Terrible in being paper thin, slack beaded and fitted with knobbles that are as soft as cheese

Hmm, maybe I need some new tyres at some point then. Any (cheap) recommendations for a general all round xc tyre? I have a road bike for road riding, so this one is probably ridden 90% off road, and I'm not likely to swap tyres for winter and summer, so something that can cope with a little mud would make sense.

Joe

Speedkings are terrible.

Terrible in terms of getting lots of punctures, or how they ride or something?

Alt, get a road bike and ride it on the road instead

That is the normal way to work. No punctures in the last year on the road bike.

Joe

Rims are 'carrera XC rims', who knows what they are, double walled, quite narrow, aluminimum xc rim, look like any other to me.

Tyres: Continental Speed King 26×2.3 (wire bead)

Joe

I've done stuff like this, where I'm running a session, but usually there is a teacher or other adult who is responsible for the kids hanging around. I've never had a CRB check. That was 15 or 16 year olds I think.

Never done it for more than half a day though, if what you are doing involves you being in sole charge of kids for several days, maybe things are different (but to be honest, even with sixth formers, you don't want to be in sole charge of them for long, you need a teacher or someone like that as crowd control / problem solver / generally a responsible and sensible person).

Joe

What is wrong with the AA battery bag? Is it that the bag itself is shonky, or is it that you just don't want to use AA batteries?

Dinotte appear to sell the lithium ion batteries for their systems quite cheap (50 or 70$ depending on size), can't you just buy one of those for your light, or do they not swap over like that?

Joe

You must eat something soon after waking otherwise you're running on empty and risking heart problems.

Is that really true? Just that pretty much everyone I've known who swims hard does it early before breakfast, as that's the usually the best time to pool swim.

I eat breakfast proper before riding to work, but then often have some milk or something once I get in (it is about 16 hilly miles), so I'd be in both the before and after camps.

I think whether you need to eat before is a matter of how long and how hard you exercise. If it's just a 45 minutes of easy riding on the flat, then I would be fine on an empty stomach, whereas an hour of hilly riding (or of riding very fast on the flat), I'd want something inside me.

Really though, what you need to do on this is listen to your body – if during exercise, you find yourself feeling weak and feeble suddenly because you run out of energy, that is your body telling you that it might make sense to eat something beforehand. The same afterwards – if you feel broken after rides, maybe your body needs something in afterwards too. Similarly, if you find you feel like vomiting on a post-breakfast ride, then eat less before the ride and more after or during it.

Joe

Bear in mind people saying that their ring has a 'value' or is an 'investment', that there is no real resale market for them, meaning that if you resell it you will only get about 10% or something silly of the supposed (insurance) value. The 'value' you get calculated is only the amount it'd cost you as a punter to get it replaced, not a value you could sell it for.

Are you any good at electronics (or even very slightly nerdy / programmery)? Just that given an existing cadence sensor wire and magnet (or even just a simple magnetic switch for 50p fro maplin it'd be dead easy to connect it up to something like an arduino (they cost about 20 quid) and program that to show the display on your computer. Cost would be about 25 quid. Would be a nice little project – i reckon it'd take a couple of hours to hook up. I would buy one of those wired rear wheel speed and cadence sensors from cateye and dissect the wire personally – that way there'd be no soldering needed.

Alternatively if you're not techy think polar do something with all the bells and whistles heart rate etc but it costs hundreds of quid.

Joe

I really do get what you mean about 'worth' but the problem is that the only definition of worth in the private sector is one defined by profit.

But surely you can only really sensibly measure that in terms of the whole company. They lost zillions, had to be bailed out by the government. The only reason they've made tons now is by profiteering off the back of a spectacularly profitable situation created by ours and other countries government bailouts.

If we took a real private sector definition of worth, they'd have gone bust, and be on the dole now, so we wouldn't be having arguments about their bonuses. The only reason they are getting bonuses is because we paid em loads of money not to go bust.

Joe

After a couple of months you'll probbaly want to trade up for some better ones

Out of interest, what is so good about the more expensive SPD pedals that makes them worth an extra £60? I mean they are 50g lighter per pair, but that is next to nothing. The M520 ones appear to last for ages and keep clicking in and out fine, and turning round fine, would I really notice a sudden improvement if I bought more expensive ones?

I'm also put off the more expensive ones because they have cartridge bearings rather than loose bearings, which always seems like a bad design for pedals – the failure mode on cartridge bearing pedals usually involving the pedal coming off the axle, whereas with loose bearings it just gets a bit scritchy and you know you have to put some grease in. Is that not a problem with spd pedals?

