, it’s a perfectly normal thing to do, and loads of them will have alzheimers or whatever so have someone acting on their behalf. You need to know exactly what the (Scottish) law is in terms of how to do this right.

If it is worth tons of money or she is as rich as a rich thing, whoever inherits whatever money is left when she dies will be subject to inheritance tax, but sounds unlikely – how many Scottish ex-council houses are worth a third of a million quid?

He needs to talk to a lawyer who knows about powers of attorney.

Rose got her islabike on thursday too. Rode it 100m or so without being held after about 20 minutes of playing. She is slightly older mind, 3 and 2 months now, and had done a ridiculous amount of balance biking. I am totally sold on the whole balance biking teaching the hard bits of biking thing now.

Also really like the islabike, you can see looking at it why it cost so much, very well built and thought out, and having carried it up the hill from the park a couple of times, the weight makes a difference to me, she can even pick it up herself, and was trying to ride it up a hill earlier. All the other ones recommended were at least half as heavy again, which is a big difference.

I haven’t had time to ride mine much recently, but I’ve got several, one for road, one for mountain unicycling, and one for unicycle hockey.

I got into it as something to do during my last year at university, then got quite a lot into it in the years after that. I’ve done 100 miles on a unicycle (took just under 10 hours), ridden down Snowdon, a lot of big Scottish mountain bike rides.

I ride bikes mainly right now, but still quite like the unicycle for off-road, it is much easier to push yourself on technical stuff, because it is so easy to fall off without hurting yourself. I probably fall off 10 times as much riding mountain unicycle, but you just don’t get tangled up in it like you can on a bike.

There is a great community of riders at unicyclist.com if you get into it, good for finding people to ride with, getting tips on riding and gear etc.

You can check your anonymous google results by turning on ‘private browsing’ / porno mode or whatever it is called in your particular web browser.

from Betws, you can do Penmachno and Marin trails in one day. Very decent long ride if you do both, and I understand you can link them off road.

Joe – In looking, I spotted one or two owners are concerned that bearing change (long-lived though they claim to be) is a factory job, not for the home mechanic. Have they got that wrong? Seems like it should be a diy job.

I think it isn’t a home job on my shimano one, but it seems perfect after more than 7000km (7300km on the current speedometer which was bought a year or two after the hub), I’ll probably upgrade to a shutter precision one if it ever breaks.

On the Shimano one, I hear it is possible to DIY, but because there is a delicate cable that goes between the non moving bit and the moving bit, or something like that, it is also possible to break it.

Added resistance (okay, maybe not much but I do everything I can to optimise my rolling efficiency, within reason. eg won’t use marathons or nimbus tyres due to rolling resistance)

2 Disc brake compatibilty – probably could find one, but choice is going to be limited

3 Cartridge bearing compatibility, again there probably is one….

The resistance of a hub dynamo is next to nothing, people worrying about drag from dynamos have usually only ever ridden old sidewall dynamo systems. My light has auto-turn on and off, so it goes on when it is dark, and back on when it is light. It often turns on when you go through tunnels, or under trees on a dim day, and the only way you know that it has turned on is that you can see the light, I can never tell if it is on without looking at the light from it. It is way less noticeable than the difference between a slightly less pumped up tyre, or between a touring and a racing tyre.

All makes of dynamo have disc brake versions (shutter precision are the current most fancy, light & efficient one I think).

Oh, and I’m pretty sure shutter precision hubs have cartridge bearings.

And you get everlasting actual ride in the dark light for very little weight penalty (200g or so extra on the front hub, but the lights are extremely light compared to most decent battery lights, what with having no batteries).

You could get an old Raleigh 10 speed bike or similar. You can pick em up in any second hand bike shop or on ebay/gumtree. Probably be about 50 quid, maybe slightly more. Look for mudguards, and if possible 700c sized wheels, as tyres/rims for old 27″ wheels are slightly harder to find. They appear to last forever, my old Holdsworth at home has done tons of miles since I first got it, and never had anything more than brake blocks and tyres (not even a new chain).

On the other hand, I really like my aluminium trek road bike, a lower end one (Trek 1200, but model names are different now) where they are still a bit racy, but have room and mounts for guards and rack. I also have a dynamo hub, which is well worth getting, no noticeable extra drag, you always have lights with you (and they never run out), and in the long run cheaper and way better than battery lights that I had in the past.

I’m not sure that the association running the event will be happy with a load of printouts from some medical notes, fussy buggers that they are insisting on an ECG for doing something that I do multiple times every week (cold water swimming).