Joe

If you got it wet, you have broken the warranty, and they will know about it (little damp detecting sticker inside it).

Apple shop will be able to tell you how much it'll cost to repair. It will probably be >£100 for anything other than a very minor fault.

Joe

Living where I do (in Derbyshire) I maybe one cyclist a day riding badly or dressed as a ninja, or doing something crazy like jumping red lights across the traffic. Whereas about 50% of drivers* are happy to overtake me by going onto the right hand side of the road, on a narrow, completely blind corner, on a busy 50 limit A road (obviously there are double lines and I'm going faster than 12mph, so it is an illegal overtake too). Unless I ride right in the gutter in the hope that they won't kill themselves when overtaking, in which case about 80% of drivers would happily drive 1 inch from my bars and then turn in towards me when they are half way past me.

From what I see on my commute, I'd say 20%-30% of cyclists are crazy suicidal lunatics who don't care about their own health. Whereas at least 50% of drivers are crazy murderous lunatics who don't care about the health of people on bikes.

Joe

*I actually kept a rough count to come up with that number

Nokia has it, and it is a lot fancier than the iPhone apps (if you pay for Viewranger), or pretty much the same (if you use the built in sportstracker).

Android phones (HTC Hero etc.) have basically the same kind of programs as the iPhone apps. They supposedly have better battery life while using the GPS (some people with iPhones moan about getting only 2 or 3 hours of GPS tracking off a battery charge – maybe someone will pop up to say if this is realistic).

Joe

I always stick a cheap white flashing light on at the front, red one at the back, for visibility (and legality), but then use whatever pointy light that lights up where I am riding on the front.

Joe

Oxfam / British Heart Foundation shops always a bargain for dinner jackets. Unless you are a real fashion follower who wants whatever style of button is in fashion this year (in which case you'd probably have it anyway). They aren't something that people wear often, so you can pick em up dead cheap in good condition in charity shops. You'll probably get a fancier one that way too than what you'd get if you got it from ASDA.

At least that's my experience from my student & trumpet playing days, where I seemed to need to wear black tie way too often. I think my DJ cost about a tenner, probably with inflation you're looking at £15 quid or so. Oxfam usually have nicer things, but cost a lot more than other charity shops. Charity shops in posh university towns and places like that have tons of DJs in.

Joe

Tissington Trail / High Peak Trail etc. have quite nice views, and appear to attract people with trailers (mainly nice and wide). They are down at the south of the Peak District. Tissington Trail starts from Ashbourne, is that within an hour or two's drive from you?

If you do the High Peak Trail, I would start somewhere up the top (Middleton Top or somewhere) and not go down the inclines towards Cromford, as they are jolly steep even without a trailer to pull up them. It is pretty exposed and windy in parts if the weather is bad, but if the weather is good, you get great views.

Those trails are very well set up for family cycling, flat, wide, traffic free (except for all the walkers and cyclists obviously) and with a fair number of cake stops on them.

Joe

If you pay paypal, and you're not sure, then don't make it a gift, make it a payment for an item. Yes someone pays charges, but if you pay as gift, you have no recompense if the person just doesn't send you the stuff.

For big things like bikes I'd only buy if I could see them (and pay cash), or knew who the person was.

Joe

Not that it helps you, but it is great with Air New Zealand, they let you take bikes for free, and are lovely about it.

The customs stuff, clean it with a toothbrush until there is not a speck of dirt on it, especially on the tyres. Then clean it a bit more. Then bag it. They will still spray it, but if it looks like you have made an effort to clean it yourself, they won't charge you for doing it (and I hear the charges can be quite big).

The second time I took a bike into NZ, I did this, and it was dead easy. The first time, I had it pretty clean, but not perfect, and I had to do the whole sorry I'm a stupid foreigner act in order to avoid paying out money. Whatever you do, don't get angry with the customs people – if you are lovely and friendly and slightly confused, they will be much more likely to help you out than if you are a grump. Expect it to add about 30-40 minutes to the time you take getting out of the airport.

Joe

If you're blatantly helping someone commit fraud, surely that must be against some law?

Spelling! Handwriting! Apparently they don't teach that anymore when you get to High School, rely on spell checks on the PC. A teacher told me that.

Really? Are you sure that isn't an urban myth? I'm sure kids I know have spelling words to learn.