Have you been to Matlock Meadows for ice cream? Nice ice cream made on the farm there (and bacon sandwiches and all that), and there are animals to look at (rabbits, pigs, cows, hens, that sort of thing). Not a whole day trip, but worth popping in if you’re in the area and fancy nice ice cream.

I’ve done a few events, and I have to say, while you’re in the midst of an event, it can be hard to have any idea of how far you’ve gone, so it could have been an honest mistake, took a wrong turning somewhere where there was a split between lap 1 and lap 2 or something.

From the guy’s results*, that swim time is shocking, and certainly doesn’t point towards someone who is going to get almost 19mph average in the bike (or complete the race for that matter), and that big gap in the splits with a massive boost of speed during it does suggest he missed out some of the course. Surprised there isn’t a 2 hour or so cut-off time for the swim anyway, what is the chance that someone doing an ironman can’t swim 4k in 1.5 hours?

*given the information you’ve posted, it is pretty obvious who you’re talking about

The ridgeback weighs 18.5lbs vs 12.5 for the Islabike. If you think about it, if I could drop a third of the weight off my own bike by spending £100, I’d do that as soon as I had the £100. If it is anything like her current bike, it’s also something I am likely to have to carry for significant distances once she gets tired – having carried both heavy and light balance bikes back, there is a real difference, even just back half a mile from the park.

Maybe I am obsessing needlessly, but with the balance bike, buying a light one meant that it got ridden tons, and that has been great value for the fun. Other kids I know with the same balance bike have all got on with it really well. If the fancy pedal bike lasts a year or two and is used anything like as much as the balance bike, then it’ll have been worth it whatever, ignoring the resale stuff.

Mine is a trek 1200 with triple chainring. Use it with a trailer, plus commute to work on it.

Things that are essential:-
1)If you live anywhere hilly, a low gear – I have 30×23 as my lowest gear, and I do use it here in Derbyshire. If you use a compact, 34×27 would be even lower.

2)Mudguards – especially with the trailer, as otherwise any puddles go straight in the face of the kids (when you have the top open).

3)Rack mounts – I have rack and panniers, but to be honest this is just because any bike without them isn’t going to be the sort of bike you want to pull a trailer with – friend stuck his trailer on his super-light road bike, and it was really flexing the tubes in a bad way.

Other than that:

I have 23mm tyres, although if they’d not been half the price of the 25mm, I’d probably have gone 25mm.

I have Mavic Open pro + shimano hubs, I think I went 32 hole on both ends, seem plenty strong enough. I’d just get something like that, bog standard mavic rims, with disc hubs if you go that way. Oh and a dynamo hub on the front, which is brilliant – no noticeable drag, and you just always have lights, great in summer storms when it suddenly turns dark.

I’ve got normal caliper brakes, they work fine, although if you’ve already got disc brakes I’m sure they would be fine, and I must admit I do get through a pair of pads a year on the calipers, which is more than I used to pre-trailer.

Oh and drop bars for me, I just find it so much faster and more comfy on drops. Don’t know if you can run your discs with drop bar though.

One funny thing is how much difference the bike you tow a trailer makes – I sometimes tow it using my mountain bike, and it is completely night and day. Probably mainly the tyres and the bars and the riding position, but with the lightish road bike, you don’t notice the trailer too much until you hit a hill, whereas with the mountain bike it always seems like a big old drag. It shouldn’t make a difference, after all the loaded trailer weighs about 35kg, but it really does.

Frog bikes is only £5 cheaper than the islabikes at that size though (£185+10 postage vs £200), and an unknown as to whether you can sell it on afterwards.

Joe

For a really mixed group, there are the railway trails right near too (Monsal is closest, but High Peak & Tissington too). Generally flat, traffic free, wide, good for kids, no interesting riding but nice scenery.

Think about the sheds we’d have cheerfully ridden all day when we were their age.

I couldn’t ride at all till I was something like 5 (and I think that was pretty normal), and I lived somewhere flat. Both those things make a big difference to how important weight is I reckon. The cheap balance bike, the kids we know literally couldn’t pick it up to get on and ride when they first started (at just before 2), whereas the fancy one, even small kids can pick up.

Are you over that way anyway, and do you literally mean two weeks?

Just that if you don’t have some other reason you need to be in NZ, it is an awful long way to go for just 2 weeks, bearing in mind that you realistically waste at least 4 days in total spent flying there and back, and then getting around NZ is slow. Aren’t there hot places in the south of Europe with decent mountains where you can ride that time of year, you’d have two days more riding, no jet lag, save a zillion quid on the flights, and there must be equally good riding in any mountainous region in Europe (lots of nice scenery in Europe too).

We didn’t, because we didn’t mind either way.