Although I can understand why you wouldn't bother teaching handwriting beyond a very basic level to allow you to scribble quick notes – how many people write anything important by hand nowadays?

Joe

see, i wrote a topic about this on sunday, and no one cared! if you want real tracking software, you need motionX gps

Nah, you want viewranger. Like all the other ones, but with OS maps (and pretty decent route following arrow gubbins too if you like that sort of thing). Only symbian for now, but coming out on Android next year.

Joe

Wouldn't it make most sense if people aimed to do all the routes from whichever book they live closest to? Rather than all heading up a zillion miles to the Lake District. It would seem silly for me to aim to do a load of rides in the Lake District when the Peak District is a couple of miles ride away.

Joe

p.s. Where is the news article? was it on the front page earlier?

I got told ages ago, that the best thing to do in mud is usually to ride in the lowest part of the trail / rut.

I attempted to ignore this good advice on Sunday morning, trying to ride a less slippery looking but higher line round the side of a big muddy dip, and have a cut and a bruise on my elbow from the ensuing sideways slide into the dip. Next time I shall experiment with doing the right thing and see if that hurts less.

Joe

If it's anything like as successful as the existing ones (Tissington, High Peak Trail), they are pretty busy on a weekend, even in winter, and uncomfortably full of people riding / walking in the summer. They are obviously pretty popular, particularly with people with kids and people who don't cycle much, so it's great that there are going to be more of them.

Joe

The nokia ones, you can get viewranger which works fine off signal, so you can see OS maps.

The applications on iPhone / Android that show maps don't work off signal. Viewranger is supposedly coming out next year on Android, I dunno about iPhone, but I guess it might well do.

On my N95, you get about 6 hours of GPS on a single battery using Viewranger. I hear it is closer to 2 hours on the iPhone, which makes it no use really – can anyone confirm that? My friend's Android G1 phone can do a good few hours of gps tracking though.

If you get iPhone, make sure to get the latest gs version, the original 3g one the gps really sucks (it is way worse than the android / nokia ones), and I hear they have improved it on the newer one.

Joe

Other than non-bike related things which are mostly nice (happily married, work being okay, generally being in an okay financial position, living somewhere great, house is well supplied with cake and cheese), I went riding this morning, I went riding on Friday, I went riding on Thursday, I went riding on Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday, last Sunday, last Saturday. I've done 6150km this year so far, and I get to commute 30 miles tomorrow too, on a lovely road ride over Derbyshire hills (and a little bit of not so pretty Nottinghamshire riding, but that's over pretty quick, and I get to play with traffic on that section). Maybe one day this week I will manage the off road commute (20 miles each way, about 2 miles on roads), although that depends a bit on how busy I am at work.

Even this morning's mountain bike ride was fun, I got soaked, covered in mud, fell off and cut myself, wussed out of stuff I knew I could ride easy in the dry, rode through a flood, but somehow it was still a really fun ride. And I saw Highland Cattle, which always make me laugh. Oh and yesterday I saw Alpacas, how awesome are they?

Best of all, neither the bike or me are broken, so I don't have to mend anything before I can go riding again. I even have a decent nightriding torch this year (Dealextreme P7 torch), no faffing with mountain bike light systems is an absolute bonus, makes for really quick night ride preparation, I can get out and ride 6 or so miles of nice rocky trails and be back in just over an hour including getting the bike & lights out, so I can nightride even if I don't have a whole evening to spare.

Oh and the weather has been fantastic this autumn until this last week, so it is only now that I'm having to ride in slippy mud (hence the fall this morning), pretty much in December.

Joe

Is it worth saying one picture per ride maximum – I'm on a similar thing for unicycling, and it is a pain when people just bung all the pictures from their ride onto it. Much better if people post exactly one good picture, rather than 30 pictures of a ride.

Hmm. I need to find my flickr account.

Joe

For future reference, if you get off at Martin's Heron, you can ride there all off road from about 100m from the station, on the obvious tracks through the woods marked on the OS map. You have to be careful crossing the A road, but it is pretty easy to navigate, I did it first time on a night ride with no hassles.

Joe

Ignoring the skier-fight that is going on, yes to the main bit of the original point. Whilst if you're riding it is obviously your responsibility to avoid hitting people round corners, and people in front of you don't necessarily have to get out of your way, anyone with half a brain will get off the trail if they've stopped, and if you're taking kids out on trails, it's worth making sure they do, as the person behind you may well not be riding responsibly. To be honest, I've taken adult beginners on rides and had to mention this to them too, I don't think it is just kids, it is just inexperienced people who don't think about the risk. The other thing to remember about kids is that often they are out with quite inexperienced people taking them round, their parents might not be thinking about this either, especially on the easy routes.

In terms of getting out of the way, I think if you are not riding, then fair enough it is polite to let people past. If you are still on the bike, then I am happy to let you pootle until you get to the end of a section, we were all slow once, and it is only one bit of trail. People pootling are often a bit scared, and you shouldn't force them to stop and start all the time just because there are faster riders out there. Although it was pretty infuriating last time I rode cannock, to be sitting behind some poor very slow biker all through the first singletrack section of Follow the Dog until it was wide enough to overtake, and I was on a unicycle, I can see it must be a bit exasperating on a bike.

Joe

Virgin will use the existing BT landline to your new house. They will simply notify BT that they're "taking it on". Having said that, if you do have an issue with the landline, it will be a BT guy that comes out and fixes it.

If you have cable, Virgin internet / phone is good, but if you have the landline broadband, it seems pretty rubbish, I'd avoid it if you want internet – ours is too slow to watch iPlayer in the evenings, because they over-sell it and there are too many people on their thing. When we tried to get them to fix it, they basically said that they don't consider what is a 7000kbps line to the exchange (that's what we get when it is not the evening) to be in any way faulty as long as it is getting more than 150kbps. On a weekend, it sometimes can't even play radio on iPlayer, let alone play video.

Looking at traceroutes etc. it slows down somewhere around Manchester where the virgin network goes off to somewhere else, I imagine this is just because virgin oversell the amount of bandwidth they have massively, so it probably happens everywhere in the country.

Basically, I would just recommend going with someone else, even BT was better than this (and I totally wouldn't recommend BT either).

Joe

I've known a motorbiker who had this happen and got paid for the damage off the other driver's insurance (they should have been looking).

But regardless of legal stuff, overtaking when you can't see past the thing you're overtaking is asking for trouble if there's a side road.

Joe

Exams are great for undergraduate courses, because some undergraduates cheat like crazy on some types of coursework. They get caught cheating (in our labs the magic anti-cheating software gets them), but it is a pain having to tell people that they are getting 0 for the module* and deal with the ensuing arguments and fuss, whereas exams are much harder to cheat in.

They also are more practical to set/mark for large groups like you get on undergraduate courses, whereas in masters courses with smaller numbers, project based work is much easier to do & supervise (plus masters students pay more, so there is more money to pay people to supervise their individual projects).

Joe

* most academic / research people think that people should be chucked off the course if they ever get caught cheating, but apparently there are various reasons this isn't practical. Hmph.

With a Geko (or a mobile for that matter), you no longer need to buy expensive software to create routes for them. You can use http://www.bikehike.co.uk to create routes (there is also another one that I can't remember which is similar). They aren't as fancy as tracklogs or memory map, but they are £200 cheaper.

Viewranger on a mobile is great, but you do have to pay for it, and it isn't all that cheap, for a coast to coast, you'd probably be buying £50 worth of maps or something.

Mobile phone based things (or very very expensive – like £300+ garmin / satmap GPS units) are the only way you will get decent maps when you are outside. Most people who use garmin units just upload a route in advance and follow arrows / lines on screen, but with no map.

There are free OS map things for iPhone and Android phones, but currently they require you to have a mobile data connection to use them, which isn't so good if you're in middle of nowhere (like in big sections of the peak district & lake district if you happen to be with t-mobile).

Joe

I've got a 24 spoke rear wheel and 23mm tyres, and I carry loads most days. It works fine. I had a bit of trouble when I first started carrying loads, as my wheel had a very bad loose wheelbuild (they are Bontrager wheels), but all I had to do was true the wheel and bring the tension up to a sensible level and then it was fine (the original wheelbuild was shockingly bad).

The only thing I'd be really sure about for touring is having a decent frame-fit pump (one of the long ones that clip into the frame, not some silly mini pump). As long as you keep the pressure nice and high, punctures shouldn't be a problem – mini pumps can never reliably get up to 100-110psi, whereas a good frame-fit pump will happily do that.

Having said that, I've toured before with 28mm tyres and they were perhaps a bit comfier, and something like a continental top touring or similar has probably more puncture protection than my 23mm tyres.