Also, we were told that the error rate was somewhere around 5%, ie. 1 in 20, so you have to be careful if you’re an everything pink or blue person. Although I only know of one person who’s had this problem, friend of a friend on facebook, so I don’t know if the error rate is actually quite that high nowadays.

The cheap bikes that I’ve seen, appear to weigh almost as much as my (not very expensive) road bike, and have rubbish brakes. Living in a hilly town in Derbyshire, I think the lightweightness of her current (strider) balance bike makes a massive difference compared to the super-heavy balance bike that some friends have. The balance bike has been to BMX tracks, for 2 mile rides round here, up in ski-lifts in the Alps, loads of places. I think that’s worth the extra £20 that I paid compared to the heavy one which got to the park a few times. Plus the weight is less to carry when you get half way down a 300m descent and she falls asleep on her mum’s shoulder!

So now she’s ready for a pedal bike I’ve gone for the lightweight but expensive option again.

My car (originally a French import) used to not come up on the database, despite having been insured (off-line) for 12 years, but once I insured it using online comparison sites once, it now does.

Milk is fine in theory but you need to drink a lot to get the recommended carb and protein levels, like 2 pints or something.

No you don’t. If you look at high 5 recovery, mixed up with water at the recommended strength, it is roughly 4g protein per 100g. If you look at milk it is 3.2g / 100g. So you need to drink less than a quarter more. Carbohydrates, they are both similar.

And is there actually any study out there that shows Ribose being any use? A quick search of pubmed just brought up things like this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16937963 which appear to suggest that it doesn’t make any difference. There is a book saying how awesome ribose which Torq reference, but I can’t find any study that actually passed a peer review and demonstrates any advantage.

There is absolutely no way you can get insurance cover etc without an address. If you don’t believe me I suggest you try it, its easy enough call any company and try to arrange insurance. I guarantee you will not get past the address question. ditto applying for a licence, tax or anything else.

Yet travellers do manage to get insurance for their vans. So either: a)they have an address, or b)they have a way of getting insurance without an address. If you google for ‘how do travellers get insurance’, there are various people explaining ways which it happens. You have to bear in mind, that like any group of people amongst whom there are a visible minority of dodgy geezers, like young men, there presumably are also a lot of them who don’t break the law, who will have considered things like how to tax and insure their vehicles so they don’t get in trouble with the police.

And from what I read in a newspaper article about this, they DNA test & fingerprint people who don’t have a clear identity nowadays, and have a lot of contact with the travelling community in all areas for when they need to track someone down. So it’s all a bit of a myth, the idea that these groups of people who are extremely regularly in contact with the police are ever going to be completely anonymous and outside the law. If anything they’ll be easier to find than your average person.

Don’t go when my daughter is there then. She narrates the entire process –
Something like this:

“I am doing a wee daddy”
Tinkle tinkle tinkle
“and a poo”
Splosh
“look I think I did the Biggest Poo In the World”
“now I am wiping”
“Oh No!”
“you come in and help please!”

Family railcard and a seat for the kids makes life really easy, and is usually quite a bit cheaper too (we sometimes save the cost of the railcard on one trip down to London).

In theory you have to sit in your allocated seat. Sometimes they moan at you if you don’t, but that is all.

Surely travellers do have insurance though. Otherwise any time they annoyed the police, they’d take all their vans away. As to how you get things when you don’t have an address, you get an address (friend or organisation that have an address, or live on a permanent site, or own a house somewhere).

If you are in a situation where you’re pretty darned likely to get hassle from the police even if you’re not a criminal, then you’d be stupid not to be squeaky clean on the most obvious things that let them hassle you.

Is it just me, or is the creation of a database which says which major political figures like to download a bit of porn just asking for trouble? Instant hacking/paying somebody at the ISPs target.

It’s also a political minefield, as every MP will have to answer the question as to whether they have turned the filter off, so they’ll either have to not watch any porn, lie, or admit in public that they watch a load of porn.

Oh, and whatever you do, if you have a worry about being rescued or whatever, do something where the teachers are in the pool. Stupid policy at our local pool is that teachers can only go in the pool with people in a one to one lesson. Makes no sense.

Swimming teaching has changed quite a lot since we were kids.

In particular, there are a few methods of swim teaching that are more based on understanding how your body floats in the water, rather than kicking up and down the pool endlessly with a float. There are also teachers who take a hands on approach, guiding your body into the right shape. All of this is designed for people who don’t intuitively grasp swimming, which to some extent is most of us, but for adult non-swimmers may be even more true.

The old school kicking up and down with a float type lessons still exist, and will obviously work for some people, but the one size fits all approach seems to fail people who just don’t develop an intuitive understanding of the water that way.