Joe

Oh, and if that doesn't work, it's possibly worth calling up the person responsible for the course you are applying for, explaining what is happening and seeing if they could pop down the corridor and bug the person who needs to write a reference.

Joe

Do either of them have secretaries / P.A.s? If so, ask them for help getting it, they probably have more of a chance of dragging a reference out of the academic.

If you're having real trouble getting a reference, phone up the head of department and waste some of their time – things get fixed very quickly once they start inconveniencing important people. After all, writing references for people is part of the job of an academic, and it is really important to get the darned things written quickly, as like you say, a lot of things can rely on a reference (and it isn't like it takes more than half an hour to write one).

Joe

I use that boat a fairly often, and it's nice and stable. If the weather is bad they will also tend to shadow the coast rather than crossing directly from Hull to Rotterdam to make things as comfortable as possible for passengers.

I've gone on that boat once in a bad storm, and I think I was the only person who didn't puke. It can certainly get a bit wobbly on a bad day.

I've also crossed the channel in a 60 foot yacht in force 6 gusting to 7 winds (30mph winds or something silly). That was the closest I've come to puking on a boat – everyone else chucked at some point, and I was feeling pretty rough by the time we anchored in a sheltered bay somewhere near Portsmouth. Bloody fast crossing though, no-one wanted to hang around in that, the front of the boat was jumping about 10 foot off the waves and slapping down, and even with radar, it was darned scary crossing the shipping lanes and seeing huge tankers looming out of the fog.

I don't medicate for it, but the only thing that I've ever found to be useful if I am feeling travel-sick is controlling steady breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Don't know what it does, but it seems to at least delay the feeling of sickness.

Joe

Battery life is pretty poor (just about a day on a full charge for me) on the iphone though I don't think it's a lot worse than the N95 8GB I had before.

Are you using GPS a lot? Or loads of web browsing? If not, that's pretty shocking – I get better than that on my N95, and I use the GPS for 2 hours every day (on the commute).

iPhone is going to be a mile better than any blackberry, just because of the support from other people for it – pretty much no-one except boring corporate developers makes interesting stuff for blackberry.

The only other thing worth considering if you want an internet mobile is an Android Phone of some kind (G2 / HTC Hero etc). The Android App Store thing is also growing and has a decent quantity of developers working on things for it. For example Viewranger mapping (GPS tracking + OS maps for mountain biking and hiking) is going to come out on Android at some point soon, and I think maybe iPhone, but I'm guessing there is no chance of it coming out on the other newish mobile platforms like Blackberry and Palm.

Joe

http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?t=248583

This guy has made a neat little dynamo light – even smaller than my rear light (basically the same circuit, but he had access to smaller components). That is pretty handy. A decent single LED light, in a unit about 10mm diameter by 30mm. Someone ought to build them, surely roadies would love em, given how much they'll pay for things like solidlights.

Joe

Someone ought to make a good, small mountain bike dynamo light with different brightness modes.

Can you get a disc brake dynamo hub?

Loads of people run 6 or 9W of lights off a dynamo on road bikes, and with the newest hubs, it adds very little drag, way less than you'd expect if you last used dynamo lights 10 years ago, or have only used tyre dynamos (my 6w setup I can't tell the difference in drag between on and off). 9W of power is enough to run something like a P7 or Cree MC-E LED, or a triple LED like people are putting in lumicycle conversions.

I think it'd be dead easy to build, as the hubs are current limited, so you don't have to worry about constant current supplies, all you have to do is rectify it somehow, maybe add a capacitor to smooth things out, and some kind of switching circuit for different brightness modes (easiest way would probably just be to switch in 1,2 or 3 LEDs depending on how a switch was set).

The other thing I think would be neat, would be a much smaller light head, with open airflow to the LED. I built something like this with a 20mm plastic light head (a plastic bottle cap actually) ages back, and it is still working fine, and is lighter and smaller than any light I've seen. The open airflow ensures it gets cooled very nicely without needing a massive light head. The connections can be hot glued if you're worried about rusting / short circuits, and the driver electronics potted. The downside I guess is the potential for dirt getting in, it doesn't seem to be a problem with mine, although I've only tried with single 3w LEDs so far, be interesting to see with a P7 or similar. Thinking about it, my rear dynamo light is also an open-airflow light – a 2W red LED, stuck in a bit of old seatpost (20mm inner diameter), although being on my commuter, it is above the mudguard, so quite protected from wet. My rear light is about 24mm x 50mm all in (could be shorter, it'd just be more hassle to mount).

Joe