The downside of fancy pants swimming lessons is they tend to be small group or 1:1 and so quite expensive. The upside is that if you have been failed by traditional lessons, you may have more luck at actually being able to swim.

The most obvious one to try would be the Shaw Method, see the link below:
http://www.artofswimming.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&layout=item&id=64&Itemid=296

There are also special ‘learn to swim’ camps, where you go away for a week, and they guarantee you’ll be swimming by the end of the week, with teaching from people who specialise in adult non swimmers, but I have no idea how successful they actually are, or what the tuition is like. They aren’t cheap either.

Where do you live? I can ask for any recommendations for teachers from swimming people?

I have electron backupz lights as my emergency backup lights. I had one that came with a dodgy seal or something, stopped working pretty much straight away, but they warrantied that without even looking at it, just posted out a replacement straight away. Other than that, they have worked perfectly. There are two on my daughter’s bike also, and she hasn’t managed to break them or stop them working, which suggests they are quite robust.

Wouldn’t have them as my only light, but as a backup/emergency light, I don’t see any need for anything more expensive, especially not something that needs a charger, which kind of removes the point of a backup light.

You might be able to, depends on your system:

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/dh2go/digital_se/

or a USB monitor:

http://tuxgeek.me/2012/06/11/philips-221s3ucb-monitor-a-solid-choice-for-the-enterprise-market/

If I had googled more effectively I might have found this:

http://www.trainingbible.com/joesblog/2009/05/more-on-time-trial-pacing.html

more efficient going fast as possible up the hills due to air resistance being non-linear.

Great, that was my guess, but somehow, perhaps through years of riding fixed gear and unicycles, it always feels right just to keep spinning the pedals round all the time.

Hopefully it’ll save me time (or energy) on the commute, especially when combined with the fact that I’ve been doing tons of swimming, so I have a way stronger and more flexible back, so can get in a low tuck much more easily.

Drunk by lunchtime Thursdays?

With the exception of academia, where I am currently, in all my jobs as a computer programmer drunk at lunchtime Fridays has been the norm. I never drunk that much because I had to bike home though. It didn’t worry me that much when I worked in London and everyone got the tube home, but when I had the job on the trading estate in Nottinghamshire, the number of people who would happily drink 3 pints of beer at lunchtime then drive home 3 hours after was scary.

With the exception of actual alcoholics, academics don’t appear to drink during the work day very much at all, which is kind of nice in a way – I’d rather get off early than waste time with that Friday afternoon drunk in the office feeling.

Oh, and did no one tell you, British Shorts Time started on March 31st, and ends on October 27th, so obviously I’m wearing shorts today.

Please can some of you start riding from Belper to Nottingham. I only ever meet a few people on the 1km of the a608 that I ride, and very rarely someone coming from Nottingham to Ilkeston or vice versa, and those people always seem to turn off at Ilkeston, just before it gets hilly and when there’s still 10 miles to go.

I did once, a couple of years back, get a proper fast guy hop on the back then take turns for the first 8 miles, got back pretty fresh, but at least five minutes early thanks to that. If only that could happen every day.

If you’re worried about safety I wouldn’t be put off the trailer, a trailer has got to be safer – people drive around you like they’re on tiptoes when you’re pulling a trailer, I’ve never seen people be as careful. Sometimes people are so darn careful you have to wave them past.

Seriously, it is shocking how nicely people treat you when you have a trailer, I guess part of it is that you’re much more visible than just a bike, but to be honest I think the main thing is that it makes it bleeding obvious that there is a kid in there and that makes people calm down a little.

Youtube video, or instructions, usually off the xda-developers website.

Make sure you have all the tools (usually 1 or 2 small torx screwdrivers and very small cross head, plus plastic pry tools – buy them all off ebay, can usually get a cheap tool set with all of them in), and any stupid sticky tape required.

Follow the instructions slowly and carefully. Be sure that you reconnect everything you disconnected. Have something safe to put the tiny screws in while you work (some people just work on a large white sheet of paper).

If you are methodical, it is pretty easy usually.

Unless you’re super unhappy with the phone, and really want the cash/hassle, just flash the firmware, it’s a piece of piss to do.

You can re-flash the firmware to make it an Orange one with UMA

or if you root it, you can stick this onto your existing firmware:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1663778

My lights are on the caliper brake mount. Most dynamo lights are like that.

I can totally recommend dynamo lights by the way. I have a B+M one (IQ Fly I think, there are newer and brighter ones). I fitted it in September 2008, and haven’t touched it since, it turns on when it detects that it is dark, and turns off otherwise. Weighs next to nothing too, and the drag is less than noticeable. You can just go out and do a 100 miler in the dark and never have to worry about lights running out or spare batteries.